LITTLE PEOPLE!

by Gardner Dozois

  The first explanation that occurred to her was also the most menacing: that she had lost her own mind, that her unfinished therapeutic business had finally caught up with her. If the little man had not escaped from an institution, then maybe she was on her own way to one. In fact Jenny’s record of mental stability, while not without an average number of weak points, contained no hint of anything like hallucinations or drug-related episodes. But in the absence of a more obvious explanation her confidence on this score was just shaky enough to give weight and substance to such thoughts.

  To escape them (and the panic they engendered) Jenny applied herself desperately to solving some problems both practical and pressing. It was cold in the cave; she could see her breath. Her bladder was bursting. A ladder against one wall disappeared into a hole in the ceiling, and as the cave appeared to have no other entryway she supposed the ladder must lead to the outside world, where now for several reasons she urgently wished to be. She threw off the robe and wriggled out of the sleeping bag—catching her breath at the pain from dozens of sore muscles and bruises—and crippled across the stone floor barefoot; but the hole was black as night and airless, not open, at the top. Jenny was a prisoner, naked and in need.

  Well, then, find something—a bucket, a pan, anything! Poking about in the nick of time she spotted her backpack in the shadows of the far wall. In it was a pail of soft plastic meant for carrying water, which Jenny frantically grubbed out and relieved herself into. Half-full, the pail held its shape and could be stood, faintly steaming, against the wall. Shuddering violently, she then snatched bundles of clothes and food out of the pack and rushed back into bed. In point of fact there wasn’t all that much in the way of extra clothing: one pair of woolen boot socks, clean underwear, slippers, a cotton turtleneck, and a spare sweater. No pants, no shoes, no outerwear; she wouldn’t get far over the open moor without any of those. Still, she gratefully pulled on what she found and felt immensely better; nothing restores a sense of confidence in one’s mental health, and some sense of control over one’s situation, like dealing effectively with a few basic needs. Thank God her kidnapper had brought the pack along!

  Next Jenny got up again and climbed to the top of the ladder; but the entrance was closed by a stone far too heavy to move.

  The radio sat in a sort of doorless cupboard, a tiny transistor in a dimpled red plastic case. BOOTS THE CHEMIST was stamped on the front in gold, and a wire ran from the extended tip of its antenna along one side of the ladder, up the hole. Jenny brought it back into bed with her, taking care not to disconnect the wire.

  She was undoing the twisty on her plastic bag of food when there came a scraping, thumping noise from above and a shaft of daylight shot down the hole. Then it was dark again, and legs—whitish hair-covered legs—and the back of a gray fleece came into view. Frozen where she sat, Jenny waited, heart thumping.

  The figure that turned to face her at the bottom of the ladder looked by candlelight exactly like a very old, very small gnome of a man, covered with hair—crown, beard, body and all— save for his large hands and feet in pads of fleece. But this was a superficial impression. The arms were longer and the legs shorter than they should have been; and Jenny remembered how this dwarf had ranged before her on four limbs in the fog, looking as much like a sheep as he now looked like a man. She thought again of the albino deer.

  They contemplated one another. Gradually, outlandish as he looked, Jenny’s fear drained away again and her pulse rate dropped back to normal. Then the dwarf seemed to smile. “It’s a bright morning, the roke’s burned off completely,” he said, in what was almost BBC English with only the faintest trace of Yorkshire left in the vowels.

  Jenny said, calmly enough, “Look, I don’t understand any of this. First of all, I want to know if you’re going to let me go.”

  She got an impression of beaming and nodding. “Oh yes indeed!”

  “When?”

  “This afternoon. Your clothes should be dry in time, I’ve put them out in the sun. It’s a rare bit of luck, our getting a sunny morning.” He unfastened the sheepskin as he spoke and hung it from a peg next to a clump of others, then slipped off his moccasins and mitts and put them on the shelf where the radio had stood. Except for his hair he wore nothing.

  Abruptly Jenny’s mind skittered away, resisting this strangeness. She shut her eyes, unafraid of the hairy creature but overwhelmed by the situation in which he was the central figure. “Won’t you please explain to me what’s going on? Who are you? Who are they? What is this place? Why did you make me come here? Just—what’s going on?” Her voice went up steeply, near to breaking.

  “Yes, I’ll tell you all about it now, and when you’ve heard me out I hope you’ll understand what happened yesterday—why it was necessary.” He dragged a stool from under the table and perched on it, then quickly hopped up again. “Now, have you enough to eat? I’m afraid we’ve nothing at all to offer a guest at this time of year, apart from the grouse—but we ca’t make any sort of fire in this clear weather and I very much doubt you’d enjoy eating her raw. I brought her back last night in case anyone else was awake and hungry, which they’re unfortunately not . . . but let me see: I’ve been through your pack quite thoroughly, I’m afraid, and I noticed some packets of dehydrated soup and tea and so forth; now suppose we were to light several more of these excellent candles and bunch them together, couldn’t we boil a little pot of water over the flames? I expect you’re feeling the cold.” As he spoke the old fellow bustled about—rummaged in the pack for pot and candles, filled the pot half-full of water from Jenny’s own canteen, lit the candles from the burning one, and arranged supports for the pot to rest on while the water heated. He moved with a speed and economy that were so remarkable as to be almost funny, a cartoon figure whisking about the cave. “There now! You munch a few biscuits while we wait, and I’ll do my best to begin to clear up the mystery.”

  Jenny had sat mesmerized while her abductor rattled on, all the time dashing to and fro. Now she took tea, sugar, dried milk, two envelopes of Knorr’s oxtail soup, and a packet of flat objects called Garibaldis here in England but raisin cookies by Nabisco (and squashed-fly biscuits by the children in Swallows and Amazons). She was famished, and lulled into calmness as the old fellow contrived to sound more and more like an Oxbridge don providing a student with fussy hospitality in his rooms in college. She had not forgotten the sensation of being dragged as by a freight train along the footpath, but was willing to set the memory aside. “What became of your accent? Last night I could barely understand you—or are you the same one that brought me in?”

  “Oh aye, that was me. As I said, none of the others is awake.” He glanced rather uneasily at the row of shadowy cots. “Though it’s getting to be high time they were. Actually, what’s happened is that most of the time you were sleeping, I’ve been swotting up on my Standard English. I used the wireless, you see. Better switch it off now, actually, if you don’t mind,” he added. “Our supply of batteries is very, ah, irregular and where should we be now if there hadn’t been any left last night, eh?” Silently Jenny clicked off the red radio and handed it to him, and he tucked it carefully back into its cubby. Then he reseated himself upon the stool, looking expectant.

  Jenny swallowed half a biscuit and objected, “How can you totally change your accent and your whole style of speaking in one night, just by listening to the radio? It’s not possible.”

  “Not for you, of course not, no, no. But we’re good at languages, you see. Very, very good; it’s the one thing in us that our masters valued most.”

  At this Jenny’s wits reeled again, and she closed her eyes and gulped hard against nausea, certain that unless some handle on all this weirdness were provided right away she might start screaming helplessly and not be able to stop. She could not go on chatting with this Santa’s elf for another second. Jenny Shepherd was a person who was never comfortable unless she felt she understood things; to understand is, to some extent, to have co
ntrol over. “Please,” she pleaded, “just tell me who or what you are and what’s happening here. Please.”

  At once the old fellow jumped up again. “If I may—” he murmured apologetically and peered again into the treasure trove of Jenny’s backpack. “I couldn’t help noticing that you’re carrying a little book I’ve seen before—yes, here it is.” He brought the book back to the table and the light: the Dalesman paperback guide to the Cleveland Way. Swiftly finding the page he wanted he passed the book over to Jenny, who got up eagerly from the bed, holding the robe around her, to read by candlelight:

  The Cleveland area is extremely rich in folklore which goes back to Scandinavian sources and often very much further. Perhaps the hobs, those strange hairy little men who did great deeds—sometimes mischievous, sometimes helpful—were in some way a memory of those ancient folk who lingered on in parts of the moors almost into historic times. In the years between 1814 and 1823, George Calvert gathered together stories still remembered by old people. He lists 23 “Hobmen that were commonly held to live hereabout,” including the famous Farndale Hob, Hodge Hob of Bransdale, Hob of Tarn Hole, Dale Town Hob of Hawnby, and Hob of Hasty Bank. Even his list misses out others which are remembered, such as Hob Hole Hob of Runswick who was supposed to cure the whooping cough. Calvert also gives a list of witches. . . .

  But this was no help, it made things worse! “You’re telling me you’re a hob?” she blurted, aghast. What nightmarish fantasy was this? “Hob . . . as in hobbit?” However dearly Jenny might love Tolkien’s masterpiece, the idea of having spent the night down a hobbit-hole—in the company of seven dwarves!—was completely unacceptable. In the real world hobbits and dwarves must be strictly metaphorical, and Jenny preferred to live in the real world all the time.

  The odd creature continued to watch her. “Hob as in hobbit? Oh, very likely. Hob as in hobgoblin, most assuredly—but as to whether we are hobs, the answer is yes and no.” He took the book from her and laid it on the table. “Sit down, my dear, and bundle up again; and shall I pour out?” for the water had begun to sizzle against the sides of the little pot.

  “What did you mean, yes and no?” Jenny asked a bit later, sitting up in bed with a steaming Sierra Club cup of soup balanced in her lap and a plastic mug of tea in her hands, and thinking: This better be good.

  “First, may I pour myself a cup? It’s a long story,” he said, “and it’s best to begin at the beginning. My name is Elphi, by the way.

  “At least the dale folk called me Elphi until I scarcely remembered my true name, and it was the same with all of us—we took the names they gave us and learnt to speak their language so well that we spoke no other even amongst ourselves.

  “This is the whole truth, though you need not believe it. My friends and myself were in service aboard an exploratory vessel from another star. Hear me out,” for Jenny had made an impatient movement. “I said you need not believe what I tell you. The ship called here, at Earth, chiefly for supplies but also for information. Here, of course, we knew already that only one form of life had achieved mastery over nature. Often that is the case, but on my world there were two, and one subordinate to the other. Our lords the Gafr were physically larger than we, and technologically gifted as we were not, and also they did not hibernate; that gave them an advantage, though their lives were shorter (and that gave us one). We think the Gafr had been with us, and over us, from the first, when we both were still more animal than thinking thing. Our development, you see, went hand in hand with theirs but their gift was mastery and ours was service—always, from our prehistory.

  “And from our prehistory our lives were intertwined with theirs, for we were of great use to one another. As I’ve said, we Hefn are very good with languages, at speaking and writing them—and also we are stronger for our size than they, and quicker in every way, though I would have to say less clever. I’ve often thought that if the Neanderthal people had lived on into modern times their relations with you might have developed in a similar way . . . but the Gafr are far less savage than you, and never viewed us as competitors, so perhaps I’m wrong. We are very much less closely related than you and the Neanderthal people.”

  “How come you know so much about the Neanderthalers?” Jenny interrupted to ask.

  “From the wireless, my dear! The wireless keeps us up to date. We would be at a sad disadvantage without it, don’t you agree?

  “So the Gafr—”

  “How would you spell that?”

  “G, A, F, R. One F, not two, and no E. The Gafr built the starships and we went to work aboard them. It was our life, to be their servants and dependents. You should understand that they never were cruel. Neither we nor they could imagine an existence without the other, after so many eons of relying upon one another.

  “Except that aboard my ship, for no reason I can now explain, a few of us became dissatisfied, and demanded that we be given responsibilities of our own. Well, you know, it was as if the sheepdogs hereabouts were one day to complain to the farmers that from now on they wanted flocks of their own to manage, with the dipping and tupping and shearing and lambing and all the rest. Our lords were as dumbfounded as these farmers would be—a talking dog, you see. When we couldn’t be reasoned or scolded out of our notion, and it began to interfere with the smooth functioning of the ship, the Gafr decided to put us off here for a while to think things over. They were to come back for us as soon as we’d had time to find out what running our own affairs without them would be like. That was a little more than three hundred and fifty years ago.”

  Jenny’s mouth fell open; she had been following intently. “Three hundred and fifty of your years, you mean?”

  “No, of yours. We live a long time. To human eyes we appeared very old men when still quite young, but now we are old indeed—and look it too, I fear.

  “Well, they put fifteen of us off here, in Yorkshire, and some dozen others in Scandinavia somewhere. I often wonder if any of that group has managed to keep alive, or whether the ship came back for them but not for us—but there’s no knowing.

  “It was early autumn; we supposed they meant to fetch us off before winter, for they knew the coming of hard winter would put us to sleep. They left us well supplied and went away, and we all had plenty of time to find life without the Gafr as difficult—psychologically, I suppose you might say—as they could possibly have wished. Oh yes! We waited, very chastened, for the ship to return. But the deep snows came and finally we had to go to earth, and when we awoke the following spring we were forced to face the likelihood that we were stranded here.

  “A few found they could not accept a life in this alien place without the Gafr to direct their thoughts and actions; they died in the first year. But the rest of us, though nearly as despairing, preferred life to death—and we said to one another that the ship might yet return.

  “When we awoke from our first winter’s sleep, the year was 1624. In those days the high moors were much as you see them now, but almost inaccessible to the world beyond them. The villages were linked by a few muddy cart tracks and stone pannier trods across the tops. No one came up here but people that had business here, or people crossing from one dale into another: farmers, poachers, pannicemen, Quakers later on . . . the farmers would come up by turf road from their own holdings to gather bracken for stock bedding, and to cut turf and peat for fuel, and ling—that’s what they call the heather hereabouts, you know—for kindling and thatching. They burned off the old ling to improve the grazing, and took away the burned stems for kindling. And they came after bilberries late summer, and to bring hay to their sheep on the commons in winter, as some still do. But nobody came from outside, passing through from one distant place to another, and the local people were an ignorant, superstitious lot as the world judges such things, shut away up here. They would sit about the hearth of an evening, whole families together, and retell the old tales. And we would hang about the caves, listening.

  “All that first spring we spied out the
dales farms, learnt the language and figured our chances. Some of us wanted to go to the dalesmen with our story and ask to be taken into service, for it would have comforted us to serve a good master again. But others—I was one—said such a course was as dangerous as it was useless, for we would not have been believed and the Church would have had us hunted down for devil’s spawn.

  “Yet we all yearned and hungered so after direction and companionship that we skulked about the farms despite the risk, watching how the men and milkmaids worked. We picked up the knack of it easily enough, of milking and churning and threshing and stacking—the language of farm labor as you might say!—and by and by we began to lend a hand, at night, when the house was sleeping—serving in secret, you see. We asked ourselves, would the farmers call us devil’s spawn for that? and thought it a fair gamble. We’d thresh out the corn, and then we’d fill our pouches with barley and drink the cat’s cream off the doorstep for our pay.

  “At least we thought it was the cat’s cream. But one night in harvest-time, one of us—Hart Hall it was—heard the farmer tell his wife, ‘Mind tha leaves t’bate o’ cream for t’ hob: He deeas mair i’ yah neet than a’ t’men deca iv a day.’ That’s how we learnt that the people were in no doubt about who’d been helping them.

  “We could scarcely believe our luck. Of course we’d heard talk of witches and fairies, very superstitious they were in those days, and now and again one would tell a tale of little men called hobmen, part elf, part goblin as it seemed, sometimes kind and sometimes tricksy. They’d put out a bowl of cream for the hob, for if they forgot, the hob would make trouble for them, and if they remembered he would use them kindly.”

  “That was a common practice in rural Scandinavia too—to set out a bowl of porridge for the tomte,” Jenny put in.

  “Aye? Well, well . . . no doubt the cats and foxes got the cream, before we came! Well, we put together every scrap we could manage to overhear about the hobmen, and the more we heard the more our way seemed plain. By great good fortune we looked the part. We are manlike, more or less, though we go as readily upon four feet as two, and stood a good deal smaller than the ordinary human even in those days when men were not so tall as now, and that meant no great harm would come of it should we happen to be seen. That was important. There hadn’t been so many rumors of hobbish helpfulness in the dales for a very long time, and as curiosity grew we were spied upon in our turn—but I’m getting ahead of my tale.