LITTLE PEOPLE!

by Gardner Dozois

  He was right about the last part anyway; people would never leave them alone, even if the other objections could be answered. Jenny herself didn’t want to leave Elphi alone. It was no use.

  As she went to mount the ladder the old hob moved to grasp her arm. “I’m afraid I must ask you to wear this,” he said apologetically. “You’ll be able to see, but not well. Well enough to walk. Not well enough to recognize this place again.” And reaching up he slipped a thing like a deathcap over her head and fastened it loosely but firmly around her neck. “The last person to wear this was a shopkeeper from Bristol. Like you, he saw more than he should have seen, and was our guest for a little while one summer afternoon.”

  “When was that? Recently?”

  “Between the wars, my dear.”

  Jenny stood, docile, and let him do as he liked with her. As he stepped away, “Which was the hob that died?” she asked through the loose weave of the cap.

  There was a silence. “Woof Howe Hob.”

  “What will you do with him?”

  Another silence, longer this time. “I don’t quite know . . . I’d hoped some of the rest would wake up, but the smell . . . it’s beginning to trouble me too much to wait. I don’t imagine you can detect it.”

  “Can’t you just wake them up?”

  “No, they must wake in their own time, more’s the pity.”

  Jenny drew a deep breath. “Why not let me help you, then, since there’s no one else?”

  An even longer silence ensued, and she began to hope. But “You can help me think if you like, as we walk along.” Elphi finally said. “I don’t deny I should be grateful for a useful idea or two, but I must have you on the path by late this afternoon, come what may.” And he prodded his captive up the ladder.

  Aboveground, conversation was instantly impossible. After the den’s deep silence the incessant wind seemed deafening.

  This time Jenny was humping the pack herself, and with the restricted sight and breathing imposed by the cap she found just walking quite difficult enough; she was too sore (and soon too winded) to argue anymore.

  After a good long while, Elphi said this was far enough, that the cap could come off now and they could have a few minutes’ rest. There was nothing to sit on, only heather and a patch of bilberry, so Jenny took off her pack and sat on that, wishing she hadn’t eaten every last bit of her supplies. It was a beautiful day, the low sun brilliant on the shaggy, snowy landscape, the sky deep and blue, the tiers of hills crisp against one another.

  Elphi ran on a little way, scouting ahead. From a short distance, with just his back and head showing above the vegetation, it was astonishing how much he really did move and look like a sheep. She said as much when he came back. “Oh aye, it’s a good and proven disguise, it’s saved us many a time. Mind you, the farmers are hard to fool. They know their own stock, and they know where theirs and everyone else’s ought to be—the flocks are heafed on the commons and don’t stray much. ‘Heafed,’ that means they stick to their own bit of grazing. So we’ve got to wear a fleece with a blue mark on the left flank if we’re going one way and a fleece with red on the shoulder if we’re going another, or we’ll call attention to ourselves and that’s the last thing we want.”

  “Living or dead,” said Jenny meaningfully.

  “Aye.” He gave her a sharp glance. “You’ve thought of something?”

  “Well, all these abandoned mines and quarries, what about putting Woof Howe at the bottom of one of those, under a heap of rubble?”

  Elphi said, “There’s fair interest in the old iron workings. We decided against mines when we lost Kempswithen.”

  “What did you do with him? You never said.”

  “Nothing we should care to do again.” Elphi seemed to shudder.

  “Haven’t I heard,” said Jenny slowly, “that fire is a great danger up here in early spring? There was a notice at the station, saying that when the peat gets really alight it’ll burn for weeks.”

  “We couldn’t do that!” He seemed truly shocked. “Nay, such fires are dreadful things! Nothing at all will grow on the burned ground for fifty years and more.”

  “But they burn off the old heather, you told me so yourself.”

  “Controlled burning that is, closely watched.”

  “Oh.” They sat silent for a bit, while Jenny thought and Elphi waited. “Well, what about this: I know a lot of bones and prehistoric animals, cave bears and Irish elk and so on—big animals—were found in a cave at the edge of the Park somewhere, but there haven’t been any finds like that on the moors because the acid in the peat completely decomposes everything. I was reading an article about it. Couldn’t you bury your friend in a peat bog?”

  Elphi pondered this with evident interest. “Hmmm. It might be possible at that—nowadays it might. Nobody cuts the deep peat for fuel anymore, and bog’s poor grazing land. Walkers don’t want to muck about in a bog. About the only chaps who like a bog are the ones that come to look at wildflowers, and it’s too early for them to be about.”

  “Are there any bogs inside the fenced-off part of Fylingdales, the part that’s closed to the public?”

  Elphi groaned softly, swinging his head. “Ach, Woof Howe did hate it so, skulking in that dreary place. But still, the flowers would have pleased him.”

  “Weren’t there some rare plants found recently inside the fence, because the sheep haven’t been able to graze them down in there?”

  “Now, that’s true,” Elphi mused. “They wouldn’t disturb the place where the bog rosemary grows. I’ve heard them going on about the bog rosemary and the marsh andromedas over around May Moss.” He glanced at the sun. “Well, I’m obliged to you, my dear. And now we’d best be off. Time’s getting on. And I want you to get out your map, and put on your rain shawl now.”

  “My what?”

  “The green hooded thing you were wearing over your other clothes when I found you.”

  “Oh, the poncho.” She dug this out, heaved and hoisted the pack back on and belted it, then managed to haul the poncho on and down over pack and all despite the whipping of the wind, and to snap the sides together. All this took time, and Elphi was fidgeting before she finished. She faced him, back to the wind.

  “Since I helped solve your problem, how about helping me with mine?”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I want to remember all this, and come back and see you again.”

  This sent Elphi off into a great fit of moaning and head-swinging. Abruptly he stopped and stood, rigidly upright. “Would you force me to lie to you? What you ask cannot be given, I’ve told you why.”

  “I swear I wouldn’t tell anybody!” But when this set off another groaning fit Jenny gave up. “All right. Forget it. Where is it you’re taking me?”

  Elphi sank to all fours, trembling a little, but when he spoke his voice sounded ordinary. “To the track across Great Hograh, where we met. Just over there, do you see? The line of cairns?” And sure enough, there on the horizon was a row of tiny cones. “You walk before me now, straight as you can, till you strike the path.”

  Jenny, map in hand and frustration in heart, obediently started to climb toward the ridge, lifting her boots high and clear of the snow-dusted heather. The wind was now at her back. Where a sheep-track went the right way she followed it until it wandered off-course, then cast about for another; and in this way she climbed at last onto the narrow path. She stopped to catch her breath and admire the view, then headed east, toward the Youth Hostel at Westerdale Hall, with the sun behind her.

  For a couple of miles after that Jenny thought of nothing at all except the strange beauty of the scenery, her general soreness and tiredness, and the hot, bad dinner she would get in Westerdale. Then, with a slight start, she wondered when the fog had cleared, and why she hadn’t noticed. She pulled off the flapping poncho—dry already!—rolled it up, reached behind to stuff it under the pack flap, then retrieved her map in its clear plastic cover from between her kn
ees and consulted it. If that slope directly across the dale was Kempswithen, then she must be about here, and so would strike the road into Westerdale quite soon. She would be at the hostel in, oh, maybe an hour, and have a hot bath—hot wash, anyway, the hostel probably wouldn’t have such a thing as a bathtub, they hardly ever did—and the biggest dinner she could buy.

  ###

  “This is our off-season. You’re in luck,” said the hostel warden. “We were expecting you yesterday. In summer there wouldn’t have been a bed in the place, but we’re not fully booked tonight so not to worry. Will you be wanting supper?”

  “I booked for the fifth,” said Jenny a bit severely. “I’m quite sure, because the fifth is my sister’s birthday.”

  “Right. But the fifth was yesterday; this is the sixth.” He put his square finger on a wall calendar hanging behind him. “Thursday, April the sixth. All right?”

  “It’s Wednesday, the fifth,” said Jenny patiently, wondering how this obvious flake had convinced the Youth Hostel Association to hire him for a position of responsibility. She held out her wrist so he could read the day and date.

  He glanced at the watch. “As a matter of fact it says Thursday the sixth. But it’s quite all right, you’ll get a bed. Now what about supper, yes or no? There’s people waiting to sign in.”

  Jenny stared at the little squares on the face of her watch and felt her own face begin to burn. “Sorry, I guess I made a mistake. Ah—yes, please, I definitely do want supper.” A couple of teenage boys, waiting in the queue behind her, were looking at her strangely; she fumbled out of her boots, slung them into the boot rack, hoisted up her pack, and with all the dignity she could summon up proceeded toward the dormitory she’d been assigned to.

  Safe in the empty dorm she picked a bed and sat on it, dumping her pack on the floor beside her. “I left Cambridge on the third,” she said aloud. “I stayed two nights in York. I got on the Middlesbrough train this morning, changed there for Whitby, got off at Kildale, and walked over the tops to Westerdale. How and where in tarnation did I manage to lose a day?”

  On impulse she got out her scat ticket for the Inter-City train. The seat had been booked for the third. The conductor had looked at and punched the ticket. Nobody else had tried to sit in the same seat. There could be no reasonable likelihood of a mistake about the day.

  Yet her watch, which two days ago had said Monday, April 3, now said Thursday, April 6. Where could the missing day have gone?

  But there was no one to tell her, and the room was cold. Jenny came back to the present: she needed hot water, food, clean socks, her slippers, and (for later) several more blankets on her bed. She wrestled her pack around, opened it, and pulled out her towel and soap box; but her spare pair of boot socks was no longer clean. In fact, it had obviously been worn hard. Both socks were foot-shaped, stuck full of little twiglets of heather, and just slightly damp.

  The prickly bits of heather made Jenny realize that the socks she was wearing were prickly as well. She stuck a finger down inside the prickliest sock to work the bits of heather loose, giving this small practical problem all her attention so as to hold panic at bay.

  The prickle in her right sock was not heather, but a small piece of paper folded up tight. Hands shaking, Jenny opened the scrap of paper and spread it flat on her thigh. It was a Lipton Teabag wrapper, scribbled over with a pen on the non-printed side, in her own handwriting. The scribble said:

  hob called ELFY (?)—caught me in fog, made me come home with him—disguised as sheep—lives in hole with 6 others—hobs are aliens—he’ll make me forget but TRY TO REMEMBER—Danby High Moor?/Bransdale?/ Farndale?—KEEP TRYING, DON’T GIVE UP!!!

  These words, obviously penned in frantic haste, meant nothing whatever to Jenny. What was a hob? Yet she had written this herself, no question.

  Her mind did a slow cartwheel. The sixth of April. Thursday, not Wednesday.

  Jenny folded up the scrap of paper and stowed it carefully in her wallet. Methodically then she went through the pack. The emergency food packet had gone, vanished. So had the flashlight, and the candles. The spare shirt and underwear that ought to have been fresh were not. Her little aluminum mess kit pot, carefully soaped for easy cleaning through so many years of camping trips, had been blackened with smoke on the bottom.

  Something inexplicable had happened and Jenny had forgotten what it was—been made to forget, apparently; and to judge by this message from out of the lost day she had considered it well worth remembering.

  All right then, she decided, hunched aching and grubby on a hard bed in that cold, empty room, the thing to do was to follow instructions and not give up. Trust her own judgment. Keep faith with herself, even if it took years.

  ###

  It did take years, but Jenny never gave up. She returned as often to the North York Moors National Park as summers, semester breaks, and sabbaticals permitted, coming to know Danby High Moor, and Bransdale and Farndale, and their moors, as well as a foreign visitor could possibly know them in every season; and each visit made her love that rugged country better. In time she became a regular guest at a farm in Danby Dale that did bed-and-breakfast for people on holiday, and never again needed to sleep in Westerdale Hall.

  The wish to unriddle the mystery of the missing April 5 retained its strength and importance without, luckily, becoming obsessive, and this fact confirmed Jenny’s instinctive sense that when she had scribbled that note to herself she had been afraid only of forgetting, not of the thing to be forgotten. She wanted the lost memories back, not in order to confront and exorcise them, but to repossess something of value that rightfully belonged to her.

  But Elphi’s powers of suggestion were exceptional. Try as she might, Jenny could not recapture what had happened. Diligent research did uncover a great deal of information about hobs (including the correct spelling of Elphi’s name, for he had been famous in his day). And Jenny also made it her business to learn what she could about people who believed themselves to have been captured and examined by aliens (for instance, they are drawn back again and again to the scene of the close encounter). Many of these people had clearly been traumatized, and were afterwards tormented by their inability to remember what had happened to them. Following their example, in case it might help, Jenny eventually sat through a few sessions with a hypnotist; but whether because her participation was half-hearted or because Elphi’s skills were of a superior sort, she could remember nothing.

  None of Jenny’s efforts, in fact, produced the results she actively desired and sought. They did have the wholly unlooked-for result of finding her a husband, and a new and better home.

  Frank Flintoft at forty-eight had flyaway white hair and a farmer’s stumping gait, but also wide-awake blue eyes in a curiously innocent face. His parents were very old friends of John and Rita Dowson, whose farm in Danby Dale had become Jenny’s hob-hunting base in Yorkshire. Frank had grown up on his family’s farm in Westerdale, gone off to Cambridge on a scholarship, then returned to take a lease on a place near Swainby, just inside the Park boundary, and settle down to breeding blackface sheep.

  The Dowsons had spoken of this person to Jenny with a mixture of admiration and dubiety. A local boy that went away to University rarely came back. Frank had come back—but with Ideas, and also with a young bride who had left for London before the first year was out; and the Dowsons frowned upon divorce. Frank would use no chemicals, not even to spray his bracken, which put John Dowson’s back up. For another thing, he went in for amateur archeology—with the blessing of the County Archeologists for half the North Riding—and was known to the Archeology Departments at the Universities of York and Leeds. And with it all, more often than not Frank’s Swaledale gimmer lambs took Best of Breed at the annual Danby Show.

  This paragon and Jenny were introduced on one of her summer junkets. The two hit it off immediately, saw a lot of each other whenever Jenny was in Yorkshire, but were not quick to marry. Frank had first to convince himself that
Jenny truly loved the moor country for its own sake, and could be trusted not to leave it, before he was prepared to risk a second marriage; but Jenny, to her own surprise, felt wholly willing to exchange her old life for Frank, a Yorkshire sheep farm at the moors’ edge, with a two hundred-year-old stone farmhouse, and part-time teaching at York University.

  Not until six months after the wedding did Jenny tell her husband about the hob named Elphi. They had finished their evening meal and were sitting at the kitchen table before the electric fire, and at a certain point in the bizarre narrative Frank put his thick hand over hers. “I’ve heard of Elphi myself,” he said thoughtfully when she had finished. “Well, and so that’s what really brought you back here, year after year . . .

  “You’ve still got the note you wrote yourself, I expect.” Jenny had had the teabag wrapper laminated, years before. Wordless, she went to her room to fetch it, and wordless he read what she had written there.

  “Can you suggest an explanation?” she finally asked.

  Frank shook his head. “But I know one thing. Ancient places have got lives of their own. There’s 3,500 years of human settlement on these moors, love. When I’m working on one of the ancient sites I often feel anything at all might happen up there. Almost anything,” he amended. “I’m not happy thinking of the hobs as spacemen from somewhere else—I’ve been hearing tales of Hob all my life, you know. He belongs to our own folklore. I’d prefer to find an explanation closer to home.”

  “Well anyway, then, you won’t think me barmy to go on trying to solve the mystery? It’s the one truly extraordinary thing that ever happened to me,” she added apologetically.

  Frank grinned and shook his head again. “You didn’t by any chance marry me for convenience, did you—in order to get on with the search?”

  “Not only for that,” said Jenny in relief, and hugged her tolerant and broad-minded husband.

  But more years went by, and gradually she forgot to think about Elphi at all. Her quest had brought her a life which suited her so perfectly, and absorbed her so entirely, that in the end there was too little dissatisfaction left in Jenny to fuel the search for a solution to the puzzle.