Little People

by Tom Holt

  While I was busy listening to all these bloody stupid voices, I guess I got so distracted I didn’t realise what I was doing; because the next thing I knew, I was dragging the snuffed elf by its little ankles off the road and onto the verge. I’ve never had what you’d call outstandingly good night vision, but by a weird chance I did actually know precisely where I was; namely, five yards or so short of a field gate, on the other side of which was an old cracked cattle trough that ought to have been, according to my best guesstimate, just about long and wide enough to stow an elf in. I knew this spot so well because I’d fallen off my bike there about three years earlier and the surrounding area had well and truly impressed itself onto my mind, as well as other parts of my anatomy.

  Of course, I was navigating entirely by dead reckoning and touch, and I’m still amazed and really quite proud of the fact that I found that damned trough, and it was more or less where it ought to have been. It was more of a job than I’d anticipated, hefting a dead elf over a gate and then trundling it over sticky mud and up into the trough; I’ve never been your barrel-chested village-blacksmith type, and I have an idea that elf-meat is heavier, cubic centimetre for cubic centimetre, than the ordinary human kind. Also, slipping over backwards and sitting down in the mud two or three times didn’t help matters. Eventually, though, the moment came when I let go and the slimy green trough-water went ‘glop’ over the pathetic little body, the side of the trough and the front of my trousers, in that order, and I straightened my aching back and breathed a ragged sigh of relief. Job done, I thought. So that’s all right.

  I’d retrieved my case and was a mile closer to home when the flaw in my logic hit me like a wrecking ball. HORROR OF MIDGET DROWNED IN TROUGH, shouted my mind’s eye’s tabloid headlines: police are searching for the crazed killer whose ruthless hands thrust itinerant circus artiste Thomas Thumb, 46, down into his watery grave. ‘This unspeakable crime,’ said Inspector Fang of Surrey CID . . .

  Yes. Well. Hysterical melodrama aside, it wasn’t exactly the smartest thing I could have done under the circumstances. A dead elf lying by the side of the road is one thing; the same, face down in a watering-trough, is an entirely different kettle of piranhas.

  I stopped dead in my tracks and tried very hard to figure out what I should do next. Go back, fish the little bugger out, put him back? Yes, but that’d be begging Providence on bended knee to line me up with one or more eyewitnesses; and even if, by some miracle, I got away without being seen, even the dimmest of coroners was going to wonder how a body found in the road came to be all covered with green trough-sludge. Besides, for all I knew the horrible thing could already have been discovered and the whole place crawling with fuzz; and what was that statistic I’d heard about the vast proportion of malefactors nabbed and incarcerated because of their lemming-like urge to return to the scene of the crime?

  Short of finding a tree with a conveniently placed overhanging branch and hanging myself with my school tie, I couldn’t see any way out of it at all. On balance, however, going back would be marginally more suicidal than pressing on home. Groaning aloud, I squelched the last mile and was welcomed home with the most eloquent and forceful telling-off I’ve ever had the bad luck to get in the way of. Water off a duck’s back, of course: when you’re facing the prospect of thirty years in jail for murder, even a level six tongue-lashing from your Mum dwindles instantly into perspective. I kicked off my shoes, muttered something like, ‘Yes, you’re absolutely right,’ and pottled sadly away to have my last-ever bath with the door shut.

  But the night passed, and the following morning, and still the SWAT teams hadn’t come for me. I sat and watched my formerly green-slimed trousers whirling round and round in the tumble-dryer, each evolution purging my sin a little more; I cleaned and polished my shoes to the point where light fairly ricocheted off them; and while I was at it, the radio news and the TV news didn’t say a word about little men drowned in watering troughs. Eventually, on the third day (can you say unconscious symbolism?) I dredged up enough nerve to go and take a look.

  When I got there, the trough was completely empty. Not a trace of elf to be seen. A Happy Easter 2.0 to all our readers.

  As I stood in the mud staring into a tank of elfless green goo, I can honestly say I was more freaked out than ever before. A silly little voice in the back of my mind was saying, Maybe it was foxes, or badgers, but I didn’t dignify it by taking any notice. As far as I could make out, there were only three possible explanations, and that was destruct-testing the tensile strength of the word ‘possible’.

  – either the little bugger had risen from the dead and climbed out; or

  – he hadn’t been dead, only stunned; or

  – someone had come along, fished him out and disposed of him tidily in the manner advocated on the sides of beer cans without seeing fit to mention a word of it to anybody.

  Yeah, I thought, right; and will passengers waiting to board the 12.41 British Airways flying pig to New York please have their travel documents ready for inspection? There was, of course, a fourth possibility, namely that there had been no accident, no elf and no death, nothing more to it than me slithering one notch closer to total insanity. For sure, that’d have to be where the smart money would go, because for starters there’re no such things as elves –

  Of course not. Everybody knew that.

  Everybody, that was, except me.

  I went home and sat looking out through the French windows at the garden, at the spot where the rose bushes obscured the view of the place where I’d once seen a little man with pointed ears smoking a roll-up. The garden was looking particularly neat and crisp that day, which I took for a nice bit of irony; the lawn tidily trimmed and edged, the flower beds as straight and precise as Pythagoras’s Greatest Hits. Then again, I reflected, when hadn’t it been thus? In winter, the bare earth was always impeccably groomed and levelled, in summer the grass was invariably immaculate, the flowers colour-coded, the vegetables smartly lined up on parade and presenting leaves—

  Which was odd.

  Which was bloody odd, since I’d never known Daddy George to get his hands dirty, Mummy was allergic to outdoors and we’d never had a gardener.

  CHAPTER TWO

  That was a long, hard holiday, believe me.

  It has to be said that my view of Christmas is quite like those of the unregenerate Scrooge and fifty billion turkeys. It’s not so much about the crass materialism that I object to (fact is, the crass materialism is the best thing about Christmas, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise) as the depressing convention that, at a season of the year when it rains non-stop throughout the severely truncated hours of daylight, it’s somehow desirable for families to gather like condors around a dying llama and pretend to like each other. This notion would be daffy enough in midsummer, when you could at least escape outdoors and hide in the shrubbery until they’ve all gone home. In the deep midwinter, of course, there’s nowhere to run to. You have no choice but to turn and face them, like a bear baited by a hundred poodles, and do your best to endure.

  That year, though, my mind was elsewhere most of the time. Instead of cowering in nooks and trying not to scream every time some aunt falsely accused me of having grown, I blundered through the festive season shrouded in a cloaking device of preoccupation that in the event earned me far more privacy and freedom from intrusion than I had any right to expect. Unfortunately I was too wrapped up in my long, strange thoughts to notice, let alone enjoy.

  Stuck in my mind like a haddock-rib in an unwary throat were some of the things the elf had said, just before he died. Something about death being freedom; also about knowing who I was and why I could see him, and something else about it not counting because he was outside the limits, whatever that was supposed to mean. And hadn’t he called me a traitor at some point? I wasn’t sure; after all, I’d been in a state of mild shock at the time and I certainly hadn’t taken notes. But: the point I’m trying to make is that if none of it had made
any sense I could’ve ignored it, filed it under ‘miscellaneous’ in the shoebox of memory and moved on. Unfortunately, there were one or two minuscule twinkles of sense winking up at me, like the eyes of Dutch paintings following you round the room.

  Freedom, the poor little bugger had said, and outside the limits, and knowing who I was; and there was a garden out there, somewhere under all the rain, in which nobody ever worked but which nevertheless boasted a flower every 3.75 inches and lawn edges you could do trigonometry by. A garden where I’d seen an elf and then been firmly told not to.

  Maybe there’re people in this life who can bring themselves to ignore world-altering facts and events when they tread in them or trip over them. Maybe back in the twelfth century a man sat under an apple tree, looking up at the branches and rubbing the top of his head resentfully, and suddenly out of a clear blue sky the truth about gravity swooped down on him and gate-crashed his mind. But he looked the other way and hummed a tune loudly to drown out the voice in his head, knowing that it’d be far better for all concerned if he didn’t get involved. After all, discovering and inventing isn’t compulsory. You have the choice to look the other way when the coastline of the undiscovered country suddenly looms at you out of the mist; when you spill your bathwater, you can turn a blind eye to the physics and just mop the floor with a towel until all the evidence has gone.

  Could you, really? It’d depend on the circumstances, such as whether the Inquisition was likely to drag you out of your kip at three in the morning and set fire to you, or whether there was good money to be made. But nobody was going to barbecue me for discovering elves, and nobody was going to pay me for it either, because there wasn’t a lawyer’s chance in Hell that anybody, with one possible but largely irrelevant exception, would ever take me seriously. So it stood to reason that if elves couldn’t be true, neither could the disturbing little theory that was starting to coagulate in the back of my mind, since there was nothing for it to be true with.

  So there I was on Christmas Day: Columbus with his hands folded behind his back, whistling perhaps a tad too nonchalantly and saying, ‘New World? Nah, sorry didn’t see anything like that, squire.’ No wonder even my cousin Eileen and my cousin Derek left me alone and went and hassled someone else. By mid-afternoon, in fact, I’d reached the point where the effort of not reaching the only logical conclusion of my discoveries was starting to give me cramp in my spine, and I knew that if I didn’t find someone I could explain my theory to and who’d tell me, That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard, go and sleep it off somewhere, I was either going to burst or have no choice but to face up to that conclusion and have the whole world change shape all around me.

  A day or so before the end of term, I’d asked her: Cru, would it be all right if I phoned you a few times during the holidays? And she’d looked at me and said, Well, for just long enough to make the rest of the reply unnecessary. This, however, was an emergency. I slipped away from the mob scenes in the drawing room, crept upstairs to Daddy George’s study, where there was a telephone and a good thick door, and tapped in her number.

  Needless to say, I’d never spoken to her parents or heard their voices before. From her descriptions of them, I was expecting either incoherent drunken giggling or something that’d have been perfectly at home announcing that it could smell the blood of an Englishman. When her dad answered and turned out to sound – well, normal – my immediate assumption was that I’d got the wrong number.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ the voice answered pleasantly when I chirped my is-Cru-there-please routine. ‘Who’s calling?’

  ‘Um,’ I said. No fooling, I had actually forgotten. Fear’ll do that to you. ‘Um, it’s Mike.’

  ‘Just a tick,’ replied the very nice man at the other end of the line; and a very long thirty seconds later, Cru’s voice jabbed into my ear. ‘Mike? Is that you?’

  She sounded annoyed. ‘Yes, it’s me. Look, I’m really sorry to dist—’

  ‘So you bloody well should be, you pig. I’ve been waiting by the phone for days and you couldn’t be bothered to spare me five minutes.’

  Really sorry to disturb you like this, when you made it clear you’d rather I didn’t call, was what I’d been about to say. Just as well this wonderful language of ours is so delightfully flexible.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ I repeated.

  ‘It’s fine you saying that,’ she snarled at me. ‘Only goes to show, though. Just one lousy call would’ve done, just so I’d have known you were still alive and not dead in some ditch somewhere.’

  I managed to choke back the ironic laugh before it escaped from my throat. Sure was funny, though: me being dead in a ditch would’ve been a slice of luck and a piece of cake compared with what I seemed to be up against. ‘Well, anyway,’ I said, ‘I just wanted to, um, wish you Happy Christmas, and all that stuff. If it’s OK, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ she said, as if grudgingly conceding a point in a particularly fraught session of peace talks. ‘Happy Christmas to you too, with brass knobs on. Well, is that it?’

  At that point I realised that I wasn’t going to be able to tell her about the dead elf and our beautiful garden after all. ‘Pretty much,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh. Oh well, then, I won’t take up any more of your valuable time.’

  ‘That’s OK, really,’ I said quickly as I could get the words out. ‘I mean, I wasn’t doing anything else at all.’

  ‘That’s such a weight off my mind,’ Cru growled ominously. ‘It’d really wreck my day, probably the rest of my life too, if I thought that maybe you’d had to sacrifice ninety seconds of your day just to phone silly old me. I could have got ulcers worrying about it, you know?’

  There’s an old Australian proverb: the left foot of a man with a hangover makes an infallible mine detector, even if only once. In the same vein, I guess I could write an etiquette book listing all the things you must never ever say on the phone to the girl you love. All I’d have to do is tape my own phone calls and transcribe the result. ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ I said, and I think I just managed to get the word that out in time before she slammed the phone down on me.

  I sighed. Yes, I could call her back; and she’d tell her dad she didn’t want to talk to me ever again, and he’d have the embarrassment of relaying the message, and I’d have the embarrassment of saying, Well, thanks anyway. (Because you’ve got to be polite, haven’t you?) That’d be bad, and not calling her back would probably be even worse. I was toying with the idea of writing her a letter (‘Dear Cru, You’ll never guess what happened, I was just about to ring you back when an asteroid landed in the lane outside and smashed the telegraph pole into matchwood . . .) when the door flew open, and there was Daddy George, looking like Grendel after a hard day at the office.

  ‘What the bloody hell are you doing in my study?’ he said.

  It was one of those questions you wish people wouldn’t insist on asking, since it’s obvious to all parties that anything you say is going to make matter worse, even if it’s only ‘Um . . .’ Which was precisely what I did say, as it happens.

  ‘I thought I told you,’ he went on, giving me a look you could’ve carried out surgery with, ‘never to come in here without my permission. Well?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, feeling I couldn’t really go wrong if I stuck to the plain facts. ‘Yes, you did say that.’

  ‘So what in God’s name do you think you’re doing in here?’

  Facts. Tell the truth and shame the devil. ‘Using the phone,’ I replied. ‘Only, I couldn’t use the one in the living room because everyone’s in there, and I can’t hear . . .’

  He’d quickly gone from angry to intrigued. ‘Who’re you phoning, then? You never use the phone.’

  Which was mainly true. ‘Oh, just a friend,’ I replied.

  ‘Bullshit. You haven’t got any friends.’

  Also mainly true, except for one, assuming she was still talking to me, which was by no means certain. ‘Someone from school,�
�� I said.

  ‘Really? Someone from school.’ His monstrous swathe of eyebrows swept together; on a still day you could probably have heard the rustling in the next room. ‘And this call to this someone from school’s so bloody important that on Christmas Day you’ve got to sneak away from our guests and break into my study—’

  ‘Um, yes,’ I interrupted. ‘It’s my girlfriend, you see, and—’

  He blinked five times, very rapidly. ‘You’ve got a girlfriend?’ he said, making it sound as if I’d just claimed I’d found the holy grail at the bottom of a cornflakes packet. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since the start of last term, actually,’ I replied. ‘Her na—’ I caught myself just in time. “I promised I’d ring her today, just to, you know, say Happy Christmas. But I didn’t want to call from downstairs, with everybody listening . . .’