by Tom Holt
‘Jesus.’
Well, maybe I had thought of it, at least on a subconscious level; but I certainly hadn’t consciously fitted together those particulars pieces. Or hadn’t allowed myself to, more like. Cru, on the other hand, was under no such disability and now she’d actually said it out loud, it wasn’t ever going to go away.
Pity, that. I’d wanted understanding and moral support, not to have my nose rubbed in an uncomfortable, possibly life-altering hypothesis. A bit like running to Mummy to have a bumped knee kissed better, to find Mummy waiting for you with a chainsaw and saying she’s going to have to amputate.
Cru just seemed annoyed that I’d interrupted her. ‘Well, doesn’t it?’ she demanded. ‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s as obvious as an elephant sandwich. To be honest with you, I can’t really see how you could’ve failed to—’
Gee, I thought; if she’s the sensitive, tactful one, I must be really crass. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Well, you’ve given me something to think about, and no mistake.’
‘Oh, there’s more,’ she assured me. ‘For a start—’
‘Yes,’ I interrupted. ‘Thank you. But if it’s all the same to you, I’ll try and get my head round this lot first. Shouldn’t take more than the rest of my life.’
‘I thought you’d be pleased that someone else believed you,’ she said, sounding all hurt and spurned. ‘Damn it, I was only taking an interest.’
. . . As the dragon said to the oil refinery. ‘I know,’ I said quickly, ‘and I’m really grateful, truly I am. You’ve no idea how much it means to me. But I’d like to think about this on my own for a bit, if that’s OK with you. No offence.’
‘Please yourself, then,’ she replied, sniffing fiercely. ‘Let me know when you’re through moping.’
I assured her that I’d do just that, and she flounced off towards the main building. I know modern women aren’t supposed to flounce, but she must’ve been born with the knack; besides I think it’s nice that somebody’s keeping these ancient skills and crafts alive for future generations.
Well, it was one of those instances where the more you think about it, the more bewildering it gets. On the one hand, if she was right, it’d explain a whole raft of funny little things going right back to when I was just a little kid. On the other hand, if she was right, I was living under the same roof as a man who enslaved elves to dig his vegetable garden. Rather a lot of trouble to go to for a few scrawny little carrots and a meagre picking of Kevlar-reinforced runner beans. Besides, Daddy George didn’t even like vegetables.
Since it was the only explanation I’d considered so far, it was simultaneously the most convincing and the daffiest. I tried to think of an alternative. I failed.
When you can’t solve the whole problem, my aunt Sheila once told me, nibble off the simplest bit of it and try solving that; it probably won’t get you anywhere much, but at least you won’t feel such a total dead loss. So I thought about the diary and the disappearing writing, and had a shot at making sense of that. It was getting chilly outside, so I trudged back indoors and found a relatively secluded corner of the study area that I shared with a bunch of other guys. Then I pulled out the diary and ruffled through the pages.
It was back.
Damn it to hell, there it was again: four letters, tiny but unmistakably there. I scrabbled my way through the rest of the diary and, sure enough, all the other messages were there too, just where I’d seen them before.
Not funny, I thought.
Oh, there were rational explanations available, if I’d wanted them; some kind of chemical that was only visible under artificial light, or a compound that stayed inert unless gently warmed through by my body heat, permeating off my leg into my trouser pocket. There was also self-hypnosis, shared delusion, or the slender chance that some humorist had spiced the lunchtime roly-poly pudding with a generous dose of bad LSD. Those, however, weren’t the sort of explanations I was looking for, thanks all the same. I was more concerned with Why me? and What did I do to deserve that? and sundry related issues. You see, I’d already guessed the real reason. The message had been for my eyes only. Trying to share it with anybody – anybody at all – just wasn’t allowed.
If so, that was going to be something of a hardship. What I wanted most of all, of course, was for the whole wretched business to go away; failing that, my second choice was for someone else to come along and take it off me, while I tiptoed away and snuffled round the trashcans looking for a life. The burden being mine and mine alone was something I could really do without, what with one thing and another. After all, I wasn’t particularly interested in zoology or folklore, or even gardening. I could only conclude that it was a cat thing – you know, like that amazing ability cats have of choosing the one person in the room who doesn’t like them, and then jumping on his or her lap with all claws locked outwards, curling up and going to sleep.
Still, what did my feelings matter? It was only me, after all, not anybody important . . .
While I was thinking all this stuff, I was on automatic pilot: putting books away, clipping the day’s notes into ring-binders, general admin and clutter control. By the time I reached the industrial-grade self-pity stage, I was getting ready to make a start on the rather daunting raft of maths problems I was due to hand in before noon the next day. I guess you could say maths was my best subject, though only in the sense that his attention to grooming and personal hygiene was Darth Vader’s most attractive quality. Maths was what I was least hopeless at, on a good day. But the impenetrable briar-patch of wiggly brackets and equals signs confronting me was so far over my head I could’ve wished on it; another reason, perhaps, why I wasn’t in the most cheerful of moods.
Nevertheless, the sooner I made a start, the sooner I could legitimately give up in despair. I opened the stapled-up wodge of photocopied sheets, and looked at the first page.
At first I assumed it was simply a hardware problem, my eyes playing tricks on me or my stressed-out little brain overheating. So I looked away, eyes tight shut, counted slowly to twenty plus two for luck, and looked again. It was still there: a neat but minuscule paragraph of mathematical calculations carefully inscribed in the margin, apparently answering the question. Oh please, I whined inwardly, not now, can’t you see I’m busy? I picked up the booklet and went through it page by page; next to each problem, an elegantly elfwritten answer, no letter or number more than two millimetres high but nevertheless surprisingly legible. There wasn’t a pen made that wrote that small.
After I’d been sitting there for an indeterminate length of time, it occurred to me that it might just be helpful to run through one of these answers and see if it made sense; so I did. It did, too. Furthermore, the answer was so well presented and set out that, for the very first time, I got just the faintest sliver of a clue as to what all this guff was supposed to be about.
What to do?
Well. There’s an old folk tale about a man who was walking down a country lane and came to a long single-storey shed, out of the front of which protruded an unmistakable dragon’s head, while a similarly unmistakable dragon’s tail stuck out the back window. Next to the shed was a magnificent crop of brussels sprouts, being weeded by a little old man in a bobble-hat.
‘Excuse me,’ the passer-by said to the old man, ‘but is that a dragon in your barn?’
The old man looked at him for a while, then shrugged. ‘Ain’t no such thing as dragons,’ the old man said, ‘but their dung’s mighty good for brassicas.’
Well, anyway, you get the general idea. Maybe the existence or non-existence of elves was making my life a metaphysical nightmare; but if they were prepared to do my maths homework for me, I wasn’t going to complain. True, squinting at that tiny handwriting as I made a fair copy gave me a splitting headache, but nothing in life is ever entirely perfect, not even chocolate profiteroles.
The copying-out took me a quarter of an hour. As soon as I’d finished, I put my answer paper carefully away, picked up the question bo
oklet and prowled around in the corridors to nab the first person I met. This turned out to be a guy called Paul Schenk, who was virtually a friend of mine.
‘Paul,’ I said.
He stopped and turned to face me. ‘What’s up with you?’ he said. ‘You look awful.’
‘Do me a favour,’ I said, ‘and have a look at this question sheet for me, will you?’
He glanced down at it. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘haven’t got time. Besides, I’m bloody hopeless at that sort of stuff.’
‘No, that’s all right,’ I told him. ‘I don’t need any help with the questions, I just want you to look at the paper.’
He frowned. ‘Is this a conjuring trick?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Because if it’s one of those things where you’ve got a hidden squirter that shoots a jet of water up my nose, I suggest you take it away and avoid months in plaster.’
‘No trick,’ I said. ‘All I want you to do is tell me if you can see anything on there apart from the questions. Well?’
He looked at me as if I’d just walked through the wall with my head under my arm, wearing a frock. ‘Apart from the questions,’ he repeated.
‘That’s it. Any writing, that sort of thing.’
He made an exaggerated dumb-show of examining the paper, turning it upside down, shaking it, holding it to his ear, even nibbling off a tiny corner and chewing it. Great sense of humour, Paul had – according to Paul. ‘Nope,’ he said eventually. ‘Nothing I can see except a big mess of quadratic equations with a tasteful white border. Are you sure you’re feeling OK?’
‘Much better now, thanks for asking,’ I said. ‘Be seeing you.’
I went back and stared at what I’d just written, as much as anything to satisfy myself that it was still there. It was; and bloody impressive it looked too, so much so that although I could see on a purely intuitive level that the answers were right, when I tried to follow the calculations they sort of bounced away ahead of me like excessively frisky dogs chasing sheep. One thing was for sure, namely that those answers had been figured out by somebody else, not by me. And if I hadn’t done them, it stood to reason that someone else had. Someone with very small, neat handwriting.
The implications of that didn’t really bear thinking about, but I thought about them anyway. If, as logic would have me believe, an elf had done my homework for me, that meant that my tiny, Spock-eared benefactor must’ve found the question paper in my folder on my shelf in this same room and had either done them for his own amusement, the way a human being might do a crossword puzzle, or else had done them in order to help me out, presumably by way of saying thank you for some kind deed or other. The former hypothesis posited the existence of a life form able and willing to do vicious, man-eating quadratic equations for fun – elves I could believe in, but some concepts are just too freaky for the brain to get a grip on. The other explanation required me to believe that there was an elf here, on the premises, and (there are concepts even freakier than maths-loving elves) that he liked me. A lot.
Now that really was crazy, particularly since to my certain knowledge I’d thoughtlessly killed a third of all the elves I’d ever met. But suppose it was true, and that the gracefully tumbling sheaves of numbers and mathematical symbols staring up at me from my sheet of paper were a token of grateful esteem. Surely that had to rule out the possibility of a local chapter of elves (unless my act of kindness had been entirely unconscious, like chucking away a seven-eighths empty crisp packet behind a bush under which cowered a family of starving elf orphans; but I’m careful about litter and I don’t like crisps) and left me with the bizarre conclusion that when I came back after the Christmas holiday, I brought with me a minute, prodigiously numerate freeloader.
Yes, but how? In my pocket? Hidden deep in the folds of my innermost socks? Or maybe elves were invisible to everybody unless and until they wanted a specific person to see them, in which case the sucker could’ve travelled up with me, sitting on my shoulder like an invisible parrot.
Why, though? And, more to the point, where was he now? And what was he up to, apart from abstruse mathematical calculations?
I tried to sit still and put it out of my mind, but I couldn’t: there was too much of it, and it wouldn’t shut up. I needed to share it with somebody; but that was all right, because now (I realised) I had evidence. Hard, indisputable proof. I grabbed the question sheet and my answer and shot out of the study area like a politician pursued by newshounds.
Eventually, I ran Cru to ground in the library, of all places. She was sitting in a corner, apparently trying to barricade herself in with stacks of big, fat books. For a moment I wondered whether it was a protest of some kind; but at least it wasn’t a hunger strike, since she was surreptitiously munching a fistful of Twiglets, one of which she swallowed the wrong way when I popped my head up over her literary battlement and said, ‘Guess what!’
She jumped, scowled horribly, and shoved the Twiglet packet into her bag. ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ she hissed. ‘I could’ve choked to death.’
‘Sorry,’ I replied, with a rather obvious lack of sincerity. ‘But it’s important. Here, look at this.’
She took the question paper and glanced at it. ‘If you think I’m going to do your stinking maths questions for you—’
‘No,’ I interrupted. ‘Look. Closely. What do you see?’
She looked. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you ask me it looks as if someone’s eaten too many numbers and then been sick into a photocopier. Take it away, I don’t do maths.’
(Which was true: strictly an Eng Lit and History buff was Cru. Not that she wasn’t perfectly competent at mathematical procedures, especially if the product was less than ten and she wasn’t holding anything in her hands at the time.)
‘You’re missing the point,’ I told her. ‘Now, then. Apart from the questions can you see anything else on this page? Well?’
She gave me a fools-not-so-gladly look. ‘Please don’t tell me it’s more invisible writing,’ she sighed. ‘Because if you do I’ll have to smash your skull with a dictionary, and that’ll mean spending all evening hanging about down at the police station.’
‘You can’t see anything, then.’
‘No. It’s one of the drawbacks to being sober and sane – it can be so limiting sometimes.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Now look at this.’ And I handed her the answers.
She looked at the page for awhile, turned it right side up and looked at it again. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘What’s it supposed to be?’
‘Think,’ I said. ‘I just wrote out those answers to those questions.’
She twitched her nose. ‘You did. And?’
The penny landed and teetered round on its edge before flopping over. Yes, I had conclusive proof to back up my elf story; but she, not being a mathematician, couldn’t understand the significance of it. I took a deep breath. ‘Do you trust me?’ I asked.
‘No, of course not.’
‘Try. Just this once. Please. I want you to go and find someone you know who’s good at maths. Show them both the questions and the answers, and ask them what they reckon to it. All right? I’ll wait here.’
A look of martyred patience dragged across her face. ‘Have I got to?’
‘Yes.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘All right. Don’t let anybody touch those books. That includes you. Actually, that includes you a lot.’
Cru was gone a long time. When eventually she came back, she had a pained, thoughtful look on her face.
‘This is weird,’ she said. ‘In fact, this is the weirdest thing since Salvador Dali got a job as the speaking clock. This is your handwriting, yes?’
‘You know perfectly well it is.’
‘True,’ she replied. ‘I don’t think there’s anybody else in the world who can do such cruel and unusual things to innocent letters.’ She checked her books were where they’d been, to the millimetre, then sat dow
n. ‘I found someone to ask,’ she said. ‘Melanie Harrison, not my favourite person and about as interesting as a gardening programme in Portuguese, but very good at sums. Then I found someone else, just to be sure.’ She handed me the papers. ‘If what they said is right, there’s no way you could’ve done those answers.’
I grinned. ‘I didn’t,’ I said.
‘I’d guessed that.’ She paused for a moment, and turned up the gain on her scowl.
‘So,’ I said, ‘your friends confirmed it. These are the right answers.’
‘Ah.’ She looked at me as if I was a pane of glass. ‘That’s actually a very good question. You see, apparently whoever wrote that stuff doesn’t do maths the way everybody else does it. That’s what freaked our Melanie and our Sean. I couldn’t follow all the technical drivel, but apparently, it’s maths, Jim, but not as we know it. Completely new, different approach, is what they told me.’
I frowned. ‘But I use a new and different approach all the time,’ I said. ‘That’s why I keep getting the wrong answer.’
‘Ah, but that’s because you’re stupid,’ Cru explained. ‘Whoever did this stuff may be a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them.’ She leaned forward on her elbows. ‘So,’ she said, ‘out with it. Who’s the new Einstein?’
I looked at her and didn’t say anything. No need.
‘Thought so,’ she replied slowly. ‘Which is why you made me look at the question paper. There’s something written on it that you can see and I can’t.’
I nodded.
‘Fine.’ She breathed out slowly through her nose. ‘Let me guess. This writing that you can see and I can’t – it’s not very big, is it?’
‘Nope.’
‘In fact, it’s quite small. Tiny.’
‘Virtually microscopic.’
‘Jesus.’ She clicked her tongue. ‘Have I got to use the E word?’