by Tom Holt
‘No, I just don’t like it very much.’
‘Really?’ I smiled. ‘Come on, it can’t be that bad.’
‘You reckon?’ she said, with a wry grin. ‘All right, three guesses.’ I thought for a moment. ‘Rumpelstiltskin, Peaseblossom. Am I warm?’
‘No, just extremely annoying. Hurry up and use your imagination. You see, unless you’ve had your three guesses – properly, I mean, not just saying the first thing that comes into your head – it isn’t going to work.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘All right: Thumbelina, and that’s my best offer.’
‘Nope.’ Her shoulders hunched and she looked the other way. ‘If you really must know, it’s Melissa.’
‘Melissa? That’s a nice name. Well, quite nice. Nothing wrong with it, anyhow.’
‘Nothing wrong?’ She was angry now. Suited her better. ‘Melissa’s a human name, it’s downright embarrassing. God, it was bad enough when I was at school, with all the other kids teasing and chanting. Melissa is a hu-man, Melissa is a hu-man every single bloody playtime. And making fun of my ears.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your ears,’ I said, crossing my fingers behind my back. ‘They’re very, um, pointy.’
‘Well, of course they damn’ well are. But the kids at school, they pretended they weren’t, just to be hurtful. You get sick of that sort of thing really quickly, believe me.’
Well, she wasn’t going to get any arguments from me on that score. Nevertheless, I didn’t have time for angst, even if legitimately acquired. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘will you please tell me – in terms I can understand - what you’re doing here. Please?’ I added, on the off chance that she’d respond well to abject pleading.
She sat down on the oven floor, her chin resting on her hands. ‘Like I told you,’ she said, ‘only maybe you didn’t hear me with all that wax in your ears. I’ve escaped. And,’ she said quickly, ‘I’m not going back, and you can’t make me.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of trying,’ I replied. ‘Escaped from where, exactly?’
This time she looked at me slightly differently; still the same level of contempt per kilowatt of stare, but a different sort of contempt. ‘You don’t know, do you?’ she said. ‘You really don’t know. Well, bugger me. I wouldn’t have thought anybody, not even a human – dammit, not even a small rock at the bottom of a disused mine shaft – could be that unobservant, but clearly I was wrong. Only goes to show,’ she concluded, with a shrug.
‘Show what?’
‘Huh?’
‘Only goes to show what?’ I repeated. ‘What is this thing I obviously don’t know about?’
Long pause. ‘If you don’t know,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure I ought to tell you. Let me think about it for a moment, OK?’
I sighed. ‘Please yourself,’ I said. ‘All right, so you’ve escaped from somewhere, and now you’re here. So why did you do my maths questions for me?’
That provoked a tiny but ferocious scowl. ‘If that’s your idea of gratitude—’
‘Oh, I’m grateful,’ I interrupted. ‘Really, it was very kind of you. But why did you do it?’
She shook her head. ‘Bored, mostly. Besides, it was pretty bloody easy. Only took me five minutes.’
I managed to keep the soft growling noise down to an inaudible level. ‘You were bored.’
‘Well, yes. And,’ she conceded, ‘after you made it possible for me to escape – not intentionally, I know, but who gives a damn? All that stuff about it being the thought that counts is just a load of old socks spread around by people who got really lousy Chrissy presents when they were kids. Sorry, where was I? Oh yes. You let me escape, and you gave me a lift down here, so I felt I ought to do something, just by way of saying thanks. Though I should add that it’s bloody dark and horrible inside your briefcase. You ought to give it a good clean-out. There’s small, nasty things living in it.’
‘Apparently so. You, for one.’
‘Not living,’ she pointed out, ‘just passing through. And don’t be so horrible to me. Especially after I did you maths for you.’
Well, it had to be said. ‘Thanks, anyway. It was a nice thought, and I appreciate it. Only—’
‘Only?’
‘Only it’s sort of missing the point. I mean, how’ll I ever learn to do that stuff if you do my problems for me? And if I get picked on in class and told to explain my workings, I’ll just be sat there opening and shutting my mouth like a goldfish singing karaoke.’
There was enough concentrated venom in the look she gave me to poison a major reservoir.
‘Well, thoughtless old me,’ she said. ‘Actually, it’s your own fault for being too bone idle or boneheaded to learn the stuff yourself, so don’t you go blaming me. Bloody hell, if you can’t manage simple stuff like this, maybe you ought to consider switching special subjects and doing something a bit more on your wavelength, like media studies or woodwork.’ She stopped and scowled. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
I hadn’t realised I was. ‘Like what?’
‘Like you just found me in the bottom of your lunch-box and you can’t decide whether to eat me or call in the Air Force. Something’s on your mind, I think. Of course, it’d have to be something pretty small, or it’d overbalance and fall off, but—’
‘Ah yes,’ I said. ‘Now I think I know what it is. You remind me of someone.’
Suddenly she seemed to shut down, as though I’d switched off the power. ‘Really?’
I nodded. ‘You don’t look much like her,’ I said. ‘And I’m not just talking about size, she’s not as – well, she looks different. But you sound a lot like her – voice, and turns of phrase, that sort of thing.’
‘How fascinating. I don’t believe you, of course. I mean,’ she added, trying to sound bored and superior, ‘from what I can gather, you’ve lived most of your life among humans, so any resemblance’d have to be fairly superficial.’
She was lying. Well, lying’s maybe the wrong word, but she was definitely trying to misdirect me in some fashion. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Now you’re doing just what she’d do if I got onto a subject she didn’t want to talk about. You’re being extra-specially obnoxious, so I won’t notice you change the subject.’
‘Who the bloody hell are you calling obnoxious, you tall . . . ?’
I let her rant on for a moment or so while I considered what I’d just said. I suppose I hadn’t really noticed the remarkable similarity between the elf’s way of talking to me and Cru’s, presumably because I was so used to being insulted by girls that it just seemed normal. Now I’d made myself aware of it, however, I couldn’t see past it: there were differences, sure, but the resemblance was too close to ignore. ‘All right,’ I broke in, interrupting her in mid-tirade, ‘let’s deal with this human thing. Who the hell are you, and what do you know about me that I don’t?’
She sighed, a long, rather musical sigh that seemed to start somewhere down around her ankles. ‘We-ell,’ she said, ‘if you really don’t know, I suppose it’s only fair to tell you, before you make life really difficult for yourself. Not to mention for us,’ she added, in a distinctly odd tone of voice. ‘Only problem is trying to get the idea across to you in human terms. It’d be like trying to explain quantum theory to a water vole.’
I frowned. ‘Try me,’ I said.
She thought for a moment. ‘No,’ she said eventually, ‘it’ll be far easier to show you. I’m not supposed to,’ she added, ‘but we won’t worry about that now. Besides, I’m going that way anyway. And,’ she said, looking away awkwardly, ‘I need your help to get there.’
‘You need my help?’
‘All right, don’t make a six-part miniseries out of it,’ she snapped. ‘You’ll be amazed to hear that I’m not actually all that thrilled about having to go begging and pleading with a tall – with a compactness-challenged person about anything, let alone something as important – oh, the hell with it. Are you going to help me or not?’
I shrugged. ‘Depend
s,’ I said. ‘Is it dangerous? Will it hurt? And how long’s it going to take, because if I’m not careful, I’m going to be late for—’ I paused. She was laughing. ‘Sorry, what’s so unbearably amusing about that?’
‘Nothing,’ she said around a mouthful of giggles. ‘Nothing at all. Elf stuff. Don’t you worry about it. As far as you’re concerned—’ Big snigger. ‘Far as you’re concerned, it’ll take no time at all.’
Well, that didn’t sound so bad. ‘And it won’t hurt?’
‘You won’t feel a thing. Promise.’
‘All right. And then you’ll explain.’
‘It’ll all become as clear as crystal, just you wait and see. Well, don’t just stand there like a lovesick prune. This way.’
I had my doubts, of course. Unfortunately, the Pavlovian urge to obey overrode the soft whinnying of my vestigial self-preservation instinct. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Where are we going? There’s nothing out this way but sheds and dustbins.’
‘That’s what you think,’ she replied without looking round, as she strode out of the door like a cross between Tinkerbell and Xena. ‘That’s because you’re pathetically unobservant, as I think I may have mentioned already. Ah, here we go. I was sure I’d seen it on the way over, and here it is.’
I looked down, and saw a circular bald patch in the scruffy grass where, by the looks of it, a dustbin had stood until very recently. ‘That’s it?’
‘I just told you, yes.’ She stood on the edge of the ring, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. ‘It’s going to be a hell of a squeeze getting you in there with those ridiculous great big feet of yours, but we’ll just have to manage somehow. That’s it,’ she continued, as I went and stood where she was pointing. ‘Now, make sure that your whole foot’s inside the ring.’
She was right, it was a tight fit. Believe me, it’s a bizarre feeling having a very attractive six-inch-tall woman nestling in a hostile manner close against the calf of one’s leg.
‘Is that all right?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely not, you’ve got the big toe of your left foot three-eighths of an inch over the line.’
‘Have I really? Does it matter?’
Force six scowl. ‘Up to you,’ she said. ‘Just remember, while you’re making your mind up, anything you don’t take with you gets left behind. This includes clothes, footwear and, most of all, toes. Now, then: on three. One, two—’
I twitched my foot back just as she said the T word, and on balance I’m glad that I did, even though it meant that I inadvertently kicked my small companion in the stomach and knocked her over. Now, this wouldn’t have mattered particularly (to me, at least, except on ethical and social grounds) if she’d stayed six inches tall; there would have been a small, irate girl yelling at me down at ankle level, but I’ve put up with far worse than that in my time. Where it all started to go wrong was the point where she started to grow.
Melissa put on five and a half feet in about a quarter of a second.
This complicated matters. Where, not so long before, there’d been something weighing maybe a pound and a half pressing against my ankle, there was now a mass roughly equivalent to that of a medium-sized farrier’s anvil. Curiously enough, I heard the snap before I felt the pain.
More agonisingly late than never, though, if you see what I mean; when the pain eventually came on line a whole microsecond later (we apologise for the late running of this service &c &c) there was enough of it to fill up my senses like a well-presented pint of Guinness. I’m only mentioning this, not out of some rather pathetic attempt to gain sympathy, but to explain why I wasn’t really paying much mind to the extraordinary miracle going on all around me.
Pity, really. And typical of my luck, needless to say. At the precise moment when everything changed out of all recognition (while staying exactly the same in virtually every respect), I was squirming on the deck in agony, yelling, ‘Get off me, get off me!’ to a six-foot-tall female sprawling across my right thigh. Like I just said, typical; dammit, the sprawling alone should’ve been the most fun I’d ever had in my life, and of course I missed out on that, too.
I guess she must’ve removed herself, because the pain grew slightly less unbearably awful. Reconstructing the order of events with the benefit of hindsight, my guess is that she rolled sideways and scrambled up before she started yelling at me. At any rate, I tuned out the yelling (years of experience) and concentrated on the suffering and self-pity aspects, where at least I was doing something I was good at.
Then, quite suddenly, there was another click; except that this one was, for want of a better word, an unclick, the same sound as before only reversed. The pain stopped – of course, pain doesn’t do that, it fades out like the end of a track on a record, but this time it was immediate, as though nasty Mr Pain had driven into a brick wall. And serve him right.
‘Uh?’ I said.
‘Idiot,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, we’re here.’
I wasn’t expecting a comment like that, since I hadn’t been aware of travelling any distance, unless you counted a short, fast journey in the Y axis. ‘My leg,’ I said. ‘It’s better.’
‘I fixed it,’ she said, with the air of someone getting an irrelevant detail out of the way. ‘Double green-stick fracture of the left shin. That’s perfectly all right, don’t mention it, you’re very welcome.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘What the bloody hell do you mean, you fixed it? and how do you know what sort of a—’
‘Shut up, for pity’s sake,’ she said. ‘We’re here.’ Her voice was suddenly different. ‘I’m here. Home.’
‘But you can’t just fix a broken leg just like—’ Then I noticed something out of the corner of my eye and sat up to look about me; after which I stopped worrying about my leg, or how come it was suddenly unbroken. Priorities, you see. Legs are all very well in their place, but there’s other things in life.
I knew where I was, of course; I could’ve drawn a map blindfold, and marked the place where I was sitting with an X. There was the shed we’d just come from; behind that were the other outbuildings, and fifty yards or so in the other direction were the tennis courts and the football pavilion, all exactly where they should be.
Except that they weren’t.
Let me try and hook my fingernails over the edge of coherence here, and try to explain. In the places where there should have been buildings, there were buildings, and the buildings were more or less the size and shape they should have been. But where there ought to have been rather crummy creosoted timber and galvanised steel sheet (that’s our school for you: all Victorian Gothic out front, and scruffy as Albert Steptoe’s junk-yard round the back), there was mellow golden stone and new thatch the colour of Dutch salted butter. Likewise, the grass should’ve been thin, patchy and scrawny, covering the mud like the residual traces of hair on Daddy George’s bald patch. Instead, it was thick, even, and I think the word I’m looking for is verdant: Hollywood grass, costing more per square metre than best-quality Axminster carpet. Even the sky - the sky, dammit, was this amazingly blue shade of blue, like a very unconvincing background matte on a film. In England, in January? Get real, will you?
‘What?’ I asked.
Melissa was looking at me. She hadn’t changed at all, except that now she was much, much taller, and somehow, during the thirty seconds or so since she’d said the word ‘three’, her hair had formed itself into a ferociously complicated-looking plait. There was another change, too, now I come to think of it, even more drastic and improbable than the instant hairdo. She looked happy.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘here we are. Welcome to Elfland.’
CHAPTER SIX
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘this is round the back of the main buildings. We’re in the Home Counties. England. Earth.’
Melissa laughed; and although she was laughing at me, there wasn’t any cruelty in it. ‘You’re absolutely right,’ she said. ‘That’s precisely where we are. Isn’t it wonderful.’
I didn’t sa
y anything for a moment. All right, yes, she’d obviously gone barking mad at some point in the last couple of minutes, but there was an argument for saying that this was no bad thing, since it seemed to have done wonders for her attitude. On the other hand, anybody who could use the word ‘wonderful’ to describe the wasteland round the back of the school sheds was quite possible a danger to herself and others and oughtn’t to have been out loose.
‘Sorry,’ I said mildly, just in case her mental condition involved sudden extreme mood-swings, ‘but I’d rather got the impression that you said we’d gone somewhere. And didn’t you just . . .?’
She nodded, beaming like an angel (or, depending on your point of view, an imbecile). ‘That’s right, she said, yes. This is Elfland, where I come from. Do you like it? Isn’t it fantastic?’
Well, the weather was an improvement and the architecture wasn’t bad; likewise the grass, if grass is something that really matters to you. But it was still round the back of the sheds, or so she’d have me believe. ‘Please tell me what’s going on,’ I pleaded. ‘This is beginning to worry me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said –
Just in case you’re as amazed as I was, I’ll just repeat that.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m being thoughtless. It’s just – well, being back here after such a long time . . . And I’m just starting to feel like I’m me again. You’ve no idea how utterly wonderful that is.’ She frowned, with a side salad of guilt. ‘Do I sound different?’ she asked.
I paused. ‘Do you want me to answer that?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘It’s very important that you’re completely honest,’ she said.
‘Ah, right. Fine. In that case, yes, you do sound different. Nicer. Less of a horrible sarcastic bitch, if you follow me.’
She nodded gravely. ‘That’s how I see it too,’ she said. ‘You know, that’s awful. It must mean that all the time I was there I was this really nasty unpleasant person—’ She stopped, and a tiny teardrop welled up in the corner of her eye, like a small leak in a sink trap joint. ‘I can remember,’ she said unhappily. ‘I’m remembering some of the horrid things I’ve said to you.’ Pause. Sniff. ‘Oh Michael, I’m so very sorry—’