Little People

by Tom Holt

  ‘Tell us what you think the question is,’ the Fuller elf suggested, ‘and maybe we can help you.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Who am I?’

  The two pointy-eared ones looked at each other. ‘Good question,’ the Fuller elf said. He was starting to get on my nerves.

  Melissa took a deep breath. ‘Here goes,’ she said. ‘In your world, that’s easy. You’re Michael.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘How about here? Since everything and everyone in my world seems to have a counterpart here, I suppose I must have one too. Yes?’

  ‘No.’

  Yeah, right. Just when you think there’s a tiny thread of spider’s web connecting the monolithic blocks of weirdness. ‘There isn’t,’ I repeated. ‘Oh.’

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ Melissa said, with a slight catch in her voice. ‘That’s why it’s all so difficult, in your case. You see, you’re Michael here too. You’re the only person in the whole world—’

  ‘Both whole worlds,’ the Fuller elf interrupted, presumably under the impression that he was helping.

  ‘– Both whole worlds, thank you, who’s the same on both sides.’ Melissa bit her lip; not something you see every day, your actual perplexed lip-biting, but she did it exceptionally well. ‘It’s what makes you unique.’

  Me. Unique. Probably just as well, of course. ‘Really,’ I said, and if I sounded just a tad sceptical, can you really blame me?

  ‘Yes,’ Melissa said. ‘Which is absolutely wonderful, of course, because it meant you were able to save me. Nobody else in the world could’ve done that, and I’m really, really grateful. But it does—’

  ‘Complicate things rather,’ put in the Fuller elf. ‘In fact, we aren’t quite sure what to do.’

  I sniffed. Well, if they could all do melodramatic gestures, so could I. ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘You could appoint a leader and ask him.’

  Yeah, well. It was supposed to be bitingly sarcastic, but I guess I wasn’t exactly at the peak of my form.

  Melissa took a step forward, then stopped. She looked extremely uncomfortable, and my diagnosis was either an intolerable moral dilemma or itchy underwear. ‘It’s because of what you are,’ she said. ‘Who you are. I think it’s about time I told you.’

  The Fuller elf gave her an are-you-sure-that’s-wise look. I decided I didn’t like him one bit. She replied with a little dip of the head. It made her hair sway in a quite enchanting fashion, but I really wasn’t in the mood.

  ‘Well,’ I said.

  Melissa looked at me gravely. ‘I think perhaps you should sit down first.’

  ‘How?’ I objected. ‘There aren’t any—’

  ‘—Chairs,’ I continued, leaning back against the extremely soft and comfortable cushions of this really neat old-fashioned armchair. We were sitting on either side of a roaring fire in a gorgeous old oak-panelled hall that was, bizzarely, also the school gym. I clearly remembered getting there. ‘All right,’ I conceded. ‘Look, would it be too much to ask for you to warn me the next time you do that? It makes my head hurt.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said the Fuller elf. ‘My fault, I forgot you aren’t used to it.’

  I shrugged. ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘And now I’m sitting comfortably, can we begin?’

  I could tell from the look of Melissa’s face that she really didn’t want to. Tough. I scowled at her, and she nodded.

  ‘This may come as a bit of a shock,’ she said.

  Didn’t say anything. No point.

  ‘The thing is . . .’ She paused, squeezing her left hand with her right – her dazzling repertoire of truly corny gestures was probably the most amazing thing I encountered in the whole of Elfland.

  ‘Your father,’ she said. ‘Your real father—’

  ‘Yes, I know all that,’ I said. ‘Daddy George isn’t really my dad. My real father buggered off when I was just a kid. Was that what you were going to tell me?’

  ‘You’re sort of warmish,’ Melissa replied wretchedly. The Fuller elf, meanwhile, was gazing at a small grey stain in the carpet as if it was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen in his life. Coward, I thought. Have I mentioned that I didn’t like him very much?

  ‘So,’ she went on, ‘you don’t remember your real father?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘There’s a reason for that,’ Melissa said. ‘You see, the man you call Daddy George - well, he actually is your real father.’

  I started to get up, but it was one of those chairs from which you have to gradually work yourself free, like a bit of shrapnel in an old war wound. ‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘My mum told me—’

  ‘I’m afraid she wasn’t being absolutely straight with you,’ Melissa said. ‘Daddy George really is your father. In a sense,’ she added.

  ‘In a sense?’

  ‘In a sense,’ she repeated. She was so obviously upset about something that under any other circumstances I’d have felt sorry for her. ‘Oh dear, how can I put this? A Daddy George is quite definitely your father. But not perhaps the one you’d be likely to think of first.’

  A very nasty, creepy thought was beginning to scamper across my mind. ‘A Daddy George?’ I parroted.

  ‘That’s right. You see, there’s two. Just like there’s two of everybody. One in your world,’ she said, the words coming out like pulled teeth, ‘and one in ours. And the one who actually – well, your real father . . .’

  I closed my eyes. I’m not the world’s most naturally intuitive person, but I didn’t want to see it coming.

  ‘Your real father,’ Melissa said, ‘is our Daddy George. The one from our side of the line, not yours. Which makes you—’

  My hands started towards my ears, but I have pretty slow reactions. Explains why I’ve always been lousy at catching things, or tennis.

  ‘Which makes you,’ Melissa said, ‘an elf.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I have this recurring nightmare. It’s the one where I’m asleep and I’m dreaming that I’m a fairly average normal sort of a guy, meandering along quietly through life, nothing much happening – wake up, slice of toast and cup of coffee, then out into the world to do whatever it is I do. And just when this part of the dream is getting so normal as to be screamingly dull, I wake up and discover that I’m not a human being at all, I’m a small green bug hanging upside down off the underside of a leaf, dreaming I’m human.

  Don’t you just hate it when your dreams come true?

  Well, yes. Elves aren’t bugs. But it’s a dream, damn it, not a simultaneous equation.

  ‘What did you just say?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘You’re an elf,’ Melissa repeated. To her credit, she seemed very upset about it all. ‘Or at least, half an elf. Your mother’s a human, of course, so—’

  ‘Half an elf,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right, yes,’ the Fuller elf cut in. ‘Which means, you see, that there can only be one of you; not a human version on the other side of the line and an elf version over here, like everyone else. Which is also why you can go across the line from there to here. Which is wonderful,’ he went on, trying to sound cheerful, ‘because you were able to bring Melissa back with you. Isn’t that great?’

  ‘I’m half an elf,’ I repeated. ‘My mother’s human, and my father’s the elf version of Daddy George. Fine. Now can I go home, please?’

  The Fuller elf squirmed a little bit in his chair. ‘Melissa,’ he said, ‘maybe we ought to have told him all about it—’

  I’m not usually very quick on the uptake, God only knows, but I noticed the tense of the verb tell. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Have told?’

  Neither of them said anything.

  ‘I get you,’ I said. ‘You’re too embarrassed to tell me whatever this story is that you think I ought to hear, so you’re going to do your fast-forward thing, so I’ll remember you telling me but you won’t actually have to do it.’ I shook my head. ‘No dice.’

  Melissa winced. ‘It’d be much easier
,’ she said. ‘And you’d have all the facts, and I wouldn’t need to—’

  ‘Tell me the bloody story,’ I growled.

  (Assertive little bugger I’d become, yes? I can only assume it was because they were being so polite and nice. If they’d been all snotty and brusque at me, I’d never have dared to speak to them like that. Typical.)

  Pause, while souls were searched and consciences racked. ‘All right,’ Melissa said sadly, ‘I’ll tell you. It’s a sad story, so you mustn’t—’

  ‘Get on with it already.’

  ‘All right.’

  It all started (she said) one Christmas.

  Once upon a time, there was a little girl who believed in Santa Claus. Every Christmas Eve, she’d hang up her stocking from the mantelpiece before she went to bed, hoping that Santa would come and fill it with wonderful presents. And, sure enough, when Christmas morning came round—

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said.

  She looked up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I hate to criticise,’ I said, ‘but could you cut the saccharin levels, please? Otherwise when you get to an important bit I might be so preoccupied with throwing up that I could miss something vital.’

  She frowned. ‘But that’s how it happened,’ she said. ‘Really.’

  ‘Oh, for crying out—’ I sighed. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You can do the fast-forward stuff.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said – and suddenly the memory was there in my mind as fast as a bullet.

  What I remembered was, basically, this.

  Yes, sure enough there was this little human kid, and she believed in Santa. At least, she believed in what she’d been told about Santa, which is only a very small part of the whole truth, and not by any means the useful or essential part. I guess it’d be like being a Christian if the only parts of the Bible to have survived down the ages were Noah’s ark, the feeding of the five thousand and the publishers’ address.

  All right, here’s the important stuff about Father Christmas. He’s an elf, too; that is, his natural habitat is the Elfland side of the line. He’s also the greatest quantum physicist the elven race has ever produced (and, as I think you may have gathered from the ease with which Melissa did my quadratic equations, elves are hot stuff at sums). One of his many discoveries, and by no means the most significant, is the secret of faster-than-light travel.

  Once you’ve grasped that, of course, a lot of the stuff you’ve heard about Santa Claus and dismissed as ludicrously implausible needs to be re-evaluated. Yes, he can travel right across the world in the space of a single night, no trouble at all; faster than a speeding bullet, in fact, (which is another elf-story we won’t go into right now), and yes, he does have time to visit all the good little boys and girls and load their hosiery with consumer goods, because of (a) the relativistic temporal distortion resulting from the faster-than-light stuff and (b) this annoying but undoubtedly useful elf trick of being able to skip the boring bits of one’s life and just live through the interesting stuff. In other words, it’s all true, even the sleigh and the reindeer. Furthermore, the act of breaking the light-speed barrier opens a window in the barrier dividing Elfland from the human side, just large enough for an old fat guy in an overgrown wheelbarrow to slide through.

  The first year, apparently, he did it as a bet; and it went down so well with the kiddies that he thought it’d be nice to make a regular thing of it. After a few years it all started to be a bit of a bind and he wished he’d never got involved, but all the kids in the Western world had come to expect it, not to mention the toymakers and the turkey farmers, and it was too late to back out without causing a considerable amount of grief and bad feeling, which elves aren’t inclined to do.

  (The thing about elves is that, because they can choose which bits of their lives to experience in real time, so to speak, quite apart from making a lifespan last ever so much longer than humans can, they tend only to bother with the nice stuff. This has had the effect, over many thousands of years, of making them nauseatingly cheerful and pleasant and charitable and good-natured, while poor human suckers have to put up with all the tedious garbage, which is why they’re all so miserable.)

  Anyhow, enough about that. Back to the little girl. There she is, one Christmas Eve, lying in bed waiting for it to be morning so she can scamper down the little wooden hill and start shredding wrapping-paper. She hears a clunk, down below in the living room. Hooray, she thinks, It’s Santa!

  Now, 999,999 times out of 1,000,000 she’d be wrong. Because of the various phenomena cited above, the actual amount of perceptible time Santa spends in any one house is something like a ninety-millionth of a nanosecond. In, get the job done, gobble the mince pie, swill the milk, out again like a rat up a kilt. But sometimes, in, say, one household in twenty million, he’ll stop for a minute or so just to catch his breath, check his list, blow his nose, whatever. Throughout this time, of course, the transdimensional rift is wide open, which means that if an inquisitive and extremely stealthy little girl creeps downstairs and sneaks into the living room just as Santa’s finished his breather and is all ready to get back to work, there’s a risk, slight but real, that she might get sucked into the hyperspatial anomaly by the backwash of depolarised temporal ions (I’m making all this pseudo-technical garbage up, but you get the general idea) and find herself stuck in Elfland before she knows what’s hit her.

  Her name, by some sublime irony, was Carol. She was five years old when the vortex gobbled her up. As soon as the nice elves on the other side found her and realised what’d happened, they knew she’d have to go back, though of necessity they’d have to wait until next Christmas before it’d be possible to return her. A whole year in Elfland.

  Being responsible and caring, the elves knew that the best thing for her would be to fast-forward her through her year of exile and fiddle the temporal divergence calibrations so she’d arrive back no more than five seconds after the moment in real time when she’d left; she’d still be five years old, her memories would seem like a pleasant dream, and everything would be OK. But, being loving and sweet to the point where they’d constitute a lethal threat to a diabetic, they couldn’t bring themselves to do this. After all, a year in Elfland – how could they deprive this innocent wee mite of such a wonderful experience? Whisking her through it in a fingersnap and then effectively invalidating her memories? Too cruel, they felt, too callous and unfeeling.

  Well, as I mentioned a moment ago, elves are red-hot when it comes to maths and physics. In most other respects, they’ve got the intelligence and common sense of educationally subnormal plankton.

  Time passes, you see, even in Elfland. Especially in Elfland. One year on their side of the line can work out as anything from twenty to a thousand years on the human side, depending on a lot of technical stuff that I don’t think even they understand. Furthermore, because Time is so profoundly squiffy there, the process of ageing works rather differently: everybody zooms to the age between eighteen and thirty that suits them best, and there they stay. There are no children and no wrinklies in Elfland, and no ugly or sick folks either – just healthy, beautiful young people. Imagine California, or the offices of a television company.

  You can see where this is going, can’t you? About ten minutes after setting pink-slippered foot on elf turf, little Carol was a gorgeous twenty-three-year-old, albeit with the outlook, experience and world-view of a wee tot. This would’ve been a problem if the same wasn’t basically true of everybody else there.

  And the highly predictable happened, as it so often does: she met a cute elf and they fell in love. Everybody in Elfland, without exception or excuse, is in love, needless to say, and everybody’s love is perfectly requited, without any of the angst and mess that humans have to put up with, and they spend about ninety per cent of their time drifting vapidly from enchanted grove to fern-trimmed lake, hand in hand, gazing into each other’s eyes like deranged optometrists.

  Had Carol and her lover both been elves, of course, there wouldn
’t have been a problem. Without getting into the embarrassing details, little baby elves don’t happen the same way that little baby humans do. (Actually, the stork brings them. Honest.) Accordingly, elves are rather less fussy about certain aspects of amatory relationships than humans are since the worst and most inconvenient thing that can happen is grass-stains on the elbows of their shirts. And, since most elves know approximately as much about humans as humans do about them, they naturally assume that it works the same way for Homo sapiens.

  Unfortunately it doesn’t.

  So; when Carol – my mum – returned to the human side a year later, wafted back across the line on a flying sleigh drawn by eight light-speed-capable reindeer, she unwittingly brought with her a little souvenir of her visit, which soon grew into a big souvenir, namely me.

  When she reached home, there were a few more surprises waiting for her. No sooner had Santa deposited her at chimney’s end than she noticed that her living room had changed somewhat since she’d last been there. Different wallpaper, different carpets and curtains, different furniture, not to mention five unshaven men in shirtsleeves sitting round a table playing stud poker.

  There was, inevitably, a certain initial awkwardness. The card-players, who were sports reporters working for a certain tabloid newspaper, weren’t nearly as surprised as members of almost any other calling might have been at finding a beautiful girl in a very short skirt and green tights suddenly in their midst, and for a few minutes Carol couldn’t make herself heard about the baying sound of the four guests thanking their host for his extremely imaginative hospitality. Eventually, several spilled beers and slapped faces later the truth was gradually winked out of its shell. Carol’s parents didn’t live there any more; they’d sold the house over ten years ago, and the present owner had been living there ever since – ‘ever since’, in this context, meaning eight years.

  Needless to say, the story made the front page of a certain tabloid newspaper the very next working day. A quick rummage in the files had turned up the story of the little girl who’d vanished without trace on Christmas Eve eighteen years ago, and one glance at the archive photos and the girl who’d come down the chimney was enough to confirm the latter’s identity. In the limited time available the reporters weren’t able to locate Carol’s parents, but it was a fair bet that wherever they lived now, a copy of the paper would reach them before the day was out.