by Tom Holt
All the time he’d been talking, I’d been fidgeting around inside my mind, looking for a volume control. I knew there had to be one, because I could remember how Melissa had been able to speak up so I could hear her, when she’d been over this side of the line. Eventually I did find it, purely by fluke; I have no idea what I did, but it worked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If you don’t mind my asking. What happened to my real father?’
He laughed. ‘I was telling you how clever I am,’ he said, ‘and there’s a case in point. Now, if you were good enough at maths to be able to do long division without a calculator, you’d have figured out for yourself that having me and him together in the same dimension wouldn’t be a good idea; a bit like mixing matter and antimatter in a cocktail shaker with a sprig of mint and an olive. It was only the fag end of the original interface that saved England from getting blown into orbit, that night when I nobbled the creep; whittling him down to your present size helped a bit, because the five per cent of him on the other side helped stabilise the whole mess a little, just long enough for me to invent an unbelievably cool and brilliant dimensional-implosion stabiliser – think of it as a magnetic acroprop wedged under the crumbling foundations of the cosmos – that sorted the problem out once and for all and also gave me a stable interface with a wonderful source of cheap labour.’ He laughed again. ‘Bless their feckless little hearts,’ he added. ‘No matter how much evidence snowdrifts up to the contrary, there’ll always be a healthy supply of utterly stupid people, your side and this, who truly believe they can get a fresh start and a new, wonderful life just by crossing a border. Greenbacks, I call ’em, and long may they continue to trickle through. Anyhow, your old man. Well, I needed a specimen for some fairly essential tests I had to do in order to calibrate the interface controls, so I sent him back. All of him,’ he added cheerfully. ‘Eventually.’
I suddenly felt cold, as if I’d just stepped out of a warm house into the snow. ‘You killed him, then,’ I said.
The great laugh rolled out once more. ‘You bet I did,’ he said. ‘In fact, saying I killed him is a bit like saying America is bigger than the Isle of Wight. I killed him a lot. Partly for sound commercial, just-business-nothingpersonal reasons, because he’d been the one who burst through the interface and might have used his elves-being-good-at-sums brains to figure out a way of jamming it up. Partly because of what he’d been and done with your mother – and bringing you into my life, let’s not forget that. Partly, I suppose, because by the very nature of things he was my exact equal and opposite, so it’s just straightforward physics that I’d have to cancel him out. But mostly because he was a pointy-eared green-skinned freak, and I hate elves. Always have, ever since I was a snot-nosed brat. I was drawing horns and blackening teeth on pictures of elves in my First-Ever Story Book before I could walk, and if Tolkien was alive today I’d have him executed for crimes against humanity. That’s mostly why I killed your dad. That, and I needed something to do my experiments on, like I said. One thing I’ve never ever been guilty of is random, senseless violence. Don’t hold with it – complete waste of time and effort.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, thank you for explaining.’
That made him laugh even louder. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘that sort of thing puts it beyond a shadow of a doubt, you really are one of them. Only an elf could thank his father’s murderer for taunting him with it. You people, you’re worse than Canadians. Well, as bad as, anyway.’
I couldn’t really think of anything else to say to him; the sheer size of what he’d done was so unimaginable, like he was himself, that even hating him seemed faintly ridiculous, like trying to exact a terrible vengeance on the sea by pissing in Morecambe Bay. In fact, just being in the same space as him was starting to make me feel almost embarrassed. He was overdoing the Evil Overlord stuff so painfully that he was undercutting his own credibility. To be helpless and at the mercy of a vicious, sadistic monster is one thing; being in the power of a vicious, sadistic silly monster, the sort who’d prompt you to yawn and switch channels if you saw him on the box, is something else entirely. It’s a very bad sign when you can’t respect your arch-enemy.
(And he was being so like himself, too; that may have been the worst thing of all. The harsh mocking laughter, the melodramatic exaggerations, the brutal insults – these were all things I’d fidgeted and stifled yawns through all my life, in respect of such issues as broken windows, untidy rooms and unfinished mashed potato. It was all so dreadfully familiar, and familiarity was breeding what it always tends to breed with the speed and efficiency of a state-of-the-art rabbit factory farm.)
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘this is a moment I’m going to savour for a very long time. I’d like to say that all through your childhood I tried to like you, or at least get to the point where I could be in the same room with you without wanting to throw up; but we can’t have everything we want in this life and that’s all there is to it. Like I said just now, you’re the closest thing I’ve ever had to a kid of my own, and that’s still too bloody close for me.
So I guess this is goodbye for ever, you horrible little shit.’
There he went again: I don’t know, maybe he believed it himself. But the plain fact was that he hadn’t always been like that – oh, sure, he’d never exactly been a TV-commercial father, playing football in the backyard and taking me fishing at weekends, but there had been times, not many but some, when he’d forgotten he was the arch-villain wicked stepfather and been quite normal, even relatively pleasant. When I was ten, he’d made me a kite and helped me build a plastic scale-model kit of the Ark Royal. You’d never have caught Darth Vader doing that, or at least not in the version I saw.
If this really was the last time I’d ever see him, I had a feeling I’d miss him.
‘Bye, then,’ I said. ‘And thank you for the kite.’
‘Kite?’ He blinked, then nodded. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that kite. The one I got you just so as to lull you into a false sense of security, and then you flew it slap bang into a tree first time out and shredded the bloody thing.’
I wondered if he’d been resenting that all these years. Well, obviously he had. But really it was his fault, he’d mucked up the airframe and the kite wouldn’t fly straight. But that was typically him, too, rewriting history so everything was someone else’s fault and done regardless of his best efforts to avert disaster, usually just to spite him.
If he hadn’t been twelve times bigger than me and about to send me to a forced labour camp to die, I’d probably have felt sorry for him.
He must’ve pressed some kind of hidden bell or buzzer, because I heard the door sweep open behind me, and tyrannosaurus footsteps padding towards me from behind. Call me a pessimist if you must, but I had an idea that this probably wasn’t a positive development, seen from my perspective.
‘Well,’ boomed Daddy George, ‘I suppose this is it. You know, things just won’t be the same without you hanging round the place – I mean, they’ll be better, absolutely no question about that, but they’ll be different. Not all that different, of course, because you’ve been away fifteen years, but somehow knowing you’ll be gone for good – it’s like the place where the aching tooth you had pulled out used to be not hurting any more. The end of an era, if you like. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye,’ I replied, half a second before a giant hand closed around me and hoisted me into first the air, second a Marks & Spencer plastic carrier bag. (One instance where putting your name and logo on your give-away peripherals proved to be counter-productive; for some reason I blamed them for their unwitting complicity and swore an oath never to buy another pair of socks from them as long as I lived.) I hit the bottom of the bag squirming, gave that up as a bad job and flopped.
‘All right,’ said Daddy George, ‘he’s all yours. Here you go.’
A rustle and a vertiginous vertical take-off suggested that he was handing the bag over to whoever it was who’d just come in. Some thug, I supposed, or hired myrm
idon. Still—
Still, I said to myself, mostly in a vain effort to take my mind off the stomach-churning unpleasantness of being carried around in a plastic bag. (Guilt spanned a chasm of years, whisking me back to a ten-year-old me carrying home a goldfish I’d won at a fair; in particular the moment when I nearly dropped the poor wee sod, and only managed to retrieve it inches from the ground with a rather remarkable juggling catch.) Still, this wasn’t so much an ending as a new beginning. True, it was the beginning of a long and probably horrible career in the shoe manufacturing business, and I’d have had to be as optimistic as twelve short planks to believe that it was going to be fun, challenging, fulfilling or a barrel of laughs. But at least I’d be somewhere, doing something, able to go to sleep at night with a moderate chance of waking up the next morning in the same place in the same dimension, the same size and only a few hours older than when I’d gone to bed. And yes, I’d just lost the only girl I’d ever loved, just when I was on the point of uncrossing the galaxy of crossed stars we’d somehow managed to blunder into; and yes, this time it did rather look as if I’d lost her for ever, since even if we did ever meet again, I’d be six inches tall and she wouldn’t be able to see me. But – actually there wasn’t a ‘but’ to that one, it was a silver-lining-free zone and immune to all forms of positive thinking and bright-side visual inspection. Damn, I thought. Still, better than being dead. Probably.
Now the chances are that you, poor underprivileged stay-at-home that you are, will probably never get to travel for several hours in a plastic bag. Instead, you want me to describe what it was like for you, so that you can live the experience vicariously by means of the small miracle of imagination.
Believe me, you don’t want to know. If you’re the sort of reckless contaminant floating on the scummy surface of the gene pool who makes a habit of ignoring the well-meant advice of wiser sufferers, you’ll probably have a shot at imagining it anyway, so here’s a few pointers, just to steer you towards the right kind of nightmare. Think of a football-pitch-sized trampoline, or a Bouncy Castle of Doom, or a zero-gravity padded cell that has suddenly come alive and decided it’s hungry. Think of all this happening for a long time, and please also bear in mind that there are no toilets in carrier bags, not even Marks & Sparks ones. In other words, think scary, painful, undignified, unpredictable and extremely sordid.
Still, most bad things come to an end, and eventually the hamster-in-a-blender sensation slowed down and stopped. I was still trying to make up my mind whether or not this was a good thing or just something even worse getting ready to happen when the world suddenly flipped upside down and shot me out onto a cold, hard, concrete floor.
At least that cleared up one point for me; to paraphrase Lennon and McCartney, you dunno how lucky you are, boy, back in the Marks & Spencer carrier bag.
Most of what I dislike about cold, hard floors can be summed up in the two words ‘cold’ and ‘hard’. My physics education was rudely interrupted just as I was getting to the good bit, so I can’t actually lay my hand on my heart and tell you for certain that a hard surface is harder when you’re knee high to a Cabbage Patch Doll than it would be for, say, a seven-foot-tall professional basketball player, and the same reservation obviously applies to coolth. It just feels that way, that’s all.
No point in moving around; in fact, being small and invisible and therefore at extreme risk of being trodden on if I started wandering around like a one-man nomadic tribe, the only sensible course of action was to stay put and wait for someone to come and tell me what to do. So I did, and they didn’t; not for a very long time. If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s possible to be scared into a jelly and bored stiff at the same time, let me assure you that it is. In fact, it’s dead easy; no previous experience or specialist equipment necessary.
To my surprise, when the Main Cop finally did show up, it turned out to be an elf; on the large side, sure, at least six and an eighth inches tall, maybe as much as six and a quarter, but not the agonising strain on the neck tendons I’d been anticipating. When I heard his voice behind me, of course, I instinctively looked straight up in the air.
‘No, you clown, down here,’ the voice corrected me, and I got the impression that maybe I’d started off the foreman/junior-assistant-nonentity relationship on the wrong foot. ‘So you’re him, then,’ the voice went on, as I lowered my chin looking for its source. ‘The freak.’
Bear in mind that I’d met elves, rather more of them than I’d ever wanted to, and the ones I’d been hanging out with recently were all pleasant, friendly, hospitable, kindly folks, gentle and polite to the point of violent nausea. They were also, of course, on the other side of the line; on the side where I was a loud-mouthed, overbearing jerk. Of course I should have anticipated the effect of that syndrome, like changing the signs when you take away the brackets in algebra; but I didn’t. Tsk. And me a Nobel prizewinner.
‘Freak?’ I repeated. ‘Oh, you mean—’
With that size and complexion and those ears, he was indisputably an elf, couldn’t have been anything else.
But not only did he sound different from the ones on the other side, he looked different too. Where the Elfland elves had been long and thin, like supermodels hung over a radiator to dry out, he resembled your stereotypical Alabama police sergeant, only with added neck density and smaller, beadier eyes. I can’t say I took to him.
‘Freak,’ he said, with lots and lots of emphasis. ‘You got a problem with that?’
I thought about it and decided I didn’t. Eminently fair and admirably concise, I reckoned. I shook my head. ‘No, sir,’ I said. I guessed he was probably the sort of person who liked being called ‘Sir’. Most thoroughly unpleasant people do, in my experience.
‘And don’t call me that,’ he snapped, making me wonder if perhaps I’d misjudged him. ‘You call the manager ‘sir’. You call me ‘boss’. You got that?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Boss.’
He frowned; it was like watching a rockslide on Mount Rushmore, to the point where you expected to see miniature Cary Grants and James Masons slugging it out on the bridge of his nose. ‘OK,’ he grunted, ‘but you’re still a freak, and I’ve got my eye on you. Understood?’
I wanted to assure him that he’d explained all the relevant factors so lucidly that even someone of my limited intelligence had no trouble at all in grasping all the salient points; but it occurred to me that if I said all that in words he’d probably think I was being funny and kick my ears inside my head, whereas if I stuck to body language, the worst that’d happen if I cocked it up would be him thinking I’d got epilepsy or a nervous tic or something. So I nodded.
He didn’t react to my nod, so I suppose I judged it about right. ‘Just remember, though,’ he grunted, ‘the first sign of trouble from you and I’ll know what to do. All right, follow me.’
Well, it wasn’t as if I had a non-lethal choice. So I followed him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The first thing that struck me about my new surroundings was the scale, and boy, was I relieved. Everything was the proper size – well, not everything; the doorways loomed overhead like triumphal arches, and the windows were set neck-crickingly high in the soaring walls, giving me the feeling I was in a cathedral. But the stuff that actually mattered, like chairs and tables and benches, were all the right height, and so were the people.
There were a lot of people. All elves, needless to say: pointed ears, greenish complexions. They were far greener than Elfland elves; I eventually found out that there was a sound scientific reason for this, something to do with light travelling at a different speed over there – either this was the reason the locals could play games with linear chronology, or else their continual faffing about with time had resulted in it getting seriously bent, with knock-on effects to several other constants. In any case, the Elfland spectrum isn’t nearly as inflexible as ours, which may also have something to do with the fact that their rainbows really do have ends, and pots of g
old to go with them. According to the elf who told me about this stuff, all the time I was in Elfland, the locals would have perceived me as being a garish shade of orange, though naturally they’d been far too polite to mention it.