Little People

by Tom Holt

  (Before you ask: yes, I’d tried the circle trick, it was practically the first thing I did when I arrived. On one of the stockroom shelves there were traces of an ancient coffee-mug stain, a ring of blackened stickiness still clinging to the grey metal. I’d jumped into it and done what I reckoned were all the things that had worked the previous times, but nothing happened other than some very odd looks from my co-workers. The obvious conclusion, from that and stuff I remembered from Melissa’s downloaded history lesson was that Daddy George had set up some kind of technobabble field or incomprehensibility generator that damped down any and all elven superpowers. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? A simple thing like that, even an Evil Underling should be able to hack it, let alone a full-blown Overlord. Needless to say, there was also the possibility that the anti-superpowers fix was something to do with the big electric shock, rather than a territorial thing, and that even if I got outside I’d still be fixed every bit as good as I’d been back in the stockroom. But I passed a unilateral resolution to forget I’d ever thought of that, since it was far too discouraging.)

  Escape. Well, according to my observations, it might well be as easy as heading for a doorway and keeping going. I couldn’t see that playing hookey from the work gang for a day while I did some essential reconnaissance was going to get me into any fatal kind of trouble, since I hadn’t as yet seen any evidence to suggest that anybody else remembered who I was or where I was meant to be. Admittedly it might all end in tears and six weeks in solitary, but what was six weeks – or six months, or sixteen years – in a place where time was about as relevant as degree-level pure maths in a Latvian brothel?

  Nothing to lose. Go for it.

  So, the very next day (I couldn’t quite bring myself to let go of my rope and walk away in the middle of the afternoon) I put my plan, or at least the big fuzzy hole in my mind marked as SPACE RESERVED FOR PLAN, into operation. When the screamer went and the elves trooped out for breakfast, markedly not singing hi-ho, hi-ho, I hung around at the back of the crowd and, when I was fairly sure nobody was looking, I sneaked off as fast as my wee short legs would carry me, due east. I had an idea I knew where east was because of the angle of the light slanting in through the windows each morning, and it seemed likely that there was an external door somewhere in the east wall because I fancied I’d heard the revving of artic engines coming from that direction, albeit filtered through many inches of brick.

  Nothing like being proved right, even if your road to the correct conclusion was paved with false premises, as mine was. A morning spent snooping around the eastern elevation of the factory (I managed to snag a clipboard and a pencil – add a worried expression, and walk quickly at all times) didn’t reveal the loading bay or the factory gate or any of the apertures I’d been expecting to find; but there was a small door with frosted glass in the top half, through which leaked palpable daylight. Trouble was, of course, that the handle was seven times my height off the ground.

  But I was feeling pretty good about finding a door of any description; added to which, I had a huge reserve of pent-up energy to spend on anything that looked like a good idea, and a chocolate-free diet and hauling on ropes had left me in pretty good, though miniature, shape. A bit of hunting around unearthed a ball of string, a pocket tape-measure and an old-fashioned metal ruler. The rest was sheer ingenuity, though I say so myself.

  Before I tell you what I did next, a word of warning:

  don’t try this at home.

  Step one was to haul the ruler over to the skirting board, where a pair of copper pipes ran in parallel, level with the floor. With an awful lot of effort and bad language, I got the ruler upright, scrambled up onto the top pipe and hauled the ruler up after me; then I wedged it between the upper and lower pipes and tied it down as best I could with nine inches of the string. Cutting the string proved to be a real pain; there was a pair of scissors on the seat of a human-sized office chair about a yard away, but when I eventually managed to scale the chair-leg and drag myself up by my fingernails on to the seat, I found that the scissors were way too heavy for me to move, so my chances of getting them over the pipes and operating them were effectively zero. In the end, I managed to saw through the string with the edge of the tape-measure; but the whole string-cutting thing took over an hour and used up a lot of my reserves of strength and positive attitude.

  Now came the really difficult, fiddly part. The idea was to use the ruler as a catapult to shoot the ball of string over the door handle. As if making such a precise shot didn’t promise to be tricky enough, I also faced the fairly monumental problem of getting the ball of string – which I could just about lift over my head if I really tried – to stay on the ruler while I pulled it back (how was I going to pull it back?) far enough to achieve the necessary airspeed and arc of trajectory.

  There is always Sellotape in a British office, just as there’s always water a few feet under the desert; the trick is to find it. Eventually I tracked it to its lair in the second drawer of a desk five minutes’ walk away across the limitless floor. Climbing up there, prising the drawer open with a fortuitously abandoned metal-barrelled biro, elfhandling the roll of tape up onto the lip of the drawer until it overbalanced and dropped to the ground, these were enough to wear me down to the point where I was running on the last knockings of emergency adrenalin. Getting the Sellotape roll back to the launch site, however, turned out to be far easier than I’d anticipated, once I’d hit on the cunning wheeze of climbing inside the roll and imitating the action of the hamster.

  The Sellotape made all the difference. As soon as I’d mastered the art of fraying it into lengths against the tape-measure edge, I was able to construct a double-sided sticky pad to go on the top of the ruler, into which I was able to press the string so it’d stay put. With another length of sticky tape, I secured one end of a foot of string to the top of the ruler; after all this time, I was fairly confident that I’d be able to do the business with the other end of the string, and for once my confidence wasn’t misplaced. When I’d bent the ruler as far as I could get it to go – a healthy thirty degrees of deflection, more than I thought I’d be able to get – I tied it off on the pipe with a slip-knot and collapsed, hardly able to move at all, for a very long time.

  Aiming my improvised siege engine was going to have to be a matter of intuition and blind guesswork. Whether I’d get another shot if I missed was a point of the utmost mootness, so I took my time, considered the angles, the air-resistance factor, the speed and direction of the wind (there was a small electric fan whirring away on the other side of the room: details matter . . .) and every other possible variable I could think of, did the maths, double-checked my answers, realised that I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing, closed my eyes and yanked on the string to release the slip-knot.

  The recoil from the discharge of the bent ruler knocked me off the top pipe. When I was through picking myself up off the floor and indulging in concussion-induced astronomy, I looked to see where my shot had gone and was both amazed and thrilled to see the string forming a wonderfully graceful right-angled triangle – pipe (where one end was securely fastened) to door handle, door handle to floor. I’d done it.

  Well, I’d done part of it. Next came the really fiddly bit.

  Hauling on ropes may have become my career, even my vocation, but I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to be able to scramble all that way up to the door handle from the floor just by doing the Indian Rope Trick. This, of course, was where the tape-measure came in. You may not have noticed this, but at the extreme tip of a tape-measure, where there’s a right-angled piece of flat plate which serves as the hook for securing the end to what you’re measuring, there’s always a rivet to hold the hook in place; and on your better class of tape-measure (which luckily this example was) the rivet takes the form of a hollow eyelet, just wide enough to admit a piece of string.

  I lugged the tape-measure over until it was directly under the end of the door handle, and threaded the string
through the hole. Then it got awkward. What I had to do was haul on the other side of the string – the section forming the hypotenuse of the right-angle triangle we admired so fulsomely just now – so as to pull the tape out of the casing, which I’d taped securely to the floor. The hook part was festooned with multiple tendrils or pseudopods of training Sellotape, and the idea was that when I hoisted it up to the handle, the Sellotape would wrap itself around the projecting aluminium horn of the handle – you now how Sellotape loves to attach itself to things, particularly when you don’t want it to – and create a secure anchor-point. The rest would be (relatively) easy.

  My strength gave out completely on the second attempt; I was pulling against the coiled spring inside the tape-measure, and I’d already exhausted myself setting the whole apparatus up to reach this point. So I rested for as long as I dared – of course, I had no guarantee that a party of quisling elves wouldn’t happen along at any minute and drag me away to the solitary-confinement shoebox – then tried to figure out a way of bringing mechanical advantage to bear on the problem. I have to say this, and screw false modesty; my solution was little short of serendipitous genius. Admittedly, I was in two minds as to whether it would work; I pondered and fretted, racked with doubt, like a man offered a cigar by Bill Clinton. On the floor near to where I’d tied up to the pipes, neglected and unloved like all its kind in these cyber-crazed times, there huddled a good old-time Remington manual typewriter. Now, if you’re old enough to remember them, you’ll recall that when you got to the end of a line, you had to pull back the carriage; and there was a little key you pressed that made the carriage shoot back at great speed, propelled by a hidden spring.

  So: the end of the string, made fast to the carriage return lever. The carriage, laboriously forced back step by arduous step (like trying to push-start an eighteen-wheel lorry) until it locked. All set, whereupon I jumped with both feet on the shoot-the-carriage-back key.

  It worked; when the carriage crashed back into place, it had raised the end of the tape-measure a good twelve inches. Onwards; tie up the slack of the string to the pipe, shorten the line and tie it to the carriage, repeat the procedure, and jump once more. Repeat the operation four times; job done. The tape-measure hook was right up level with the door handle, and the trailing strips of Sellotape had wrapped themselves round the handle horn like half a dozen starving pythons attacking a water buffalo. I untied the string, holding my breath, and – behold – the tape-measure was still there. Success.

  Which only left the piss-easy part; namely, to swagger across to the tape-measure, sit astride it, tease off the ends of the Sellotape that secured the tape-measure casing to the deck, and ascend, as if on a magic carpet, to the door handle under the firm power of the tape-measure spring.

  Firm. You betcha. My main concern had been that the spring would prove to lack the necessary welly to get me up there, and I’d been left stranded astride a tape-measure three feet off the ground. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about that, not one bit. In fact, I distinctly remember thinking, well, that’s all right, then as I sailed past the door handle at something approaching the speed of sound. It was only when I hit the ceiling like a fly swatting itself against a windscreen that I realised that dangling comfortably in the air isn’t the worst possible fate that can befall a person in this uncertain world.

  By pure chance, having rebounded with extreme force off the ceiling I landed in a plastic beaker filled to the brim with rubber bands. Half an inch either way and I’d have broken my silly neck, but either the Force was with me for once or it decided I was too stupid to die and lower the tone of the afterlife. It took me quite some time to get my breath back, though, and even longer to scrounge up enough strength to scriggle backwards out of the beaker and drop numbly to the floor. As I lifted my head and stared at the firmly closed door, I reached a definite and irrevocable decision. I was giving up.

  I have no idea who the human who walked in through it was. I guess he was a lorry driver making a delivery, something like that. At any rate he walked in, gave the tangled mess of string hanging off the inside door handle a quick, bewildered glance, dumped a load of papers on the seat of the office chair and hurried back the way he’d just come, banging the door behind him. And, since he was in a hurry to get out of there – the place seemed to give him the creeps, God alone knew why – he didn’t look round to see if the door had actually closed, or if something (the casing, say, of a broken tape-measure) had fallen into the jamb and blocked it as neatly and effectively as the proverbial salesman’s foot.

  For several minutes I just lay there and gawped. The door was ajar. All I had to do was walk through it.

  Simple as that.

  So I did. I may even have had my hands in my pockets as I crossed the threshold. I may even have been whistling a jaunty tune. Whatever; it made no odds, because as soon as I emerged into the sunlight on the other side of the door, something invisible but very, very, very heavy and hard bashed me on the head and I went straight to sleep.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I woke up with a migraine, a bump on my head the size of a roc’s egg, and a feeling of grim determination quite unlike anything I’d experienced before. At last, after a life of aimless and uncommitted drifting, devoid of any real meaning, I had a purpose. I was getting out of there; not only that, I was taking the enslaved elves with me. Whether they liked it or not.

  Someone I used to know when I was a kid – I think it was the man who came to service the water heater; anyway, he was singularly unmemorable, whoever the hell he was, apart from this one thing – used to say that the quickest and easiest way to do something is properly. By this, I’ve always assumed that what he meant was, if you go for the quick fix and the botched-up job, you’ll spend twice as much time, ingenuity and effort getting it wrong and then struggling to put it right again than you’d have done if you’d gone about it in a calm, methodical fashion to begin with. On balance I’ve got to say that if he was the guy I’m thinking of, he was a better philosopher than he was a heating engineer, because the water heater used to make the most amazing noises in the middle of the night, and as far as hot water was concerned we’d have been better off warming up a tin bath over a large candle. That, however, shouldn’t detract from the shining truth of his one great statement; and besides, it could just as easily have been the tree surgeon or the man who emptied the septic tank who said it, and not the water-heater bloke at all. I mean, I was only twelve at the time and I wasn’t taking notes.

  So; no more half-baked why-not-just-stroll-out-the-door-whistling-‘Greensleeves’ escape attempts for me; from now on, it was going to be all meticulous planning, with lots of timing people with stopwatches and scale drawings and every possible contingency allowed for. After all, there was no desperate rush. Life in the factory went on; it was miserable and boring and there was nothing nice to look forward to and all the other people who worked there were about as much fun as severe piles, but never mind. If such conditions as those were enough to kill you off, the human race would’ve died out a thousand years ago and there would never have been any accountants.

  I was still quite a long way off perfecting my escape plan – to be mercilessly honest, I hadn’t even started it yet – when I got my promotion. Apparently, I’d caught the supervisor’s eye, with my deep-rooted work ethic and uncomplaining diligence, to the point where he couldn’t stand the sight of me any more. So I got a transfer: out of the stockroom and into packing.

  Yes, definitely a promotion; and in an environment where such things were considered extremely rare. It wasn’t even a case of dead elves’ shoes, since the elves appeared to live for ever in spite of the exhausting work and rotten food. You were assigned to a job and you stayed put and did it. Only the very best, brightest and most insufferable actually progressed up the golden ladder.

  Mind you, I had to keep telling myself it was a promotion, usually through gritted teeth. True, the work in packing was lighter, you got to sit
down instead of being on your feet all day, there was none of that back-breaking, tendon-wrenching hauling on ropes we got in the stockroom. But it was boring. Very boring. Very very boring. Very very very boring. Very very very boring indeed.

  Packing centred around a long conveyor belt, a sort of ghastly satanic parody of the yellow brick road. At one end there was a small, dismal colony of elves who took cardboard boxes out of large cartons and hoisted them with a winch and a derrick onto the belt. Downstream from them was where I was stationed, along with a dozen or so fellow craftsmen; our job was to lay a sheet of tissue paper over the open top of each box. Further down from us, another group inserted a single left shoe. Still further down the line, the next batch folded one end of my tissue sheet over this shoe, so that the next outfit could lower the right shoe, whereupon the next mob folded over the other end of the sheet and the bunch of tiny specks in the far distance put the lid on. Adventurous travellers who claimed to have been all the way down the belt, presumably in the spirit of Sir Richard Burton seeking to discover the source of the Nile, asserted that after the lid went on the boxes just vanished down a chute, like medieval mariners falling off the edge of the world. It was far less trouble to believe them than to argue, so I did.

  My first job as founder, chairman and sole member of the escape committee was to recruit some support. This turned out to be extremely difficult. Naturally enough, the first people I tried to enlist were the twelve or so other wretched souls who worked with me on tissue-sheet insertion, partly because they were essential to the plan that was just starting to take shape in my mind, partly because they were the only ones close enough for me to make myself heard without shouting.

  Talk (if you can really be bothered) about apathy. I had to explain the plan a dozen times before they were even prepared to acknowledge my existence, and their initial reaction was a not-particularly-encouraging piss off, you noisy bugger. But, being a man with a mission and having absolutely nothing else to do, I persisted, and eventually five out of the twelve declared that they were with me to the death, provided they didn’t actually have to do anything and that if they agreed, I’d shut the hell up.