by Tom Holt
It was time I was back at my post on the conveyor belt; heroes of the revolution may enjoy a certain degree of latitude in matters of timekeeping, but leaders of failed uprisings had better be in their places when the whistle goes, or the foreman will want to know the reason why. Damn, I thought, it shouldn’t be like this. After all, I’d managed the really difficult bit, getting all those pathetic, terminally apathetic losers to get off their bums and do something. Failing at this point was tantamount to having threaded my way through the labyrinth of doom and climbed the sheer cliff face to the temple housing the golden fleece, only to be turned back because I didn’t have the right change for the ticket machine.
I was missing something, I knew that; something right down deep, something fundamentally important but so simple I was taking it for granted. All I had to do was recognise it for what it was –
I waited, but it didn’t come. Maybe I was wrong after all, maybe there wasn’t a way out, and I had just been wasting my time and raising everybody’s hopes with nothing to show for it. Now that was just plain cruel, because I wasn’t that sort of person. Me, a leader; me, the type that gets people moving, shapes destinies, sets off revolutions. As if. The very fact that I’d started this idiotic conspiracy only went to show it was doomed from the outset, like a literary quarterly in Australia.
And what had I done to deserve all this, and what was I being punished for? All my life I’d been the meek, patiently waiting to inherit the Earth –
(If the meek ever do inherit the Earth, by the way, you can be sure that they’ll dutifully pay the inheritance tax and the capital gains tax and the stamp duty, and the thought of trying to dodge any of the due taxes will never even cross their minds; with the result that after the lawyers and accountants have had their bite out of what’s left, all the meek will actually inherit is the unfashionable south-western quarter of Madagascar . . .)
Not fair, I thought, not fair at all. What did I do? Why me?
Why me?
And then it all clicked into place, like a jigsaw you’ve been staring at for three-quarters of an hour and suddenly you realise that if you turn round the little knobbly-edged bit, it’ll go. Why me? Because nobody else could do it, was why. Fancy not realising that from the very start. That was what I’d been doing wrong. I’d been a man sullenly trying to bash a screw into a block of wood with a butt of a screwdriver while bitching about the poxy useless hammer I’d been issued with. I’d missed the point by such a wide margin that I’d got myself impaled on the next point across.
All I had to do was be myself, the person I was meant to be all along. You see, I wasn’t born to be anybody important, clever, successful or even interesting. I was supposed to be an insignificant, unimportant nonentity – I’d have been good at that. Instead, I was a Nobel prizewinner, a major shareholder in one of the world’s biggest multinational corporations, the sole bridge between human-side and Elfland, the chosen one who’d lead the enslaved elves out of servitude. Either I’d misunderstood myself completely (but come on, you’ve shared my company and been inside my head for a while now, you don’t need me to tell you there simply isn’t enough in me to misunderstand) or the officer in charge of the duty roster had screwed up on a pretty staggering scale; or the duties, privileges, station and responsibilities I’d been called to demanded precisely the sort of person I was.
Maybe this was a battle that only a total loser could win.
The elves took some convincing, but you don’t want to take any particular notice of that because the elves would’ve argued the toss if they’d been aboard a sinking ship and someone had suggested they get into the lifeboat. I convinced them, somehow. God only knows how I managed it. I mean, if I’d been one of them, I sure as hell wouldn’t have convinced me.
Setting it all up only took about half an hour. If we’d done it properly so it’d have worked, it would probably have taken over a month, but we didn’t need it to work. In fact, that was the very last thing we wanted to happen. The hell with stuff working. Stuff working is for winners.
Spike did all the wiring, while Sweetie-Pie showed me how to use the phone. It wasn’t a regular phone, of course; it was more of a real-time digital video link, with special enhancements so that Daddy George could see an invisible elf on his screen, but all the elf at our end could see was a grim-looking loud speaker with a steel grille over it to prevent sabotage and vandalism. He wrote down the access codes for me on a piece of paper, told me which buttons I had to press, and which ones had to be held down when and for how long. I reckon flying the space shuttle would have been a piece of cake compared with making a quick call on Daddy George’s special phone. Once I’d finally got the hang of the system (it took a while) all that remained was to get everybody else safely out of sight. This meant forcibly rounding up and herding all the hyper-miserable types who were still refusing to have anything to do with the escape project; they didn’t fight or anything, but it all took time and effort when we couldn’t be doing with the extra hassle, and the whole thing got very tiresome indeed. Sure, Moses had his problems along the way, but I’ll bet he didn’t have to put up with two dozen snotty elves from Cutting (and if he had, there’d have been no Exodus, and Egypt’d be knee-deep in extra pyramids).
But in the end, even the round-up somehow got done, and we reached the extremely unnerving point where there was nothing else to do except set the plan in motion. There was an enormous weight of reluctance hanging over us at that moment, like the heaviest, sulkiest pre-thunderstorm weather you’ve ever had to live through. I could see why. Up till then, we all had something to look forward to, something to believe in – even for terminally miserable elves, that’s a wonderful thing. But if we did the plan and it all went horrendously wrong, we’d have nothing at all. It didn’t help that all our meagre, fanatically hoarded savings of hope were sitting there in the pot, and all we had in our hand was a pair of threes. The fact that anything higher than that and we’d most certainly lose was no consolation at all.
Sweetie-Pie looked at the loudspeaker grill, then at me. ‘Right, then,’ he said.
‘Right,’ I replied. Neither of us moved.
‘You’re all set,’ he said.
‘Right.’
About five seconds of dead silence. ‘You can start any time,’ he pointed out.
‘OK,’ I said.
Another four seconds. ‘Like, now, for instance.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right.’
He didn’t frown; in fact, his face was as blank as a hard drive after the latest Windows upgrade has just done its worst. ‘You don’t want to do this, do you?’ he said.
‘Not really.’
‘Can’t say I blame you,’ said Sweetie-Pie. ‘It’s a bloody terrible idea.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well, then.’
‘Quite. Oh well,’ I said, ‘here goes nothing.’ And I pressed the button.
‘Not that one, you clown,’ said Sweetie-Pie. ‘That’s the one for setting the month on the digital clock.’
‘Oh, right, sorry. This one?’
‘That one.’
‘Ah, fine, I see. All right, then, here goes nothing. Does it?’ I checked. He nodded.
I pressed the button. For maybe a second and a half, nothing happened, and I was just starting to hope that perhaps we’d got it all wrong and the phone link wouldn’t work for me and we’d have to call the whole thing off and go back to making shoes (which really wasn’t as bad as all that, in fact it could be quite satisfying and fulfilling at times, there’s a sort of pure Platonic beauty in a precisely folded piece of tissue paper) when the speaker crackled violently, and a voice I quite definitely recognised growled, ‘Yes?’
Hearing him again – it went beyond a nasty turn and a quick flash of instinctive panic. I’d got used to those, over the years, they were almost reassuringly familiar and friendly (you know how it is when something, a sound or a smell, reminds you quite unexpect
edly of something from your childhood). This time, though, there was something new, a quite different and altogether less pleasant isotope of fear – the kind that tells you you’re going to die, very soon, very painfully, and there’s nothing at all you can do about it. Acquaintances have told me that shopkeepers get the same sort of feeling when the excise men show up for a surprise VAT audit, but I wouldn’t know about that.
‘Hello,’ I said.
Silence. A very long moment of dead silence. You know, I should have realised before then (what with elves’ weird fast-forwarding ability and so forth) just how elastic and negotiable time can be. I may have lost fifteen years flitting back and forth across the line, but I reckon I caught up with them in full during that second and a half.
‘Who is this?’
‘Me,’ I replied.
‘Oh.’ Very neutral tone of voice: no expression, no feeling. ‘Thought I recognised you. What the fuck are you doing using the phone system?’
I took a deep breath. ‘There isn’t anyone else,’ I replied. ‘Look, you’ve got to come quick, before it’s too late.’
Another pause. By my calculations, I was at least sixty-three years old by the time it was over. ‘What are you drivelling on about now?’
‘You’ve got to come here now and stop them,’ I said, ‘before they’re all killed.’
‘What is all this?’ asked Daddy George. (And I thought, Shit, he knows I’m up to something. I never could fool him, he knows me too well. And then I remembered, that’s why me, because he knows me too well.)
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘please. There’s no more time, they’re all going to die unless you—’ And then I hit the kill button.
I stood there for quite some time, my finger still down hard on the button, as if I was trying to smother it to death, or at least keep it from getting out of its socket and biting me. Or maybe I was afraid that if I let go, Daddy George himself would push his way up out of the control panel, squeezing his head through the button socket. Crazy.
‘You think he bought it?’ Sweetie-Pie whispered.
I shook my head. ‘No idea,’ I said. ‘But he’s coming.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
I nodded. ‘Absolutely positive,’ I said. ‘Trust me. I know him too well.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Waiting for him to arrive –
It was the strangest feeling. Partly – partly, it was just like when you were a kid and your best friend was supposed to be coming to tea; and you’d sit by the window looking out for the car, and when it didn’t arrive and didn’t arrive you’d open the front door a crack and peep out through that. (How that was meant to make the car get there quicker I never quite figured out.) Partly it was hoping and praying that I’d been right and Daddy George had suspected something and wasn’t going to come after all (but that didn’t work, because if he thought I was up to something, he’d get here even quicker), and partly it was a dull, bleating voice in the back of my head repeating, Seemed like a good idea at the time, seemed like a good idea—
At least there was plenty to do to keep myself occupied; there were stray elves to chivvy into hiding, wiring relays to triple-check, unforeseen contingencies to plan for, lots of redundant and meaningless stuff that had to be done anyway; and all the time I was thinking, Me and him, face to face, and whoever loses will be proved to have been wrong. I guess that was the very worst part about it all; not the fear of death or pain, certainly not an abstract fear of losing (I’ve always been a very good loser, probably because I’ve had so much practice), but the very specific and unbearable fear of losing to him, because that would mean that in some vague but incredibly important sense, he’d be vindicated and I’d know for sure, in that last despairing moment, that he’d been right about me being worthless and no good all along, just as I’d always suspected—
If the bad guy wins, he isn’t the bad guy any more, because everybody knows the good guy always wins. It’s like the old gag about how in every election the government always gets elected. Victory is clarity, it defines everything.
Him and me, I told myself. We know each other too well.
I thought I’d gone over everything, visualised each moment, each possible version of each moment, in my mind’s eye before I even made the call. But apparently not. Turned out I’d forgotten to prepare myself for the biggest moment of all, the door opening.
The door opened.
The way it should be is, the older you get, the smaller they become; the big people, the giants who stomped around and scowled down at you when you were a kid. Parents, teachers, headmasters, the older boys who used to kick you around; the idea is that you grow up and they grow old, so when you meet them again ten, twenty, thirty years later, you find yourself looking down, looking at this funny little guy who once scared you half to death just by scowling at you, but now you could lift him up and shake him like a pillow, except you don’t want to any more – all the fear and the resentment and the hate melt away, because you who were once small are now big, and he who was once big has dwindled down into a little old man. You look down and see what you once were, one of the little people.
But the door opened, and he was absolutely fucking huge; he’d always been this big, broad, threatening ogre, American-footballer shoulders, hairy-backed hands like frying pans, the biggest face you ever saw in your life. Sure, I’d seen him from this angle before, once, the first day, when his goons grabbed and shrunk me and he’d loomed over me and sentenced me to the shoe factory. But I’d had other things on my mind at the time and besides, I’d really only been able to see his lower slopes (and at the time I wasn’t used to being this size, I still didn’t believe it had happened to me and most certainly didn’t believe I’d be this way for ever, that this was actually the size I’d always been meant to be …)
He walked in, quickly shut the door and locked it behind him, then pulled some kind of remote-control thing out of his inside pocket and prodded a few buttons, making some little green and red lights flash. He hadn’t seen me – fair enough, I was hiding behind a chair leg, and I was only six inches tall. Same as I’d always been.
He looked round, then lowered his head and looked down.
‘There you are,’ he said.
It was one of his phrases, I remembered it very well. ‘There you are,’ he used to say, when I’d done something bad. (I never meant to do anything bad, but a lot of what I did turned out that way, because he said it was bad and he was bigger than me, so of course he must’ve been right.) I used to hide, but I was very bad at it and when he found me he’d always say, ‘There you are,’ in that same tone of voice, that same fundamental disappointment that I was so pathetic I couldn’t even hide. ‘There you are,’ he said again. ‘Now then, what’s all this about?’
I took a deep breath. ‘It’s too late,’ I said. ‘You’re too late. They’re all dead.’
He raised an eyebrow. His eyebrows were as long as my arm. I’d have needed a crane and a winch. ‘Just for once,’ he said, ‘try not to babble. Who’s dead?’
He hadn’t changed a bit; apart from still being so big, I mean. I’d hoped for a few comforting signs of ageing – some wrinkles, a little sagging of the skin, a token gesture or two in the direction of mortality, just one or two grey hairs would’ve done – but he hadn’t given me the satisfaction. ‘All of them,’ I said. ‘I tried warning them, but they wouldn’t listen. They laughed at me.’
‘Well, they would,’ said Daddy George. ‘You’re very funny when you try and be serious.’
‘They’d decided to escape,’ I went on. ‘Some of them were going to try going out onto the roof, another lot were going through the air vents, and the rest of them had decided on the drains. I told them you’d have booby-trapped all the ways out. I told them, I know how your mind works.’
He laughed. ‘They should’ve listened to you.’ He actually laughed. ‘You chose a hell of a time to be right.’ A long sigh. ‘So,’ he went on, ‘they’re all dead
. Bugger. All of them except you. Why am I not surprised?’
I peered up at him from behind my chair-leg. He’d lost me.
‘You know what you are?’ he went on. ‘You’re a born survivor. Pity, that, but there it is. You know, you remind me a lot of a virus; you’re small and insidious, and just when it looks like you’ve been wiped out and I’m finally rid of you, bingo! You mutate into an even more stubborn and annoying strain, and there you bloody well are again. I hate that.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
He sighed; it was like a scale-model El Nino. ‘I don’t suppose you can help it,’ he said. ‘I mean, the worst you’ve ever done to me is to be alive – though it’s always seemed to me that you’ve consistently managed to be alive at me, as if carrying on breathing and walking about was a gesture of insubordination, like refusing to eat your carrots. You turn up, you vanish, you turn up again – I knew you weren’t dead, you know; even when you disappeared, I knew you were still hanging around somewhere, because you’re the toothache in the tooth I’ve just had pulled. It wasn’t enough that your mother and I couldn’t have children of our own. Oh, no. We had to have you.’
‘It’s not my fault,’ I said.
‘Of course it’s not your fault, you moron,’ Daddy George snapped. ‘Like it’s not your fault you’re his son, that fucking prickle-eared freak’s nasty little act of preemptive revenge. It’s not your fault that everybody thinks that all my work, all the absolutely amazingly brilliant discoveries I’ve made were all done by you, Mister Double-Nobel-Laureate. It’s not your fault, as in you didn’t do anything. Not a thing, not one bloody hand’s turn, and yet you’re part-owner of everything I’ve worked myself half to death to achieve, and I can’t even kill you, because of not being able to look your mother in the face again if I did. I really do love her, you know, I’d never do anything to hurt her. And now they’re all dead, except you. Just my absolutely bloody wonderful sodding luck.’