Little People

by Tom Holt

  ‘Please.’

  I stopped. ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘that puts a different complexion on it. All right,’ I said, in my sergeant-major voice, not nearly so thin and crackly as it had been a few minutes earlier, ‘that’ll do, leave him alone.’

  I had no idea whether they’d listened to me or not. I suspect that if I’d been them, I’d have told myself to get profoundly lost. Luckily they were more amenable to reason than me.

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘here’s what we’re going to do.’ I took a deep breath; because I’d only stopped them for the simple reason that, where they’d only had to put up with being kidnapped and turned into slaves, I’d grown up with the bastard as my stepfather, and seeing him ripped into mince just wouldn’t have been good enough. I wanted to get even. So I took Daddy George’s remote-control thing out of my pocket. ‘Here, Spike,’ I said, ‘you’re good with technical stuff. Tell me how you work this thing.’

  She looked at me, and grinned. ‘Pleasure,’ she said. ‘You know what,’ she added, ‘you’re evil.’

  ‘I learned from the best,’ I replied, and handed it over.

  That Spike – even for an elf, she was smart with electrical goods. I didn’t actually see the moment when Daddy George shrank, because there was a dazzling blue flash that half-blinded me. One moment he was stood there, all six foot one of him. The next—

  ‘I think you overdid it,’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘It’s a tricky thing to calibrate,’ she said. ‘Still,’ she added, as she put the remote carefully on the ground and jumped on it, ‘no harm done.’ I don’t think I’d have liked to have been Daddy George just then. It must have been rather intimidating for him, not more than an inch and a half tall, looking up at all those gigantic elves crowding round him in a ring and staring. ‘Now, then,’ I said, ‘mind your backs, coming through.’ I edged my way past them into the middle of the circle, bent down, picked Daddy George up and placed him on the palm of my left hand. ‘Guess what’s going to happen now,’ I said.

  He was too small for me to be able to see the expression on his face, but I could hear him quite clearly. He was calling me all kinds of uncouth names. Not sensible, for a very small person in his position. ‘Shut up,’ I advised him, ‘or I’ll inhale you.’

  ‘You think you’re really clever,’ he yelled inaccurately. ‘You think you’ve won, and it’ll be happy endings all the way. You wait and see.’

  I frowned. ‘Not all the way,’ I replied. ‘There’s still flu and income tax and traffic jams and supermarket queues and stuff like that. Mostly, though—’

  ‘I told her,’ he said. ‘Your girlfriend, that Cruella. She came looking for you, after I had you captured and brought here, she said I knew what’d happened to you and she wanted you back.’

  ‘Really,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, really. So I told her, I hadn’t got you, you’d gone back over the line. Not to get away from me, I said, to get away from her; because you’d got this elf girl over there, that was why you’d gone away in the first place, and stayed so long.’ He laughed: tiny little laugh, all full of unpleasantness, full of victory. ‘You know what? She believed me. Hook, line and sinker. Burst into tears, stood there on the doorstep sobbing her eyes out at me. Said she never wanted to see you again, in this world or the next. I nearly did my back in not laughing. So you see,’ he went on, ‘I really put one over on you; made sure she wasn’t going to come sniffing round again, making trouble. And I know her sort, vindictive little bitch, nothing you can ever say or do’ll convince her I wasn’t telling the truth. You’ve had it as far as she’s concerned. I just thought I’d tell you that, while I think of it.’

  Clever man, my stepfather, but he didn’t know me as well as he thought he did. He was sure I’d go mad with rage and close my hand tight, squash him to death, put him out of his misery, make myself the villain. But I knew him too well; I knew that he’d rather die than go where I was about to take him. Like I’d told Spike, I’d learned from the best when it came to inflicting pain and suffering, and at that moment I was all cruelty, all seventy-two enormous inches of me.

  I glanced round at the circle of elves surrounding me and closed my eyes. Here goes nothing, I said to myself, and crossed the line.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  At first I thought, ‘Where is everybody?’ – and then I figured it out. The factory was miles from anywhere, and there wouldn’t be any Elfland equivalents for the guys in the factory, since they were all elves already; and I didn’t have a counterpart, because of who I was, so that only left—

  Nobody. Remember. Daddy George had killed his counterpart, many years earlier. I had a feeling quite a few people in those parts wouldn’t have forgotten that.

  We were in a building. Well, of course we were, we were still in the factory (the Elfland equivalent of it, anyway) and when looked more closely I could see that – same floor plan, same high walls, same wide-open plan. Except that here, the factory was a cathedral. Crazy, I thought. I wonder what the Elfland equivalent of Westminster Abbey looks like.

  Daddy George was still in the palm of my hand; and that surprised me, because I’d expected him to have reverted to his proper size when he crossed the line, the same as Cru’s elfin doppelgänger had done the first time I arrived there. Apparently not. I guessed it had something to do with Spike giving the shrinker too much welly – in any event, I wasn’t unduly bothered.

  I smiled; a big, warm smile that bounded out onto my face before I could stop it, like a friendly dog when you open the front door. ‘Here we are,’ I said. ‘Welcome to your new home.’ I held out my hand, and a tiny Daddy George peered out over my fingertips. ‘This is your factory,’ I told him, ‘exactly the same, only different. We’ll come back and look at it later. But first, there’s some people I want you to meet.’

  It was, of course, the cruellest punishment imaginable. Not just the being small – I hadn’t even planned on that, it was just a bonus miracle given away free with the box tops of suffering. Instead, it was the torment of being for ever the exact opposite of himself, a timid, sensitive, caring, altruistic, pointy-eared freak, while a tiny part of himself would always remember (like I’d remembered) who he really was, back where he belonged. It had been far easier for me, of course, since in theory at least I belonged equally on both sides. For him—

  It would be a long walk from the factory to the nearest village of settlement, and I was on a schedule. I didn’t have the time. So, rather unwillingly, I fast-forwarded through the gruelling six-hour hike, to the point where we were standing in a village square, surrounded by friendly inquisitive elves.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘there’s someone here to see you.’

  (Too cruel, perhaps? Too cruel, even for him? But then I thought about the slaves in the factory and my own real father, vivisected to death just because once he’d loved my mother, and I thought, no. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a pointy ear for a pointy ear. It was exactly right.)

  I couldn’t help noticing how my minuscule companion squirmed with terror as the elves came flocking round, and tried to bury himself in the gully between my middle and index fingers. Daddy George and I may not have seen eye to eye in the past – I’d have needed a stepladder, for one thing – but even I would never have said he was the timid sort. True, there’s a lot to be timid about when you’re knee-high to an action figurine, as I’d found out myself the hard way, but even so. Interesting—

  ‘Oooh,’ cooed an elf, extending a finger towards Daddy George’s abdomen. ‘He’s so cute. Can I pick him up?’

  I smiled. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Here.’ I tipped my hand over, dropping Daddy George into the elf’s cupped palm. ‘You do realise who you’ve got there, don’t you?’

  The elf nodded. ‘He’s the one who opened up the gateway,’ she replied, ‘and lured all those poor people across the line. Oosa ickle-wickle sweetie, den?’ she added, with apparent sincerity. Hang on, I thought, this isn’t right. The greatest criminal in
elf history, and she’s trying to tickle him under the ear? ‘You don’t seem to mind,’ I said.

  She didn’t look up. ‘He’s been a very naughty boy – haven’t oo, vewwy bad, bad boyzlewoyzle – but that’s all in the past now. And he’s such a little darling, with his little feet and his dear little hands—’

  And then I realised I’d been barking up the wrong tree altogether. I’d brought him here on the assumption that when the elves got their delicate, artistic hands on him, they’d deconstruct him slowly and painfully with the help of extremely fine medical instruments. Blame it on my lack of vision, my inability to see the full canvas, the big picture. What the elf female was doing to him now was, of course, far more agonising and excruciating than anything that could be achieved with mere clumsy, inefficient steel and nitric acid. Steel could only torture his body; acid could only gnaw away at his flesh. Two or three days, a week at most, and he’d be safely dead and beyond the reach of vengeance. What the elves would do to him – sweet, sentimental, forgiving, loving, caring, nurturing creatures that they were – would strip away his self-esteem and burn out his brain, and they could keep it up for years and years and years, while he cowered and hid and cringed like the cutest-ever little puppy dog, inciting his tormentors to greater and greater excesses—

  (And inside? Just as inside every darling little bundle of fluff there’s a very small sabre-toothed tiger frantically scrabbling to get out, so it would be in this case. The real Daddy George was still in there somewhere, always would be: trapped for all eternity in a frightened, helpless little body that practically yelled to all comers, ‘Hug me! Pick me up! Stroke me! Love me!’)

  I felt sick. There’re more ways of killing a fluffy kitten than drowning it in cream, but none of them comes anywhere close as regards sheer inhuman cruelty.

  An elf was hurrying towards the group with a saucer of milk in one hand and a ball of pink wool in the other. Seeing them, I felt like some kind of monster.

  Time, I decided, I wasn’t here. I still had a lot of work to do; there were elves trapped on the wrong side of the line to be rescued, for a start. I had no idea where Daddy George’s gateway was, let alone how to defuse the booby traps so that the prisoners could use it to get home. So the only way to bring them back would be one at a time, taking them with me by way of a circle in the grass. It could take years, for all I knew – not that I had anything better to do, God knew, not after Daddy George had played his last and quite possibly nastiest trick. He’d known Cruella far too well; figured out the surest and most infallible way to make sure she’d never speak to me again. And without her – well, I might as well be back in the factory, laying sheets of tissue paper over a thousand empty shoeboxes a day.

  I turned my back and walked away. For some time, I could still hear the voices of the elves, exacting their unspeakable, unintentional revenge. When I couldn’t hear them any more, I began at last to feel as if that unwelcome and unpleasant phase of my life that had begun all those years ago when I had first seen an elf in our garden was finally drawing to a close. But that wasn’t a solution. Winning the war was one thing; coming home again afterwards is something else entirely. And what shall it profit a conquering hero to get off the troopship and catch the train back to his home town, only to find that while he’s been away the whole street’s been flattened by a land mine?

  It didn’t take years, as I’d feared, to repatriate the slaves. Once I’d got back into the swing of it, and organised the waiting elves into orderly queues, I found I could take back as many as five hundred an hour. The last elf I dropped off happened to be Spike.

  ‘There you go,’ I said, as we stepped out of the circle in Elfland. ‘Home again.’

  ‘Thank you.’ As I may have mentioned earlier, on our side of the line Spike was short, stocky and built like a very small Sumo wrestler. On her side, she turned out to be a tall, willowy blonde with deep grey eyes and the face of an unusually solemn angel. In fact, she looked quite stunningly beautiful standing there in the deserted cathedral, with a shaft of pale evening sunlight glancing down through a high window and bathing her head and shoulders in a pool of liquid gold. But as I looked at her, with the look of calm serenity glowing in her eyes, I realised that this version of Spike would be great if you liked long, soulful silences and shared moments of total intuitive clarity, but she probably couldn’t change a light bulb or rewire a plug if her life depended on it; and as for her acid tongue and the extremely grudging way she’d had of saying that for once you’d managed to get something almost sort of right, which made you feel so much better than mere praise could ever have done, because Spike never said anything nice if she could possibly avoid it—

  I looked away. Different, and not the same at all. Cute as they come, sure enough, but she just wasn’t Spike any more; and Spike had been my friend.

  ‘Well, so long,’ I said, looking at the ground. ‘Thanks for your help. Couldn’t have done it without you.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t do anything, really,’ Not-Spike replied, in a low, breathless voice that would’ve set my heart tap-dancing if it hadn’t been for who she now wasn’t. ‘You saved us all. We’d never have escaped if it wasn’t for your courage, your intelligence, your compassion.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I mumbled. ‘Don’t worry about it. Anyway, it’s time I was getting back. You know, things to see to.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Oh.’ She sounded like an angel who’s just seen the value of her investment portfolio tumble in a stockmarket panic. ‘I’m sorry, I’d rather got the impression you were going to stay. Are you sure—?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘No offence, but I’d better be getting back. I mean, it’s really nice here, but it’s not me. Really.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Amazingly versatile word, ‘oh’. With the right inflection, it can mean anything from ‘I’m not listening, shut up and go away’ to ‘Jesus fucking Christ, we’re all going to die!’ to just plain ‘oh’, with a million gradations of subtle significations in between. In this case, it was, ‘You’re going away and it’s all my fault and I’ve ruined everything and even if I managed to struggle through the rest of my life without slashing my wrists, I’ll never smile again.’

  ‘Cheerio, then,’ I said, and stepped back into the circle.

  On the other side of the line, the factory was empty, and quiet, and desolate. Sure, it had been a terrible place when it had been full of elves and the hum of busy machinery and the unique stench of tanning fluid and shoebox cardboard; but at least there had been people in it, and some of them had been my friends, even if they were difficult, annoying and dead miserable ninety-nine per cent of the time. Now it just felt empty, as if there was nothing there at all.

  All my fault, too. Because of what I’d done, all those people, the elves, my comrades-in-arms and in affliction – and Daddy George himself, of course – they’d all changed so much that by all meaningful criteria they simply didn’t exist anymore. They’d gone away for ever, and been replaced by people who were totally unlike them. You could say I’d killed them all, and you wouldn’t be far wrong.

  I was so lonely, I even missed Daddy George.

  The factory: whose was it now, I wondered? It’s rightful owner was gone for good, but there was no way of proving that. Time would pass and he wouldn’t come back (and my mother, who loved him, would be worried sick; she’d loved me, too, and I’d never come back) and presumably after a while the law would say he was dead, so Mum would own the factory, and the huge multinational business empire, and the nice house and all the money, not to mention the little plaques or statuettes or whatever it is they give you for winning a Nobel prize . . .

  (Hers by right of inheritance; they’d belonged to her dead son . . .)

  I couldn’t stay in the factory. There wasn’t anything to eat, and I was starving hungry; it was over forty-eight hours, I realised, since I’d had any food, and even then it had been a meal precisely ca
lculated to provide the minimum nourishment necessary for a person six inches tall. What I wanted most of all, I discovered, was a hamburger the size of the Sydney opera house, and enough chips to pave the Champs d’Elysée.

  I didn’t have any money, of course. Come to think of it, all I had was the clothes I stood up in, namely a leaf-green jerkin, a pair of thick green woollen tights, and brown shoes with a silver buckle; my demob outfit, the equivalent of a Marks & Spencer navy pinstripe suit in Elfland, but a tad conspicuous on this side of the line. I really didn’t want to go out into the world and get arrested again. If it was the same policeman as last time, I’d die of embarrassment.

  Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if I could just fast-forward . . .? To where? To the moment after I’d just had my next square meal; to when I’d sorted out all my many, many problems and complications, and my life was back to normal; to when I was finally happy; come to that, to the end of the tape. (Be considerate; please rewind this life for the benefit of the next person living it.) What I really wanted to do, of course, was wind back, but there didn’t seem to be a facility for doing that, even in Elfland. No back, only forwards. Sorry, but that’s how it is, and please direct any complaints to the ghost of Albert Einstein.

  So I walked out of the factory gates – strange experience, that – and found myself in a narrow country lane, with grass growing up the middle and untended hedges that met across the top, sculpted into a flat-roofed arch by the tops of heavy lorries. It was just getting light (I’d forgotten about day and night after x months in the factory) and somewhere offstage a wood pigeon was cooing. I wondered what it was saying—

  ‘ . . . Sevens are forty-nine, eight sevens are fifty-six, nine sevens are sixty-three, ten sevens are seventy. Eleven sevens . . .’