Little People

by Tom Holt

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘So you’re keeping busy, then?’

  ‘You could say that, yes. Pushing around meaningless bits of paper all day, crying myself to sleep all night, and on my day off I get called out to the police station. I guess that’s a pretty good example of what Thomas Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness. How about you? Keeping well?’

  I nodded. ‘Can’t complain,’ I said.

  She narrowed her eyes a little. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘if I didn’t know you better, I’d swear you’ve grown since I last saw you.’

  ‘Could be,’ I replied. ‘So far I’ve come up with two theories. The second theory is that in real time I’m still only sixteen years old, so maybe I haven’t stopped growing yet.’ I frowned. ‘I don’t suppose you want to hear the first theory.’

  ‘Oh, go on,’ she said. ‘I enjoy a bit of gibberish now and again.’

  So I told her all about it, from the moment when Daddy George’s men had burst into that very room, right down to the transport café and the same policeman. ‘And my theory is,’ I went on, ‘that when he reversed the shrinking process, he got the calibrations a bit skew-whiff and gave me a couple more of inches of leg. Not what I’d call full and fair compensation, mind, but I guess it’s better than nothing. To tell you the truth, I haven’t got a clue what I look like these days. I think I saw my reflection in a polished surface once or twice in the factory, but I wasn’t really paying attention; and since I got out, I haven’t been around mirrors very much. You wouldn’t happen to have a mirror on you, by any chance?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, and took one of those round plastic face-powder things out of her briefcase. There was a mirror inside the lid.

  Whoever he was, he didn’t look a bit like me. Or rather, there was a noticeable resemblance, such as you’d expect to see between two first cousins. But he was clean-cut, boldly nosed, Kirk Douglas-chinned, with a stylish fuzz of designer stubble that couldn’t have been more canonically correct if it’d been applied with an aerosol in the best hair care establishment in Beverly Hills. To be honest, I was jealous. Lucky old him, I thought, I wish I looked like that.

  ‘And I hope you two will be very happy together,’ she said, thereby bringing to my attention the fact that I’d been gazing into said mirror for rather longer than was seemly. ‘Can I have my compact back now? It’s all right,’ she added, ‘it’ll still be there even if you can’t see it. Like the light inside the fridge.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But really, it’s been a while.’

  She took the powder thing back and closed it with a snap. ‘I think they have mirrors in prison cells these days,’ she said, ‘so you’ll be able to see it whenever you want. In fact, you’ll have all the time in the world to admire yourself in; that and slopping-out’ll be the highlights of your day.’

  Downbeat, I thought; accentuating the negative to a rather unwholesome degree. ‘You think it’ll come to that?’ I asked.

  She looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Ordinarily, no,’ she replied. ‘Under other circumstances, I’d be fairly confident that you’d get off, since there’s no real proof to suggest that you were anything but an unwilling victim of abduction. All a lot of fuss over nothing, in fact.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘You said “under other circumstances”. What’s the problem here?’

  She leaned back in her chair. ‘Oh, just the fact that I’m handling the defence and I’m going to do everything I possibly can to throw the match. By the time the jury retires to consider its verdict, you’ll be lucky if they let you out much before April 2030.’

  I took a deep breath, then let it go slowly. ‘So you believe what he told you, then.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said quietly. ‘How’d it be if I took you to the factory so you could see for yourself? It’ll all still be there; the dormitories and the conveyor belt and the ladders and such all designed for use by six-inch people. I can show you all sorts of stuff I couldn’t possibly know about if I hadn’t been there.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, thanks,’ she replied. ‘On account of you can’t go there unless I somehow manage to get bail for you, and even if I could I wouldn’t. You seem to have forgotten you’re under arrest. Would you like me to write it down for you, or would a knotted handkerchief be better?’

  ‘All right, then,’ I said, ‘I’ll draw you a map and you can go there yourself. It isn’t hard to find.’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I haven’t got the time or the energy to go around living out your fantasies. You know what? I think this whole elf thing is a figment of your imagination. I think you made it all up as a bizarrely roundabout way of giving me the elbow. Thanks, but if I want my intelligence insulted I’ll visit Parliament or read a newspaper.’

  ‘If you’re that sure I’m lying,’ I said, ‘why don’t you go and take a look for yourself? Then you’d know for sure I’d made it all up. Or you’d have no choice but to believe me. That’s why you don’t want to go, isn’t it? Because you know it’ll corroborate what I’ve told you, and then you’ll have to face the fact that you’ve been wrong all this time, and I’m innocent.’

  She sighed. ‘If I had a fiver for every time someone sitting where you are now’s told me a story like that, I’d be able to buy Wales. And still have some over for a cup of tea and a macaroon. No, I’m not going to go wandering about testing out stories that are so pathetic, even I’d end up wondering why anyone’d ever believe it. Nope, I’m going to stay here and make absolutely sure you go to prison. I see it as my civic duty.’

  She was starting to annoy me. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘There was no girl. Not in Elfland, not anywhere else.’ Yes, I didn’t think about Spike when I said that, but that was between me and the past, nobody else’s business. ‘I’ve spent the last – oh God, I haven’t got the faintest idea how long it’s been. Do you happen to know, offhand?’

  ‘Eighteen months, two weeks, three days, fourteen hours and, let’s see, nine minutes. There or thereabouts.’

  Eighteen months. Jesus. ‘I’ve spent the last eighteen months working in a combination shoe factory and concentration camp, along with a couple of thousand other enslave elves. You want to know why I didn’t phone or write? Because all that time I was six inches tall, and besides, there weren’t any phones or letter boxes. And you know this is true, because you know me.’

  ‘I know you too well,’ she said.

  ‘You know me,’ I repeated. ‘You know I’ve never lied to you. It’d have been far easier to lie, right from the start, when I told you about that first elf, but I didn’t. You believed me then, and nothing’s changed. And you also know what kind of man Daddy George was—’

  ‘Was?’ Suddenly she sounded interested. ‘What do you mean, “was”? Is he dead or something?’

  I looked at her. ‘You think I’ve killed him or something?’

  ‘For crying out loud, don’t play games. Have you or haven’t you?’

  ‘I’ve settled up with him,’ I replied slowly, ‘and he won’t be coming back.’

  Her eyes were huge and round. ‘For God’s sake, Mike. What’ve you done?’

  Interesting; she never called me by my name. ‘He had it coming, after what he did to me. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes, but—’ She stopped. I smiled.

  ‘So you do believe me,’ I said.

  ‘No. Well, yes, all right; I believe he treated you appallingly badly when you were a kid, and then he stole your maths discoveries and all that money that should’ve been yours.’

  ‘Yes,’ I interrupted, ‘but that’s not what either of us meant. You do believe me, about the factory. I know you do.’

  ‘All right,’ she snarled, ‘yes, I do believe you about the stupid factory and being six inches tall and everything like that. That’s beside the point. If you’ve killed him—’

  ‘And you know he was lying,’ I ground on. ‘About there being a girl, I mean.’

  ‘I already said
so, yes. Look, that doesn’t matter right now. If you’ve committed murder—’

  I shook my head. ‘I never said I’d killed him,’ I replied. ‘I haven’t. I said I’d dealt with him and he’s gone for good, but he’s still alive. Do I look like someone who’d go around killing people?’

  She sagged a little. ‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘But a lot of people who kill people aren’t killers – I mean, they aren’t professional hit men or crazed serial murderers or anything like that, they’re just ordinary people who find themselves in impossible situations, and someone ends up dead. And after everything he’s done to you - well, anybody could just go snap under those circumstances. I’m pretty sure I could.’

  ‘I know you better than that,’ I told her. ‘You wouldn’t, and neither would I. Oh, I was tempted, and not just for a split second, either. But I couldn’t kill him. It wouldn’t be enough.’

  She was very quiet for a moment or so. ‘Go on, then,’ she said. ‘What’ve you done?’

  So I told her. It was some time before she spoke, or even moved.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ she said eventually.

  I looked away. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m not particularly proud of what I did. It was vindictive and cruel, and I did it because it was the nastiest, most vicious punishment I could think of. But I didn’t kill anyone, and besides, he – what are you laughing about?’

  She made a valiant but futile attempt to choke back a snigger. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but—’

  ‘I don’t happen to think it’s very funny.’

  For some reason, that just cracked her up even more. ‘It’s bloody hilarious,’ she said. ‘Oh, come on; the chairman and CEO of one of the world’s most powerful corporations, one inch tall and being cooed over like a gerbil—’

  ‘I’d call that tragic, not comic,’ I replied stiffly.

  She put her hands in front of her mouth. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I guess you probably would. You know, we’re going to have to find some way of getting you to lighten up. Otherwise, we’re going to have an awful lot of rows in the years to come.’

  In a way, it was a bit like that old bottom-of-theescalator thing, when you’re expecting a step and there isn’t one. Also there was a sense of having turned over two pages at once, subtly blended with getting hit on the head by a rapidly descending sack full of wet sand. ‘Are we?’ I said.

  ‘I should think so,’ she replied. ‘Because if you’re going to be all po-faced and stuffy, you’ll be a real pain to have round the house, and I’m not going to put up with it without a fight.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  It was also a bit like waking up one morning to find that you’ve been elected Pope – a wonderful thing and a really stupendous honour, but really, really unexpected. She was smiling at me, and part of me was saying, she can’t do that, how dare she, she’s taking the mickey; and the rest of me was pointing out that it couldn’t care less if she accused me of dressing up in women’s clothes and molesting sheep, because what she was mostly saying was that it was all right, she loved me right back, and everything was going to be just fine. In any event, one thing that even I could figure out was that talking about it, trying to clarify the grey areas and maybe work towards hammering out a joint communiqué and statement of intent, simply wasn’t going to cut it this time. It was a situation where nothing except strictly non-verbal communication would get the job done. So I kissed her.

  It’s a confoundedly tricky operation, kissing someone, especially if you’re not used to it. Stuff like noses and teeth get in the way—

  ‘Ouch,’ she said. ‘Watch what you’re doing, you clumsy idiot.’

  – But if you take both hands off the wheel, so to speak, and let instinct take over, I assure you, it can be done. Good fun, too. If you’ve never tried it, you should.

  ‘All right,’ she said, some time later, ‘you’ve made your point. Get off, someone could come in any minute. I don’t want some bluebottle to stroll in and find me snogging the suspect, they’ll report me to the Legal Aid.’ She frowned. ‘Which reminds me,’ she said.

  ‘Oh.’ To be honest with you, the being-under-arrest side of things had slipped my mind rather. ‘But that’s all right,’ I said. ‘Like you told me, they haven’t got any evidence. You can point that out to them, and they’ll have to let me go.’

  She nodded thoughtfully. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But by the time I’ve done that, word’s going to get about that your rotten stepfather’s disappeared; and you stand to benefit from his death, obviously, because you still have a big stake in the company; and they’ll ask you where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing.’ She frowned. ‘And even if you’ve got the sense not to mention the shoe factory, that still leaves us with a hell of a problem. Like, if you tell them about the elves and crossing the line and all, they’ll stick you in a padded cell; and if you don’t, you’ve got no way of accounting for your movements or explaining where you’ve been or what you’ve been doing all these months – all these years, rather.’ She sighed. ‘This is very bad,’ she said. ‘I really don’t like the look of it one bit.’

  That wasn’t really what I wanted to hear. ‘Aren’t you being just a tad alarmist?’ I said. ‘I mean, it could be days before anybody notices he’s not around any more—’

  ‘I’d say a maximum of six hours,’ Cru interrupted, ‘from the time you sent him away. After that, he’ll be missing appointments, not showing up for important meetings, not being there when his flight to New York takes off without him. Could be much sooner than that, of course. Depends on how his diary was looking for the rest of the day.’

  She had a point; and the way she seemed to be insisting on driving said point through my skull into my brain with a big hammer didn’t detract from its patent validity. ‘Then you’d better get me out of here quick,’ I said. ‘I don’t know, you could threaten to sue them for wrongful arrest of something.’

  A little sideways flick of the head, to indicate that my suggestion was too fatuous to deserve a response; typical Cru gesture and quite endearing, in an extremely annoying sort of way. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘if you were on fire, carrying a contagious disease and had a ticking bomb stuffed down the front of your trousers, it’d still take over an hour just to fill out the release paperwork. It’s what Shakespeare calls the law’s delays, and what we in the trade prefer to think of as the law’s fucking you about from here to next Whitsun with a blunt tent peg. Sorry, but that’s how it is. No fast-track checkout, and you can’t get a table by tipping the head waiter.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but if I’ve got to lighten up, you’ve got to stop being so damned negative. We’ll just have to escape, that’s all.’

  She sighed. ‘What a wonderful idea,’ she said. ‘All right, what’s it to be? Do we dig a tunnel, or were you thinking more along the lines of the old riding-a-motorbike-across-the-Swiss-border routine?’

  This time, I smiled. Or rather, I smirked. Can’t say I remember ever having smirked before. It’s OK, but it puts a strain on the muscles at the corners of your mouth. ‘Piece of cake,’ I told her. ‘All we need is a circle.’

  ‘What do you mean, a circle?’

  ‘Round thing,’ I said. ‘A plane figure bounded by a single line equidistant at every point from its centre. Got a lipstick?’

  She shrugged, and produced one from her bag. ‘It’s not really your colour,’ she pointed out. ‘You’re more of an Autumn, if you ask me. Can I ask what you think you’re doing?’

  ‘I’m drawing a circle on the floor.’

  ‘That’s not a circle,’ she objected. ‘More of an irregular ellipse. Well,’ she added as I pulled a face at her, ‘you’re the one who started up with the maths stuff. What’s it supposed to be for?’

  Another smirk; I’d have to be careful I didn’t stick like it. ‘You’ll see,’ I said. ‘Now, if you’ll just come over here—’

  She stopped. ‘You’re going to Elfland, aren’t you?’ she said.

 
; ‘We ’re going to Elfland,’ I corrected her. ‘Come on, it doesn’t hurt or anything.’

  The scowl she gave me would’ve stripped chrome. ‘No,’ she said, ‘absolutely not. I hate foreign travel. I’ve only been abroad once, on a school trip, and I had a tummy upset for weeks afterwards. If you think—’

  Uncharacteristically, she didn’t finish her sentence. Which may have been because I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her into the circle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ‘Here we are,’ I said.

  Apparently, the Elfland equivalent of a police station was a farmyard. There’s probably a perfectly rational explanation: either the only place on their side of the line where living creatures are detained in a confined space is a hen-coop, or it’s something to do with the fact that we ended up standing next to a trough full of swill.

  ‘Where the hell,’ Cruella demanded, ‘is this?’

  ‘Same place that we were a moment ago,’ I said wearily. ‘Only different.’

  ‘Elfland?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ she replied with feeling. ‘For one awful moment I thought I’d died and gone to Ambridge.’

  I realised we weren’t alone. There was someone standing right behind us; a tall, slim, golden-haired girl with shining blue eyes, an angelic expression and pointy ears. Oh snot, I thought.

  ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘We were wondering where you’d got to.’

  Not really the most helpful thing to say, after I’d spent a fair bit of time and energy persuading Cru that there wasn’t a tall, slim, golden-haired, blue-eyed, pointy-eared babe waiting for me at the end of the rainbow. For her part, Cruella jumped a foot in the air and said, ‘Eeek!’

  Oh well, I thought. ‘Cruella,’ I said, ‘I’d like you to meet Melissa. Melissa, Cruella. I don’t suppose either of you are going to be happy about this, but you’ve both got a lot in common.’