20. Curiously, the British Locomotive Act of 1865 (also known as the “Red Flag Act”) required that no self-propelled vehicle (which included cars) could travel faster than four miles per hour in the country, and two miles per hour in the city. Each car was also required to have a crew of three, one of whom had to walk 180 feet in front of the car carrying a red flag. In 1878, the whole flag business was made optional as cars became faster, probably because someone in a car got tired of traveling at two miles an hour and ran over the bloke with the flag, making it hard to recruit replacement flag wavers from then on.
VII
In Which We Have a Musical Interlude
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, DAN gathered the dwarfs in the yard behind the offices of “Dan, Dan the Talent Man, & Company,” as he had recently renamed himself and the business. The “& Company” referred to the dwarfs, who each had an equal share in the talent management company, and therefore an equal say in its affairs. This made the monthly company meetings noisy, stressful, and, in the case of Mumbles, difficult to understand. Behind Dan was a vaguely van-shaped object covered in a white tarpaulin.
“Now,” said Dan, “you’ll remember that, at our August meeting, we decided we should buy a new van.”
The dwarfs vaguely remembered this. They didn’t pay a lot of attention at the company meetings. They just liked shouting and arguing, and sticking their hands up to vote for things that they didn’t understand.21 They might well have voted in favor of buying a new van. Then again, they might have voted in favor of buying a spaceship, or invading China. For little people, the dwarfs didn’t pay much attention to small print.
“Just remind us: why are we buying a new van again?” asked Jolly.
“Because we can’t keep repainting the old one,” said Dan. “And you didn’t want to be known as ‘Dan’s Dwarfs’ anymore, or even ‘Dan’s Elves.’ ”
“That’s because elves don’t exist,” said Angry. “It’s like being called ‘Dan’s Unicorns,’ or ‘Dan’s Dragons.’ ”
“Exactly,” said Dan.
“And we’re not ‘your’ elves,” said Jolly. “It makes us sound like slaves. Which we’re not.”
You’re definitely not, thought Dan. Slaves might do a bit of work occasionally.
“You don’t like being called ‘little people,’ ” said Dan, “and you’re not sure about ‘dwarfs,’ so I had to think up a different name, which I did. I now present to you—the new van!”
Dan whipped away the tarpaulin, and the van stood revealed. It was bright yellow, and very shiny.
Dan glowed.
The van glowed.
The dwarfs did not glow.
“What’s that?” said Angry.
“It’s a van,” said Dan.
“No, not that. That! The writing on the side.”
“It’s your new name: Dan’s Stars of Diminished Stature.”
Dan was very proud of the new name for the dwarfs. He’d spent ages thinking it up, and he’d visited the painters every day that they were working on the job just to make sure they got the details right. The words flowed diagonally down both sides of the van. They’d even found a way to continue the writing over the windows without obscuring the view. The van was a work of art.
DAN’S
Stars
Of
Diminished
Stature!
The dwarfs looked at the van. Dan looked at the dwarfs. Dan and the dwarfs looked at the van. Dan’s eyesight wasn’t very good, and things might have gone on like that until night fell had Angry not said, “So, nothing strikes you as odd about the van?”
“No,” said Dan.
“Nothing at all?”
“Maybe the letters aren’t big enough. Is that it?”
“No, no, the letters are more than big enough. Too big, some might say. It’s more how they read that bothers me, so to speak.”
Dan looked again. He spelled out the words, moving his lips. He took a step back. He squinted.
He saw it.
“Oh,” he said.
“Yes, oh,” said Angry. “In fact, not just ‘Oh,’ but ‘Ess, Oh, Dee, Ess’. The side of our van reads ‘Dan’s SODS’!”
“That’s not good,” said Dan.
Definitely accurate, he thought, but not good.
• • •
The dwarfs and Dan sat in Dan’s office. They did not present a happy picture. The van was just the latest in a series of disasters. They had caused a major gas explosion, and they now owned a van that described them as sods.
Oh, and they had recently been dragged to Hell for a time. Let’s not forget that.
But their main problem at the moment was that, while they owned a talent agency, it didn’t have any real talent to promote.
“What about Wesley the Amazing Tightrope Walker?” said Dan. “We have him. He’s a genius! He can walk along a length of spiderweb without falling off.”
“He’s afraid of heights,” said Dozy. “It’s hard to get excited about a man who can only walk a tightrope that’s six inches off the ground. Even then he looks a bit nervous.”
“Jimmy the Juggler?” suggested Dan. “You’ve got to admit that the man can juggle.”
“He can juggle,” said Jolly. “He has a gift. He’d be better if he had two arms, though. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t juggle: he tosses.”
“Bobo the Clown?”
“He gets angry with children. It’s one thing throwing a bucket of confetti over them, but he’s not supposed to throw the bucket as well.”
“And then there’s, well, them,” said Dan.
“Them!” said Jolly, shaking his head.
“Them!” said Angry, casting his eyes to heaven.
“Them!” said Dozy, putting his head in his hands.
“Arble!” said Mumbles.
Which said it all, really.
• • •
They followed Dan down a steep set of stairs to the basement and walked along a hallway to a large padlocked door. Dan fumbled in his pocket for the key.
“Do you really need to keep them locked up?” asked Jolly.
“It’s for their own good,” said Dan. “They wander off if I don’t.”
“They were never very intelligent,” said Angry. “It’s a wonder they lasted as long as they did.”
“It’s sad, really,” said Dan. “You know, they wouldn’t survive a day in the wild.”
He placed the key in the lock and turned it.
“Careful now,” Dan warned. “They react to the light.”
He removed the padlock and pulled the bolt. The door began to open with a creak. The room beyond was big and comfortable, but very dark. As the door opened farther, a rectangle of light appeared on the floor and grew wider and wider, like the beam of a spotlight tracing its way across a stage.
A figure jumped into the light, followed by a second, and a third, and a fourth. They all looked a little bleary-eyed. Their spangled shirts had seen better days, and their trousers bore food stains. Their voices also sounded somewhat croaky, but that was nothing new.
“Hi,” said the first. “I’m Starlight.”
“Oh Lord,” said Jolly.
“And I’m Twinkle,” said the second.
“Good grief,” said Angry.
“I’m Gemini,” said the third.
“They never stop, do they?” said Dozy.
“And I’m Phil,” said the fourth. “And together we’re—”
“BoyStarz!” they all cried in unison, and performed a small twirl before they began doing to a perfectly innocent song what grape crushers do to grapes.
“Make them stop,” said Jolly, his hands pressed to his ears. “Please!”
“It’s very hard,” said Dan. “They see a light and they start performing. I’ve tried electric shocks, but that just seems to make them livelier.”
These were hard times for the boy band BoyStarz. For a start, they were no longer as young as they were, but “MenStarz” didn’t have t
he same ring to it. Phil in particular looked like a doorman at the kind of nightclub where people got killed on a regular basis, while Sparkle, Twinkle, and Gemini had only enough hair among all three of them for two people to share. Their career had never recovered from vicious rumors that the BoyStarz could not sing, and they simply mimed along to songs recorded by more talented vocalists. This led to the BoyStarz signing up for a special tour to prove the doubters wrong. In this it was successful, to a degree. The tour did prove that the BoyStarz could sing.
Horribly.
One critic compared the sound of BoyStarz singing live to the final cry of a ship’s horn as it sinks beneath the waves with the loss of everyone on board. Another described it as only marginally less awful than being trapped in a room with a flock of frightened geese that were honking in panic as they bumped into the walls. A third wrote: “If Death had a sound, it would sound like BoyStarz.”
The BoyStarz kept trying. They turned up for the opening of shopping malls, but nobody came. Then they started showing up for the opening of individual stores, but still nobody came. Eventually they grew so desperate that if somebody opened a newspaper, or a packet of crisps, BoyStarz would pop up beside them and start warbling about how love was like a flower, or a butterfly, or a sunny day. People started complaining. Where once the BoyStarz had been driven everywhere in limousines, they now rode bicycles, or they did until someone stole the bicycles to stop them from showing up unexpectedly. It was all very sad, unless you actually liked music, and songs being sung in tune, in which case it wasn’t very sad at all.
The dwarfs felt partly responsible for the run of bad luck that the BoyStarz had endured because it was they who had ruined the filming of the video for the BoyStarz’s Christmas single “Love Is Like a Castle (Built for Two).” They had done this by taking bits of the castle in question and flinging them from the battlements until the castle built for two looked like a shed built for one. When the dwarfs had decided to set up a talent agency with Dan, it seemed only right and proper that they should try to find work for the BoyStarz. So far, the only work they’d found for them was in a hamburger restaurant, and even then they’d lasted only a day because they insisted on singing about how love was like a lettuce leaf, or a chicken nugget, or a bun.
“All right, boys,” said Jolly, “the song’s had enough. Time to put it out of its misery.”
The BoyStarz stopped wailing.
“Has you got work for us?” asked Gemini.
“Is we going to be stars again?” asked Twinkle. As he said the word stars, he tossed fairy dust in the air.
“Where do they get that fairy dust from?” asked Angry. “They never seem to run out, do they?”
“I’ve searched their cell—I mean, their room—and I can’t find a trace of it,” said Dan. “I think they just produce it from their pores, like sweat.”
“What are you feeding them?” asked Dozy.
“Mostly cheese.”
“Well, that doesn’t explain it. Whatever you get from eating lots of cheese isn’t going to look like fairy dust, or smell like it either.”
“When is we going to sing again?” asked Starlight.
“What does he mean, ‘again’?” asked Jolly. “And why can’t they tell singular from plural?”
“I think they’re becoming a single entity,” said Dan. “Except for Phil, of course.”
“Ah.”
They all looked at Phil, who bore the same relationship to the other three as an emu might to three ducks. Every boy band had to have someone who looked like Phil in it. It was a rule.
“What are we going to do with them?” said Angry. “We can’t keep them down here forever. Eventually somebody is going to come looking for them.”
“Really?” asked Jolly.
Angry thought about it.
“Possibly not,” he said. “Still, we have to find something for them to do or else we’ll just end up with four old people living in our basement who can’t sing, smell of cheese, and appear to be made partly of fairy dust.”
There was a soft thud from above them as a copy of the Biddlecombe Evening Crier dropped through the letter box.
“Maybe there’ll be a job for them in the newspaper,” said Dozy.
“Unky,” said Mumbles.
“You’re right,” said Dozy, “it is highly unlikely, but you never know. Sometimes good things happen to good people.”
“And what about us?” said Angry.
“Sometimes good things happen to us, too,” said Dozy, “although only by mistake. Or through theft.”
They closed the door on the BoyStarz.
“Good-bye, little men,” said a voice. It might have been Starlight’s. Nobody knew for certain. They all looked the same.
Except for Phil.
And through the door came the sound of four voices singing loudly, if not terribly well, about how love was like a little man.
• • •
The dwarfs sat in Dan’s office and thought about their future. It looked bleak.
“This is terrible,” said Jolly. “We’re broke, and we have a talent-free talent agency.”
“Maybe we could sell the BoyStarz into slavery,” said Angry.
“They wouldn’t make very good slaves,” said Jolly. “They’re too delicate. Except for Phil.”
He looked at Dan.
“So?” he said. “Is there by any chance a job for the BoyStarz in the newspaper?”
Dan beamed at him. At last, a bit of good luck.
“No,” he replied, “but there’s a job for all four of you!”
21. This is how parliaments work.
VIII
In Which the Forces of Law and Order Encounter the Forces of Lawlessness and Disorder
SERGEANT ROWAN AND CONSTABLE Peel were enjoying a nice pot of tea and a couple of pea-and-pork pies at Pete’s Pies. The sun was shining, the pies were good, and all was well with the world.
“Hello, Sergeant,” said a passerby, walking his dog. “Criminals taking a day off today, are they?”
Sergeant Rowan smiled. When he chose to use it, he had a smile like a fatal gunshot.
“Do you have a license for that dog?” he said, and the man hurried quickly along.
Constable Peel sipped his tea.
“Do you think criminals actually take days off, Sarge?” said Constable Peel. “I mean, if they’re on holiday and someone leaves a car unlocked or a wallet unattended, do criminals think, ‘No, I’m not stealing that, I’m on my holidays’?”
Since he’d been dragged to Hell, and then escaped, Constable Peel had begun to take a different view of life. His belief was that any day that didn’t involve demons, the undead, or being hauled off to Hell was a good day as far as he was concerned.
“I don’t know, Constable, but here comes a criminal. Let’s ask him.”
Sergeant Rowan stretched out a hand and gripped a passing dwarf by the collar.
“Bless my soul,” he said. “If it isn’t Mr. Jolly Smallpants, off to find something that isn’t nailed down.”
“All right, Sergeant Rowan. Always nice to see you,” lied Jolly, his toes almost touching the ground.
“My colleague here was wondering if criminals ever take holidays,” said Sergeant Rowan. “I thought you might be able to help him with an answer.”
Jolly thought about the question.
“I once stole a yacht. Does that count?”
Sergeant Rowan reminded himself never to shake hands with Jolly Smallpants, or, if he did, to count his fingers afterward just to make sure that they were all still there.
“When I said ‘taking’ a holiday, I did not mean stealing one,” he said. “I meant spending time not engaged in criminal behavior, if you could imagine such a thing.”
“Oh, no, Sergeant,” said Jolly. “If you have a gift, you ought to take it seriously. We’re like the law: we never rest. Well, except for you and Constable Peel. You like a rest. And arrests.” He chuckled. “See what I did there?
”
“I did,” said Sergeant Rowan, “and if you do it again I shall drop you on your head. So where were you off to in such a hurry before I felt your collar? Somebody leave a bank vault open? Is there a cow standing in a field with bricks where its legs used to be?”
“No, Sergeant,” said Jolly. “I’m off to get a job.”
Sergeant Rowan was so shocked that he let Jolly go, and Constable Peel began choking on a piece of pie until Jolly helped him by slapping him a bit too enthusiastically on the back.
“Thank you,” said Constable Peel, once he could feel his spine again.
“Give him back his whistle, Mr. Smallpants,” said Sergeant Rowan sternly.
“Sorry,” said Jolly. “Force of habit.”
He handed Constable Peel his whistle and, as he was feeling generous, also returned his notebook, his pencil, and his hat.
“You mentioned a job,” said Sergeant Rowan while Constable Peel tried to store away his belongings until he realized that Jolly had stolen one of his pockets.
“Yes,” said Jolly.
“An honest, paying job?”
Jolly looked slightly ashamed. “It’s only temporary. Desperate times, and all that.”
“And what would this job involve?”
“Christmas elf at Wreckit’s,” said Jolly. “A chance to make children happy, and to lighten the hearts of their parents.”
“Lighten their pockets by stealing their wallets, more like,” said Sergeant Rowan.
“Speaking of pockets . . .” said Constable Peel.
Jolly handed over a scrap of dark blue material.
“Sorry again,” said Jolly. “Sometimes I don’t even know what my own hands are doing.”
At that moment he was joined by Angry, Dozy, Mumbles, and Dan, who greeted the two policemen with cheery smiles and the theft of the remains of their pies.
“Don’t you lot have a new van?” asked Sergeant Rowan. “I seem to recall seeing it being delivered yesterday.”
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