Shrunk!

by F. R. Hitchcock

  Eric turns the meteorite over in his hands, stroking the shiny black bits, and weighing it, just like I did. ‘Like a shooting star?’

  ‘Let me out or I’ll never talk to you again.’

  ‘Very like a shooting star,’ I say.

  ‘And, you wished on it?’ says Eric.

  ‘Yes, but my wish didn’t have anything to do with shrinking. I don’t understand where that came from.’

  ‘I’ll kill you, Model Village!’

  ‘Does that mean that if I have the meteorite in my pocket, I can shrink things?’

  I shrug. ‘Try.’ I hand him the meteorite. ‘Put your middle finger and your thumb together, make a little circle, hold your hand about six inches in front of your eye, and click in your head, as if it was a camera.’

  Eric’s concentrating really hard. He’s got his fingers in a circle and he’s staring at a shoe lying on the other side of the room.

  ‘Let me out!’

  Eric lets his breath out in a big rush. He shakes his head. ‘No . . . it just works for you. It must be because you were the first to touch it, or something. But, wow, Tom. Wow.’ He turns the meteorite over in his hand. ‘Can you make things big again?’

  I shake my head.

  We both look at the chest. We’re both thinking the same thing. Jacob Devlin could be tiny for the rest of his life. Is that such a bad thing? The chest’s shaking. It looks really weird. In fact it’s all really weird, and now I’m feeling sick too.

  ‘LET ME OUT!’

  I pick up the chest. I can feel his weight inside. Almost nothing. ‘OK, Jacob,’ I say. ‘I’m going to open the lid, but you’ve got to shut up. If you keep shouting, I’ll squash you.’

  There’s a pause, and then he says, ‘OK.’

  I open it. And there he is, standing there. The little toasting fork in his hand. About two inches high. A raspberry, all in tight-fitting segments, with horns, and a huge tail.

  ‘I’ll get you, Model Village. I’ll kill you for this.’

  I can’t help wondering how. He’s only two inches tall and I’m four foot six.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say, and flinch, because I’m sort of expecting him to suddenly be big again. But he stays tiny and shakes his toasting fork at me.

  ‘I’ll tell my mum, I’ll tell my dad – and then you’ll be for it, Model Village. You’ll be in serious trouble.’ He sneers at Eric. ‘And you, Snot Face, Four Eyes, Geek. I’ll tell them about this room, won’t just be your dad they all laugh at then.’ He shakes his tiny fist and stamps his foot.

  I look around at the room. Jacob’s right, it would be bad if this got out. Probably the least embarrassing thing is a framed picture of Eric; dressed as a fairy.

  ‘Presents from my aunt. She still thinks I’m three,’ says Eric, calmly. ‘I expect there are some advantages in being small, Jacob. For example, look how big this sweet is now.’ Eric rootles about in his trick or treat bag and hands Jacob a jelly baby.

  Jacob stops shouting and stares at it. It’s only a bit smaller than him; in fact his arms don’t quite reach round it. He sticks one finger out, and it sinks into the soft sugar dusting.

  ‘Oh woah – I’ve died and gone to heaven,’ he says, burying his head in the side of the jelly baby.

  ‘Wish I had a camera,’ says Eric.

  I did this. I DID THIS! But it doesn’t make me feel good. 1% good? Maybe 2% good, but not as good as I should feel. The awful thing is, that this shrinking business is not as good as it should be. It’s one thing to shrink random things, but people? Planets?

  ‘Um, do you have the internet, Eric? Could you look up – the news? BBC or something.’

  ‘Why?’ Then Eric stares at me. ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with . . .?’

  And I say it. I say it for the first time. I have to close my eyes while I say it – I don’t want to see what Eric thinks. ‘I shrank Jupiter, and lost it.’

  Eric draws in his breath. Jacob does a tiny high-pitched belch.

  ‘You can’t have done.’

  ‘I did – I was playing around, and . . .’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘It happened.’

  ‘Whoops,’ says Jacob.

  Chapter 13

  The sky’s really gone off on one now, with shooting stars cascading all around us. People have come out from their houses and are staring up. It’s like a huge free firework party. It would be really beautiful if it wasn’t so terrifying.

  Eric points up at the sky. ‘See – see what you’ve done? This is even worse than they predicted . . .’

  ‘Nit,’ shouts Jacob, from my pocket.

  I feel 1000% rubbish now.

  ‘It’s your fault, Jacob,’ I point out. ‘If you didn’t go round stealing things off people then I’d still have Jupiter in my pocket and we’d be able to try and stick it back in the sky. It’s your fault the planet’s ended up ground into the gravel.’

  ‘S’cuse me, Model Village, if you didn’t go round shrinking things then none of this would have happened.’

  We’re walking back to school. Eric seemed to think that all we really needed to do was to find Jupiter, dead or alive – that once it was back in the sky, all this would stop.

  ‘Back in the sky?’ I asked. ‘How?’

  ‘I’m sure there’s a way,’ said Eric.

  I suggested that as Jacob was so small, it might be easy for him to find the planet.

  ‘Naff off!’ he said.

  But then I pointed out that he was two inches tall, and that my feet were quite big, compared to his head.

  Eric’s dad passes us. He’s leaving cables along the side of the road.

  ‘Why?’ I ask Eric.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ says Eric.

  I look up at the sky now. Just in case Jupiter’s back where it should be.

  ‘Thing is, though,’ says Eric, answering a question that no one asked, ‘it takes around forty-three minutes for us to see what’s up there.’

  ‘What?

  ‘Light years – it takes that long for the image of an object the distance of Jupiter, to appear to us on Earth.’

  ‘How do you know this stuff?’ I ask.

  ‘He’s a nerd,’ says Jacob. We both ignore him.

  Eric shrugs. ‘I also know that Jupiter takes about twelve years to orbit the sun, that it’s more than seven hundred and seventy million miles from the sun, that the red spot’s really a storm that’s been raging for more than three hundred years. That it has a moon called Io. I could go on.’

  ‘Don’t,’ says Jacob.

  ‘Who’s that?’ says Eric, pointing towards Grandma’s house.

  I’ve sort of forgotten about ‘Mr and Mrs Magic’s Night of Halloween Fun’, so when Mum and Dad and Tilly blunder out into the street light in front of us, I’m not prepared.

  The pumpkins are Mum and Tilly – Dad’s dressed as Dracula. He’s got wonky stick-on teeth, and his hair’s dyed black. He’s wearing his ‘I drink blood for breakfast’ braces. He’s waving his arms at us. He actually looks completely mad.

  ‘Whooooo, whooooo, whooo – anyone ready for a little nibble?’ he says in this stupid voice. ‘Are you coming to watch an evening of hilarious, heart-rending, horrifying, humungous, hair-raising, Halloween Magic!’

  ‘Oh, Daddy and Daddy – can’t we go?’ shouts Jacob from my pocket.

  Mum stares at me and I start imaginary coughing.

  ‘Um,’ says Eric.

  ‘No,’ I whisper.

  ‘No,’ says Eric, and we run, legging it down the street until we reach the model village, and pause in the dark for Eric to breathe. It’s so warm I’m sweating.

  ‘If my parents were as pants as that – I’d emigrate,’ says Jacob.

  I think of Jacob’s pink round mother and boring headmaster father. ‘If I had parents like yours I’d emigrate.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my parents?’ he says.

  ‘What’s wrong with mine?’ I reply.

&nb
sp; ‘Yours must be soooooooo embarrassing.’

  ‘Yours too.’

  ‘All parents are embarrassing,’ says Eric. ‘Even grandparents are embarrassing. That’s what they’re there for. Come on, let’s try running again.’

  Chapter 14

  We race past the model village. Tilly’s left a pumpkin lantern on the wall.

  ‘Hey, that reminds me.’ I leap over the wall. ‘I’ve got these things I shrank earlier.’

  ‘I want to see – let me down!’

  I’d like to call him Snot Face Four Eyes, but the best I can think of is ‘Squit’. ‘OK, Squit,’ I say, and open the flap at the top of my pocket. He climbs out on to the ground. Yuk, he still looks really weird.

  I chuck my backpack down and reach into it for my tiny prizes.

  Eric clangs the gate. ‘Woah – what are these?’ He picks up the tiny bench and admires it. ‘Hey – that’s from the seafront . . . I know that – it’s got my name on it. My aunt paid for it, when I was born.’

  ‘My aunt paid for it, when I was born. Bless. When I was born, my dad got a row of seats at Bywater Regis Football Club. And he paid for them, they cost thousands. They’ve all got my name on.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ says Eric, and he says it as if he means it.

  Eric helps me balance the pumpkins on the miniature windowsills. He takes the candle out of Tilly’s big pumpkin on the wall and Jacob relights all the small ones.

  They glow like a line of orange berries.

  I put the bench in front. And the plastic hot dog alongside. I wonder if Grandma’ll notice.

  ‘They look brilliant,’ says Eric.

  Jacob tries sitting on the bench. ‘It’s a bit big,’ he says.

  I’m just about to pick up the bench when I hear something.

  Tap, clunk. Tap, clunk.

  Grandma?

  She appears from out of the darkness behind us. She’s not dressed up, but she’s got the plastic bag on her head again. I know she’s round and cosy to look at, but she’s still scary, especially coming out of the dark like that.

  I grab Jacob and stuff him in my trouser pocket. He’s wriggling.

  ‘Hello! Granny!’ he shouts.

  I go into another fit of imaginary coughing.

  ‘Hello, boys. What are you up to?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  ‘Watching the shooting stars,’ says Eric, pointing at the sky.

  ‘Hmm,’ she says, in that way grown-ups say when they don’t believe you. ‘It’s a very unhappy solar system – with Jupiter missing.’ She stares at me. I look at the ground. ‘Nice lanterns you’ve got there. Have you seen mine? Take a look at the bowls club as you pass.’ She moves off towards the house. ‘There’s some oxtail soup for you, Tom, on the stove, when you’re peckish.’

  ‘Bye,’ I say, watching her sink back into the darkness, and waiting until I see the yellow square of the door open and close around her. ‘Phew.’ I open my hand so that Jacob can stand up.

  ‘I nearly told her,’ he says, his shiny devil outfit glistening in the shooting starlight.

  ‘I nearly squashed you,’ I say.

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ he says.

  ‘He would,’ says Eric. ‘Wouldn’t you, Tom?’

  ‘I might.’

  Jacob goes quiet for a minute. ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘Why’d you think?’ I say.

  ‘Because he’s a scaredy cat?’

  ‘Because he’s not a horrible person,’ says Eric.

  I can almost hear the cogs turning in Jacob’s brain.

  ‘I’d squash you if you were tiny.’

  ‘We know,’ says Eric. ‘But just because you’d squash us, doesn’t mean we’d squash you.’

  ‘Does that mean I’m a horrible person?’

  We don’t bother to reply.

  Chapter 15

  We run on, but stop at the miniature bowling green. There are four tiny pumpkin lanterns there, and Jacob clambers down to inspect them.

  ‘These are awesome,’ he says.

  ‘They can’t be as good as mine,’ I say.

  ‘Well, they are.’

  ‘But Grandma made them.’

  ‘Your gran’s pretty amazing,’ says Eric.

  Jacob skips off across the bowling green.

  ‘Is she?’ I thought Grandma was just scary Grandma.

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Eric. ‘She’s looked after my dad for years, and run this place, making loads of things for it every year, running the cafe and all that stuff. I remember her making me a miniature garden – it was brilliant, real flowers and everything.’ Eric waves his arms about as if it was still in front of him. ‘I won the village show that year. They gave me a box of jelly fruits.’

  ‘Yuk,’ says Jacob. ‘I hate jelly fruits, I’d only enter the village show if they had proper prizes.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like a games console, or a laptop, or hard cash. That stuff’s for sissies.’

  ‘It’s about taking part,’ says Eric. ‘Not winning.’

  ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  Eric stares at the little red bulbous thing on the ground in front of him. ‘If you don’t get it, then I can’t possibly explain.’

  I pick up one of Grandma’s pumpkins. It’s completely perfect.

  ‘Grandma sent us here on purpose,’ I say. ‘She’s suspicious about the meteorite, and she wanted me to see that her pumpkins were as good as mine.’

  ‘Why?’ asks Eric.

  ‘Exactly,’ I answer.

  We move on through the model village, the meteor showers now filling the whole sky, except for one small cloud hanging over the sea.

  ‘Wow,’ says Jacob, climbing into the miniature post office window. ‘I didn’t realise how pants these buildings were. They’re really rubbish.’

  ‘Thanks, I think I knew that.’

  ‘They’re all junk, except this one.’ He stops by a barn that I’ve never noticed before. ‘This,’ he says, ‘is not pants. Look, it’s even got those mushroom things underneath. And, woah, there’s tiny initials scratched in the stone. Did your gran make this? Awesome.’

  I shine my torch at the barn. It’s not in the real village – so why’s it in the model village?

  ‘Hey – and this – this is mega.’ He’s standing next to a water trough. ‘It’s even got the writing on it – 1888, presented by, oh, I dunno, some boring bloke. Awesome.’

  Lit by fairy lights in the trees, Jacob chases off through the houses.

  Eric’s stopped. He’s staring at the barn. ‘I’ve seen photos of this. This used to be in the real village. It was taken by aliens, just when Dad was abducted. A whole load of things went, all at the same time. There’s a newspaper cutting about it, on the stairs, at home.’

  ‘You mean this was in the village, and then disappeared?’

  ‘Yeah. Although why would the aliens shrink it and leave it here? I don’t know.’

  Luckily, in the dark, Eric can’t see the colour of my face. I feel the flush charge down my back and right down to my feet. So it’s happened before. There must be someone else who’s done this, someone who hid the things in the model village. But they can’t have done Eric’s dad, otherwise he’d still be tiny. That really must have been aliens. I stand staring at Jacob’s shiny red body skipping through the model village.

  My brain grinds into action.

  ‘How old is your dad?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just how old is he?’

  ‘Fifty-five.’

  Fifty-five years ago. Grandma would have been here then, Grandma’s always been here. It was her father’s house before. He started the model village and she grew up in my bedroom.

  I glance back at the perfect pumpkin lanterns on the bowling green.

  ‘Eric, it’s Grandma!’

  ‘Grandma?’

  ‘She must know. She’s the one. That’s why she’s been following me, looking in my bag. That’s why she wanted me to see the
pumpkins.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Eric stops. ‘You think she can shrink things too?’

  ‘The night that the meteorite fell,’ I say. ‘She didn’t want me to get it. She didn’t want me to wish.’

  ‘Because she can do it herself?’

  Chapter 16

  I stand paralysed.

  Eric grabs me by the arm. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We’d better get a move on. We need to find Jupiter as soon as possible.’

  ‘But, Eric – even if we find it, I don’t know how to put it back.’

  ‘Ask your grandma. If she can shrink things – she can probably unshrink them.’

  Ask Grandma? A shudder of fear runs down my neck. ‘Bet she can’t,’ I say. ‘I can’t, can I?’

  ‘Bet she can. Your grandma can do most things.’

  Jacob clambers over Eric’s shoe and undoes one of his shoelaces.

  ‘But what if we can’t find it?’ I think of another excuse.

  ‘We won’t know, if we don’t look,’ says Eric, sounding a lot like Grandma.

  ‘But, but . . .’

  ‘What is it?

  ‘I can’t ask her,’ I whisper. ‘I’m too scared.’

  ‘Oh! We’re all going to die. Model Village has messed up the solar system. We’re going to crash into the sun and fry – if we’re not squashed by a giant asteroid first, and all because scaredy Model Village doesn’t want to ask scary granny.’

  ‘Oh, do shut up, Jacob,’ Eric says. ‘Anyway, I’ve been thinking, if Jupiter’s about 143,000 kilometres in diameter, and it has a magnetic field of 1,600,000 kilometres, then even if it’s only the size of a bead, it would still have a magnetic field – it would have a pull.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How big was Jupiter?’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  Jacob undoes Eric’s other shoelace.

  ‘How big was Jupiter – before you lost it?’ He says ‘lost’ like I did it on purpose.

  ‘Half a centimetre, maybe.’

  Eric mutters to himself and stares at his fingers. ‘One million six hundred thousand, one hundred and sixty thousand, sixteen thousand, take the noughts off – then that’s divided by a hundred and forty-six thousand, so, take away the zeros all round – um, about five centimetres. It would have a magnetic pull of five centimetres.’