Little People

by Tom Holt

  Tom Holt was born in London in 1961. At Oxford he studied bar billiards, ancient Greek agriculture and the care and feeding of small, temperamental Japanese motorcycle engines; interests which led him, perhaps inevitably, to qualify as a solicitor and emigrate to Somerset, where he specialised in death and taxes for seven years before going straight in 1995. Now a full-time writer, he lives in Chard, Somerset, with his wife, one daughter and the unmistakable scent of blood, wafting in on the breeze from the local meat-packing plant.

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  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © Tom Holt 2002

  Cover illustration by Jessica Williamson. Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First US e-book edition: September 2012

  ISBN: 978-0-316-23318-7

  Also by Tom Holt

  Expecting Someone Taller

  Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?

  Flying Dutch

  Ye Gods!

  Overtime

  Here Comes the Sun

  Grailblazers

  Faust Among Equals

  Odds and Gods

  Djinn Rummy

  My Hero

  Paint Your Dragon

  Open Sesame

  Wish You Were Here

  Only Human

  Snow White and the Seven Samurai

  Valhalla

  Nothing But Blue Skies

  Falling Sideways

  Little People

  The Portable Door

  In Your Dreams

  Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

  You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here, But It Helps

  Barking

  The Better Mousetrap

  May Contain Traces of Magic

  Blonde Bombshell

  Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages

  Doughnut

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Also by Tom Holt

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  For Melody, Paul, Beetle, Matthew

  and everyone in the village.

  Be seeing you.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was eight years old when I saw my first elf.

  It was a Monday evening in July or August: school holidays, I’d just been watching Star Trek on the box, and Mummy let me out in the garden to play. I was being Captain Kirk in the secluded patch between the spuds and the compost heap, and I’d just phasered next door’s cat into oblivion through a gap in the fence when I looked round and there, quite suddenly, he was.

  If I close my eyes, I can see him yet. He was at least a foot high, maybe thirteen or fourteen inches, with sharply upswept pointed ears, short black hair and a slight but noticeable greenish tinge to his skin. As I recall, he was leaning against a nascent iceberg lettuce (God only knows why my stepfather grew the loathsome things; none of us liked them, him included) and he was rolling a tiny cigarette in a wrapper of withered spinach leaf. Stuck into the dirt directly in front of him were a miniature pickaxe, crowbar and shovel, like something you might expect to find among the accoutrements of a pre-Glasnost Soviet doll’s house – Heroine of Agriculture Barbie, or My Little Comrade. He was wearing a cute little yellow top, black tights and big clumpy boots, and when he’d finished rolling his fag, he gave his nose a quick ream-through with a tiny black-edged fingernail before lighting up.

  I crouched there, staring, for at least fifteen seconds, which is a very long time indeed to hold perfectly still, especially when you’re eight. Quite possibly I could’ve stuck it out even longer if a wasp hadn’t materialised out of thin air a few inches from my nose, triggering an instinctive flinch-hop-skip-swipe procedure. By the time I’d landed and looked round, the elf wasn’t there any more, understandably enough; but that was OK. I’d seen him, which was all that really mattered.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy,’ I yelled out as I ran back into the house. ‘Guess what! There are Vulcans at the bottom of our garden!’

  Mummy and Daddy George (my stepfather) were sitting out on the patio, glugging some kind of amber booze from small glasses. It was what they usually did in the evenings.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Mummy said.

  ‘Vulcans,’ I replied, too preoccupied to point out that she’d just used a Bad Word. ‘I just saw one, down by the compost heap. He was only little, about this big, so there must’ve been a transporter malfunction, probably a misaligned EM coupling in the plasma conduit, and he was wearing a yellow shirt, so he was probably bridge crew, though I didn’t see his rank insignia—’

  ‘Hang on,’ Daddy George interrupted. ‘Where did you say this was?’

  ‘Down the garden,’ I replied impatiently – I’d already covered that point in my initial report, why was it that grown-ups never listened? ‘He had pointy ears and everything, just like Mister Spock. But then a wasp came and when I looked round again he’d gone, so he must’ve beamed back to his ship . . .’

  ‘Michael,’ said Daddy George, in his extra-quiet-meaning-real-trouble voice, ‘go to your room.’

  Well, you didn’t argue with him when he used that voice; not if you had even a faint residual trace of a survival instinct. So I did as I was told: no arguments, no protests, no it’s-not-fairs, just a slump of the shoulders and a slow trudge up the little wooden hill to HM Prison Bedfordshire.

  (Show me an eight-year-old kid who wants to go to bed at seven o’clock on a summer evening, and I’ll show you a clear case of demonic possession, alien abduction or both.)

  As I went, I could hear them talking; Daddy George was saying something like, I thought I told you never to let him something I didn’t catch; Mummy was coming back at him with the old don’t-you-talk-to-my-baby-like-that-you-pig line, but I could tell it was very much a rearguard action and her heart wasn’t in it. For my part, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about; but ten minutes or so later I got a Class One Official Warning from Daddy George, all flared nostrils and eyebrows meeting in the middle. A quarter of a century has
slipped by since so I can’t give you the exact words, but the general idea was that smart cookies don’t go around seeing small green-faced people in gardens; and even if they do, they keep very quiet about it for fear of being classified as dangerous loons and taken away to places with high walls and handles on one side of the door only. He added a few choice remarks about wicked children who made up silly stories just to get attention, coupled with a reminder that that part of the garden was (a) out of bounds and (b) infested with poisonous snakes, spiders and scorpions (and if that wasn’t making up silly stories, I remember thinking, I’d love to know what was) and left, slamming the door behind him. After he’d gone I climbed into bed and studied the ceiling thoughtfully for a while; there was a little wisp of cobweb in one corner that’d been there ever since I could remember, and focusing on it helped me drift into a state of deep and insightful meditation. Just before I fell asleep, I distinctly remember thinking about something he’d said: small green-faced people in gardens. Small, yes; I’d said small, also pointy-eared and yellow-shirt wearing. Not green-faced, though. I hadn’t mentioned that aspect at all.

  About Daddy George, my stepfather. From the above you may have got the impression that he was a grumpy, miserable little man who shouted a lot and was no fun. This isn’t entirely accurate. He wasn’t little. Quite the opposite: at the time I formed the impression that he was at least twelve feet high and about the same across the shoulders, with a shout they could probably hear in New Mexico, wherever New Mexico was. In reality he was no more than six foot five, six six at the very most, and it wasn’t the shouting you needed to worry about; it was when he turned quiet and looked at you for two or three seconds without saying anything at all. That was definitely a cue to leave the area, change your name and if possible your species, because Daddy George had a temper you could use to generate electricity.

  He’d come on the scene when I was about four, four-and-a-half. My other daddy had slung his hook for some unspecified reason and I wasn’t to talk about him any more. About the same time we moved house, from a town or city I can barely remember to a big, way-cool house in the pseudo-country, a few miles on the quieter side of the M25. That was extremely good; likewise the fact that Daddy George ran a big, successful shoe factory, which made lots and lots of money and (better still) occupied most of Daddy George’s time. As I got older, it became easier for me to be out of the house when he was in it, an arrangement that seemed to suit all of us pretty well; and just before my fourteenth birthday I was sent away to boarding school. This took a certain amount of arranging, since (as Daddy George made a point of informing me) I was far too thick to get into this school by the conventional route of passing the entrance exam, and Daddy George had to build them a new science block before they’d take me off his hands.

  Boarding school wasn’t perfect, by any manner of means – looking back, I get the impression that the bunch of misfits who ran it had drawn on ancient Sparta, Rugby in the reign of Victoria and Wormwood Scrubs as their main sources of inspiration in figuring out their operating philosophy – but it did have the overwhelming advantage of not being Home. True, this was a quality it shared with a whole lot of other, warmer places, but nobody was going to let me go to any of them, so at a fairly early stage I resolved to keep my face shut, my head down and my nose clean, and make the best of it. And it wasn’t so bad, at that; it was far enough away that the risk of my parents dropping in while they were in the neighbourhood was reassuringly negligible, and I did manage to learn some useful stuff, most of which concerned keeping warm and staying hidden. One piece of advice I brought from home that did stand me in very good stead was Daddy George’s warning about the danger of having seen elves. I quickly realised that in the basically carnivorous culture of a boys’ school, any kind of aberration or difference from the norm quickly marks you out as being on the wrong side of the predator/prey divide. Admitting that you’d once seen an elf would’ve been blood in the water for sure, and in consequence I gave the topic of elves, fairies, brownies, pixies, goblins and little people in general a very wide berth whenever it came up in conversation. Nonetheless: the more I didn’t talk about what I’d seen that evening and tried to forget all about it, the more it became part of me, something unspoken and therefore fundamental, like the British constitution. So I’d seen an elf when I was a kid. So what? Big deal.

  Thus my first elf encounter stayed dark and buried in my heart like a tiny plastic aeroplane at the bottom of a skyscraper-sized cereal packet until the day after my sixteenth birthday, when I happened to be doing something very unusual, very out of character and, as far as I was concerned, very scary indeed. I was talking to a Girl.

  We had them at our school, in the sixth form; about two dozen of them, as against two hundred and fifty adolescent males. This was supposed to be a good thing; and all I can say is that whoever dreamed up that idea was either fundamentally misguided or else had originated on the planet of the Plant People, where sex is a typo for a number between five and seven. What it was like for the girls I can’t really begin to imagine, though I’ve always tended to assume it must’ve resembled those primitive cultures where the king is treated as a god for 364 days of the year and gets ritually eaten on the 365th. For the boys – Oh, go on. Guess.

  Consequently, from the age when I first started to be uncomfortably aware of them, girls to me were exotic, almost mythical creatures; more outlandish than Klingons and Romulans, way more outlandish than elves. And yet; on 10 September (day after my birthday; first day of term), there was I, alone with and actually talking to one. Bizarre? Yes.

  Her name – well, that was part of it, I guess. Many parents name their children after fictional heroes and heroines, and little tangible harm results. Some parents call their kids after their favourite Disney characters, and still get away with it. It’s amazing how resilient young people can be. Once in a while, however, you get a truly appalling act of nomenclature whose repercussions last a lifetime.

  ‘Sorry,’ I repeated. ‘Your name, I didn’t quite catch it.’

  ‘That’s because I didn’t tell you,’ she replied, scowling. She had a face that looked like it was built around a scowl, to the point where two hundred and forty-nine teenage boys had taken one look and headed in another direction. ‘Where’s the science block?’

  ‘This way,’ I replied. ‘I’ll take you there if you like.’

  ‘Don’t bother.’

  ‘It’s no bother,’ I replied, quick as lightning. ‘I was going that way anyhow.’

  Which was, of course, as barefaced a lie as you’ll ever find in the wild outside the Houses of Parliament; and she knew it, and so did I. But, for some reason, she didn’t tell me to push off, with or without extreme prejudice.

  Instead, she simply grunted, ‘Yeah, all right,’ like a shy, freckled warthog, and allowed me to lead the way.

  ‘I’m Mike, by the way,’ I said. ‘Mike Higgins. So, this is your first day, is it?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ I went on, ‘once you get used to it. Like Stilton cheese,’ I added.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not so bad, once you get used to it.’

  ‘What’s cheese got to do with anything?’

  ‘Nearly there. Actually, my dad built it.’

  ‘Built what?’

  I tried to sound nonchalant. ‘The science block. That’s why it’s called the Higgins Science Centre, actually.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I never met a human being who could invest the word oh with such a wide range of eloquent meaning. On this occasion, oh clearly meant, ‘Even if I believed you, why the hell would I care?’, a definition that for some unaccountable reason is missing from most popular dictionaries. In short, I was striking out; and it says quite a lot about the aura of pure unsullied miserableness that she radiated that, at that precise moment, I didn’t really mind. If this was a Girl, I said to myself, you can have ’em. Give me plastic model aircraft every time.

>   ‘Cru,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Cru,’ she repeated. ‘My name.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what it’s short for?’ The way she said the words was equivalent to a slap round the face with a glove from a professional duellist; soon, it told me, we’re going to fight, and you’re going to die. ‘Well, aren’t you?’ she added.

  ‘It’s short for something, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Well, indeed. I may be stupid, but I’m not thick, and when someone says, ‘Come over here so I can bash you’, just occasionally I have the common sense to stay put. Besides, once in a while I like to do the unexpected.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask, then?’ she said, a tad louder this time.

  ‘Let me guess,’ I replied. ‘Crudence?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cruese?’

  ‘Cruella,’ she said, ‘after Cruella de Vil.’

  I frowned. Genuine bafflement. ‘Who?’

  ‘Cruella de Vil. You know, in 101 Dalmatians.’

  I shrugged. ‘Never seen it. Here we are, it’s the big grey building on the left, the one that looks like a giant shoebox standing on end. Probably deliberate,’ I added. ‘My dad’s in shoes, you see.’

  ‘I couldn’t care less if he was in black leather and frogmen’s flippers,’ she replied, but it was obvious she wasn’t putting her weight behind it; just a token left-arm prod, for appearance’s sake.

  ‘You’ve never seen 101 Dalmatians?’

  I shook my head. ‘Or Bambi,’ I said, ‘or Jungle Book or any stuff like that. We didn’t go to the pictures when I was a kid.’

  ‘Right.’ She stopped, and I stopped too. We were outside the science block, and there was no call for me to go any further, or for her to stay. ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘here we are.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You said you were on your way here.’

  ‘I lied. Have a nice day.’

  She twitched her nose, like a rabbit. Not many people can do that. I can. ‘Be seeing you,’ she said.