by Tom Holt
He scowled thoughtfully at me for two seconds, then shrugged. ‘Well, fuck me,’ he said. ‘Wonders will never cease. So what’s she like, then, this bird of yours?’
He was letting me scramble past him onto the moral high ground, of course, but I don’t suppose he cared. ‘She’s not my bird,’ I said huffily. ‘And that’s a rather derogatory expression, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
He grinned. ‘Get stuffed,’ he said. ‘Go on, I’m interested. What’s wrong with her, then? Fat? Spots? Embarrassing body odours?’
No, but she’s got a really freaky name. ‘Nothing’s wrong with her,’ I snapped back, trying to sound bitterly offended and upset. Which I was, of course, but I was also profoundly grateful to have seen the back of what-are-you-doing-in-my-study, and it’s hard to work up a fine lather of righteous fury when what you really want to do is breathe a long sigh of relief and bust out grinning. ‘Why must you assume—’
He laughed. If offensive laughter was a martial art, he’d have been the little wizened Grand Master with the bottle glasses who can beat up all the heavies without breaking into a sweat. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘Now get your useless arse out of my study. Your mother’ll be wondering where you’ve got to.’
So that was that; I’d escaped, but I hadn’t found anybody to share the burden with, or to absolve me of it, so it looked like I was stuck with it. I spent the rest of the day hiding in the lee of the Christmas tree (we always had something that looked like an undercover giant redwood. Conspicuous consumption? Us? Nah . . .) with a box of someone else’s Ferrero Rochers and a notebook, trying to figure out a properly scientific approach to the next phase of my research – it was research already, you’ll have noticed. Well, when you’re that age and for the first time in your life you happen to trip over something that actually engages your attention, there’s a slight tendency to obsess.
Boxing Day was good, because the entire household could be relied on not to stir out of their pits until the nausea died away and the light stopped hurting their eyes, which gave me till noon at the very least, probably longer. I’d set my alarm for 7 a.m. – before you start revising your opinion of me I’d just like to point out that I’m not normally a morning person, but extreme circumstances justify extreme measures – and it turned out to be one of those bright, cold, brittle late-December days when it’s deceptively easy to forget what a screw-up your life is, because everything looks so calm and relaxed and meant, if you see what I mean. I made myself a coffee, mummified myself in long scarves under a thick coat and let myself out into the garden.
I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know how all the Attenboroughs and the nature-documentary people hack it, unless the whole thing’s a set-up and they’re using stop-animation and stuffed animals. Ten minutes huddled motionless in a bush and I’d already checked my watch twenty-seven times, on several occasions shaking it vehemently to see if it’d stopped. Not a trace of any elves, of course. I drew the logical conclusion – that I was simply in the wrong place and that just the other side of the loganberry entanglements was a seething mass of elves – crawled out, stretched my apparently permanently mutilated spine and relocated. Ten minutes later, though, the new spot was just as elf-free. The only conclusion to be drawn was that my fieldcraft was at fault: I was making too much noise, or they could see me, or I was either upwind or downwind or at-right-angles-wind of them and they were scuttling back into their lairs with hankies pressed over their noses muttering, ‘Coo, what a pong!’ in Elvish.
I thought hard, trying to remember something I’d heard or read years ago about some bloke who hunted tigers by sitting up in a tree; tigers don’t tend to look up much, apparently, so they don’t see you so easily if you’re twelve feet off the ground. There was, of course, absolutely no logical reason why a tactic that held good against huge stripy psychotic moggies should work with elves; I guess it was just one of those intuitive things, a sudden reprise of a million-year-old predatory instinct, linking me for one brief telepathic moment with my hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Didn’t bloody work, though. Oh, the tree was no problem; there was a whacking great apple tree with thoughtfully arranged branches that even a sworn acrophobe like me could get into without screaming, and from the naturally formed armchair about halfway up you had a wonderful view over the whole garden; you could sit perfectly still, screened by a swathe of branches and small twigs, and nobody’d ever know you were there unless you dropped your chewing gum on their heads. It was even fairly comfortable, as trees go. Just no elves showed up, was all.
I gave it a whole half-hour, which is a long time to sit dead still and pay attention to absolutely nothing whatsoever going on around you. By this time, I was beginning to wonder if I really did care so passionately about the elf question, or whether there might not be a slim chance that I could carry on and live a normal life, indoors and not freezing to death, without knowing the truth about small pointy-eared people. It was at this juncture that I discovered that both of my legs had done what I should’ve stayed doing when the alarm went off, and gone to sleep.
Even our old apple tree wasn’t so amenable that you could get down out of it with two numb legs, so it quickly became obvious that I was going to be stuck there a little longer. By now I’d come to the conclusion that for whatever reason there weren’t any elves to be seen, and I might as well rest my eyes for a while by closing them.
Bizarre thing, the process of falling asleep. It seemed to me that I stayed where I was, and so did the tree, but that the landscape underneath it changed: a bit like a revolving stage in a theatre. Under the tree there was – well, a garden, but a different garden; bigger, more open, scruffier. Lots more room between the flowers, if you see what I mean.
The strangest thing about it was how normal it seemed; as if this was somewhere I’d been before, loads of times, no big deal at all. Certainly I wasn’t the least bit nervous when I hopped down out of the tree and strolled towards where the house would have been if there’d been an equivalent to our house in this scenario, which there wasn’t. Of course, I knew that, having been here so many times before . . .
Then, quite suddenly, I was on my hands and knees in a very soft flower bed that smelled overpoweringly of freshly turned earth and vintage horseshit. I swore, got up again and looked round to see what had tripped me. It turned out to be a miniature cliff face in the soil, part of an inverted plateau, something like eight inches below the rest of the bed and compressed flat, as if by a heavy weight that had descended from overhead. It was a big plateau, though much more long than wide, with an outward curve on the right hand side and a corresponding inward curve on the left. In fact, but for the excessive size of it, you’d have sworn it was a giant footprint.
Who left that there, then? I asked, under my breath and rhetorically. Bloody lunatics, why can’t they ever look where they’re putting their feet?
It was, of course, a giant footprint. Furthermore, it was my giant footprint – not mine in the sense of I-sawit-first-so-get-lost. Mine in the sense of having been created by my left foot; which was ludicrous, of course, because for one thing my foot wasn’t that big, and for another it was attached to the end of my leg, and I knew perfectly well where it had been. Still, I looked round and sure enough, there it was; the manufacturer’s name, which was embossed into the sole of the trainers I was standing up in, but here standing proud of the dirt in mirror-written relief.
Well now, I mused with disgust; maybe a trifle lacking in subtlety as regards the symbolism? Just to make sure I was interpreting it correctly, I felt the top of my right ear. Sure enough, there it was; a sharp upsweep to the curve, finishing in a distinct point. Still there, I told myself. So that’s all right.
At that moment my eyes snapped open. I looked down. Below me was our garden – the small, crowded version – and just beyond that, the house. The reason I’d woken up so abruptly was apparent from the angle at which this view presented itself. In other words, I’d slipped sidewa
ys while I was sleeping, and any second now I was going to fall out of the damned tree.
I managed to wiggle myself upright just in time, after which I carefully climbed back down again. My watch read 9.45. Now, though I was fairly confident that the rest of the house party would be fully occupied with wallowing in their hangovers till at least 10.30, I decided I’d better clear out and not take any silly risks. I still had one last job to do.
Fortunately I’d remembered to bring the makings with me as I’d left the house earlier on: half a pint of milk, four saucers and four slices of stale white bread. I poured the milk carefully, held the bread in it till it was soggy, and gently put each saucer down in the strategically ideal spot I’d selected for it earlier on. For the final touch I got the watering can and used it to turn a swathe of earth surrounding each saucer into a circle of sticky mud. Anything approaching the saucer couldn’t help but tread in my mudbath and leave a tell-tale footprint. Neat idea, or what?
Just before going back into the house, I stopped and checked my reflection in the glass of the French windows. Yup, just how they should be, gracefully rounded without even the faintest suggestion of a point on the top.
Needless to say, nobody was up and about yet except me, and there I was in the front room, standing right next to the telephone. By now it was gone ten, a perfectly respectable time to ring someone, if I happened to have someone I wanted to ring. I thought about it for a long time before walking on past.
Nothing to do now except wait and see, two activities I’ve never been particularly good at. For want of anything else to do, I found a book and lay down on the sofa (For pity’s sake, I heard my mother’s voice in my mind’s ear, you aren’t sitting reading again, are you? Haven’t you got anything better to do?) where, thanks to the unscintillating nature of the book I’d chosen, I was soon fast asleep once more. This time, my dream was different. The giant footprint was there once more, but this time it was even bigger, and right in the middle of the living-room carpet, and I was trying to explain to Mum why it wasn’t really my fault.
When I came round again it was 10.45 and I could hear voices bumbling away in the kitchen. This reminded me that I was hungry and hadn’t had any breakfast yet, unless you counted a very small corner of the dry bread, which I’d absent-mindedly nibbled at while I was setting my traps. A dilemma: on the one hand, in order to get food I’d have to go out and be polite and sociable to my relatives, while on the other hand if I stayed put or hid somewhere, I’d have to carry on starving. Sadly, it was no contest. I made for the kitchen.
After that, the day declined and slithered away into a regulation Boxing Day, tedious and endless. Illogically enough, I found myself hanging around within arm’s reach of the phone for as much of the time as I could manage, just in case it rang and Cru was on the other end of the line. But it didn’t and she wasn’t; no surprises there whatsoever. Once or twice I did catch sight of Daddy George looking thoughtfully at me out of the corner of his eye, but that could just as easily have been general distaste rather than anything specific.
The afternoon gradually edged along like a slow day on the M25, and thickened into evening and then night. After all those catnaps during the day, I found it annoyingly impossible to get to sleep; instead I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling, trying to remember what the garden in my first dream had looked like. But it had faded away long since, leaving only a vague shape, like crop circles in standing corn.
It’s always the way when you know you want to get up early in the morning but can’t seem to drift off to sleep. Eventually you do nod off around a quarter to five and then you sleep like a log from the petrified forest, right through the alarm, and wake up to find it’s three hours later than you wanted it to be and you’ve snored away the time you needed for the job in hand that needed the early start – in this case, inspecting my traps without being seen. I finally rolled out of bed around 10.30 to find the house infested with family and the way through the French windows barred by guardian cousins and aunts, as effective an obstacle as any triple-headed giant hound or fire-breathing dragon. I swore under my breath and settled down to grind my way through another slice of unmitigated family Christmas.
My luck was in, though, just for once; at three o’clock in the afternoon they all buggered off to watch some God-awful musical on the television giving me a glorious window of opportunity for a little supernatural nature study. As soon as the coast was clear, I slipped out through the French windows to inspect my saucers.
The first one, a complete blank. No sign that anything had been near it, no foot- or paw-prints in the mud, no decrease in the carefully noted milk level or evidence of nibbling on the soggy sludge the bread had become. A similar lack of anything to report from saucers two and three. How depressing, I thought. As I went to check the fourth saucer I’d more or less given up hope of finding anything, which meant that I very nearly missed it: a little speck that at first sight I took to be a small shred of fallen leaf, or something equally useless. Just as well I looked again, though, just to be sure, because it wasn’t a leaf after all.
It was the butt of a tiny roll-up.
CHAPTER THREE
I fished the tiny, sodden fag end out of the milk with my fingertip and stood staring at it for quite some time, all security considerations temporarily forgotten. Yuck, I thought.
But it was evidence, something tangible (squelchy, but tangible). Couldn’t modern forensic science scan fag ends for saliva traces and extrapolate the smoker’s DNA, age, sex, race, religious beliefs, favourite Humphrey Bogart film? Sure, it was very small indeed and the milk probably hadn’t helped any, but if they could put people in jail for life on the basis of a single strand of polyester from a snagged cardigan, a genuine cigarette end ought to be enough for a complete reconstruction of the elven genome.
Get real, I told myself. What were you planning to do, anyhow? Barge your way into the science labs at Cambridge University, yelling, ‘This tiny blob of disgusting white mush will prove that elves exist?’ I took in a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. I had enough proof to convince one person – myself. The rest of the world was going to need something a bit more substantial.
At this point, it occurred to me that I’d been standing in full view in the middle of a restricted area for several minutes; not smart at all, since the only thing standing between me and probable discovery were the singing and dancing skills of a cast of veteran Hollywood troupers. I closed the forefinger and thumb tightly on the fag end, threw myself on the ground and rolled sideways into the cover of a dense patch of bolted spinach.
I stayed put for as long as I could bear to, but quite apart from the cramp and the small inquisitive insects crawling up my trouser leg there was the issue of how long it’d take for my absence to be noted and remarked on. A curious thing, that: none of my family ever seemed to have much use for my company, but the absence of it seemed to give tremendous offence. Slowly and carefully I crawled out of the spinach jungle, checked for obvious signs of observation, and scuttled back indoors as fast as I could go.
Luck was with me for once, and I made it to my room without being intercepted. First order of priority was finding a safe home for my evidence; luckily I had one of those empty plastic film canisters handy, and I scraped it off my finger into that, sellotaped round the lid and cached the canister on the top of my wardrobe, among the dust and spiders’ webs. That made a quick visit to the bathroom something of a necessity – the dust dissolved in the milk to form a fine, creamy-textured taupe mud, which I decided I’d probably be better off without. Once again my luck held and I was able to sneak back into my bedroom, shut the door and get down to a brief but intensive figuring-out session before rejoining the family downstairs.
It didn’t take me long to resolve on a plan of campaign; it was basically just a minor tweak on what I’d already done, only with a degree more thought and insight behind it. Of course, I had to wait till early the next morning before I could do anything ab
out it. Luckily, this time I managed to wake up when the alarm went off at 6 a.m. (horrible time of day, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise). I crawled out of bed, pulled a shirt and trousers on over my pyjamas, and snuck down as quietly as I could to the kitchen.
Preconceptions can be a real pain in the bum, can’t they? For some reason I’d got it into my head that elves must be vegetarians – probably because of their alleged fondness for bread and milk, though the fact that they’d used my previous offering of same as an ashtray seemed to suggest they weren’t all that keen on the stuff after all
– so I couldn’t bring myself to plunder the turkey carcass, just in case I mortally offended their principles, or whatever. So I burgled the biscuit jar instead, and dug about in the back of the kitchen cupboard for a bar of cooking chocolate I’d remembered having seen a while back – not parsimony, let me hasten to add; it was simply that after three days’ infestation by my blood kin, it was the only unscoffed chocolate left in the house.
Fortunately, the booze wasn’t a problem. True, they’d swigged a hell of a lot of it over the past few days, but Daddy George was far too canny to underprovide in that department; not that it mattered, since I was able to fill my saucers from the dregs of last night’s unwashed-up glasses.
Tiptoeing down a gravel path in the dark while carrying a tray of saucers three parts full of stale beer calls for precision footwork, excellent night vision and a certain degree of luck. It’s not something I’d recommend to anybody who’s inclined to be timid or slapdash in their approach to fine work – such as, on both counts, me. Still, I made it. The hardest part was locating the saucer-drop sites by dead reckoning alone, since I couldn’t see what I was doing. It’s amazing, though, what a clear mental image of a place you can drag into your mind’s eye when you absolutely have to. As soon as the last saucer was in place I snatched up the tray and legged it back indoors, pausing only to hop up and down a few times and scream noiselessly when my unshod big toe found the large stone urn on the corner of the patio.
