Little People

by Tom Holt

  When Carol’s mummy and daddy saw the picture under the inspired headline –

  I WAS ABDUCTED BY ALIENS,

  CLAIMS ESSEX BEAUTY

  – they could hardly believe their eyes. As you can imagine, the disappearance of their only daughter had done a fairly thorough job of screwing up their lives, and getting her back – radiant, healthy and clutching an exclusive-rights contract that was worth three times as much as their house - was truly the stuff of dreams and fairy tales. At once her father threw in his job sweeping floors at the local abattoir in order to become her business manager, and they settled down in confident expectation of a golden future of love, togetherness and lucrative product endorsements. Even the discovery that a little stranger was on the way was greeted as a marvellous blessing (I’M CARRYING ALIEN’S LOVE CHILD, REVEALS TV’S CAROL). In short, despite all the pain and loss and confusion surrounding the unfortunate affair, everything seemed as firmly locked on to the happy ending as a wire-guided missile when an unexpected visitor showed up at the gatehouse of the family’s new 4,500-acre Wiltshire estate.

  You’ve guessed it. Humans, being born to sorrow, expect love not to last and are accordingly equipped to get over it. Not so elves. After pining as tragically as a restaurant critic on a diet, Carol’s elven lover had turned desperate. He hijacked the sleigh, rustled the reindeer and punched a nasty jagged hole in the spatio-temporal whatsisface big enough to drive a century through.

  Being an elf – sheer tabasco at long division but otherwise thick as a brick – he hadn’t planned any further ahead than actually breaching the barrier and getting to the human side. I guess he assumed that once he was across, kindly humans would pick him up, give him some warm bread and milk, and take him to see his beloved. As luck would have it a bunch of humans did find him almost immediately; with the result that, ten hours after leaving Elfland and trashing the sleigh, he found himself sitting in a glass tank in a strange, rather grim-looking building in the middle of nowhere, while serious men in white coats and carrying clipboards drew off syringefuls of his blood and attached electrodes to various parts of his anatomy.

  It was all rather unpleasant to begin with - which was strange, because the serious men turned out to be scientists (in the broadest sense of the term; he soon discovered that by elf standards their knowledge of science was ludicrously elementary) and so they should have had a lot in common and been friends, especially after he taught them a few junior bite-sized gobbets of basic theory that just about blew their minds. But the more he told them, the more needles they stuck into him and the less inclined they were to let him go. He tried asking nicely, then asking nicely but forcefully, then insisting. They took no notice. Finally, twenty-four hours after landing, he was forced to the conclusion that the people on this side of the line weren’t as nice as elves, not by some considerable margin.

  Whether it was because he was upset at the way he’d been treated, or whether it was something to do with gradually adapting himself to his new environment, the elf started to get annoyed. Annoyance escalated into irritation, irritation erupted into outright crossness, and the resulting explosion gouged a crater three-quarters of a mile wide and blew out windows in three adjacent villages. A cross elf is a dangerous entity, not to mention a cartographer’s nightmare.

  Once he realised what he’d done, and that the building disappearing in a sheet of red and yellow fire was all his fault, the elf was filled with horror and dismay. He sat at the very centre of the crater, watching the twisted steel girders dropping out of the sky like autumn leaves and wondering, for the first time, whether he might not have been better advised to stay at home and find someone else. But the feeling passed – remarkably quickly, in fact – and in its place was a little raw patch of resentment. Dratted humans, he said to himself, being all nasty and horrid like that. In a sense, it almost served them right, picking on a visitor from another dimension and making a pincushion out of him. Sure enough, he was very sad about the damage he’d done, especially the scientists he’d reduced to a fine red mist, but it had to be said, if they didn’t want to be vaporised they shouldn’t have shone lights in his eyes and prodded his tongue with wooden sticks. What was more, if any of them tried any more of that stuff, he’d probably do it again.

  Now then, let’s see if you’ve been paying attention. Elfland and our world are exactly the same (except for the differences). Consequently, every elf has a human counterpart, which does everything exactly the same (only differently). Therefore it follows that the lovestruck elf who’d gatecrashed our side of the line had a counterpart too, and that when the elf suddenly popped into existence and crash-landed in a field near Swindon, the counterpart had to be in precisely the same place.

  Fortunately for him, the human counterpart (later known to me as Daddy George) had the good sense to leave that place, albeit only by about twenty yards, as soon as the fiery sleigh burst out of the sky and plummeted like a meteor or a dot-com share towards the ground. At the actual moment when the sleigh crashed into the exact same square food of grass he’d been standing on twenty seconds earlier, Daddy George was on the ground, rolling like a croquet ball, the unfortunate result of having put his foot down a rabbit hole as he scampered for cover. His head happened to coincide with a tree root, and he went to sleep for a while. When he woke up, the air was buzzing with helicopters, their floodlights scything the ground all about him and creating bizarre kaleidoscopic effects when they happened to coincide with the flashing blue lamps of the police’s panda cars and the local hospital’s ambulances.

  Now, as everybody knows, the innocent citizen has nothing to fear from the police. Daddy George, on the other hand, was not an innocent citizen. The only reason he was in a cold, muddy field on a dark night was because he was on his way to steal a tractor, left lying around by some over-trusting farmer. The son et lumière of police helicopters evoked some painful memories in various strata of his subconscious, and as soon as he was able to get to his feet without falling over, he ran away as fast as he could in the first direction that came to hand.

  Ah, you’re saying, how could he do this? Surely if the cops and the guys in white coats and carrying clipboards had marched his elven oppo off to the freak-dissecting plant, he had no choice but to be there too.

  Full marks for being the kind of observant, nit-picking, fault-finding reader who gives poor narrators ulcers. But you’ve failed to take into account (maybe because I haven’t told you about it yet) the fact that once a stranger comes over from the other side, the link between him and his identical-except-for-the-differentbits twin is severed, although a strong subliminal urge to be close to him remains buried deep among the other submerged wiffin in the bottom of the shoebox of the mind.

  Quite possibly it was this latent impulse that led Daddy George to try and burgle the secret government research station about ten seconds before the elf reduced it to widely dispersed brick dust. It’s hard to think of any other reason why he should try and do such a bloody stupid thing.

  As luck would have it, when the elf finally lost his rag and brought the house down (not to mention up and sideways) he’d just failed to get a foothold on the drainpipe that ran down the side of the biochemical weapons laboratory. The blast reduced the lab (and, fortuitously enough, its entire contents) to a cloud of disparate molecules, but the eight-foot-thick concrete wall that Daddy George had been vainly trying to scale held together long enough to deflect the main force of the explosion upwards and off to one side, with the result that, although everything else in the vicinity vanished like a pay cheque in December, he was left sitting on his bum among the ruins, trying to cope with the nagging suspicion that he’d just set off a truly serious alarm system.

  A moment later he was on his feet again – just as well, because a substantial chunk of the administration-block roof swiftly snuggled into what had been his personal space about ten seconds previously – and running like hell towards the skyline. It was at this point that his personal doppel
elf first caught sight of him.

  ‘It’s all right,’ yelled the elf.

  Liar, thought Daddy George, and carried on running. I don’t know, maybe his body language was a little too obvious and he was running in an offensive manner, but that just made the elf angrier. He reached out with his transdimensional third arm – don’t ask me, I’m just remembering what was downloaded into my head – grabbed Daddy George by the collar and hauled him right back.

  ‘I was talking to you,’ he said.

  Amazingly, even while dangling by his collar from the elf’s hand, his feet six inches off the deck, Daddy George’s reply to that was, ‘Fuck me, you’ve got pointed ears!’ Only goes to show, I feel, the extraordinary strength of the innate human thirst for knowledge.

  ‘Sure I have,’ the elf replied. ‘And you haven’t, you freak.’

  Have you noticed, by the way, that the elf’s tone and general manner is getting steadily less couth and reminiscent of a Canadian hotel manager, and more in line with what you’d expect to hear this side of the line? Yes? That’s all right, then – I’m trying not to hammer it into the ground, but subtlety is wasted on some people.

  Anyway, Daddy George, suspended in the air like a very large fairy on a smallish Christmas tree, didn’t quite know what to make of that. True, people had been making disparaging remarks about his appearance ever since his other car had been a pram (and with good reason, God only knows) but this was the first time he could remember ever being berated for the unpointedness of his ears. In this regard, a change wasn’t really as good as a rest.

  ‘Huh?’ he said.

  ‘You heard,’ the elf snarled. (Did you catch it that time? Snarled? This display of carefully modulated incremental snottitude brought to you by courtesy of Flaubert Integrated Dialog Systems Inc.) ‘Your ears aren’t pointed, they’re sort of round at the top. Like all you people. All you freaks,’ he added, with a pronounced spitty hiss on the final S. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you, anyhow? Cut yourselves shaving?’

  To which Daddy George said something entirely appropriate and well chosen, like ‘Urgh!’ It should have been borne in mind that he hadn’t been able to breathe very well for the last fifty-odd seconds, and the air in his lungs was getting distinctly unfashionable.

  ‘Fuck you, too,’ growled the elf. ‘Right, then, where’s the girl?’

  ‘Girl?’

  ‘Yeah, the girl, snot-for-brains. The bimbo. The chick. The skirt. Where’ve you hidden her?’

  All throughout history wise men, from Pythagoras to Aristotle to Confucius to Lao Tzu, right down to St Thomas Aquinas and Descartes, have warned of the dangers of arguing the toss with a pissed-off elf with his hands round your throat. It’s a tragedy that generations of over-fussy editors forced them to cut those bits for the mass-market paperback editions, because it’s left so many of us unprepared for a rare but nonetheless very serious threat to life and health. Fortunately, Daddy George’s wonderfully tuned survival instincts were able to work the whole thing out from first principles, in less than a sixteenth of a second.

  ‘Ths wy,’ he whispered.

  The elf relaxed his grip by a few tons per square inch. ‘Say again?’

  ‘This way,’ Daddy George wheezed, jerking his head due east. Quite by chance, he was indeed nodding along a direct flying-crow vector towards Carol’s new home. ‘Take you there if you like,’ he added.

  ‘You do that,’ replied the elf. ‘And if you’re lying, I’m going to suck your brain out through your filthy round ears and blow it up your nose, capisce?’

  Daddy George replied to the effect that that sounded perfectly reasonable to him, and the elf put him down, though he maintained a firm grip on Daddy George’s collar with his third hand. Daddy George started, nervously, to walk.

  For his part, the elf was getting grumpier with every step he took. Round ears weren’t the worst thing about this neighbourhood, not by a long way. Even the getting prodded and electrocuted in the research lab hadn’t been all that much of a problem for a life form practically impervious to physical pain. What was really bugging him was the boredom; second after second, minute after every boring minute, they were walking as due east as they could manage, and every step was practically identical to the one before. Back home, of course, all he’d have needed to do was fast-forward and he could’ve moved on painlessly to the end of the walk, where the girl would’ve been waiting for him, and a second or so of perceived time later, he’d have been home again, the rest of the century his own. Instead he was repeating the same action over and over again, and it wasn’t even a particularly nice action, at that. It was enough to fry an elf’s brain.

  Enough of this, he decided. ‘You there,’ he snapped, yanking back hard with his third hand and stopping Daddy George dead in his tracks. ‘Isn’t there a faster way of getting to where we’re going?’

  ‘Sure,’ Daddy George replied. ‘Lots of different ways. Plane, train, bus, car, motorbike, skateboard—’

  ‘What?’

  (None of that sort of thing in Elfland, of course, unless you count Santa’s sleigh. After all, why bother inventing things to help you move faster when you can just edit out the dull and uneventful journey, just like they do in the movies?)

  ‘Machines,’ Daddy George replied (and at that precise moment, a tiny speck of inspiration dropped into his mind). ‘You climb up onto them, and they carry you. We’ve got loads of them, all different types.’

  ‘That’s more like it,’ grunted the elf. ‘Right, let’s find some. I’ve had enough of this stupid walking.’

  ‘No problem,’ Daddy George replied. ‘Provided you can get it unlocked and started, that is.’

  ‘Locked?’

  ‘It’s something we have to do,’ Daddy George explained. ‘Otherwise some scumbag’d be in there stealing our stuff while we aren’t looking. So there’s these little machines called locks. They hold doors and things so tight shut, not even a germ could get in. Same with cars: you can’t open the door or start the engine – sorry, the bits of the machine that make it go – unless you’ve got a little knobbly lever, called a key, which undoes the lock. It’s really very—’

  ‘Shuttup,’ the elf yelled. The sound of Daddy George’s voice was another tedious experience that just seemed to keep going on and on for ever. ‘Look, just sort it out, will you, before I start rotting from the feet up.’

  Purely by chance, they’d come to the main road. It was pitch dark by now, and the usual nose-to-tail procession of heavy lorries was trundling up and down the carriageway, each lorry pushing its own pool of light along in front of it, like a photon-scavenging dung-beetle. Insofar as Daddy George had a plan, it involved luring this freak to the side of the road, where with any luck the unaccustomed glare of some trucker’s heavy-duty halogens would dazzle him stupid just long enough for Daddy George to get away, preferably after shoving the prickle-eared arsehole under a sixteen-wheeler. It was more of a blueprint or IOU for a plan, but Daddy George believed that inspiration is like a knackered grandfather clock: it only strikes if you force it. Besides, he was too scared to come up with anything too elaborate.

  ‘What the hell are those?’ the elf demanded. ‘Those racing boxes with the bright eyes?’

  ‘Lorries,’ Daddy George replied. ‘For moving large quantities of stuff from place to place.’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ the elf muttered. ‘You people are so weird it’s creepy being around you. Why would anybody in their right mind want to move things? If you’re in the wrong place to use something, you should just go where it is. Otherwise, how in hell’s name will anybody else know where to find it if you keep shifting it about?’

  Daddy George replied that he’d never considered the matter in quite that light before, and when he’d finished helping the elf with his quest, he’d most certainly write to the United Nations and get them to pass a law changing it all around.

  ‘Right,’ said the elf. ‘So I should hope.’

  Then Daddy George s
hoved him under a bus.

  It was one of those intercity coaches, the long, sleek ones that look like Cubist cigar tubes. It was hammering along at a smartish sixty-something, and it weighed a lot; accordingly, when it hit the elf, something was bound to get severely bent.

  In this instance, the coach. The front end crumpled up like a squashed beer-can, and the engine coughed and died. It was a minor miracle, on a par with changing water into ginger beer or the Feeding of the Five, that no one was killed. The elf, meanwhile, hardly seemed to have noticed the impact.

  ‘Watch what you’re doing, moron,’ he said, and his tone of voice was almost gentle. ‘You nearly had me over that time.’

  Daddy George was too stunned to be able to do more than mumble an apology; furthermore, the elf’s third hand was still firmly attached to his collar. Back to the drawing board, he decided.

  ‘Right,’ the elf was saying. ‘So, if we get on one of these things, it’ll take us where we want to go?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Daddy George replied. ‘Not that one,’ he added, looking at the coach’s mangled front end. ‘I’m afraid it’s a bit broken, I don’t think it’ll go.’

  The elf scowled. ‘Fragile bloody things, aren’t they?’

  ‘Extremely so, yes.’

  ‘Really can’t see the point,’ the elf muttered under his breath, as he reached out and grabbed a passing motorbike by the back wheel. ‘Here,’ he said, lifting the bike up and shaking the rider off like someone dislodging an earwig from a lettuce. ‘Will this do instead?’

  ‘Um,’ Daddy George replied.

  ‘It’ll do,’ the elf grunted. ‘Now, how do you work this thing? No, don’t tell me,’ he went on, ‘I should be able to figure it out for myself.’ The rider got up off the ground, observed the way the elf was holding the bike upright with one hand by the rear swinging arm so as to get a good look inside the chain guard, and hobbled away as fast as he could go. ‘Yes, all seems to be pretty straightforward. Centrifugal force, and there’s a sort of box inside to contain the explosions. Fairly ingenious, I suppose, but it’s a hell of a lot of fuss just to get somewhere. Why you people insist on doing everything the hard way—’