by Tom Holt
The short man didn’t seem very impressed by that. ‘I’m going to call the police,’ he said. ‘Stay right there. If you move, I’ll smash your face in.’
He’d have needed a stepladder to make good on that threat, but I wasn’t looking for a fight, even if for once there was a one-in-a-million chance that I might win. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘don’t do that. Is this – I mean, I was at school here.’
That seemed to calm him down just a tad; at least he didn’t reach for the phone on the desk. ‘So what?’ he said. ‘This place hasn’t been a school for nearly ten years. What gives you the right to go prowling round my office like you owned the place? And how did you get in, anyway?’
That last one was going to be tricky, I could tell, and I was just wondering, in a very abstract and theoretical way, whether bashing the bloke on the head and running for it might not be such a bad idea at that, when he took a step back and looked at me.
‘Hold on,’ he said, ‘I know you.’
Well, I wasn’t going to call him a liar to his face, even if his face was on a level with my collar-bone, but if we’d met I didn’t remember. ‘Do you?’ I asked.
He didn’t answer straight away. Then a sort of combination one-size-fits-all smile and frown lip up his fairly commonplace features. ‘You’re him, aren’t you? Bloody hell, you are him. Where did you suddenly pop up from, then?’
Not terribly helpful, you’ll agree. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I don’t quite follow. Who do you think I am?’
He laughed. ‘You’re my special benefactor,’ he said, relaxing perceptibly (but he was still firmly between me and the door). “It’s all thanks to you I was able to buy this place. Well, bugger me. Where have you been all this time?’
I was morally certain he didn’t want to know that. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘will you tell me what you’re talking about? Only I’ve been, um, away, and—’
He laughed. Heartless git. ‘Oh, you’ve been away all right. Don’t you know what happened?’
The urge to belt him one on the nose was getting stronger by the second, and it didn’t have much to do with effecting an escape. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Will you tell me, please?’
‘You vanished,’ he replied, grinning. ‘The way I understand it, one minute you were there, one of the pupils at this exclusive toffee-nosed private school, and the next you’d gone. No clues, no ransom note, nothing. Cops turned the area upside down for a fortnight, your picture was on the news and in the papers, and they never had a clue what’d happened to you. Course, once they’d given up the search, the smelly stuff really hit the fan – your family sued the school for ten million, the school had to close and sell up; I was lucky, I nipped in and did a deal with the receivers, got this joint for pennies. Thank you,’ he added, beaming. ‘You did me a right favour there. Now fuck off out of here before I have you arrested.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Yes but nothing,’ he growled, his grin dying away suddenly. ‘I’m not a bloody lawyer, don’t know about these things; for all I know, your turning up again and not being dead after all might mean the whole deal’s off or something.’ He scowled at me. ‘How do I know you’re really him, anyway? For all I know, you might just be some con artist pretending to be him, just to get money off me.’
He was going a bit too fast for me. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I don’t want any money from anybody, I just wanted to know where everybody’d gone. My parents,’ I added, as what he’d just said finally permeated through my thick skull. ‘They think I’m dead?’
‘Everybody thinks you’re dead,’ he replied. ‘Come on, get real. Do you honestly think you’d be worth ten million quid to anybody if you were alive?’
An entirely valid observation, if tactlessly phrased. ‘Everybody,’ I repeated. ‘Oh.’
You’re way ahead of me, I expect. Well: if it’d been ten years, and everyone was sure I’d snuffed it, there was absolutely no reason to think that she might have waited for me. Probably married with two kids by now, and who wasn’t to say she hadn’t had a lucky escape? Which was assuming the relationship would’ve lasted beyond the puppy-love stage, which of course it wouldn’t, because how many people do you know who married their childhood sweethearts? Nevertheless and even so; shit, I thought. Bloody interfering elves.
‘You still here?’ the short man said.
‘What? Oh, I see what you mean.’ I tried to remember how to move. ‘I’ll be going now, shall I?’
‘You do that, sunshine. And listen: if you so much as breathe a word about being him and not being dead after all, my lawyers’ll be all over you like flies on a dog turd, so you just watch it, understood?’
He got his gardener, a very large man called Kurt, to show me to the end of the drive; in case, presumably, I’d forgotten the way. One thing that was definitely new since my time was the radio-controlled twelve-foot-high gates and the razor-wire fence. Getting back in was definitely not going to be easy, assuming I ever wanted to. Which I didn’t. Probably.
The railway station in the small town five miles down the road from the school had closed and been turned into a tyre-and-exhaust outfit; not that it mattered, since elves apparently don’t use money. I sat down on a low wall as the rain started to drizzle, and reflected on what the Melissa elf had said. Sure, I could go back, but the person who arrived could never be me, just some old guy inconveniently returned from the dead. Did I still exist, I wondered; was the me who’d crossed over into Elfland stranded somewhere in some spatio-temporal waiting room, twiddling his thumbs in a vortex of warped chronology and reading back issues of Scientific Aztec? I couldn’t see how that could be possible. He’d gone, been blitzed out of existence when I crossed over; not like the bits of data you’re supposed to be able to retrieve from a crashed hard drive, but lost for ever. Properly speaking, he’d been lost when I entered Elfland, when my personality changed from pathetic little weed into arrogant, aggressive jerk. Now I was back home, the jerk was fading away and the weed was, so to speak, growing up again through the cracks; but I was now a twenty-five-year-old pathetic weed, which was a very different kettle of scampi from the fifteen-year-old variety. After all, I didn’t feel all that different, I still had the mindset and database of experiences and overall gauche unloveliness of a teenager. (You’re as young as you feel, quoth the calendar), which wasn’t going to sit well in the body of a man who was meant to be ten years older, wiser and more mature. As far as I could see, I was inevitably doomed for a life of solitude, inadequacy, stunted emotional growth and working in local government.
Now to be fair, it’s not as though I’d been anticipating a wonderful life and a glorious career even if I hadn’t been scooped up and dumped in a deep pool of weirdness; I was, after all, the kid who’d seen the elf – I wasn’t ever going to amount to very much. But . . . all right, I’d have been pathetic and sad no matter what happened, but at least I’d have been pathetic and sad with Daddy George’s money to fall back on – was he going to welcome me home with open arms if it meant parting with ten million quid? Somehow I had my doubts about that one – and there was at least the slender possibility that I had actually found true love, if only for the short period of time that it took Cru to grow sick of the sight of me. As it was, I hadn’t even had that.
Not fair, I thought. Not fair.
So I could jump under a bus (not a train, since there weren’t any), or I could drift aimlessly through life getting trodden on and serve me bloody well right; or I could do what I’d promised Melissa and the Fuller elf I’d do as soon as I got here – in fact, wasn’t that supposed to be the main reason for returning, this frightfully important wrong to be righted that mattered so desperately much to me that I’d clean forgotten all about it until now?
Yeah, right. Might as well. Nothing better to do.
Almost immediately, of course, I realised that there was now a problem with the original plan. The notion that I was the person best suited to rescue the enslaved elves depended on me
being on the inside; and now, of course, I wasn’t. In fact, I wasn’t anything any more; my whole life, such as it was, had been wiped out by a pesky chronological anomaly, and all because of those rotten, interfering, we-know-what’s-best-for-you-even-if-youdon’t elves (the same ones I’d been dead set on rescuing a few hours ago; well, they could forget that, for a start). Now, for the first time in my life, I had real problems. It wasn’t just a case of my parents not loving me or not being popular at school or having a face like a prune and the physique of a Lowry portrait of an anorexic; right now, I had nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat, no money and no means of getting any. Those aren’t just a few specks of dust in Life’s ice cream, those are real problems, as faced by millions of real people every day right across the world.
Fuck, I thought. I’m screwed.
Not a pleasant situation to find yourself in, at that. Of course, there was one other option: I could find some grass with a circle in it, and go crawling back to the elves. Somehow I got the feeling that starvation and homelessness and stuff like that didn’t happen over there; and even if economic disaster was possible on the other side of the line and they were temporarily hungry or broke, all they had to do was fast-forward until they reached the point where the found gold dust in the bed of a stream or their number came up in the premium bonds draw. All right for some, I thought resentfully, they just don’t know they’re born.
(And all this anger after I’d been penniless and destitute for about three-quarters of an hour. God only knew what I’d be like after, say, an hour and a half. Storming the Winter Palace single-handedly, probably.)
No, I told myself, you’re being melodramatic. All right, maybe Daddy George won’t be overjoyed at seeing you again, not to mention forfeiting his ten million quid, but he’s still family, blood is thicker than water, the prodigal lamb goes most often to the well, and there’s no place like home.
Assuming you can get there.
Not so much of a problem as the penniless-and-destitute thing, but still a problem. No train; no money for a ticket even if there had been one, so forget buses too. My sturdy yeomen ancestors (on my mum’s side; my father, of course, was a bloody elf) would’ve sneered at me and told me that’s what the flat-bottomed things on the end of my legs were for. But it was over a hundred miles from school to home and I didn’t even know what direction to start walking in. How the hell was I supposed to find my parents’ house if I didn’t even know whether to turn left or right at the bottom of the road?
But of course. How stupid of me. All I had to do was hitch a lift.
Oh sure. Well, in this era of wandering serial killers and smiling little old ladies with axes in their shopping bags, do you stop and pick up hitch-hikers any more? Of course you don’t. Back in 1985, however, things were different, and I was still thinking in those terms.
After a bit of aimless wandering I found a main road with lots and lots of big lorries and cars swooshing up and down (the cars looked odd, as if they’d been left on a hot radiator and started to melt; I assumed that was because of Progress), and I walked beside it for a couple of hours until it got too dark to see and my thumb hurt from being waggled. By this stage I was painfully aware that my last meal had been a school breakfast in 1985, and the blisters on my heels weren’t helping much, either. I sat down on a little patch of grass between the crash barrier and the chain link fence, leaned up against a fence post and closed my eyes for a minute or two.
When I opened them again, someone was pointing an offensively bright torch in my face and telling me to get up. It took me a few seconds to boot up my sorely fragmented memory and figure out who and where I was – I’d been having this wonderful dream where I was back at school, with nothing worse to contend with than an unprepared-for maths test – during which time the voice behind the torch repeated its request, only louder and not quite so graciously. Policemen, I realised. Wonderful.
Of course, they asked what I thought I was doing, dossing down beside a main road in a designated something-or-other area, but I got the feeling they didn’t really want to know, and I quite definitely didn’t want to tell them anything remotely resembling the truth. Car design wasn’t the only thing that had changed since 1985; these days, it appeared, police fashions tended towards thick belts with loads and loads of scary-looking toys dangling off them, including a few obscure-looking gadgets I felt sure that any self-respecting Imperial Stormtrooper would give his right prosthetic limb for. These weren’t the cuddly, helpful bobbies of my youth (they weren’t even then, but at least they didn’t clank when they walked), and my instincts told me they were probably a bit short on patience and understanding, and not at all minded to be told interesting stuff about elves.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
They helped me into the back of their car by the scruff of my neck, stuck the siren on (whatever happened to DAA-dum, DAA-dum, by the way? If you ask me, this modern cat-in-a-combine-harvester noise they’ve got these days isn’t a patch on the old one) and off we went for a ride.
At first I just sat there, hating Fate and God and the world in general (not to mention bloody elves); and then it occurred to me that at least I wasn’t still walking, risking chronic carpal tunnel syndrome by wiggling my thumb like a loon, and that where I was going it’d probably be warm and dry, and they might well give me a cup of tea, and possibly food as well. That felt like a promising avenue of thought, so I followed it up by recalling something about being allowed one phone call (or was that only in America?), not to mention the right to have a lawyer present . . . Not that I wanted a lawyer, of course, but by the time we reached the cop-shop and they’d asked me my name fifteen times and taken my photograph and confiscated by bootlaces it’d probably be cracking on for midnight, and the thought of rooting some fat git of a lawyer away from his fireside and TV and making him trek in from the suburbs and sit around for an hour or so on an uncomfortable chair gave me a distinct glow of sadistic pleasure. Misery should be like Quality Street, something you share with those around you.
More to the point, I could phone home, or if it really was just America where they let you do that, I could get the solicitor to phone home for me. (That’d be better: an experienced orator, he’d be far more likely to know what to say than I would.) Looked at from that perspective, I began to realise that getting nicked was in fact the best possible thing that could have happened to me, and that the grim-faced kydex-fetishist sitting beside me was really my best friend in all the world.
Well, maybe not that; but it could be worse, and there was at least a fair chance that things were going to turn out all right. I smiled (it was dark in the back of the car, so there was no risk of them seeing me. I have an idea it’s a serious offence, smiling in a police car without a licence).
About twenty minutes later the car stopped, they extracted me from it with what I’m sure was the minimum of reasonable force, and took me to say hello to the desk sergeant. He turned out to be a pleasant enough fellow if you happen to like Nazis, and even let me keep my socks after he’d snipped them lengthways with a pair of scissors to make sure I didn’t have an Uzi hidden in them. I thanked him for his kindness and asked about the phone call thing.
Turns out it is only in America; but when I explained that really it was all a mistake and I hadn’t been dossing down by the road, it was really a very important and sacred ritual that was essential to my religion, and hadn’t there been that case recently where they awarded record damages for wrongful arrest, I guess he decided that if letting me use the phone would induce me to shut up, the quality of mercy wasn’t strained and anyway, it wasn’t his phone bill.
My main fear was that there’d be nobody home; typical, I thought, for them to be out on the razzle – probably getting smashed out of their minds at some criminally expensive restaurant before driving drunkenly home, wickedly irresponsible and dangerous –
‘Hello?’
Apparently not; at least, there was someone at the end of the line. Wasn’t sure I rec
ognised the voice, but it could be a new live-in handyman or other peon. ‘Hello?’ I replied.
‘Hello.’
No, not a voice I was familiar with. ‘Is that Norton six seven six five eight?’
‘Yes. Who’s this?’
Um, I thought. ‘Could I speak to George Higgins, please?’
‘Ah, right,’ the voice said. ‘I know that name. They’re the people who had this house before the people we bought it from.’
My mind spied with its little eye something beginning with S, in which the rest of me was enmired up to the kneecaps. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Look, I don’t suppose you happen to have their new number, do you?’
‘Sorry,’ replied the voice. ‘I used to have the Perkins’ number – that’s who we bought from – but I seem to remember hearing they’d emigrated to Tasmania. ’Course, you could ring their old number, if I can find it, and the people who bought their old house – the old house they had after this one, I mean – they might have their number in Tasmania, if that’s any help.’
The desk sergeant was scowling and tapping the dial of his watch; somehow, I got the feeling he wouldn’t be enthusiastic about playing hunt-the-Higginses across two hemispheres. ‘No, that’s OK,’ I said. ‘Thanks, anyway.’
Thanks, anyway, unhelpful bastard was what I really wanted to say, but I didn’t, not with a police officer watching. Instead I put down the phone and looked glum, something that came naturally to me.
‘Well?’ said the desk sergeant.
‘They’ve moved,’ I replied.
‘Really.’ His expression communicated more clearly than words ever could his belief that if I’d been out of circulation for so long that my next of kin had moved away without bothering to tell me, I must’ve been in prison, probably for a crime so heinous that even my own mother wanted to make sure I’d never be able to find her. ‘Right, this way.’
