“I forbade all meddling with these infernal machines,” said Nisodemus. “And I said we were to stop, um, putting people on watch, didn’t I? The watch Arnold Bros (est. 1905) maintains should be enough for humble nomes!”
“Yes . . . well . . . Dorcas said he thought it wouldn’t do any harm if we gave him a hand, sort of thing,” said the nome nervously. “And he said—”
“I gave orders!” screamed Nisodemus. “You will all obey me! Did I not stop the truck by the power of Arnold Bros (est. 1905)?”
“No,” said Grimma quietly. “No, you didn’t. Dorcas did. He put nails down in the road.”
There was a huge, horrified silence. In the middle of it Nisodemus went slowly white with rage.
“Liar!” he shouted.
“No,” said Grimma, meekly. “He really did. He really did all sorts of things to help us, and we never said please or thank you and now he’s dead.”
There were sirens along the road below and a lot of excitement around the stationary train. Blue lights flashed.
The nomes shifted uneasily. One of them said, “He’s not really dead, though, is he? Not really. I expect he jumped out at the last minute. A clever person like him.”
Grimma looked helplessly at the crowd. She saw Nooty’s parents in the crowd. They were a quiet, patient couple. She’d hardly ever spoken to them. Now their faces were gray and lined with worry. She gave in.
“Yes,” she said. “Perhaps they got out.”
“Bound to have done,” muttered another nome, trying to look cheerful. “Dorcas isn’t the type to go around dying all the time. Not when we need him.”
Grimma nodded.
“And now,” she went on, “I think even humans will be wondering what’s happening here. They’ll soon work out where the truck came from, and they’ll be coming up here, and I think they might be very angry.”
But Nisodemus licked his lips and said, “We won’t be afraid. We will confront them and defy them. Um. We will treat them with scorn. We don’t need Dorcas: We need nothing except faith in Arnold Bros (est. 1905). Nails, indeed!”
“If you start out now,” said Grimma, “you should all be able to get to the barn, even through what’s left of the snow. I don’t think the quarry will be a very safe place to be, quite soon.”
There was something about the way she said it that made people nervous. Normally Grimma shouted or argued, but this time she spoke quite calmly. It wasn’t like her at all.
“Go on,” she said. “You’ll have to start now. You’ll have to take as much food and stuff as possible. Go on.”
“No!” shouted Nisodemus. “No one is to move! Do you think Arnold Bros (est. 1905) will let you down? Um, I will protect you from the humans!”
Down below, a car with a flashing blue light on top of it pulled away from the excitement around the train, crossed the main road, and headed slowly up the lane.
“I will call upon the power of Arnold Bros (est. 1905) to smite the humans!” shouted Nisodemus.
The nomes looked unhappy. Arnold Bros (est. 1905) had never smitten anyone in the Store. He’d just founded it, and seen to it that nomes lived comfortable and not very strenuous lives in it, and apart from putting the signs on the walls hadn’t really interfered very much. Now, suddenly, he was going around being angry and upset all the time, and smiting people. It was very bewildering.
“I will stand here and defy the dreadful minions of Order!” Nisodemus yelled. “I will teach them a lesson they won’t forget.”
The rest of the nomes said nothing. If Nisodemus wanted to stand in front of a car, then that was all right by them.
“We will all defy them!” he shouted.
“Er . . . what?” said a nome.
“Brothers, let us stand here resolute and show Order that we are united in opposition! Um. If you truly believe in Arnold Bros (est. 1905), no harm will come to you!”
The flashing light was well up the lane now. Soon it would be crossing the wide patch in front of the gates, where the great chain hung uselessly from the broken padlock.
Grimma opened her mouth to say: Don’t be stupid, you idiots, Arnold Bros (est. 1905) doesn’t want you to stand in front of cars. I’ve seen what happens to nomes who stand in front of cars. Your relatives have to bury you in an envelope.
She was about to say all that and decided not to. For months and months people had been telling nomes what to do. Perhaps it was time to stop.
She saw a number of worried faces in the crowd turn toward her, and someone said, “What shall we do, Grimma?”
“Yeah,” said another nome, “she’s a Driver, they always know what to do.”
She smiled at them. It wasn’t a very happy smile.
“Do whatever you think best,” she said.
There was a chorus of indrawn breaths.
“Well, yeah,” said a nome, “but, well, Nisodemus says we can stop this thing just by believing we can. Is that true, or what?”
“I don’t know,” said Grimma. “You might be able to. I know I can’t.”
She turned and walked off quickly toward the sheds.
“Stand firm,” commanded Nisodemus. He hadn’t been listening to the worried discussions behind him. Perhaps he wasn’t able to listen to anything now, except for little voices deep inside his head.
“‘Do whatever you think best,’” muttered a nome. “What sort of help is that?”
They stood in their hundreds, watching the car coming closer. Nisodemus stood slightly ahead of the crowd, holding his hands in the air.
The only sound was the crunch of tires on gravel.
If a bird had looked down on the quarry in the next few seconds, it would have been amazed.
Well, probably it wouldn’t. Birds are somewhat stupid creatures and have a hard enough job even coming to terms with the ordinary, let alone the extraordinary. But if it had been an unusually intelligent bird—an escaped mynah bird, perhaps, or a parrot that had been blown several thousand miles off course by very strong winds—it would have thought:
Oh. There is a wide hole in the hill, with little old rusty sheds in it, and a fence in front of it.
And there is a car with a blue light on the top of it just going through a gate in the fence.
And there are little black dots on the ground ahead of it. One dot standing very still, right in the path of the thing, and the others, the others—
Breaking away and running. Running for their lives.
They never did find Nisodemus again, even though a party of strong-stomached nomes went back much later and searched through the ruts and the mud.
So a rumor grew up that perhaps, at the last minute, he had jumped up and caught hold of part of the car and had clambered onto it somehow. And then he’d waited there, too ashamed to face other nomes, until the car went back to wherever it came from, and had got off, and was living out the rest of his life quietly and without any fuss. He had been a good nome in his way, they said. Whatever else you might say about him, he believed in things, and he did what he thought was proper, so it was only right that he’d been spared and was still out there in the world, somewhere.
This was what they told one another, and what they wrote down in The Book of Nome.
What nomes might have thought in those private moments before they went to sleep . . . well, that was private.
Humans clomped slowly around the train and what remained of the truck. Lots of other vehicles had turned up at what was, for humans, great speed. Many of them had blue lights on top.
The nomes had learned to be worried by things with flashing blue lights on top.
The Land Rover belonging to the quarry men was there as well. One of the quarry men was pointing to the wrecked truck and shouting at the others. He’d opened the smashed engine compartment and was pointing to where the battery wasn’t.
Beside the railway, the breeze rustled the long grass. And some of the long grass rustled without any wind at all.
Dorcas had been
right. Where humans went once, they went again. The quarry belonged to them. Three trucks were parked outside the sheds, and humans were everywhere. Some were repairing the fence. Some were taking boxes and drums off the trucks. One was even in the manager’s office, tidying up.
The nomes crouched where they could, listening fearfully to the sounds above them. There weren’t many hiding places for two thousand nomes, small though they were.
It was a very long day. In the shadows under some of the sheds, in the darkness behind crates, in some cases even on the dusty rafters under the tin roofs, the nomes passed it as best they could.
There were escapes so narrow, a postcard couldn’t have got through them. Old Munby Confectioneri and most of his family were left blinking in the light when a human moved the tatty old box they were cowering behind. Only a quick dash to the shelter of a stack of cans saved them. And, of course, the fact that humans never really looked hard at what they were doing.
That wasn’t the worst bit, though.
The worst bit was much worse.
The nomes sat in the noisy darkness, not daring even to speak, and felt their world vanishing. Not because the humans hated nomes. Because they didn’t notice them.
There was Dorcas’s electricity, for example. He’d spent a long time twisting bits of wire together and finding a safe way to steal electricity from the fuse box. A human pulled them out without thinking, twiddled inside with a screwdriver, and put up a new box with a lock on it. Then it mended the telephone.
The Store nomes needed electricity. They couldn’t remember a time when they had been without it. It was a natural thing, like air. And now theirs was a world of endless darkness.
And still the terror went on. The rough floorboards shook overhead, raining dust and splinters. Metal drums boomed like thunder. There was the continual sound of hammering. The humans were back, and they meant to stay.
They did go eventually, though. When the daylight drained from the winter sky, like steel growing cold, some of the humans got into their vehicles and drove off down the lane.
They did one puzzling thing before they left. Nomes had to scramble over one another to get out of the way when one of the floorboards in the manager’s office was pulled up. A huge hand reached down and put a little tray on the packed earth under the floor. Then the darkness came back as the board was replaced.
The nomes sat in the gloom and wondered why on earth the humans, after a day like this, were giving them food.
The tray was piled with flour. It wasn’t much, compared to Store food, but to nomes who had spent all day hungry and miserable, it smelled good.
A couple of younger ones crawled closer. It was the most tantalizing smell.
One of them took a handful of the stuff.
“Don’t eat it!”
Grimma pushed her way through the packed bodies.
“But it smells so—” one of the nomes warbled.
“Have you ever smelled anything like it before?” she said.
“Well, no—”
“So you don’t know it’s good to eat, do you? Listen. I know about stuff like this. Where we—where I used to live, in the hole . . . there was a place along the road where humans came to eat, and sometimes we’d find stuff like this among the trash bins at the back. It kills you if you eat it!”
The nomes stared at the innocent little tray. Food that killed you? That didn’t make sense.
“I remember there was some canned meat we had once in the Store,” said an elderly nome. “Gave us all a nasty upset, I remember.” He gave Grimma a hopeful look.
She shook her head. “This isn’t like that,” she said. “We used to find dead rats near it. They didn’t die in a very nice way,” she added, shuddering at the memory. “Oh.”
The nomes stared at the tray again. And there was a thump from overhead.
There was still a human in the quarry.
It was sitting in the old swivel chair in the manager’s office, reading a paper.
From a knothole near the floor the nomes watched carefully. There were huge boots, great sweeps of trouser, a mountain range of jacket and, far above, the distant gleam of electric light on a bald head.
After a long while, the human put the paper down and reached over to the desk by its side. The watching nomes gazed at a pack of sandwiches bigger than they were, and a thermos flask that steamed when it was opened and filled the hut with the smell of coffee.
They climbed back down and reported to Grimma. She was sitting by the food tray and had ordered six of the older and more sensible nomes to stand guard around it to keep children away.
“He’s not doing anything,” she was told. “He’s just sitting there. We saw him look out of the window once or twice.”
“Then he’ll be here all night,” said Grimma. “I expect the humans are wondering who’s causing all this trouble.”
“What shall we do?”
Grimma sat with her chin on her hands.
“There’s those big old tumbledown sheds across the quarry,” she said, at last. “We could go there.”
“Dorcas said—Dorcas used to say it was very dangerous in the old sheds,” said a nome cautiously. “Because of all the old junk and stuff. Very dangerous, he said.”
“More dangerous than here?” said Grimma, with just a trace of her old sarcasm.
“You’ve got a point.”
“Please, m’m.”
It was one of the younger female nomes. They held Grimma in awe because of the way she shouted at the men and read better than anyone. This one held a baby in her arms and kept curtseying every time she finished a sentence.
“What is it, Sorrit?” said Grimma.
“Please, m’m, some of the children are very hungry, m’m. There isn’t anything wholesome to eat down here, you see.” She gave Grimma a pleading look.
Grimma nodded. The stores were under the other sheds, what was left of them. The main potato store had been found by some of the humans, which was perhaps why the poison had been put down. Anyway, they couldn’t light a fire and there was no meat. No one had been doing any proper hunting for days, because Arnold Bros (est. 1905) would provide, according to Nisodemus.
“As soon as it gets light, I think all the hunters we can spare should go out,” said Grimma.
They considered this. The dawn was a long way away. To a nome, a night was as long as three whole days. . . .
“There’s plenty of snow,” said a nome. “That means we’ve got water.”
“We might be able to manage without food, but the children won’t,” said Grimma.
“And the old people, too,” said a nome. “It’s going to freeze again tonight. We haven’t got the electric and we can’t light a fire outside.”
They sat staring glumly at the dirt.
What Grimma was thinking was: They’re not bickering. They’re not grumbling. Things are so serious, they’re actually not arguing and blaming each other.
“All right,” she said, “and what do you all think we should do?”
11
I. We will come out of the woodwork.
II. We will come out of the floor.
III. They will wish they had never seen us.
From The Book of Nome, Humans v. I–III
THE HUMAN LOWERED its newspaper and listened.
There was a rustling in the walls. There was a scratching under the floor.
Its eyes swiveled to the table beside it.
A group of small creatures was dragging its packet of sandwiches across the tabletop. It blinked.
Then it roared and tried to stand up, and it wasn’t until it was nearly upright that it found that its feet were tied very firmly to the legs of its chair.
It crashed forward. A crowd of tiny creatures, moving so fast that it could hardly see them, charged out from under the table and wrapped a length of old electrical wire around its outflung arms. Within seconds it was trussed awkwardly, but very firmly, between the furniture.
They saw its great eyes roll. It opened its mouth and mooed at them. Teeth like yellow plates clashed at them.
The wire held.
The sandwiches turned out to be cheese and chutney, and the thermos, once they got the top off, was full of coffee. “Store food,” the nomes told one another. “Good Store food, like we used to know.”
They poured into the room from every crack and mousehole. There was an electric heater by the table, and they sat in solemn rows in front of its glowing red bar, or wandered around the cramped office.
“We done it,” they said, “just like that Gullible Travels. The bigger they come, the harder they fall!”
There was a school of thought that said they should kill the human, whose mad eyes followed them around the floor. This was when they found the box.
It was on one of the shelves. It was yellow. It had a picture of a very unhappy-looking rat on the front. It had the word SCRAMOFF in big red lettering, too. On the back . . .
Grimma’s forehead wrinkled as she tried to read the smaller words on the back.
“It says, ‘They Take A Bite, But They Don’t Come Back For More!’” she said. “And apparently it contains Polydichloromethylinlon-4, whatever that is. ‘Clears Outbuildings Of Troublesome . . .’” She paused.
“Troublesome what?” said the listening nomes. “Troublesome what?”
Grimma lowered her voice.
“It says, ‘Clears Outbuildings Of Troublesome Vermin In A Trice!’” she said. “It’s poison. It’s the stuff they put under the floor.”
The silence that followed this was black with rage. The nomes had raised quite a lot of children in the quarry. They had very firm views about poison.
“We should make the human eat it,” said one of them. “Fill up its mouth with Polyputheketlon or whatever it is. Troublesome vermin.”
“I think they think we’re rats,” said Grimma.
“And that would be all right, would it?” said a nome with withering sarcasm. “Rats are okay. We’ve never had any trouble with rats. No call to go around giving them poisoned food.”
Diggers Page 8
