Max and the Millions

by Ross Montgomery

  “Max, you can’t go. You can’t just leave everything behind.”

  “We both know I’m going to be expelled,” said Max. “I’m not like you—I don’t have family I belong to. I don’t have anyone who needs me. The only people who have ever needed me are…them.”

  He held out his hand to the millions of tiny faces spread across the seedling trays.

  “The floor people will never survive here without my help—they’ve never even left the bedroom! Mr. Darrow can’t do it all on his own. I’ve spent my whole life trying to avoid people, and I don’t want to do it anymore. I want to help them. They need me, Sasha.”

  Sasha winced. “I need you, Max.”

  Sasha pulled the hood tighter around his face, but he couldn’t hide the tears that were making tiny snowflakes on the dusty floor. Max put a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s not for forever, Sasha. I’m going to come back. Mr. Darrow and I are going to find a way to return to normal size. Until then, I’ll be right here—we can talk anytime you want!”

  Sasha looked up, his eyes wet. “How?”

  Max looked at him for a while. Then, slowly, he reached up and took out his hearing aids. They whistled loudly with feedback…and then his world was silent. He knew he would have to rely on lip-reading alone from now on.

  Max handed them over. When he spoke, all he could hear was his own voice deep in his chest, where his heart was.

  “Take them. Listen for me—I’ll be right here.”

  Sasha took the hearing aids and beamed.

  “I’ll come every day—twice a day, even! Anything you need, just ask!”

  Max put a hand on Sasha’s shoulder. “Thank you, Sasha.”

  He paused. He hoped that what he was going to say next would come out right.

  “Not just for the help, for everything. For being kind to me. For showing me what I can do. For being my friend. You’re the nicest guy I’ve ever met—and you shouldn’t let your parents leave you here. You should tell them you want to go home at the holidays and see your old friends. Joy deserves better, and so do—”

  Before Max could finish the sentence, Sasha grabbed him and hugged him tight. Max stopped talking—he didn’t need to say anything more.

  “Bye, Max.”

  “Goodbye, Sasha.”

  They reached out and crossed fingers—X. Then Max stepped back and took a deep breath.

  “Oh well,” he said. “Here goes nothing….”

  He held the bottle high above him, and let the last remaining drop of serum land on his tongue.

  Max felt the change in his stomach first. It was like all his insides were getting smaller at the same time. The breath squeezed out of his lungs, and the muscles round his heart tensed and tightened. His legs gave way and he fell onto the table, trembling. Sasha was in front of him in seconds, his face concerned.

  “Max! Are you OK?”

  Sasha’s face was growing right in front of him. The shed was getting bigger and bigger too, and suddenly it felt like he was falling into himself. His T-shirt became bigger and heavier and billowed up around him like a three-ring circus. Before he knew it, Sasha’s face was disappearing faster and faster above him, his movements slowing and grinding like a film in slow motion….

  And then Max was alone.

  His T-shirt was spread like a landscape around him, as far as he could see. Sasha loomed over him, his face flickering with the tiniest movements, like a field of grass in the wind.

  Max sat up. The entire Floor was running toward him, their lips all forming the same words.

  “The Great One!”

  Max had never seen so many people so happy to see him before. And right at the very front…

  “MR. DARROW!”

  Max leapt to his feet and ran toward him. But to his confusion, everyone started blushing and turning away. Everyone except for Ivy, who was almost senseless with laughter. Max suddenly caught sight of Luke, waving his hands to get his attention.

  “Max, your clothes!”

  Max looked down, and yelped. He was completely naked. He clapped a hand over his privates and glared at Mr. Darrow.

  “Oh yeah!” muttered Mr. Darrow. “The serum doesn’t shrink your clothes. Sorry—should have mentioned that.”

  Someone quickly handed Max a spare fly rider’s outfit and he got dressed while a million people faced the other way. Even Sasha hid his eyes. When Max was finally ready—and Ivy had stopped laughing—the Floor people fell to their knees in front of him.

  “Welcome back, Great One!” cried a Blue. “We never stopped believing in you!”

  “Lead us, Great One, please!”

  “Remember when you found my keys?”

  Max waved them all quiet—he wasn’t used to so many people talking to him at once. He cleared his throat and hoped he could make them understand him.

  “Sorry,” he explained, his voice still booming in his chest. “I’m not really the Great One. That was, well…a lie.” He pointed at Mr. Darrow. “That’s the Great One, if you’re interested.”

  The entire Floor shuffled round on their knees to face Mr. Darrow.

  “Lead us, Great One!”

  “We always believed in you!”

  Mr. Darrow grumbled and tried to bat them all away, without success.

  Max felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around and saw a face he recognized instantly. A face he knew like the back of his hand.

  “It’s you!” said Luke.

  Max smiled. “It’s you!”

  Luke held out his fingers in an X, but Max hugged him instead. Luke stepped back and stared him up and down in disbelief.

  “I…I don’t believe it. I’m taller than you.”

  Mr. Darrow placed a hand on Max’s shoulder.

  “Thank you for coming, Max,” he said. “And make sure you thank your friend, too. We couldn’t have done any of this without him.”

  They looked up at the sky. Sasha stood over them, gazing down at the world. From here, you could see the exact point where happiness and sadness met in his eyes.

  “You’ll be able to hear everything he says, you know,” said Mr. Darrow. “You and I can hear things at his speed. I’ll teach you how to do it. We’re going to need a lot of help from Sasha from now on….”

  “Like what?”

  Mr. Darrow laughed, and gave him a playful hug.

  “We’ve got plenty of time to talk about that, Max. For now, let’s get this lot moving.”

  He pointed to the Floor people around them. They were forming lines to the warflies, and Luke and Ivy and the Red Queen were taking charge, explaining plans and showing people where to go. Everyone was helping each other.

  “Moving?” said Max. “Where to?”

  Mr. Darrow gave him a look.

  “Where do you think?” he said. “Paradise, of course.”

  * * *

  Sasha watched as Max was lost among the millions of tiny people clustering around him. He felt like his heart was ready to burst, but he wasn’t sad. He’d never seen Max so happy before.

  “Sasha?”

  Joy was standing at the door, rubbing her eyes.

  “Where’s Max?”

  Sasha smiled. He picked up the microscope goggles and gently put them over her head.

  “See for yourself.”

  Joy gasped with amazement. The whole world was transformed around her. The shed had become a place of wonders.

  “The flies!”

  They were leaving the shed. One by one they buzzed through the air, laden with families and friends and people who just moments ago had been strangers. The green glow of their torches lit their way like a string of fairy lamps. They flew out the shed door, carrying a million people a handful at a time to their new home.

  They were
landing in the vegetable patch.

  Max was in paradise.

  Actually, it was Mr. Darrow’s vegetable patch. But to the people of the Floor, it was a place where food grew out of the ground, and water sometimes fell from the sky. It was the most incredible place they could possibly imagine.

  Sure, it was hard going sometimes—most of them had never experienced “night” before, or this thing called “Winter” that was going to come and shake things up—but with Max’s help and advice, and Mr. Darrow’s amazing inventions, the Floor people had learned to adapt. Working together, they had turned the vegetable patch into something wonderful.

  “Max!”

  Max’s eye was caught by something in the distance—Luke, waving at him. Luke sat on top of Miss Binkles, who was hopping alongside a tick she’d recently befriended.

  “Hi, guys!” said Max. “Check it out—I’m almost done.”

  He pointed to his latest creation: a hut carved into a cabbage stalk. His skills as a model-maker had led to him becoming one of the most sought-after architects in the vegetable patch. His recent Leek Skyscraper had won awards. The rest of the Floor lived in Mr. Darrow’s models, tucked among the vegetables: the Taj Mahal, Sydney Opera House, the Houses of Parliament…

  “I’m giving it to Mr. Darrow,” he said. “To thank him for making my new hearing aids!”

  Max pointed to them. They were much bigger than his last ones, but thanks to Mr. Darrow’s ingenuity, they worked just as well. It had taken a little while for the Floor people to learn how to talk to Max properly, but then, they were learning a lot about talking to one another nowadays. And of course, Luke was there to help them every step of the way.

  “They’re even better than my last ones,” Max explained. “And just in time, too—Sasha’s going back to America in half term!”

  True to his word, Sasha had turned up twice a day to check that the Floor people were OK. Max and Mr. Darrow had explained their plan to him—that when he went back home for the holidays, he needed to persuade his parents to visit a certain town in Massachusetts, a certain town with a certain abandoned museum, with a certain basement that Mr. Darrow had once explored—

  “Look out below!”

  Luke screamed as Ivy landed beside them with a thump. She was wearing a pair of handmade moth wings and grinning like a lunatic.

  “Did you see that? It was my highest one yet!”

  Ivy had recently made herself head explorer, and volunteered for every mission to fly round the school grounds and find things for Mr. Darrow. She’d also started jumping off the warflies midflight so she could paraglide her way back down to the ground on her homemade wings, and terrify Luke in the process.

  “Come on!” she said. “We’re almost late—the big meeting’s about to start in Potato Hall. We’re going to vote on how to make peace with the slugs, remember?”

  She pointed to the crowds of Reds, Greens and Blues heading toward the meeting on a centipede bus. Max put down his tools and dusted off his hands.

  “Sure! I’ll go tell Mr. Darrow.”

  Ivy snorted. “Ha! Good luck—he’s in his workshop.”

  Max groaned. “Again?”

  “He barely leaves,” said Luke. “All day long on the same project of his, work, work, work…”

  Ivy shook her head. “I don’t get it. There’s a whole amazing world right here in front of him, and he’s still focusing on the small stuff!”

  Max shrugged. “You can’t underestimate the small stuff, Ivy—everything’s small to something else.”

  Luke gawped. “Even Sasha?”

  “Of course.”

  “But he’s over five feet tall!”

  “That’s not that tall where I come from.”

  “Were you taller than him?”

  Max blushed. “Er…yeah, I think so.”

  The three friends jumped on Miss Binkles’s back, and together they went to build their world.

  * * *

  Mr. Darrow was also building a world.

  He was in the empty glass bottle: his workshop. There was a chair and a desk inside it, and nothing else.

  On the desk lay a single scrap of leaf. Collected inside was all the serum he had painstakingly scraped off the glass bottle over many hours. There was barely anything left—one hundredth of a single drop. Not enough for him to experiment on. Not enough to see if he and Max could reverse the transformation and go back to normal size. Of course, when Sasha returned from holiday, he should have more serum with him. They had plenty of time to find their way home.

  Until then, Mr. Darrow had a lifelong dream to fulfill.

  He took a bristle from a courgette plant, picked up the single microscopic droplet of serum in front of him, and held it over his latest creation.

  It was a tiny model of paradise, no bigger than a grain of sand.

  It’s hard for us to understand quite how small it was. It’s even harder for us to understand how tiny—how infinitesimally small—the people who lived inside it would be. You couldn’t have seen them with your own eyes, even if you tried.

  But then, the world is filled with miracles that no one sees.

  “Well then,” said Mr. Darrow, “here goes nothing.”

  Until the age of four I had glue ear (a buildup of thick fluid in the middle ear), which made me mildly deaf. Before I was diagnosed, no one could understand why I kept ignoring people and got so frustrated whenever anyone tried to talk to me. Surgeons fixed the problem by putting little tubes called grommets in my ears. After that, my mum ran me a bath and I freaked out because the taps were too loud.

  Before I started writing Max & the Millions, that was my only experience of deafness. Even now I hardly know anything. There are several people who have taught me a lot while writing this book and helped me understand what it means for someone like Max to be deaf in a hearing world. I owe them a great deal of thanks.

  They are: James Martin, who read an early draft and gave me invaluable advice; Fiona Gray and all the staff and children at James Wolfe Centre for the Deaf in Greenwich, England, for sharing so many of their experiences with me; Lindsey Frodsham at the National Deaf Children’s Society (ndcs.org.uk) for her help and advice; and Carol Lynn Kearney, senior adjunct in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Adelphi University, for her suggestions. Without them, this book would be rubbish.

  The lines Mr. Darrow recites to Max are from the poem “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake.

  Finally, if you think Mr. Darrow’s tiny hand-carved houses sound unrealistic, go online and check out the work of microartist Willard Wigan. From single grains of sand, he carves incredible sculptures so small they can’t be seen with the naked eye.

  Take care of the small things—they make up the universe.

  Ross Montgomery has worked as a pig farmer, a postman, and a primary school teacher, so writing books was the next logical step. He spent his childhood reading everything he could get his hands on, from Jacqueline Wilson to comic books, and it taught him pretty much everything that’s worth knowing. If you looked through his pockets, you’d find empty potato chip packets, lists of things to do, and a bottle of that stuff you put on your nails to stop you from biting them. He lives in London with his girlfriend, a cat called Fun Bobby, and a cactus on every available surface.

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