Little People by Tom Holt Page A

person who drinks the equivalent of ten pints of beer and guzzles three packets of chocolate digestives and a half-dozen Mars bars every day. A mental image inevitably begins to condense around statistics like that, and in my mind’s ear I was already imagining him burping a lot and talking with an Australian accent. Even so: the idea of trapping him with a hidden camera felt like betrayal. It might be the next logical step in my research, but I didn’t want to do it. Simple as that.
    When in doubt, prevaricate; as mottoes go it’s neither use nor ornament, but it’s what I tend to do, and it’s my life. I put the decision off for another two days and carried on with the biscuit-and-beer drops, hoping that something would happen that would make the stealth photo call unnecessary. Maybe the elf was getting as curious about me as I was about him, and one morning I’d show up with the day’s saucer and he’d be there waiting for me, poised to carry out first-contact protocols in a properly dignified and serious manner. Or maybe he’d get careless and leave something behind. There was a fair chance that with all the booze and chocolate he’d been getting through, I’d come down one morning and find him stone dead of heart or liver failure. Now that really would be evidence: a dead elf – another dead elf. But you can take nearly everything too far, and that includes scientific research. In fact, thinking it over, that was all the more reason to wrap up Phase Two and stop putting down the saucers, if I didn’t want another death on my conscience.
    Valid point, dammit.
    So: next morning I didn’t take a fresh saucer with me. No big deal, I told myself. After all, I’d proved the existence of elves to my own satisfaction, which meant I wasn’t crazy, or at least not as regards elf-seeing. Surely that was all that mattered; besides, even if I completed my ‘research’ and came up with dead certain conclusive proof, who the hell was I going to show it to? Any scientist worth his lab coat with the row of pens in the top pocket would tell me to get lost as soon as he saw the word ‘elf’ in the title of my field notes. Nope; time to call it a day, pack it in, get a life . . .
    I froze. Out of the corner of my eye I’d noticed something. Something strange – well, that wouldn’t have been so bad. This was worse than strange, it was familiar.
    It was an elf, sure enough. I could just make out the shape of his head through a screen of verdant weeds. Because of the angles and the height differential, I was fairly sure he hadn’t seen me yet. Very slowly and carefully I turned my head until I could see him properly.
    An elf: same size as the other two, same general appearance. This one was squatting on an upturned acorn cup with his tiny moleskin trousers round his ankles, smoking a miniature ciggy and reading a very small tabloid newspaper. Bloody hell , I thought.
    I guess that if you’re a trained naturalist, you don’t get embarrassed. Must be so, since those guys spend all their time spying on God’s creatures, with a somewhat dubious level of concentration on their reproductive activities. But this was the first time I’d done anything like this; and besides, the little fellow looked so much like a human that the natural social instincts cut in before I could stop them. And the first instinct was, of course, to apologise.
    â€˜I’m sorry . . .’ I stammered.
    The elf looked up and scowled at me. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re staring at, tall-arse?’
    If it wasn’t for the extreme mortification that was flooding all my systems at that moment, I’d have taken conscious note of the fact that, although the first couple of words seemed very faint and far away, as you’d expect of the product of a one-sixteenth scale larynx, something inside my head managed to turn the