Little People by Tom Holt Read Free Book Online

I’d woken up so abruptly was apparent from the angle at which this view presented itself. In other words, I’d slipped sideways while I was sleeping, and any second now I was going to fall out of the damned tree.
    I managed to wiggle myself upright just in time, after which I carefully climbed back down again. My watch read 9.45. Now, though I was fairly confident that the rest of the house party would be fully occupied with wallowing in their hangovers till at least 10.30, I decided I’d better clear out and not take any silly risks. I still had one last job to do.
    Fortunately I’d remembered to bring the makings with me as I’d left the house earlier on: half a pint of milk, four saucers and four slices of stale white bread. I poured the milk carefully, held the bread in it till it was soggy, and gently put each saucer down in the strategically ideal spot I’d selected for it earlier on. For the final touch I got the watering can and used it to turn a swathe of earth surrounding each saucer into a circle of sticky mud. Anything approaching the saucer couldn’t help but tread in my mudbath and leave a tell-tale footprint. Neat idea, or what?
    Just before going back into the house, I stopped and checked my reflection in the glass of the French windows. Yup, just how they should be, gracefully rounded without even the faintest suggestion of a point on the top.
    Needless to say, nobody was up and about yet except me, and there I was in the front room, standing right next to the telephone. By now it was gone ten, a perfectly respectable time to ring someone, if I happened to have someone I wanted to ring. I thought about it for a long time before walking on past.
    Nothing to do now except wait and see, two activities I’ve never been particularly good at. For want of anything else to do, I found a book and lay down on the sofa ( For pity’s sake , I heard my mother’s voice in my mind’s ear, you aren’t sitting reading again, are you? Haven’t you got anything better to do? ) where, thanks to the unscintillating nature of the book I’d chosen, I was soon fast asleep once more. This time, my dream was different. The giant footprint was there once more, but this time it was even bigger, and right in the middle of the living-room carpet, and I was trying to explain to Mum why it wasn’t really my fault.
    When I came round again it was 10.45 and I could hear voices bumbling away in the kitchen. This reminded me that I was hungry and hadn’t had any breakfast yet, unless you counted a very small corner of the dry bread, which I’d absent-mindedly nibbled at while I was setting my traps. A dilemma: on the one hand, in order to get food I’d have to go out and be polite and sociable to my relatives, while on the other hand if I stayed put or hid somewhere, I’d have to carry on starving. Sadly, it was no contest. I made for the kitchen.
    After that, the day declined and slithered away into a regulation Boxing Day, tedious and endless. Illogically enough, I found myself hanging around within arm’s reach of the phone for as much of the time as I could manage, just in case it rang and Cru was on the other end of the line. But it didn’t and she wasn’t; no surprises there whatsoever. Once or twice I did catch sight of Daddy George looking thoughtfully at me out of the corner of his eye, but that could just as easily have been general distaste rather than anything specific.
    The afternoon gradually edged along like a slow day on the M25, and thickened into evening and then night. After all those catnaps during the day, I found it annoyingly impossible to get to sleep; instead I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling, trying to remember what the garden in my first dream had looked like. But it had faded away long since, leaving only a vague shape, like crop circles in standing corn.
    It’s always the way when you know you want to get up early