Out of This World. Lawrence Watt-Evans
Pel sure hoped it wasn’t a hallucination, as up until that moment he hadn’t had any reservations at all about his mental health, and he hadn’t taken anything more mind-altering than beer in weeks.
The creature had seen him, he was sure, but it wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t running or hiding or attacking. It was just looking around, a trifle uncertainly, taking in the scenery.
“What the hell are you?” Pel asked.
The thing looked up at him and grimaced. “I’m a bookkeeper,” it replied. “Wouldn’t know it from this outfit, would you?” Pel was relieved that it spoke, and spoke English; that probably simplified the situation, because it meant he could just talk to it and get some answers. Its voice was higher-pitched than a man’s, but not squeaky or thin at all. Pel had heard grown women whose voices sounded far smaller and more childlike.
“No,” Pel said, “I don’t mean what do you do, I mean what are you?”
“I’m a human being, of course,” the creature replied. “A small one. What do I look like?”
“You look like some kind of fairy,” Pel replied, in honest bemusement.
The little person squinted up at Pel. “Are you looking for trouble, buddy?” he demanded. “I’m as much a lady’s man as the next guy! If you weren’t so damn big I’d punch your lights out!”
“Hey, I’m sorry,” Pel said, holding up his hands in apology. “I didn’t mean that. I meant an elf or something. I mean, you’re a foot tall, with pointed ears—where’d you come from?”
Somewhat mollified, the little man said, “That’s better. Yeah, I’m a little person. I came from a place called Hrumph—no jokes, I know it’s a stupid name! That’s what we called it, though, when it still existed. It was in... well, in another world.”
“Oh, wow,” said Pel, who had seen just as many episodes of ‘Twilight Zone’ and ‘Lost in Space’ as most of his generation. “You mean like another dimension?”
The creature looked puzzled. “Dimension? Um... I guess.” He hesitated. “Not the word I’d have used,” he said. “Another world, alternate reality, parallel universe, whatever.” He waved vaguely, and his voice trailed off somewhat.
Pel blinked. After a moment of unthinking acceptance, a certain uncomfortable suspicion was growing in the back of his mind. Outside of movies and TV, things like this didn’t happen, did they? Not for real.
“You’re putting me on, right? This is a joke?” he asked.
“No, it’s... it’s not a joke.” The person—he might not be human, in the usual sense, but after conversing with him Pel certainly thought of him as a person—looked uncomfortable. Not as if he were lying, but as if he were considering throwing up. “Hey...” he said, “I don’t feel real good just now. Is it hot in here?”
“Hot?” Pel glanced around at the cool, moist basement. If this little person really did come from another world, maybe it was one colder than Earth—but that was silly. He shouldn’t be taking it that seriously. “No, it isn’t hot,” he said.
“No?” The little man was swaying visibly.
“Are you all right?” Pel asked, concerned.
“No,” the creature said. “I think... I think I better go.” He swallowed hard. “Listen, we’ll be back, okay? Or someone will. Don’t go away!”
Before Pel could answer, the elf, or whatever it was, turned, stumbled away, and walked into the concrete wall.
Pel heard the smack clearly from where he sat. He winced in sympathy.
The little man got to his feet, let out a wail, and again stepped forward.
This time, when he hit the wall, he vanished into it.
Pel stared for a moment.
Then, moving slowly, he reached out and picked up the screwdriver.
He looked at the wall. In the movies, any character who had just seen such a thing would reach out and poke at the place the little guy had vanished, and maybe nothing would happen, and maybe not. He might get sucked into another world, or he might get killed by some sort of splashy special effects, or monsters might jump out at him.
Pel Brown was not going do that. He had no particular interest in watching the end melt off his screwdriver, or seeing his finger disappear into the fourth dimension, or even just poking the wall. It wouldn’t prove anything. If he could hallucinate an elf, he could hallucinate anything.
He waited for a moment, but nothing happened, and he turned back to the wagon, shaking slightly.
Whatever he had just seen, real or not, seemed to be over. Maybe it had been just a weird sort of dream or something, or some kind of flashback to the one hit of mescaline he’d taken back in college, when he was young and stupid.
Or maybe he really had just talked to an elf from another dimension, and this sort of thing happened all the time, but most people didn’t talk about it because they didn’t want everyone thinking they were nuts. Maybe all those UFO aliens were real, Bigfoot was roaming the woods, and Elvis really was alive in outer space somewhere.
Maybe it happened all the time.
And maybe it didn’t.
Whatever it was, it was not his problem; he still had to get the wheels on this stupid wagon in time for Rachel’s party tomorrow. If the little man came back, Pel thought, he would worry about it then.
* * * *
Amy Jewell leaned back in her lawn chair, the book on her lap forgotten for the moment as she rested her eyes and listened to the pleasant hiss of the sprinkler. The sun was warm on her face, unseasonably warm for early May, and enjoying it seemed more important just now than reading whatever Danielle Steel had to say.
She wasn’t sure she was going to bother finishing this one; she was beginning to lose her taste for Steel. And it was good to just lie here, eyes closed, enjoying the warmth, knowing that she had all day with nothing important to do. She liked that about Sundays.
Her eyes snapped open and she looked up, startled, at the crack of a sonic boom. It sounded as if it was almost directly overhead; she scanned the sky, but she couldn’t see any plane.
Then suddenly she did see a plane, or something like one, but it wasn’t flying, it was falling. It was brightly painted, like the old Braniff jets, mostly purple, and she didn’t see any wings, just stubs. And it was huge, and it was almost directly overhead and it was falling almost directly toward her.
She rolled out of the lawn chair, scrambled to her feet, and ran for the house.
An instant later the thing hit with an immense, booming thud. The shock of its impact rattled windows and the dishes in her kitchen, and a planter at the corner of the patio toppled over, spilling scraggly geraniums across the flagstones. The sprinkler bounced, but did not overturn; its spray rattled against the thing’s metal side.
The object had completely flattened the back hedge and had torn a major limb off the big sycamore. One of the stubby wings, or fins, or whatever they were had missed the lawn chair by just two or three inches.
It had stayed in one piece, though, it hadn’t broken into sections like the crashed airliners she had seen on the TV news. The nose was no more than twenty yards from Amy’s back door, while the tail was well across the property line, on Mr. Janssen’s vegetable garden.
Amy had reached the back door just as it struck; she turned for a quick glance, paused long enough to lean over and turn off the sprinkler, then slipped inside. From the safety of her kitchen she stared out the window over the sink for a few seconds, then reached for the phone and dialed 9-1-1.
9-1-1 worked on Sundays, didn’t it? Of course it did. Emergencies weren’t limited to weekdays.
She didn’t wait