The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale (6 page)

“Still don’t like it,” said Jolly.

“Never mind that,” said Dan. “We’re nearly there. The local newspaper is sending someone along to take pictures, and a disc jockey from Biddlecombe FM radio—‘The Big B!’—will be playing tunes and giving away prizes.”

“What kind of prizes?” asked Jolly.

“Mugs. Stickers. Pens,” said Dan.

“Fantastic,” said Angry. “I can just see someone winning a pen and dying of happiness.”

“Or a mug,” said Jolly. “There’ll probably be some old lady who’s dreamed all her life of having a mug to call her own. She’s been drinking tea out of holes in the ground for all these years, and suddenly—
bang!
—she wins a mug. They’ll write songs about it, and people will tell their children of it for generations to come: ‘You know, I was there the day old Mrs. Banbury won a mug.’ ”

Dan tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He tried to find something to be upbeat about, and decided that there was a limit to the amount of trouble that the dwarfs could cause at Honest Ed’s. There’d be no beer, and they didn’t have weapons. What could possibly go wrong?

• • •

“Well, that went all right,” said Jolly sometime later, as the van drove away at full speed. “Sort of.”

Behind them came the sound of an explosion, and a Volkswagen Beetle—twenty thousand miles on the odometer, one lady owner, perfect motoring order—flew up into the air like a big, fat firework, trailing smoke and burning fuel. A second explosion, larger than the first, quickly followed as the rest of Honest Ed’s stock went up in flames.

“I told you I smelled gas,” said Angry. “Very dangerous stuff, gas.”

“Absolutely,” said Jolly. “You can’t go messing about with gas.”

“Can’t take chances with it.”

“Absolutely not.”

They were silent for a moment or two. In the distance, the horizon glowed in the light of the flames from Honest Ed’s former car dealership.

“Probably shouldn’t have gone looking for it with matches, though,” said Dan.

He was driving faster than was safe, but it seemed like a good idea to put as much distance between the dwarfs and Honest Ed as possible. When last they’d seen him, Honest Ed had been searching for a gun.

“Well, the flashlight was a bit small,” said Angry. “And it didn’t light things very well.”

“I think we solved that problem,” said Jolly. “It looks like Honest Ed’s is lit perfectly well now.”

“Did we get paid in advance?” Angry asked Dan.

“We always get paid in advance,” said Dan. “If we didn’t, we’d never get paid at all.”

They drove on. The dwarfs sang. Dan went back to trying to be optimistic. Things, he thought, could only get better, mainly because they couldn’t possibly get any worse.

• • •

In the basement of Wreckit & Sons, Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley sat at a desk and wrote what the Voice in the Wall told him to write.

WANTED,
he wrote.
FOUR DWARFS FOR STORE WORK. EXCELLENT PAY AND PROSPECTS.

Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley stopped writing.

“Do they really have excellent prospects?” he asked the Voice in the Wall.

Yes,
replied the Voice in the Wall.
They have the most excellent prospects.

Of dying.

18
. This was not necessarily a good thing. There are many professions that might benefit from a smile and a hearty laugh, but undertaking is not one of them. The last thing people want as they arrive, red-eyed and weeping, to send their beloved auntie Ethel on her way to the next life is to find someone in a black suit grinning like a loon and opining that it’s a lovely day for a funeral. That way, frankly, lies a punch in the face.

19
. A quick word here about people who put words like
honest
or
cheerful
before their names: they usually aren’t. Anyone who has to advertise the fact that he’s cheerful is probably sadder than a bird without a beak in a birdseed factory, while someone who has to boast about how honest he is will steal the eyes from your head while you’re cleaning your glasses. Mind you, this doesn’t mean that someone who calls himself Dishonest Bob, for example, is automatically honest. He’s just honest about being dishonest, if you see what I mean. Vlad the Impaler (1431–76) still went around impaling people, and Henry the Cruel of Germany (1165–97) was still cruel. They just believed that it paid to advertise. Generally speaking, then, if someone adds a good quality to their name, they’re probably lying, and if they add something bad, then they’re probably telling the truth.

20
. Curiously, the British Locomotive Act of 1865 (also known as the “Red Flag Act”) required that no self-propelled vehicle (which included cars) could travel faster than four miles per hour in the country, and two miles per hour in the city. Each car was also required to have a crew of three, one of whom had to walk 180 feet in front of the car carrying a red flag. In 1878, the whole flag business was made optional as cars became faster, probably because someone in a car got tired of traveling at two miles an hour and ran over the bloke with the flag, making it hard to recruit replacement flag wavers from then on.

In Which We Have a Musical Interlude

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING,
D
AN
gathered the dwarfs in the yard behind the offices of “Dan, Dan the Talent Man, & Company,” as he had recently renamed himself and the business. The “& Company” referred to the dwarfs, who each had an equal share in the talent management company, and therefore an equal say in its affairs. This made the monthly company meetings noisy, stressful, and, in the case of Mumbles, difficult to understand. Behind Dan was a vaguely van-shaped object covered in a white tarpaulin.

“Now,” said Dan, “you’ll remember that, at our August meeting, we decided we should buy a new van.”

The dwarfs vaguely remembered this. They didn’t pay a lot of attention at the company meetings. They just liked shouting and arguing, and sticking their hands up to vote for things that they didn’t understand.
²¹
They might well have voted in favor of
buying a new van. Then again, they might have voted in favor of buying a spaceship, or invading China. For little people, the dwarfs didn’t pay much attention to small print.

“Just remind us: why are we buying a new van again?” asked Jolly.

“Because we can’t keep repainting the old one,” said Dan. “And you didn’t want to be known as ‘Dan’s Dwarfs’ anymore, or even ‘Dan’s Elves.’ ”

“That’s because elves don’t exist,” said Angry. “It’s like being called ‘Dan’s Unicorns,’ or ‘Dan’s Dragons.’ ”

“Exactly,” said Dan.

“And we’re not ‘your’ elves,” said Jolly. “It makes us sound like slaves. Which we’re not.”

You’re definitely not, thought Dan. Slaves might do a bit of work occasionally.

“You don’t like being called ‘little people,’ ” said Dan, “and you’re not sure about ‘dwarfs,’ so I had to think up a different name, which I did. I now present to you—the new van!”

Dan whipped away the tarpaulin, and the van stood revealed. It was bright yellow, and very shiny.

Dan glowed.

The van glowed.

The dwarfs did not glow.

“What’s that?” said Angry.

“It’s a van,” said Dan.

“No, not that.
That!
The writing on the side.”

“It’s your new name: Dan’s Stars of Diminished Stature.”

Dan was very proud of the new name for the dwarfs. He’d
spent ages thinking it up, and he’d visited the painters every day that they were working on the job just to make sure they got the details right. The words flowed diagonally down both sides of the van. They’d even found a way to continue the writing over the windows without obscuring the view. The van was a work of art.

DAN’S

S
tars

O
f

D
iminished

S
tature!

The dwarfs looked at the van. Dan looked at the dwarfs. Dan and the dwarfs looked at the van. Dan’s eyesight wasn’t very good, and things might have gone on like that until night fell had Angry not said, “So, nothing strikes you as odd about the van?”

“No,” said Dan.

“Nothing at all?”

“Maybe the letters aren’t big enough. Is that it?”

“No, no, the letters are more than big enough. Too big, some might say. It’s more how they read that bothers me, so to speak.”

Dan looked again. He spelled out the words, moving his lips. He took a step back. He squinted.

He saw it.

“Oh,” he said.

“Yes, oh,” said Angry. “In fact, not just ‘Oh,’ but ‘Ess, Oh, Dee, Ess’. The side of our van reads ‘Dan’s SODS’!”

“That’s not good,” said Dan.

Definitely accurate, he thought, but not good.

• • •

The dwarfs and Dan sat in Dan’s office. They did not present a happy picture. The van was just the latest in a series of disasters. They had caused a major gas explosion, and they now owned a van that described them as sods.

Oh, and they had recently been dragged to Hell for a time. Let’s not forget that.

But their main problem at the moment was that, while they owned a talent agency, it didn’t have any real talent to promote.

“What about Wesley the Amazing Tightrope Walker?” said Dan. “We have him. He’s a genius! He can walk along a length of spiderweb without falling off.”

“He’s afraid of heights,” said Dozy. “It’s hard to get excited about a man who can only walk a tightrope that’s six inches off the ground. Even then he looks a bit nervous.”

“Jimmy the Juggler?” suggested Dan. “You’ve got to admit that the man can juggle.”

“He
can
juggle,” said Jolly. “He has a gift. He’d be better if he had two arms, though. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t juggle: he tosses.”

“Bobo the Clown?”

“He gets angry with children. It’s one thing throwing a bucket of confetti over them, but he’s not supposed to throw the bucket as well.”

“And then there’s, well,
them,
” said Dan.

“Them!” said Jolly, shaking his head.

“Them!” said Angry, casting his eyes to heaven.

“Them!” said Dozy, putting his head in his hands.

“Arble!” said Mumbles.

Which said it all, really.

• • •

They followed Dan down a steep set of stairs to the basement and walked along a hallway to a large padlocked door. Dan fumbled in his pocket for the key.

“Do you really need to keep them locked up?” asked Jolly.

“It’s for their own good,” said Dan. “They wander off if I don’t.”

“They were never very intelligent,” said Angry. “It’s a wonder they lasted as long as they did.”

“It’s sad, really,” said Dan. “You know, they wouldn’t survive a day in the wild.”

He placed the key in the lock and turned it.

“Careful now,” Dan warned. “They react to the light.”

He removed the padlock and pulled the bolt. The door began to open with a creak. The room beyond was big and comfortable, but very dark. As the door opened farther, a rectangle of light appeared on the floor and grew wider and wider, like the beam of a spotlight tracing its way across a stage.

A figure jumped into the light, followed by a second, and a third, and a fourth. They all looked a little bleary-eyed. Their spangled shirts had seen better days, and their trousers bore food stains. Their voices also sounded somewhat croaky, but that was nothing new.

“Hi,” said the first. “I’m Starlight.”

“Oh Lord,” said Jolly.

“And I’m Twinkle,” said the second.

“Good grief,” said Angry.

“I’m Gemini,” said the third.

“They never stop, do they?” said Dozy.

“And I’m Phil,” said the fourth. “And together we’re—”

“BoyStarz!” they all cried in unison, and performed a small twirl before they began doing to a perfectly innocent song what grape crushers do to grapes.

“Make them stop,” said Jolly, his hands pressed to his ears. “Please!”

“It’s very hard,” said Dan. “They see a light and they start performing. I’ve tried electric shocks, but that just seems to make them livelier.”

These were hard times for the boy band BoyStarz. For a start, they were no longer as young as they were, but “MenStarz” didn’t have the same ring to it. Phil in particular looked like a doorman at the kind of nightclub where people got killed on a regular basis, while Sparkle, Twinkle, and Gemini had only enough hair among all three of them for two people to share. Their career had never recovered from vicious rumors that the BoyStarz could not sing, and they simply mimed along to songs
recorded by more talented vocalists. This led to the BoyStarz signing up for a special tour to prove the doubters wrong. In this it was successful, to a degree. The tour did prove that the BoyStarz could sing.

Horribly.

One critic compared the sound of BoyStarz singing live to the final cry of a ship’s horn as it sinks beneath the waves with the loss of everyone on board. Another described it as only marginally less awful than being trapped in a room with a flock of frightened geese that were honking in panic as they bumped into the walls. A third wrote: “If Death had a sound, it would sound like BoyStarz.”

The BoyStarz kept trying. They turned up for the opening of shopping malls, but nobody came. Then they started showing up for the opening of individual stores, but still nobody came. Eventually they grew so desperate that if somebody opened a newspaper, or a packet of crisps, BoyStarz would pop up beside them and start warbling about how love was like a flower, or a butterfly, or a sunny day. People started complaining. Where once the BoyStarz had been driven everywhere in limousines, they now rode bicycles, or they did until someone stole the bicycles to stop them from showing up unexpectedly. It was all very sad, unless you actually liked music, and songs being sung in tune, in which case it wasn’t very sad at all.

The dwarfs felt partly responsible for the run of bad luck that the BoyStarz had endured because it was they who had ruined the filming of the video for the BoyStarz’s Christmas single “Love Is Like a Castle (Built for Two).” They had done
this by taking bits of the castle in question and flinging them from the battlements until the castle built for two looked like a shed built for one. When the dwarfs had decided to set up a talent agency with Dan, it seemed only right and proper that they should try to find work for the BoyStarz. So far, the only work they’d found for them was in a hamburger restaurant, and even then they’d lasted only a day because they insisted on singing about how love was like a lettuce leaf, or a chicken nugget, or a bun.