THE LITTLE PEOPLE

By Aonghus Fallon

Copyright 2012 Aonghus Fallon

Smashwords Edition.

Of course I had to go back and check, even though I knew it was a bad idea. I kept imagining Declan’s red windcheater slowly unfurling itself, allowing the wind to tug it loose from where I had put it. This, despite the fact that it was wedged at the very back of that narrow hole – the hole under that slab of granite on that desolate hillside, the hole that also had Declan’s body wedged into it. This despite the fact that I’d weighted it down with rocks and put it in first for good measure, with Declan’s body effectively blocking its exit. I’d gone to so much trouble because that windcheater was bright, bright red. If somebody ever spotted it, they’d find Declan’s body, no bother.

Only I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Worrying about it. So of course I had to go back and check.

I went at dusk because I knew all the hillwalkers would have gone home by then. Because it was dangerous to be out in the Wicklow mountains at evening time, when everything was shrouded in the same faint, lovely haze and a bog hole was just one slightly darker patch of heather amongst many.

There’s another reason why it’s dangerous. The Little People.

Calling them ‘The Little People’ always irritated me. ‘Little’ maybe - and even that’s a moot point, because you’re applying criteria that’s largely meaningless, something that’ll become all too obvious in a minute. But people? Give me a break.

I mean, I know the drill. The first rule is: never discuss them with tourists – how they actually exist. Leprechauns and so on, the stuff of greeting cards and craftshops: peddling that sort of nonsense is perfectly OK, because it’s such obvious rubbish – even though all those stories about man’s dealings with the fairies captures something of their essential disposition; their malice.

The second rule is: don’t let them wind you up. That’s the important one. You get caught out on a mountainside or in the middle of a bog around dusk, chances are they’ll find you.

Just how dangerous are they? Well, being largely intangible themselves, their appetities are equally esoteric. Any intense emotion can have them swarming around you like a shoal of pirhanas. That’s why they’re so good at screwing with your head. They have to be. They need to get you angry or scared or horny in order to eat. And the pickings can be pretty thin, out here in the lonely Wicklow hills. So maybe not that dangerous. Or so I’ve always told myself. Until now.

Anyway. I set off late like I said, deliberately, and well aware of the dangers. I knew the route and I was careful. And when I started to catch little flickers of movement out of the corner of my eye, I put my head down and focussed firmly on the ground in front of me. Don’t look up. That’s what I kept telling myself.

Declan was my friend. We were a funny pair. Me, the captain of the local Rugby team. Declan thin and fussy and a computer programmer to boot. I reckon we were more alike than people realised, despite how different we looked. Declan would have gone back and checked too, for example.

We’d made it as far as the semi-finals when Deasy dropped dead on the pitch. I think Declan already suspected something was up by then, that there was something odd about our sudden, mysterious improvement over a few mere months. And Declan knew me. Knew I had no conscience when it came to winning. Whatever it takes. That’s always been my motto. I’d been out for a walk that Saturday and he’d picked me up. He wanted to climb Camaderry. On impulse I’d agreed. He’d been really quiet in the car. For most of the walk. When the pills fell out of my pocket – I’d been trying to jump across a particular nasty bit of bog – he hadn’t even reacted. That was when I guessed he already knew the truth – that there was a reason why he’d offered me that lift, suggested this walk.

He’d shared his lunch with me. Then, swigging from his bottle of Lucozade, he gave me a choice – turn myself in or he’d report me himself. He hadn’t even looked at me. Just stared across that valley (the faint grey gleam of the lake way over to our left) – which is why he never saw me pick up that rock, then swing it through the air with every ounce of strength I could muster.

I was lucky. He toppled over sideways, unconscious. He was still breathing when I checked: snuffling and groaning but still breathing. I had to hit him a few more times. Once I knew he was dead, I dragged him under the very same rock we’d both been sitting on, being careful to take off that red windcheater first. In the end, I had to lie on my back and push him those last few feet with both legs.

I can’t say I was looking forward to peering under that slab of granite, peering into the shadows and seeing his body again, grey and dead and curled up in that unnatural position. So no wonder my heart started to pitter-patter. I was nearly there by then, and the squirming half-formed shapes that I kept glimpsing out of the corner of my eye seemed to have increased in number, as if they’d sensed my trepidation.

Only when I finally did look up, Declan was sitting on top of that rock. Sitting and grinning at me, hands in the pockets of that bloody windcheater, knees covered in muck. Sitting there and grinning at me. That grin was neither friendly nor unfriendly. It was more as if the joke was on me.

And at that exact second I caught my right ankle in a small, deep hole that seemed to have been expressly designed to enclose a human foot. And even as I fell forwards I could hear the sharp crack as it broke.

That wasn’t all I heard. Something echoed briefly through my head, like the low susurration of laughter, high-pitched and malicious. And of course when I looked up again, there was no Declan. There never had been.

We only ever refer to the little people obliquely. You can only ever deduce what theories others have about them. Like that they’re not really all that bright – that their intelligence is our own, bounced back at us. That the voices you hear in your head are simply your brain’s way of translating strange, alien emotions. Only there and then I knew this was nonsense, just like I knew it had been no coincidence I’d seen that vision of Declan exactly when I was most likely to loose my balance.

And of course when I checked my phone there was no signal. Surprise, surprise.

The pain’s pretty bad. But I’m more concerned about what will happen after dark. It’s mid-October, the end of an unseasonably mild, sunny day, but I know the night will be cold. The sky above is absolutely clear. Absolutely pitiless.

They start as a flicker of movement, always on the periphery of your vision. Then they grew in confidence, drifting directly out in front of you, no more tangible than specks on your eyeball at first, but with just the faintest suggestion of luminosity. I reckon this luminosity is largely a matter of context: in this gathering gloom the faintest glow can seem almost blinding. And whenever I take out my phone and turn it on – to scare them off, to write this, my final confession - the radiance it emits is a thousand times more dazzling.

When my thumb gets sore I stop, the phone’s light dwindles accordingly and it seems like they’re everywhere. Great, semi-invisible swarms of them. Like fireflies. Look at one long enough and it brightens and drifts towards me, its shape constantly mutating in tune to my thoughts: a tiny Tinkerbell, a moth, a grinning, floating imp, each shape no more constant than smoke.

‘Hi.’ It’s Declan’s voice. Only it’s coming from somewhere inside my head. He sounds vague, almost dreamy, very unlike his usual self yet I know it’s him.

No. That’s impossible. It’s some sort of trick. It has to be.

‘Nah. It’s not a trick, man.’

He’s not trying to reassure me. Far from it.

I realise now why this place is swarming with them. They’ve been drawn here by my crime: by the anger and fear that caused me to kill my best friend. And so they can feast on Declan’s essence – whatever was once Declan’s ‘soul’ and which lingered in that dead body long enough to attract them and be absorbed by them, the Declan that still lives after a fashion, despite being dispersed through countless tiny hungry ethereal forms.

The Declan who’s still alive enough to appreciate the poetic irony that I’ll soon be sharing the same fate as him. Because there’s another reason, a third reason, why they’re gathering in such numbers.

The chance of fresh food.