The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

VI

In Which We Are Reunited with Some Old Friends, and Keep a Close Watch on Our Wallets

THE CITIZENS OF BIDDLECOMBE woke one morning to find the windows of Wreckit & Sons blacked out. From inside the store came sounds of drilling and hammering, but nobody knew what construction company was in charge, and no one was seen either entering or leaving the building. But the work went on, day and night, and from somewhere in the depths of the store orders were placed for dolls, and games, and model trains.

The rumor was that Wreckit & Sons was about to reopen as a toy shop.

• • •

Sometimes, Dan wondered if he was right to be so upbeat all of the time. He had always had a sunny disposition. If life gave him bruised fruit, he made jam. The glass was always half full, even when it wasn’t, because Dan would get down on his knees and squint at it from a funny angle until it appeared fuller than it was. Even if there was no glass at all, Dan assumed this was only because someone had taken it away to fill it up again. If he had been told that the world was ending tomorrow, Dan would have shrugged his shoulders and waited patiently for something to turn up to prevent it from happening. The asteroid that was about to destroy the Earth could have been visible as a flaming ball in the sky and Dan would have had a scone ready on the end of a fork so he could toast it without switching on the toaster.

Lately, though, it had been hard for Dan to keep a smile on his face. He had been a happy undertaker for many years¹⁸ but had grown tired of having nobody to talk to. (Well, he did have people to talk to, but they didn’t answer back, and even Dan might have been a bit concerned if they had started to.) He had then bought an ice-cream van on the grounds that he had always liked ice cream, and lots of other folk liked ice cream, too, and therefore he was likely to spread good cheer by selling it to them while his chimes played “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” over and over. At the very least, it was likely that people would buy his ice cream just so that he would move on and they wouldn’t have to listen to “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” any longer.

Unfortunately for Dan, he and his ice-cream van had been dragged to Hell and, although both had returned, the van had been considerably the worse for wear when it got back, and Dan’s insurance didn’t cover unexpected trips to Hell. But, as always, something had turned up. Actually, four of them had turned up: Jolly, Dozy, Angry, and Mumbles, known collectively as Mr. Merryweather’s Elves, or Mr. Merryweather’s Dwarfs, or by whatever name the police were NOT looking for them at any particular moment in time. Currently, they were known as Dan’s Dwarfs, which had seemed like a good idea, Mr. Merryweather having abandoned the dwarfs for a number of reasons, but mostly because he hated them.

So now Dan drove the dwarfs round in a very old van, and tried to find them work. And keep them sober. And stop them from stealing. All of which was a lot harder than it sounded, and it already sounded quite hard.

Today, Dan’s Dwarfs were on their way to the grand opening of Honest Ed’s¹⁹ Used Car Showrooms just outside the town of Biddlecombe. Why Honest Ed felt that a quartet of surly dwarfs would help him sell more dodgy cars was unclear, but Dan took the view that his was not to reason why, but just to take the money and run before something bad happened, which, when the dwarfs were involved, it usually did.

This was why, as Dan drove the dwarfs to their latest job in his rattling van, he was wondering if you could really continue to be upbeat when you were responsible for four dwarfs who appeared set on proving that good things did not always come in small packages.

“Lot of traffic today,” said Jolly, who often wasn’t.

“It’s moving fast, though,” said Angry, who often was.

“Anyone in a car that’s moving fast mustn’t have bought it from Honest Ed,” said Dozy, who often was as well. “His cars are so old, they come with a bloke to walk in front of them waving a red flag.”²⁰

“Nwarglesput,” said Mumbles, which is self-explanatory.

“Listen, lads,” said Dan. “Let’s not have any trouble, right? We go in, we dance around the cars, we look happy, we collect the check, and we leave. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.”

“What do you mean ‘we’?” said Angry. “You’re not going to be dancing around in a funny hat, only us. There’s no dignity to it.”

“There’s fifty quid each to it,” said Dan.

“I suppose so,” said Angry. “It’s still no job for a grown man.”

“You’re not a grown man,” said Dan. “That’s the point. If you were a grown man, they wouldn’t be paying you to dance around a car showroom wearing a hat with bells on it and a shirt that says ‘Honest Ed’s Cars—the Lowest Prices Around!’ ”

“We’re not actually low,” said Jolly. “We’re small. There’s no reason why we should be wearing shirts advertising low prices. Small prices maybe, but not low ones.”

“You’re small and low,” said Dan. “You’re low to the ground. Can you reach things on high shelves without standing on chairs? No. So you’re low.”

“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.