“Oh, well done, Holmes!” I shouted in a squeaky, tiny voice. “How long has this been here?”
“Well, it worked, didn’t it?” he countered, then threw the covers up around his chin, turned to the wall and loudly moaned, “Oh! Oh! The fever! And also, something about oysters!”
I could hear Mrs. Hudson escorting Smith through our front door but, curious as I was about the day’s main adventure, I had other concerns. The realm I found myself in was utterly strange. Huge boulders of dust and hair lay everywhere. Holmes seemed to have dropped an impressive collection of dishes back here—none of them very clean. The shrinking effect had spared these inorganic components, leaving me in a strange forest of plates, which, from my diminished perspective seemed to be several hundred feet high and covered in precariously balanced crusts of discarded toast that might easily fall and crush me.
Oh, and apparently, we owned a cat. “We”, I say, because it was clear she’d been back here long enough to have gone feral. She seemed to be of proper cat size to me, which is to say she must have been absolutely itty-bitty. She had a gray coat, that muscular but uncared-for look of a stray that lived by what it could hunt, and the eyes of a killer. She regarded me with open distaste. I think she could have simply stepped from behind Holmes’s bed at any time and rejoined the world of reasonably sized creatures, but the fact I hadn’t seen her before testified that she never had. And why would she, really? It was clear she was queen of this strange domain. Though there was sufficient toast-and-soup waste to sustain her for many years, her main source of nutrition was plain: the shrinking magic seemed to have had no effect on the local dust mites. Several of their semi-translucent corpses lay all around—bigger than my foot and possessed of an alien countenance that horrified me to my core. Me, but clearly not the cat, for the shattered carapaces that lay on all sides testified that she must have slain thousands of them.
I decided I’d call her Dusty.
I was just about to make a peace overture of some kind, when she suddenly hissed and leapt up onto a discarded crust of bread. An instant later, I discovered why: as Hudson led Smith back through the hall, the floor bucked and pitched sickeningly. I had never considered what footsteps must feel like when you’re less than a quarter-inch tall, but it turns out they’re quite awful. I just caught an accusatory sneer on Dusty’s face, as if to say, “It’s normally your footsteps that do this, you know,” before she scrambled up the toast crust onto a pillow Holmes had dropped back there, and disappeared into a dark crevice.
That explains why she didn’t like me, I suppose.
No sooner had she gone than all the local dust mites came to meet their new neighbor. They scuttled forth in their hundreds, waving their little antennae as if to say, “Oh! Hello. What are you? You don’t have exoskeleton all over you. How interesting. You’re all soft. Say, are you made of protein? You look like you’re made of protein. That’s quite fortunate, really. Are you going to die back here? You should die back here. Then we’ll eat your soft protein body. Do you think it will take long? Maybe too long? Would it be easier if we just swarmed you and carried you off? We could do that, if you want. Look how many of us there are! Would that be easier? It would, wouldn’t it? Sure. Okay, new friend, here we come!”
Fortunately for me, Culverton Smith had reached Holmes’s bedside by then, and Mrs. Hudson had been dismissed. Now that the horrible footsteps no longer shook our world so badly, the Battle Queen of the Land Behind Holmes’s Bed was ready to reclaim her right. Like a furry lightning bolt, Dusty streaked over my shoulder, yowling a terrible war cry. What fools the mites had been, to show themselves so clearly and in such tight formation! She landed amongst them with the sickening crunch of breaking exoskeletons, her teeth and claws tearing into insectoid flesh. They gave forth a collective squeal of fear and pain, running this way and that. It took only a moment. There I stood with both hands clutched over my mouth, trying to keep from screaming, as the flood of see-through monsters fled back to the cracks between the floorboards. Finally, my heart still in my throat, I managed to softly croak, “Umm… yes… thank you, Dusty.”
She ignored me and crunched contentedly on a still-twitching, chitinous leg.
Nor was she the only individual in the room who was feeling rather pleased with themselves. Towering high above me, Culverton Smith touched his fingertips together and laughed, “Dear me, Mr. Holmes! Was it only three days ago we met? And look at you now. How changed I find you! Ha, ha! How changed!”
From the bed, Holmes moaned, “So hard on the outside, but on the inside: nothing but glop! Are they even creatures? Or just lazy engineering?”
“Oh dear, we’ve reached the oyster-muttering stage already, have we? Your symptoms are quite advanced, Mr. Holmes.”
“I tried to make soup out of them, but what is the point? To throw an oyster into salty water… you might as well just return him home.”
“And is that the bacon-sweats I smell? I fear it is! Oh,
