Ernie is a fidelfel’elf, a creature almost too small for the human eye to see. Fidelfel’elves are wondrous beings of intrigue and mystery; no other life form is as much an enigma as they. Fidelfel’elves go by many different names and have earned their part in many of our bedtime stories – which in itself is quite a feat to be proud of, especially considering most – nay all – humans are completely unaware of their existence beyond that of an irritant and pest.
They have often been called just plain old elves, to the disgust of both races. Elves are always singing and dancing and ‘prancing around like idiots’, while the fidelfel’elves are the exact opposite. Elves are … well, boring, and their distant cousins two hundred and nine thousand times removed – which is a bit hurtful in Ernie’s opinion, surely once is enough? – were anything but.
They have also been called leprechauns and fairies, which is just as absurd. The only gold a fidelfel’elf has to cherish is what lies between their long warty ears, and the only thing that puts them even close to flying is a serious wind problem caused by a diet of epidermal flakes, with a few peanuts thrown in.
No, the few who call them imps are perhaps the closest. Imps and fidelfel’elves are actually close cousins, both races are mischievous and playful; both enjoy a good prank every now and then, and both are incredibly bad tempered when things don’t go their way.
A fidelfel’elf is something that the humans themselves believe to be brainless and irritating. You see, a fidelfel’elf is… a flea. Yes, that’s right. A flea.
However, they take great offence to the whole blood-sucking-through-bites part of the term ‘pest’. What do these humans think they are, errand boys for vampires? Ridiculous! It is true that when a fidelfel’elf grows particularly annoyed by human ignorance, they have been known to bite in the hopes of startling some sense into them, but really, drinking blood? Eugh. Ernie tried it once, but it had taken months of flossing with his human’s hair to get rid of the taste.
Fidelfel’elves actually have a job to do, you see, and just like the rest of us they have their quotas to fill. That’s right; there really is a point to the existence of fleas, incredible, isn’t it?
Fleas: Fictional Liaisons and Enlightening Author Specialists. Perhaps not the most inspiring of titles, but the humans provided the initials to work with. If they happen to bite down a few times … well, who’s going to complain?
Ernie is the best of the best, though this is a reputation that’s quickly slipping through his fingers with his current Chosen. (He has no idea why they are called the Chosen; after all, he doesn’t get to do the choosing. That’s for those higher ups, them with nothing better to do all day but stuff themselves full of peanuts. They claim it’s a subtle process of elimination, but more likely sticking a pin in the phone-book! A more appropriate name in Ernie's opinion would be vile-human-I’m-stuck-with-until-it-sprouts-a-brain, but there are certain niceties to be observed. Politics. You understand.)
The Chosen of the fidelfel’elves are supposed to be a special brand of human, the ones who dwell more in the imagination than in reality – in other words, the ones who sit back and pretend to think all day long. There are millions more fleas than there are humans worthy of being Chosen, but like all races, the fidelfel’elves have their black sheep. Thousands of Ernie’s brothers are a cause for embarrassment, getting drunk on tea and throwing wild parties whilst squatting on any poor animal they find, creatures that have to rely on the incredibly slow humans to evict them. This usually means staying in the same place for months at a time, living it up, as it were. It’s despicable, there are barely enough decent honest fleas left to complete their tasks!
Only the best of thinkers are given humans, but Ernie's saddled with a woman called Clara Murphy. Though an absolute giant to him, she is small as humans go, and embarrassingly shy. She works in a small bookshop buried between Smiths and Waterstones, right in the middle of Manchester, and dreams of the day she will become a writer. All well and good, but have we already mentioned that she’s cripplingly shy?
Allowing strangers to read into the most intimate corners of her imagination is just as agonizing to her as the thought of running down a busy street bare as the day she was born – a thought which Ernie is only too happy to encourage whenever she annoys him. It had taken him months and months of work to get her to the point of writing with the intention of publishing. Unfortunately, his work has only increased since then. All day every day he whispers idea after idea into her twitchy ear; it’s bad enough that the fidelfel’elves are the ones to do all the hard thinking – and it is hard because thinking gives Ernie such terrible headaches – only for their Chosen to just snatch up every idea, form a plot, and call it their own masterpiece!
As a fidelfel’elf and one of the best, it’s his job to ensure that his Chosen doesn’t write a dreadful story that lacks everything but too many words. So many Chosen believe that quantity is better than quality, but no good story is complete without the intervention of a fidelfel’elf. It’s his job to be on hand – or shoulder – at all times so that the ear of the human is close when important plots surface.
And what does he get out of it? Three peanuts an hour and a five hour holiday after every published novel. (The fact that those five hour holidays are always spent by moving from one Chosen to another apparently doesn’t count.)
Mmm... peanuts.
Now after all these months of finally getting her ready to write a story that she can sell, she thinks she’s going to write a flipping romance! Not bloody likely! Romance! He scoffs. If she thinks that he’s going to sit through another mess of lovey-dovey rubbish then she has another thing coming. He knows exactly what she plans to do, but he has ideas of his own, and this time they won’t be ignored.
Ernie’s looking forward to it. All he’s done while Clara has been his Chosen is to sit, think and whisper. He hasn’t interfered with any of her stories because she refused to let others view them, and if she wanted to write for her own reading pleasure, then she could write whatever drivel she pleased. Now that she’s finally decided to write for publication, his role has become a lot more active.
It was every bit as much fun as he had expected it to be.
Whenever Clara wrote something he particularly disliked, Ernie would simply alter it, and by doing so change the entire tone of the story. He was careful to time his alterations so that while she could see herself hitting the right keys on the keyboard, the right words simply wouldn’t reveal themselves. After the twelfth time, she threw up her hands in disgust and sat back to read what had been written.
Clearly she didn’t like what she saw and Ernie’s clever little whispers went ignored yet again, batted aside as if he was a … well, a flea! How dare she!
Whenever things refused to go her way, Clara would stop and go quietly to bed.
You might wonder how a tiny little flea like Ernie could perform any changes; he could hardly leap down from her shoulder to run the marathon of the keyboard (though admittedly he had tried that several times in the past, never once enjoying a second of it), he simply didn’t have enough weight in his entire body to tap down a single key. No, instead he used a standard Fidelfel’Comp X2IC9 black and green with all the latest bugs, as issued from those at the top. His was special because it held the Trojan Horse, whatever that is… something to do with a miniature pony running on a wheel inside the casing to give it power. For some reason, the Trojan Horse didn’t like human computers at all, sending them completely wild with red flashing lights everywhere. It was a powerful and hilarious tool for when the Chosen really incensed the fleas.
The fidelfel’comps are always expertly linked to the Chosen human’s computers; even those at the very top recognised that to rely on a human to write a worthy story all by themselves would be folly. They would never produce saleable material!
The days went on the same way; Clara would return from work and sit eagerly at her computer, her mind abuzz with the thoughts and ideas that had gotten her through the day, then she would write and Ernie would do whatever he had to do to make it readable. Of course, as their fights became more and more frequent, the eagerness each day when she returned home from work began to fade, to be replaced by a strange dread. Ernie watched it with contempt; he would never understand humans.
The Chosen always responded to a certain extent while under the guidance of the fidelfel’elves but Clara Murphy was something else entirely. The very large majority of humans failed to notice anything at all, taking the whisperings to be the workings of their own mind – everyone knew that a writers' mind spoke louder than their mouths, an impressive feat in some cases – but even the few who recognise that something is different merely detect a sudden brilliance to their own thoughts that wasn’t there before. Sometimes, they talk out loud, and fidelfel’elves could hold full conversations with them, though of course they assumed that they were talking to themselves.
Or their God.
But Clara was stubborn, and sharper. She began to notice an edge to the whispers that didn't come from her own mind, and when Ernie spoke, she reacted by slapping her hands over her ears – nearly squashing him in the process – and shouting for the voice to shut up! The indignity! Though of course Ernie did nothing to discourage her fears. Instead, with a wicked grin on his face, he often leapt from one shoulder to the other, whispering in both ears until he was exhausted. It was worth it every time.
Unfortunately, he’d completely underestimated the extent of her paranoia. It seemed he’d found in her a fear worse than running naked down a busy street – fear of an invasion of her mind. She began to notice that the whisperings grew worse whenever she sat down at her computer to write, and so her mistrust and suspicion fell to the poor piece of machinery. Now, Ernie had heard many Chosen make this threat, but none had actually followed through, so when Clara Murphy wrenched the heavy monitor from the desk and lugged it across the room, he could do nothing but stare.
She didn’t even open the window!
The glass shattered spectacularly, the noise sending the poor fidelfel’elf into a state of shock as she sent her hard drive after the monitor, watching it smash into a thousand pieces below. Now he began to wonder if she truly was insane.
She seemed completely calm when she returned to her empty desk and, as Ernie watched, she took out a stack of papers and a pen… and began to write again. The silence following the tantrum was intense, but Ernie was already working it to his advantage. He whispered excitedly in her ear, describing all he had just seen but replacing the computer with one of her characters.
She may have thought herself safe now that she’d rid herself of her haunted computer, but flea technology is much greater than that of humans. He didn’t need to be close to a computer to interfere, and so he tuned his little Fidelfel’Comp to her paper and began to meddle. She fought with him, snarled, even tore up several pieces of paper, but her inevitable defeat was immensely satisfying.
She grabbed for his arm the knife and pulled him close lunged forward, melting into his embrace thrusting the blade into his stomach. She was overcome. He made her feel so beauti- angry, and-
She wrote until her hand cramped but still carried on, and though she saw the changes, though she recognised the complete difference in tone, she continued. She wrote and allowed him to say what he wanted. What she had once hoped to be a beautiful and soppy romance was now a suspenseful horror, and Ernie went all out to make sure it wasn’t lacking in detail. He was bouncing with delight every day at what he was achieving.
Though they continued to write, Ernie made sure to use the time in between to continue his tormenting, just because she had exasperated him so completely these last few months. He became exceptional at imitating other voices and when she turned on her television for some rest, he would lie back and simply practice copying the people on the screen. He’d never had so much fun in his life, and Clara began to hear the voices of humans such as Hannibal Lector, Freddy Krueger, and Michael Myers in her mind. It could have been worse though, he could have been singing! Hmm, now there’s an idea…
The next few months passed favourably for the fidelfel’elf and terribly for his Chosen; eventually he began to take pity on her, and after he'd finally calmed down, he relaxed a little on his tormenting.
Then finally… finally! It was finished. He stared down at the finished manuscript with a thrill that surpassed his usual satisfaction, because this one was all his. A masterpiece! He jumped up and down on her shoulder as she turned the last page from her read-through of the entire novel and punched the air, even if gravity did pack a bigger punch in retaliation. The burst of wind lifted him higher into the air than was natural, but he was too busy laughing to care.
Such was his happiness that he didn’t think anything could ruin it. They had produced saleable material. He could finally leave, move on to a more suitable Chosen and carry on at a quicker pace. He couldn’t wait to be away from her, even if he would miss tormenting her.
However, Clara Murphy was not one to be beaten. She picked up her seven hundred page manuscript, all of which painstakingly written by hand, and smiled the biggest smile he had yet seen.
“I hope you’re watching this.” She muttered out loud as she carried the manuscript over to her microwave, pulled it open, shoved it inside, and turned it on.
Ernie watched with his mouth open wide in disbelief. He leapt from her shoulder and pressed up against the glass of the oven just in time to see all of his hard work, his masterpiece, curl and brown and eventually turn to ash before his eyes.
She’d destroyed it!
She… she’d put him out of a job.
Ernie watched until there was nothing left to see. Distraught, he realised he’s now unemployable. He’d never get another Chosen, but this isn’t the last she’d hear of him! Oh no, she would never find peace again. If she thought she was losing her mind now, it was nothing to what she’d think by the time he was done!
No one got the better of Ernie. No one!
Many writers believe that stories have a mind of their own. Many have tried to put into words the images of their imagination, only to then have it changed completely. Stories go the way that they want to go, many say, but really this is just the intervention of the fidelfel’elves.
PS: No fidelfel’elves were harmed during this story.
PPS: My fidelfel’elf is entirely unimpressed.