The Gremlins

The city was burning. Whole quarters stood ablaze and dense clouds of smoke filled the cabin of the plane. Currents of hot air and explosions of anti-aircraft shells threw the heavy bomber in all directions. Strings of flak criss-crossed in mid-air, making a colourful web.

But Elmo didn't see it; he could only feel the jerks of the plane. Machine gun bullets and small splinters rattled on the plates; the engine roared and wind screamed in the holes, creating an infernal cacophony. Squeezed into the narrow space of the engine's gondola, he was desperately trying to connect two pieces of broken pipe, which spluttered precious oil. Finally the ends joined and he fastened them together. Crawling beside the crankshaft to patch bullet holes, he preferred not to think about all the hot, flammable liquids around. Oil burns from normal cooking were more than enough for him. He was bending a broken piece of metal into place when a jet of light of light from the hole stabbed his eyes.

"Shit!"

The powerful beam of a searchlight broke through the smoke and flooded the cockpit with a blue-white light. The Pilot pulled a tight turn, but the beam followed, and with it streams of tracers. The huge machine swayed left and right trying to escape the barrage, but it was coming from everywhere. The plane shivered feverishly when splinters rapped on its wings.

The boy woke up from a dream, where people screamed for help, flying through a great emptiness full of blasts and flashes. He was trembling and afraid to sleep again, lest the horror return.

"Elmo!"

He waited for the familiar 'pop!'

"Elmo?"

Nothing happened. Nobody appeared at his bed to soothe him, give him warm milk and talk him back to sleep.

"Elmo? Where are you?"

For a moment he felt panic creeping from the darkness around. Elmo was gone, there was nobody around; he was left alone with the screaming people in the burning city. Then he heard voices. Gathering all his courage he crept out of the bed, found his slippers and walked towards them through the dark corridors.

It was his parents, not yet asleep, although it must have been very late. They didn't notice him standing in the door of the living room. His mother sat on the sofa, tapping the handrest impatiently. His father was at the door to verandah, looking into the night.

Far above the sea a Muggle machine, all the lights on, was coming to land.

"Is it Elmo's plane?" his mother looked towards the airfield.

Fabio was going back to bed before his parents noticed him. But at the sound of that name he sneaked in and curled up in the armchair. He had to learn where was Elmo and he was sure they wouldn't tell him if he asked. Lately there were many things they didn't want to talk about. Like noisy machines flying above their house. Or things which looked like small houses, but without the windows and with the chimneys sticking in front, instead of the top of the roof, crawling on the roads, making a horrible clanking noise. He asked about them, but his parents always evaded his questions.

"Too early for them. Must be a flight to Yugoslavia. He's gone to Warsaw tonight."

The blast blinded and deafened him for a second, and he smelt first petrol and then smoke. The whole front part of the engine was ablaze, flames fuelled by a thin stream gushing from a cut pipe. The plane tilted to the starboard and dived, trailing a forty-foot tail of fire. Elmo tried to reach and seal the pipe, but the heat was too strong and pushed him away, tearful and half-suffocated. For a half a second he stood immobile among the toxic fumes, and then he squeezed into the wing as fast as possible.

"Number Three on fire! Gas off!" The Engineer engaged the extinguishers.

"Feathered! Help me! I can't straighten her!"

The Engineer opened the full throttle of the Number Four, reduced One and Two to balance the lost power and grabbed the wheel to help the Pilot.

"Number Three still burning -- must be oil!"

"Extinguish it!"

"Can't! The wires must be cut! The pressure's on, but valves won't work!"

"Screw the Three! Help me pull! I can't trim her, the flaps are blocked!"

The plane listed to the right, like a partridge with a broken wing.

"Must be a splinter!"

Swallowing tears, Fabio climbed from attic room window, dragging a woollen blanket. He reached the comfortable nook and sat down, wrapping himself in the blanket, just like Elmo used to tuck him when he went to bed. Only then did he start to really cry. Often before, he used to climb here and watch the planes taking off and landing.

The view over the airfield and the sea was impressive, but he had eyes only for two long, dimly lit roads, on which yet another machine was landing, a four-engine bomber, its fans whining painfully. He knew it was called a bomber, the neighbours' boy had told him. From him Fabio heard the word "doom" for the first time and the boy showed him a book where it was explained.

Always more planes started than came back -- and now he knew why. The planes went to a place of doom. Elmo was in one of those planes and he didn't want Elmo to be doomed. But he knew that where his elf went there were fires and darkness and gnashing of the teeth.

He had been there.

He was going to wait.

It was not a splinter.

Elmo hung upside down from a large, jagged hole under the wing and desperately wished it had been a splinter and not an unexploded 20 mm shell. He didn't want to think about what would happen to his hand if it went off, but his imagination fed him all the details anyway. No, he wasn't crying, it was the wind squeezing the tears out of his eyes. Clenching his teeth, he willed his fingers (they were his only ones; crooked as they were, he was very fond of them) to touch the thing. When he tried to yank it free, the hot surface burned his skin. He felt the fire sparking inside; willing all his power to squash it, he tore the shell from the flap and dropped it immediately. It fell into darkness and exploded unnoticed among the thousands of other balls of fire. But he didn't look for it; he was already back inside the wing and patching the holes in the fuel tanks.

"Thank God!" The Pilot pulled the wheel back, centring the plane, which, relieved of the great right-wing drag, swerved to the left.

"Number Two is overheating," said the Engineer before trying to switch the extinguishers again. They didn't work, but he kept trying, flipping the switch again and again, his other hand regulating the power in the remaining three engines. Number Three still trailed long flames.

"I'm hit! I'm hit!" screamed the Rear Gunner over the intercom.

"I'll get him," said the Navigator.

"We'll have to fly over the Soviets."

"But we aren't allowed to!" the Engineer looked towards the dark right bank of the river punctuated only by an occasional light.

"I don't give a damn. We can't fly here either. And do something about this fire!"

"I'm trying! Will they shoot at us?"

"Pray they won't."

The Bomber had been doing just this for the last few minutes. Lying in his glass gondola in the nose of the plane, he saw all these streams of flak fire, all heading up to kill him, as if he was the most important person in the world. Yet the dark right bank of Vistula, where a huge army stood immobile, waiting for the inevitable massacre of the uprising, seemed to him even more menacing. The river sharply separated the fighting and the burning city on the western side from the almost calm and peaceful areas to the east.

The man who entered the house was very tall. He looked old, his steps slow and shuffling. He was wearing a Muggle-style black overcoat, silver patches on the collar, stained and torn at the bottom. He passed Fabio without even glancing at him and went into boy's father's study, his muddy boots leaving a trail of dirt on the Bukhara carpet.

Fabio wanted to peek at the strange man, but his mother, obviously distressed by the arrival, hushed him away. He went upstairs, pretended to go to play in the attic, and then came down the servants' staircase. He had to stoop, because he was already taller than an average elf, but it was still his favourite route. He sneaked through the kitchens, putting a finger to his lips before Elmo could ask anything, and he hid in the bushes under the study's windows.

"What is it, Albus?" Fabio's father sounded worried.

There was a prolonged silence.

"You haven't found any new information about Grindelwald?"

Silence.

"You did?"

After yet another long pause the other man finally spoke . "Worse."

"You've found traces of his... experiments?"

"I was blind."

There was a long silence.

"I should have known better. I, who pride myself on my Muggle knowledge...."

"There's hardly a Pureblood, who knows more than you about..."

The man snorted. "If I wanted to know, I would. Thirty years ago, during the great war, did I go to see? No, I was happily sheltered in my laboratory, distilling dragon serum. In the twenties, I was going all over the Urals following Ridgebacks. Did I spare a thought for the war which was going on there? No. In 1936..."

"Albus, stop it. Self-accusations won't get you anywhere. You have task only you can do and..."

"And now you are talking like a bloody politician. By Jove, as if I heard the Minister: 'Albus, all the resources of European Ministries are tied up in preventing the Muggleborns from meddling in the war. We can give you assistance, unofficially of course, but there's nobody else who can stop Grindelwald. I implore you, blah blah....'"

There was a sound of steps and of a cabinet opened. Then something was put on the table with a hollow thud.

"Throw it out of you, Albus. Than come back to it calmly. But for now, don't let it eat at you, whatever it is."

After a long while, Fabio gathered enough courage to peek from the bushes into the room. From his vantage point, he could just see the head and shoulders of the auburn-bearded man. He was pacing to and fro, looking but not seeing anything. Then he brought his wand to his temple. The boy squeezed his eyes shut, sure that something horrible would happen. But when he opened them again, he still saw the pacing man, occasionally reaching to his head, pulling a silvery thread with his wand and dropping it down. Fabio watched, amazed, till the gong sounded lunch.

The valves clicked and the stream of cold gas threw Elmo aside, covering him with thin frozen flakes which stung his ears before they evaporated in the heat of the fire. His lungs, burnt by acrid smoke, welcomed the clear and cold air, but the relief was false, as relief usually is. Suffocated, he collapsed in the narrow bay, his nose just an inch away from the hot exhaust pipes.

"Yes! Yes! Hallelujah! Dear old auntie!" the Engineer was ecstatic, seeing Number Three finally free from flames. There wasn't so much to be happy about, as they flew over friendly-but-not-really territory: the plane resembled a sieve, the Rear Gunner, doped with a heavy dose of morphine, was slowly bleeding to death, and of the four engines only two were working properly. And the oil pressure was dropping.

"Gremlins," murmured the Pilot, trying to keep the plane on course. "The fighter boys are always talking about them. Keeping engines alive. We have them too, so it seems."

"Gremlins or no gremlins, the extinguishers work!"

The next thing Elmo saw was a pair of green, fluorescent eyes, staring at him from nose distance.

"You is not to sleep! Masters needs our help! Your engine is not working!"

"Elmo is not sleeping! I is suffocated by the gas!"

"You is not to be suffocated!" Eldrich, the older elf, turned and squeezed towards Number Four. "You can't hear the Four is coughing? I is not to take care of everything!" he disappeared behind the block of the engine, murmuring about lazy Italians.

"Elmo is not lazy! Elmo is a good elf!" snorted Elmo climbing on the hot steel and looking for damage. There wasn't much. Halifaxes were sturdy machines. Of course they needed proper care, and that's why Eldrich came with the squadron from the far-off England to Brindisi. Elmo had never been so far, but now, with the silent agreement of his Masters, he was flying eight hundred feet above even farther lands. Very inhospitable ones, as the bullet-holes proved.

There was hardly any talk during the lunch. The guest ate in silence, gloomily shovelling orecchiette with broccoli into his mouth. Fabio's mother excused herself before dessert; the guest didn't pay any attention. He collected a carafe of grappa from the tray and went to his room. The boy's father sighed and asked for his coffee to be brought to the patio where he was going to write some important letters.

Only Elmo was still cheerful, so Fabio went to the kitchens, where he ate a second helping of the dessert and listened to the elf's chattering.

"Of course Elmo knows Master Dumbledore, everybody knows Master Dumbledore, he is a very famous Wizard and a very kind Master. He always is nice to Elmo and Elmo likes Master Dumbledore very much. Young Master Fabio must be nice to Master Dumbledore, becau..."

"He has funny accent."

"Master Dumbledore is English, young Master Fabio. It is very far to the North and Elmo has never been there, but Master Rodolfo and Mistress Loretta were there before the Muggles started the war."

"Do you want to go abroad? I want to! I want to see dragons and Snorkacks. Maybe I will travel like Dumbledore. He travels a lot, doesn't he?"

"Elmo is not knowing, Young Master, Elmo never asked Master Dumbledore, but Elmo heard Master Dumbledore is now following Dark Wizard Grindelwald. Master Dumbledore is very brave and good Master."

"Grindelwald?

"Very evil Wizard." Elmo shuddered, closing his eyes in fear. "Elmo is afraid to speak his name."

"We'll make another approach from the north," said the Pilot.

"On three engines?"

"I flew here to drop the supplies and I'll drop them. In the worst case, we'll try to crash-land among the Soviets. They haven't shot at us."

"So far," murmured the Engineer, trying to trim the engines. Number Two's temperature was still rising, but slowly enough.

"I'll man the turret," said the Navigator through the intercom.

"How's the Gunner?"

"Stable. Unconscious."

The plane made a wide turn and headed south toward the fires and flak.

"Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate," murmured the Navigator, who before the war finished classical lyceum and had planned to study Quattrocento painting. He started to make his way through the wobbling plane, towards the end of the tail.

Number Four was working well so Eldrich joined Elmo in his work to restore the Three to life. For all the English elf's grumbling, Elmo was a fast learner, and even though it was only his second real flight, he had a good grasp of what was necessary to keep the huge Merlin engine alive. Old fashioned Cleaning Charms were doing great work with removing remains of burnt oil and the Filling Charm -- usually used for filling the cracks in old mahogany tables -- needed only slight modification to be used for replacing cracked insulation. Small, fast hands spread the oil over the turbines as fast as they spread the wax on the oaken floors. The work was good and Masters needed them.

Fabio tiptoed through the siesta-calm house. The door to his father study was ajar. He sneaked in, careful not to touch the lion-head shaped knob, also napping, whistling gently through its nose. It would for sure raise an alarm, as always, when somebody tried to get in without permission.

In the middle of his father's large desk stood a stone bowl. Fabio climbed on the chair and leaned across the table. The liquid in the bowl emitted a faint silvery light, moving ceaselessly. It looked like clouds running across the sky. Fascinated, he reached and pulled the bowl towards himself. The surface of the liquid swirled and a small wave leaped and touched his hand.

The world whirled around him, something pulled him, he was falling, flying. He dropped to his feet, stumbled and righted himself. There was eerie silence around, punctuated by the repeated, muffed bangs.

".... you've nothing to do here. Go away, I'm telling you."

He jumped back, startled. He knew adults didn't like children who sneaked upon them. And he certainly was not invited to come along. Come where? He realised he had never seen that city and didn't know the man, who was speaking. He knew the other one, their guest, standing just at arm's length, stroking his beard meditatively. None of the men paid any attention to his sudden appearance.

"There are no dark Wizards any more for you to fight. There are no Wizards at all in this city. Rats are off the ship, Albus. Those people," he waved towards the figures scurrying around, "are all doomed. I will soon seal myself off with my books and let the world burn. I'll give it four days, no more."

"So you don't know..."

"Grindelwald was last here half a year ago. He won't come back. Go away now. And stay off Wola. You may not be able to stop from interfering and then your mission will be endangered."

There was a flash of cold, a painful squeeze, and then the darkness spat him out into a blinding and deafening cacophony. He saw Dumbledore transfiguring his clothing into a kind of uniform and realized that what he had just experienced must have been an Apparation. Disoriented, he lost a second and had to trot to catch up with the older man's long stride. A group of people got into his way, herded by armed men with Asiatic faces. He stumbled on a window lying in the middle of the pavement. The people, armed and unarmed alike, didn't seem to notice him at all. He stood there, in the middle of a road strewn with broken furniture, books, clothing, pots and tons of other rubbish. There was shouting and wailing and the bang of shooting. The air stank of fear and hate. A growling machine crawled through the litter, its iron caterpillars crushing everything to pieces, going straight at him, the driver not caring about a small boy in his way. The threat shook him back to reality and he ran after Dumbledore, who was just entering a large building on the other side of the road.

The stench was overwhelming. The whole room was full of bodies, some on beds, more on the floor, on planks, doors, or straight on the concrete. They were all bandaged, red stained rags everywhere. A lonely doctor was struggling with a legless patient who got fits; a walking wounded was tending his companion, offering him water by a teaspoonful.

A bunch of soldiers barged in. Two of them dragged the nurse away, one pulled a watch from a blinded man's hand. Another one kicked the doctor away and brought the butt of his rifle down on the spasming patient's head. The brains splashed the walls. The fits stopped.

An officer pushed past Dumbledore and shouted something. The soldiers ran away and another, more disciplined group came in, carrying hay and straw, which they started to throw around.

They were coming back and the artillery was waiting for them, shooting everything. The plane zigzagged according to the directions given by the Bomber, who, native to the city, was able to spot the outlines of the streets even in the heaps of burning ruins.

"Left a bit! Straight ahead! Open the bomb bay!"

Now the Pilot could see their target, the darker rectangle of Napoleon Square, illuminated only by a cross made of burning tar barrels. He dove to four hundred feet. Here the heat and stench of the city aflame was even more intense -- if that was at all possible.

"Containers out! Get us out of here!"

The Pilot pulled the wheel up as the Engineer opened the power throttles and prayed that the engines would hold. The plane bumped on the heat wave and the air cleared for a moment -- offering the German guns an even better target. There were crashes at the nose and the wings. Number Two coughed and its temperature jumped up.

"So we're done," said the Pilot, very calm, almost philosophical.

"We is done," said Eldrich, very calm, and shrugged.

"We is not!" Elmo's keen ears, trained to hear Master's commands across many rooms even during the noisiest parties, caught the unsteady rhythm of the Number Two through the howl of the wind and the blasts of the shells. Before thinking better of it, he Apparated across the fuselage and was welcomed by the intense heat of invisible glycol flames. There was no time for tying the extinguishers' cables and the Rules had been broken already. Elmo's Quick-Deep-Freezer suppressed the fire, and two more charms sealed broken pipes. The engine caught its rhythm again when the cooling liquid started to cool it, instead of burning and adding the heat of its flames.

Desperate, the Engineer ignited Number Three again, his other hand still on the extinguishers' switch. He expected everything, but not the engine kicking to life at the first try and gaining power at once. There was no end of wonders, as the Number Two's temperature suddenly dropped -- must have been an extinguisher going off by itself -- and kept steady revolutions. The plane started to climb, pursued by the fire.

Fabio felt Dumbledore's relief at this small shred of sanity among the madness. Straw was not much, but at least those heavily wounded would not have to lie on the floor. They went outside, sidestepping sprawled bodies, walked down the street, passed the small herd of leg-bloodied women, shoved off the way with bayonets by two soldiers. The Wizard avoided looking into their eyes. He stopped and leant against the villa's gate. Fabio stood nearby, clutching to the last familiar thing around. It was unbelievably strange feeling, looking at the unfolding scenes and not seeing them, blocking the shouts and smells...

In front of them a girl fell down the stairs on the other side of the road. Panicking, she got up, but tumbled again, her ankle broken. A soldier pushed her mother from behind. The woman bent to pick her child, so he kicked her down and thrust the barrel at her neck. Dumbledore had his wand out of his pocket before Fabio even thought about it, but a hand clapped down on Wizard's arm.

"Professor, wir brauchen keine weitere Katastrophe, oder?"

The young man, who was not there a second before, had eyes like small puddles of blue ice. His cleanly shaved face was a stark contrast with stains on his patterned uniform. They stayed frozen for a second and then young Auror shook his head, almost imperceptibly. Dumbledore finally averted his eyes. He glanced over the wreckage, over the now dead girl, and then a group of young men caught his attention. They were dismantling a large wooden fence and walking away under escort, each carrying his own plank. He stared at the queer procession long enough for the Auror to provide him an explanation.

"So verbrennen die Leichen besser."

"The corpses will burn better?" repeated Dumbledore, puzzled.

Cracking woods in the fire, oddly familiar picture of family outing flashed through Fabio's mind. They put leaves into fire and straw, too... Straw?

From the hospital building the wind brought a soft "poof". And than the screams.

"Never, never again pop! in my plane," hissed Eldrich, his usually green eyes pink with fury. He had just climbed through the central wing back to the Number Two and found Elmo trembling with the realization of what he had just done. "If you is lost from the plane, I is not caring! But if you pops! into the engine it is destroyed! I do not allow you to destroy my plane!"

"It is my plane, too!" Elmo recovered from his fright and started tying up broken wires.

"Then learn how to treat her well! Stupid elf! Quick-Freeze could stop the oil flow, you goblin!"

"It was Eldrich's engine I saved!"

"Only because I had to tend yours when you was sleeping!" barked Eldrich, tightening screws on the gearbox.

"Elmo was not sleeping! If it wasn't for Elmo, we would be down already! Eldrich is bad elf! Not Elmo!"

The other elf snorted and crawled below to check for splinter damage. Elmo traced oil leaks at the supercharger and spent the next half-hour plugging them and thinking unkind thoughts about Eldrich.

We may still make it, thought the Pilot, but he did not say it aloud. Better let sleeping dogs lie. The Navigator would probably want to have it in Latin. Canis dormant numquam…? He forgot the verb for 'wake up'. It didn't matter, the grammar most likely was all wrong, anyway.

"What's up with the Bomber?" he asked the Engineer, who came back from the nose of the plane.

"Dead. Shot straight in the chest. I let him lie as he is; he's plugging a big hole in the glass."

"What about the Gunner?"

"Still alive," said the Wireless Operator over the intercom. "I checked on him a minute ago."

"What about the plane?"

"Small holes everywhere in the midsection. Otherwise, seems okay."

"The same for the tail," said the Navigator, "we've lost some tin from the rudder, though."

"There's a large hole in the port wing, just before Number Three," said the Engineer, "but all the engines work well. Bah, I'd even say the performance is improving. Number Two temperature dropped to almost normal."

"Gremlins, I'm telling you," murmured the Pilot. "Spark, go up in the turret and relieve the Navigator. I want him to check the course."

"Sure."

The Pensieve regurgitated him. He got up from the floor, where he had fallen, went for the door, stumbled on carpet and made it his room. The screams were still still in his ears when he fell on his bed. And when he smelled the familiar wool, another memory came to him -- the stink, the stench of doom.

It was Elmo who found him an hour later, stiff in foetal position on his bed, fouled and covered with vomit, delirious with high temperature. He had over 40 degrees for five days and no potion could lower it; he was raving, babbling about things nobody understood, about hay and screams, and wooden sticks. They thought he had a flu or that he was jinxed, and they took turns staying at his bed.

On the sixth night he awoke and saw a large pair of greenish eyes. The elf signalled him to be quiet and put a glass of juice to his lips. He sipped slowly, too weak to hold the glass himself. His father sat sprawled in the armchair on the other side, asleep, his chin resting on his breast. He looked so peaceful and homely after what seemed like an eternity of nightmares, that Fabio wanted to crawl to him and lay in his lap. But he was too weak, so he allowed Elmo to tuck him in and for the first time in days he slept without nightmares.

But they kept coming.

Now it was more a month and a week since he looked into Dumbledore's Pensieve. He didn't know what happened in between, why Elmo was allowed to help the Muggles. But he knew he had to sit on the roof and wait to check if his elf comes back.

The plane flew south, all the engines singing in unison as if they had just left the plant. Both elves sat in the Number Three gondola, having made an unspoken and uneasy truce. The wind whistled through the holes and the wings trembled delicately, as their originally smooth surface in many places resembled a munched saw. An hour passed and nothing happened, save for a small leak of glycol in Number Four and another one of oil in Number One. Eldrich checked the landing gear pneumatics and pronounced them FUBAR, which to Elmo's ears was a sure sign he'd been hanging out with the Muggles far too long. Cold night air mixing with the engines' heat produced an almost comfortable temperature and Elmo would really have dozed off, if he hadn't known he had to be aware of any change in the engines' murmur. So he sat, listening attentively and nursing his hand, burned on the German shell.

It wasn't really the Operator's fault, even though he should have noticed the darker shape just above their machine. But it was his first combat flight and he had never before sat in the gun turret. The Navigator, better skilled in that role, was still charting their position. So the night fighter pilot dove unobserved towards his big prey, aimed carefully and fired a short burst, which killed the Pilot and the Engineer on the spot and changed the Halifax from a majestic bomber into a plummeting coffin. For a moment flames illuminated a tiny chequerboard below the cockpit windows and large letters "GR" on the fuselage. The fighter pilot told his radio operator to put it down in the flight notes and turned towards his base.

Two pops! and the crash of breaking branches frightened a family of foxes. Hidden in their burrow, they didn't see two small creatures getting up unsteadily from the broken twigs. The pair stood and listened to the sound of their plane's engines, still working beautifully, only propelling the machine faster and faster towards the ground. Then the faraway explosion stopped everything.

"You ish not to crhy!" barked Eldrich, bleeding copiously from his long nose. Strange that it was still so long, as he broke it in every crash. "We hrave to pop!pop! hrome at onshe! Mashtersh ish waiting!"

"Elmo is not crying," said the other elf, and snorted loudly. He wiped his eyes with his burnt hand. The other one was useless, all three joints dislocated. "She was such a good plane."

"You shtay with 138th Shquadron longer, you'll shee more like hrer," said Eldrich climbing on the tree stump to Disapparate. He knew what he was talking about -- it was his sixth plane shot. "And now follow me. We ish to be back at Brhindishi ash shoon ash poshible."

"Sure," murmured Elmo rebelliously, but he knew the older elf was right. They had to go. Masters needed them.

Above them, a small kobold nodded off, lulled by the constant rhythm of his fighter engines.