01
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Elam
Shemihazah
Mahway
Hahyah
It was ten to midnight on press night, and page forty-six still wouldn’t fit.
Danny Price had cut every adjective he could find. He had cut a whole paragraph about a hotel in Lisbon, which hurt, because it had been a good paragraph. He had tightened the leading, nudged the margins and sacrificed a pull quote, and still the last line of the article hung off the bottom of the page like a man clinging to a cliff.
“Problem?”
Marcus Hale had a way of arriving without making a sound, which should have been impossible for a man his size. Six foot five, built like the second row he’d once played in, with a close-cropped ginger beard and a waistcoat that someone very brave had tailored. He leaned on the top of Danny’s partition with a mug in his hand, and the partition creaked.
“Forty-six,” Danny said. “Overmatter. Eleven words.”
“Cut eleven words.”
“I’ve cut eleven words. Four times.”
Marcus studied the screen over the top of the reading glasses he wore pushed up on his head and never, as far as Danny could tell, actually used. “Then make it smaller.”
That was when Danny remembered the font.
It had been on a scratched CD in the bottom drawer of the desk he’d inherited, labelled in marker pen with a single word: DIMINUENDO. He’d installed it months ago out of curiosity and forgotten all about it. It was beautiful, a narrow, elegant serif that somehow stayed perfectly readable however small you set it. A note in the file said only: For when it absolutely must fit.
He selected the last paragraph, chose Diminuendo, and dropped it half a point.
The words slid neatly up onto the page. And the floor slid up towards Danny.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was more like a lift setting off: a gentle pressure, a little lurch in the stomach. When it passed, his chair seemed deeper than it had been, and his shirt cuffs had crept down over his knuckles.
“That’s better,” said Marcus, who hadn’t noticed a thing. “Now do forty-seven. And the contents page. Eddie’s overset the whole front section again.”
Danny did forty-seven. A point off the captions, half a point off the standfirst. Every time he clicked, the room swelled a little around him. By the time he’d fixed the contents page his feet no longer reached the floor, and he was perched on the front edge of his chair, stretching up to the keyboard like a man reaching for a high shelf.
He should have stopped. He knew that. But the pages fitted, every single one of them, for the first time in three years. And there was something else, something he’d never have admitted to anyone: every time he shrank, Marcus seemed a little more interested.
“You’re doing something different,” Marcus said, at half past midnight. He’d pulled a chair over and sat astride it backwards, arms folded on the backrest, watching Danny the way he watched the rugby. “You look…”
“Tired,” Danny said. His voice had gone up a little. Not much. Enough.
“I was going to say compact.”
By one o’clock the chair was hopeless, so Danny was standing on the desk, and by quarter past he was standing on the keyboard itself, picking his way between keys the size of paving slabs to reach the trackpad. The monitor towered over him like a cinema screen. Its glow lit him up, blue and tiny, and Marcus came and leaned on the desk to look.
His face was very close and very large: the freckles across his nose, the pale lashes, the grin he’d been trying and failing to hold back for the last half hour. “Danny,” he said gently. “How tall are you?”
“About six inches,” said Danny, from somewhere near the J. “Ish.”
“And the front section?”
“One more line.”
Marcus considered this with the gravity of a man who had spent twenty years in magazines. “Then you’d better make it fit.”
He did. Of course he did. The last paragraph of the issue went into Diminuendo at four point, and the whole office swung up and away from Danny like a crane shot in a film. When it stopped, he was standing on the page proof beside the keyboard, an inch tall, on a field of grey type that ran away from him in neat rows like ploughed earth.
The desk lamp was a sun. The coffee mug was a tower block. And Marcus Hale was everywhere.
A brass rim swung over him, and then an eye, huge and hazel and delighted, swam into focus behind the glass. “There you are,” Marcus said, and the voice came up through the desk as much as through the air. “Do you know, I think that’s the best page we’ve ever printed.”
“Can you read it?” Danny shouted.
“Every word.” The magnifying glass tilted. “Even the small print.”
Danny looked down. Printed at his feet, in a type so fine it was nearly invisible, was a line he’d never typed: Diminuendo. For when it absolutely must fit. Reversible on request, at the editor’s discretion.
He looked up at the eye in the glass. The eye looked back, and creased at the corner.
“Is that so,” said Marcus Hale. He set the magnifier down and laid his hand on the desk beside the proof, palm up, fingers together, like an invitation. “Well. The editor’s discretion says it can wait until after press day.”
Danny climbed on. It was, he had to admit, a very good fit.
THE END
The type’s too small? Drag the magnifying glass over it, or .