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Author's Chapter Notes:


Then Connor had another significant recollection. Another boy named Nathaniel had also gone missing, while Miss Balfour had been away. So it was unlikely that she and her shrinking device could have been responsible for both disappearances, but he couldn’t take the risk. He realised that he could think of no other reason for Miss Balfour to have invented the device than for shrinking people. Since Henry had not returned, and for that matter since he had often seen Miss Balfour and Miss Woodfield having lunch together, it was likely that they were collectively responsible for shrinking and abducting the two missing boys. Could they have done it for the same reason that Edith had reduced and kidnapped him?

It was unfathomable, but could well be true. Miss Woodfield had probably eaten Nathaniel, and Miss Balfour had probably eaten Henry.

Connor didn’t know that both students had volunteered for the reduction process, and that Nathaniel was enjoying his nightly facial licks from Miss Woodfield.

There was no point in going to Miss Balfour for help. He’d have been better off being eaten by the girl he adored, than by his science and English teacher.

He would have to simply go on the run and live out the rest of his life at tiny size, unless he could find someone else capable of reverse engineering Miss Balfour’s device to restore him. Yes, that was it. He’d been shrunken as a result of sneaking into the science classroom with Edith. He would need to find another girl who would sneak in there with his shrunken self, the next time Miss Balfour was at a staff meeting and hopefully still leaving her bag in the science classroom until the end of the day.

Connor began to open up the handkerchiefs and to knot the corner of each one with the corner of the next one. When it was all done, he tied the opposite corner of the first handkerchief to the handle of the drawer he was in, and then let the rest fall to reach to the carpet below. With nothing more than moonlight to aid him, he climbed slowly down the chain of handkerchiefs until he reached the floor. He turned and looked to see that Edith was still sleeping peacefully, since no lights had been turned on. He looked at the way the moonlight shone in from the window and fell on her beautiful face. How he would have loved to climb up there and snuggle against her cheek.

The window was open, but he was in an upstairs room at reduced size. There was no way of retrieving his chain of handkerchiefs, while it was still tied to the wardrobe handle. Apart from that, it would not reach nearly far enough to get him safely to the ground. He walked around the room and found a ball of wool under the bed. Now at last he had a gameplan. He tied one end of the ball to the leg of the bed, and then unrolled it as far as the base of the window curtain, and then took hold of a part of the unravelled wool in his hand and loosely tied it around his arm.

Connor climbed up the curtain and then untied himself, and continued to pull on the wool until it had all unravelled. He fed the entire section over the window ledge and down onto the lawn below. He started climbing down the wool. He could see that there was an overhang at the downstairs end of the string, but he could make it the rest of the way without a wall to touch.

He used his feet to abseil down the outside wall of Edith’s bedroom, until he got to the start of the overhang. He kicked out with his legs, to push him away from the bottom of the wall, and then slid down a little further, to see that Edith was standing on the porch below with her arms folded, smiling at him.

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