My Hero (13 page)

The window opened.

Hamlet grunted, turned over on his side and brayed softly. A shadow, a semitone or so darker than the ambient darkness, flitted through under the window sill. There was a soft bump, as of skull against timber, and a muffled oath.

The shadow advanced. It was whistling, very softly and tunelessly, under its breath. Probably it didn't even know it was doing it.

From the pillow a mild grunting noise, followed by a few lines from the rogue-and-peasant-slave speech. Hamlet was one of the few people in history who soliloquised in his sleep.

A stray moonbeam flashed on the hair-thin needle of a hypodermic, which the shadow was holding up and preparing for use. A dewdrop of colourless liquid slid down the needle as the shadow expelled the surplus air
from the chamber before stooping over the bed. As the syringe went home, Hamlet may have stirred slightly, but nothing more. The shadow withdrew the needle, stood back and waited for perhaps two minutes, until the breathing sounds became slower, flatter and more regular.

Satisfied, the shadow packed the syringe away in the small toolbox strapped to his waist, and turned to the bed. And stopped.

There is, of course, no soundtrack to this scene, and both participants were mere silhouettes in the darkness. The shadow, however, had extremely expressive body language, and he communicated his next emotion with perfect clarity. If he'd been an actor in the days of silent movies, he'd have been banned for life for swearing on screen.

Yes, his gestures said, fine. We worked out how to get in here and how to administer the tranquilliser drug. Only thing we didn't consider was getting the tranquillised body out through the window. Pity, that.

Having apparently formulated his plan of campaign, the shadow began stripping sheets off the bed and tearing them into strips. There followed an interval of undignified heaving, shoving and dropping of sleeping bodies, which resulted in Hamlet being lowered out of the window on a cat's cradle of improvised ropes. Then the shadow left by the way it had come. A dull thump from the ground below suggested that the makeshift harness had almost lasted out, but not quite.

Darkness seeped back, like penetrating oil in a rusty hinge.

 

Hamlet woke up, opened his eyes, and screamed.

He was strapped hand and foot to what appeared to be an operating table. Shining directly in his eyes was a very big, bright light, of the sort you get in up-market
dentists' surgeries. Somewhere in the background a piece of machinery hummed ominously.

‘Here!' Hamlet yelled. ‘What the hell do you think you're doing? And what the devil have you done with my left foot?'

‘Now, now,' said a voice, coming from somewhere just outside his line of vision, ‘there's no need to get excited, so just pull yourself together, will you?'

‘Easier said than done,' Hamlet replied savagely. ‘Look, who are you, and what's going on?'

‘Now,' the voice went on, ‘this isn't going to hurt you one little bit, so please keep perfectly still.'

‘But . . .'

‘If it's your foot you're worried about,' the voice continued, ‘I've got it perfectly safe, packed in some ice. I'll put that back on for you in just two ticks, after I've finished this.'

‘This? What's this?'

‘Absolutely still, please. Igor, the forceps.'

‘Actually, Doctor Rossfleisch, my name's Tracy.'

‘What a pretty name. Thank you, now the soldering iron, please.'

A pair of gloved hands materialised in the far periphery of Hamlet's vision. A moment later, frantic signals of pain scurried up and down the two cocoa tins and bit of string he called a nervous system.

‘Sorry,' said the voice, ‘I should have warned you that that might smart just a little bit. The electric drill, please, Tanya.'

‘Tracy.'

‘Thank you.'

Oh spiffing, Hamlet thought. Not only is this lunatic the mad scientist, he's the absent-minded professor as well. Pausing only to wish he was safely back in Elsinore with the ghosts and the poisoned swords, he passed out.

When he came round, he was still strapped to the table; but the light had gone away, and there was something strange about his body. It was a bit like turning the ignition key in the lock of your clapped-out old Triumph Dolomite to find that during the night some practical joker had fitted it with the latest model of Cosworth racing engine. The whole outfit seemed to growl with vitality. He clenched his fists, and the thick webbing straps around his wrists snapped like wet paper-chains.

‘Yeah!' he breathed.

He sat upright, breathed in deeply, and was hit on the back of the head with a three-pound lump hammer.

 

The bounty hunter reached the edge of the glade, stopped and peered round a tree trunk.

It takes something pretty far out of the ordinary to disconcert a trained, experienced bounty hunter. It's a line of work that attracts the cool, level-headed type, and people who worry about having left the gas on when they go on holiday generally tend to leave the profession at a fairly early stage; frequently on a stretcher.

There are, however, limits; and the sight of his target lounging on a sea of cushions wearing a donkey's head, surrounded by flickering blue lights and heavily entangled with a gorgeous, silver-skinned woman was enough to make him pause, just for a moment, and cast his mind back over the last few days to see if he could recall receiving any sharp blows to the back of the head.

Even Butch Cassidy, he reasoned, never went this far.

Having given the matter some thought, he stepped back into the undergrowth. This one, he reckoned, would probably keep for the time being. The sensible thing to do would be to round up the other one and then come back and take another look.

At that particular juncture, the other one was sitting under a lime tree, chewing hard and reflecting on the fact that the rope in these parts tasted damned odd.

You get to chew a lot of rope if you're a hero, because people are always tying you up. True, you always manage to free yourself, beat the pudding out of the inoffensive little nerk they've left behind to guard you, and find your way to the secret hideout/sacrificial altar/grand vizier's palace where you're due to effect the timely rescue; but that's only because it's aesthetically right. The powers that be appreciate these things, and they aren't particularly cruel or vindictive. The ropes in heroic fiction, therefore, tend to be either toffee or sherbert flavoured, and generally saliva-soluble.

This rope, on the other hand, was thick, tough and tasted of hemp and fairy's armpit; all of which taken together gave Regalian the feeling that something wasn't quite right about any of this. Maybe it wasn't aesthetically right that he should get out of this one; in which case, he was in deep trouble.

Maybe chewing through the rope wasn't the answer, at that. Looking round, he noticed Skinner's gunbelt lying about a foot from his big toe. Perhaps this was one of the cases where the hero gets hold of the gun, holds up the guard, is untied and
then
escapes and gets on with the job. Regalian shrugged. Only one way to find out.

‘Pssst!'

If the gun had heard him, it showed no sign. Fair enough, he reasoned; they have to make these things difficult, because heroes thrive on difficulty. If any fool could do it, it wouldn't be heroic; and wandering minstrels whose repertoire consisted of such works as ‘The Chores of Hercules' or ‘The Saga of Sigurd the Doer of Ironing' would probably end up doing more wandering than
minstrelsy. He wiggled his foot towards the gunbelt and finally managed to get his heel on to the buckle.

From the glade opposite came sounds of hawing and female giggling. As he drew the gunbelt towards him, Regalian found himself wondering whether he'd completely misunderstood the situation after all. All his finely honed character's instincts were shouting to him that this was the stage in the narrative where he rescued Skinner. The question was, did Skinner know that?

He had just managed to manoeuvre the gunbelt into a position where, with a bit of energetic wriggling and at the cost of taking all the skin off his wrists, he ought to be able to reach the gun, when a lean, dark figure who looked depressingly familiar (Jack Palance in green tights and sequins) stepped out of the shadows, flipped the Scholfield out of its holster, pointed it at him, and grinned.

‘Reach for the sky,' he said.

Regalian, with whom the penny had just dropped, obeyed. The bounty hunter drew a knife from his boot, slit the ropes and said, ‘On your feet.'

‘No,' Regalian replied.

‘You heard me. On your feet.'

‘Piss off.'

The bounty hunter's grin widened. ‘The poster says dead or alive, mister,' he said. ‘Guess you just made my mind up for me.'

He thumbed back the hammer, levelled the gun at Regalian's head, and squeezed the trigger. There was a brief whirring noise, a flag inscribed BANG! popped out of the muzzle of the gun, and a small flame appeared on the top of the frame in which, had he been a smoker, the bounty hunter could conveniently have lit a cigar.

‘You see,' Regalian explained, springing to his feet and kicking the bounty hunter savagely in the nuts, ‘the
fairies put a spell on the gun which stops it working. That meant that at some stage in the adventure—' The bounty hunter dropped to his knees, moaned and rolled over on to his side. ‘—it was inevitable, dramatically speaking, that someone would try and turn my own gun on me, only for it
not
to go off at the crucial moment. I think it's one of the lesser isotopes of dramatic irony. Should've seen it coming,' he added, stamping on the bounty hunter's hand and retrieving the gun. ‘Silly of me. Ah well, never mind.'

He buckled on the belt and, with the air of a man who once again knows exactly what's expected of him, strolled off towards the glade to do the rescue.

 

When Hamlet came round the second time, he'd learned his lesson. Instead of sitting upright and flexing his muscles he lay where he was, still as death, and waited for someone to hit him.

‘Ah,' said a voice above his head, ‘you've woken up. And how are we feeling?'

Idiot, thought Hamlet. Up till then, the Golden Lemon award for the daftest question he'd ever heard had always been reserved for To be or not to be. Now, he reckoned, it had competition.

‘Give you three gue . . .' he began to say; and then stopped himself as status reports from the various parts of his body began to filter through to his brain. ‘Marvellous,' he said, bemused. ‘Never felt better in all my - well, never felt better.'

‘Splendid,' replied the voice, which he recognised as that of the mad scientist chap. Rossfleisch? Something like that. ‘I'm so glad.'

‘If I sit up, is anything going to happen to me?'

‘Happen to you? In what way?'

‘I mean, is anybody going to thump me, or anything?'

‘Certainly not, my dear fellow. Please, do feel free to sit up as much as you like.'

‘Thank you.'

From a sitting position, Hamlet saw that he was still in the - operating theatre? Something like that. Maybe he just had theatres on the brain. Standing over him was a tall, straggly-looking man with big round glasses, a bald head, a white coat, carpet slippers and a little wispy grey beard; suggesting that either he was going to a fancy dress ball as an absent-minded professor, or he was one. A moment later, he introduced himself as Doctor Sebastian Rossfleisch.

‘Pleased to meet you,' Hamlet lied. ‘Look . . .'

‘Remarkable.'

‘Pardon?'

‘The way the isothermic membrane has taken,' Rossfleisch explained (at least, presumably it was his idea of an explanation, just as the grey fluid you get in styrofoam cups at railway stations is somebody's idea of tea). ‘I was so afraid there would be a positive reaction with the selenium nitrate. That would have been most unfortunate. '

‘Would it?'

‘Profoundly disappointing,' the Doctor replied. ‘One never really knows where one is with polymers, does one?'

Tricksy buggers,' Hamlet agreed, striving to be polite. ‘Look . . .'

‘Yes?'

‘Where am I, and what am I doing here?' Gosh, he reflected as he spoke, sounds like old times, me asking that. This time, though, I could really do with a sensible answer.

Rossfleisch shook his head, setting the wisp on his chin dancing. ‘Perhaps I had better put you in the picture,' he
said. ‘You see, I'd been hearing rumours for quite some time.'

‘Rumours?'

‘About Mr Frankenbotham's experiments.'

‘You mean that strange chap in the shed? My, um, creator.'

‘Precisely. A remarkable fellow, some quite astounding intuitive leaps, and with the facilities he had available it was quite incredible that he was able to achieve as much as he did. Nevertheless, the whole project was basically ill-conceived.'

‘You mean me?'

‘Exactly. To put it bluntly, you were not well made. Without a thoroughgoing overhaul and some substantial rethinking of a number of fundamental aspects, there was a severe risk of terminal dysfunction.'

‘Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew, you mean? I think I get the picture.'

‘Indeed. Well, it would have been a tragedy to have let that happen. So I, er, stole you.'

‘I see.'

‘And,' continued the Doctor cheerfully, ‘I've done the necessary work, and I'm delighted to say it would appear to have been completely successful.'