My Hero (18 page)

‘I was not stuffing my—'

‘Please?'

‘All right, just hold your water a minute, will you? I've only got one pair of hands.'

(And just as well, he added mentally, since scarcely five minutes seems to go by around here without some bugger tying rope round them. One set is plenty enough for me, thank you very much. You can get seriously ill eating too much liquorice.)

‘Excuse me,' Skinner interrupted, ‘but when you two have quite finished bickering . . .'

Regalian frowned. Quite right. Unprofessional. A hero acts, he does not bicker. As he traced his way through the Labyrinth, spinning out the golden thread, Theseus didn't bicker with Ariadne about who forgot to bring the torch.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I think we're ready now. This way, I think.'

‘Hey,' yelled Titania. ‘What about us?'

Regalian bit his lip. ‘Actually,' he said, ‘if it's all the same to you, I think I'll leave you both tied up just for now, and come back for you both later after I've sorted out what we do next. I mean, you'll be perfectly all right there, and I'll know where you are. No chance of anybody spraining an ankle or being used as a hostage. Cheerio. Won't be long.'

He took advantage of the brief stunned silence and departed. At least, he mused, this is business sort of as usual; crawling through pitch-dark underground tunnels on a desperate mission to seck out and fight with a giant rat. The fact that the rat wears a straw boater and a pink blazer and is known to generations of small children as Ratty is neither here nor there.

His hand went instinctively to his side. He would have preferred a sword; a sword is long and sharp and has only
one moving part, which does not require lubrication or frequent cleaning in order to make it work. Likewise, generally speaking, a sword doesn't answer you back. Nevertheless, he told himself, it's better than nothing. ‘Aren't you?' he asked aloud.

‘I'm not talking to you.'

‘Oh? And why not?'

‘Because,' replied the Scholfield, ‘you let them put a spell on me. Honestly, I've never been so embarrassed in all my—'

‘But you're cured now, aren't you?'

‘That's beside the point,' the revolver snarled. ‘Back in 1875, I'll have you know, I was the state of the art. Competing manufacturers packed it in and went into the bicycle business once they'd seen my improved patent frame latch. And now, at my age, to have a flag come out of my barrel with BANG! written on it . . .'

‘It must have been terrible,' Regalian said soothingly.

‘It was.'

‘If I were you, I'd want to get my own back on those bastards.'

‘I do.'

‘Or if not them, then some other lot of bastards.'

‘I'd settle for that, certainly.'

Regalian nodded. ‘Tell you what I'll do,' he said. ‘First lot of bastards we come across, they're yours.'

‘Really?'

‘Promise. Provided of course,' he added quickly, ‘that they start it, not us, and that armed response can within the context be classified as reasonable and a minimum-force position within the scenario as a whole, holistically speaking.'

‘Come again?'

‘In other words,' Regalian explained, ‘don't shoot till I pull the trigger, or it's in the furnace for you. Got that?'

‘Rotten spoilsport.'

Regalian shrugged, squared his shoulders in the orthodox manner and set off down the corridor. It was dark, and damp, and there was a faint smell of toasting crumpet that spoke eloquently to his trained character's senses of classic Edwardian escapist literature. He felt depressingly out of place. In fact, if it hadn't been for the fact that he knew as an absolute certainty that he was the hero, he could have sworn he was the villain.

He turned a corner; and froze, rooted to the spot in sudden terror. In front of him, filling the tunnel, was an enormous rodent.

Yes, it was indeed wearing a straw boater; and too true, it had on a pink blazer and a little silk cravat round its thick, coarse-haired throat. But its small, red eyes and villainously sharp teeth sent clear, unequivocal messages down every nerve in Regalian's body. Okay, so perhaps this little fellow liked messing about in boats; but so did his ancestors, the big grey buggers who brought the Black Death from Constantinople to Europe. Regalian backed away and reached for his gun; and, at the same time, the right words found their way spontaneously to his lips.

‘You dirty rat,' he growled. ‘I'm gonna fill you full of lead.'

 

At which point, Jane reached for the keyboard and started to type furiously.

God knows, she thought, I'm not all that fussed about what posterity says about me. Let them say I was derivative, and my plots lacked sparkle. Let them, even, not remember me at all. But don't let me go down in the annals of literature as the woman who killed Ratty. They'd probably dig me up and hang my bones in chains from Tower Bridge.

Think seamless, she commanded herself. All you have to do is steer the dialogue away from filling people full
of lead and point it in the direction of the pointlessness of spring cleaning and the general desirability of rowing up and down the river in little boats. Doesn't matter how you do it so long as it gets done.

Which was why, suddenly and without warning, Regalian found he had been turned into a beaver.

 

It was nearly two hours before Regalian was able to get back to his friends in the cellars of Mole End. He had been having such a jolly time with his new friends Mr Rat and Mr Toad, cruising lazily down the river in Ratty's little boat and eating cucumber sandwiches, that he had quite lost track of the time.

‘Where the fuck have you been?' Titania snapped, as he put his soft, hairy nose round the doorway and smiled. ‘I've got cramp in both knees, and I've had to put up with his incessant whingeing as well. Get me out of here before I start screaming the place down. And why are you dressed as a beaver?'

‘I'm not dressed as a beaver,' Regalian answered quietly. ‘I
am
a bloody beaver, and it looks like I'm stuck that way till we get out of this madhouse. Hold still while I nibble through these blasted ropes.'

‘Oh, so that's why you're a beaver.'

‘No,' said Regalian with his mouth full, ‘actually I think it's just a coincidence. Christ, this stuff tastes awful.'

‘And what,' Titania said a little while after, swinging her arms round to restore a little circulation, ‘have you been doing all this time? Lounging about feeding the ducks?'

‘Actually, I've been fixing up our way out of here.'

‘About time too.'

‘The rat,' Regalian continued, with dignity, ‘claims he knows where there's a sort of fault-line we might be able to use to get straight into
Alice
. Mind you, I wouldn't normally trust him as far as I could sneeze him when the
pollen-count was low, but this time I think he's telling the truth.'

‘Oh? Why?'

Regalian closed his eyes. ‘He wants me to deliver a package,' he replied.

‘A package? What sort of package?'

‘Oh for God's sake, woman, use your bloody imagination. It's a squarish sort of parcel about a foot long, it's wrapped in brown paper and weighs about five kilos. You don't think you get to write books about disappearing white rabbits and jabberwocks and mirrors you can walk through just by closing your eyes and using your imagination, do you?'

‘Ah. I see.'

Regalian nodded and twitched his whiskers. ‘Apparently,' he went on, ‘it's quite a regular traffic. The weasels and the stoats bring it downriver from Toad Hall in big crates marked Tractor Spares, and Ratty and Mole handle the distribution from this end. I think they launder the proceeds through a holding company at Pooh Corner. Anyway, something nasty happened to the regular courier and they need a replacement. That's us.'

‘Dear God.' Skinner looked up, dazed. ‘I always thought there was something weird about your goddamn limey children's books, but I didn't think it was as bad as that. What a country!'

‘You can wipe that grin off your face,' Regalian snapped. ‘Next time you see Brer Rabbit, ask him how he paid for his bright pink Mercedes convertible. Now, are you two coming or do you want to stay here and argue the toss with Mister Badger?'

 

Jane looked up, and blinked twice. That wasn't what she'd had in mind at all.

On the other hand; if it worked . . .

Slowly, inch by inch, the bounty hunter edged his way along the river-bank.

His calling had taken him to some odd places, and brought him into contact with some strange people; this, however, looked set fair to establish new parameters of meaning for the word ‘kooky'.

Jesus, the place was full of goddamn
animals
.

He found what he was looking for; and sat behind a bramble bush for five minutes or so, waiting to see if anyone came in or out of the little round painted door in the side of the bank.

Just when he'd concluded it was safe to proceed, he was tripped up neatly from behind and thrown on to his face in the mud. As he tried to rise, someone put a clawed foot in the small of his back and prodded his ear with the barrel of a gold-plated Uzi.

‘I say, Moley,' said Mr Rat. ‘It seems we have another visitor.'

T
he lift stopped. The doors opened.

Hamlet shut his eyes, left a prayer on God's answering machine, and stepped out. Into the street.

The doors shut behind him. In fact, if he had been inclined to be thin-skinned and oversensitive, he could have imagined they ostentatiously dusted off their hands, like a night-club bouncer who's just thrown out a couple of drunks. Not that Hamlet minded one little bit. Of all the places in the world he was most keen to get thrown out of, Dr Rossfleisch's cosy little establishment headed the list by quite some way.

On further inspection, the street turned out to be nothing but a back alley, designed as a repository for dustbins and a playground for tattered-eared cats. Hamlet picked up his enormous feet and ran, filling the narrow way with the echoes of his clopping.

At the end, the alley opened on to a broad, crowded street, into which Hamlet turned right. He was clearly in a big town or a city somewhere, although he had no idea which one. He had an idea that it wasn't anywhere in
Denmark, because he remembered something about Denmark being an unweeded garden, and there were no weeds to be seen anywhere.

Trying to mingle unobtrusively with the crowd - difficult, since he was a foot taller than anybody else within sight, and his head stuck up above the throng like a giraffe feeding on treetops - he strolled as nonchalantly as his big clumping boots would allow him towards the southerly end of the street. It would all, he knew, be wonderfully simple. In a moment or so he would find a telephone box. He would call Jane Armitage. She would come and pick him up, or at the very least tell him what to do. Then they would work out how he could get back into his play, where he belonged. If things went well, he might even get back home in time to be murdered.

At the end of the street, sure enough, stood a phone box. He smiled and pulled open the door . . .

‘Hey, do you mind?'

‘Sorry.' Hamlet stepped back. ‘I didn't mean—'

‘There's another one just round the corner,' said the occupant of the box quickly. Hamlet couldn't help noticing that he was half in and half out of a red and blue leotard, and that a plain charcoal-grey suit was lying discarded on the phone box floor. ‘And next time, look before you go barging in.'

‘Sorry,' Hamlet repeated, and closed the door. He had got about ten yards down the street when there was a sharp crack and a whooshing noise above his head. He looked up to see a tiny figure in blue and red disappearing into the sky. All around him, people were staring after it.

‘My God,' someone said, ‘I didn't know he was real. I thought he was just in comics.'

Hamlet turned back, entered the now empty phone box, fumbled in his pocket for a coin and dialled Jane's number.

Hamlet replaced the receiver, briskly, with an oath. The bloody woman, he said to himself, how dare she go swanning off when I'm missing? Typical bloody author. About as reliable as a petrol station watch.

Never mind, he reassured himself, I'll use my initiative. No problem at all finding out where I am and how to get out of it. His head held high (or as high, at least, as it would go without unseating the main neck bearings), he strolled down the road in search of somebody to ask.