My Hero (25 page)

Shaking his head, Skinner took the limp object and laid it on the ground. Titania picked up the Scholfield (guns can't smirk, but, by the same token, they can't of their own volition shoot stuffed donkeys, can they?) and laid it artistically beside the body, one stuffed paw on the
grips. ‘That'll do,' she said. ‘Now we wait and see.'

Genre splicing theory. Set up a classic stock situation from one genre in another genre and see what, or who, happens. So; a body on the hearthrug, apparently suicide, except that that would be too simple. Two obvious suspects, nobody else could have entered or left the room. But if it wasn't suicide, what possible motive could there have been? And what about the third witness, the seemingly innocuous Piglet, who, at the time the fatal shot was fired, was supposedly cowering under the rug?

‘This isn't going to work,' Skinner said, with gloomy satisfaction.

‘Give it a chance, miseryguts.'

‘Waste of everybody's—'

The scene changed.

Genre splicing theory. Set up a situation that obviously, painfully obviously, belongs in one sort of book and one sort only, and you might just build up enough dramatic tension (what reviewers call a critical mass) to bust out of one genre into another, regardless of the laws of artistic physics. Nice idea, but you wouldn't want to try it. Even if it worked, you'd have absolutely no control over where you ended up.

The scene
had
changed. Same basic layout; hearthrug, corpse, gun, chairs, table. But the walls were now oak-panelled and lined with books, the rug had once been the outside of a tiger and the corpse had somehow changed from a stuffed donkey into a tweed-clad, white-haired man with a bristling moustache, probably a retired Indian army colonel. Closer inspection revealed a clock that had stopped the first bullet, its hands now frozen at 12.15; a scrap of paper in the fireplace that looked suspiciously like the remains of a compromising letter; a small glass bottle lying under the writing desk, very probably containing the last dregs of a dose of an undetectable
poison known only to the Bushmen of northern Natal; a footprint from a size nine walking shoe with a built-up heel . . . One could go on for ever. It was like one of those newspaper puzzles where you have to find thirty-six tropical birds hidden in unlikely places all over the picture. Skinner made a peculiar noise.

‘There,' said Titania. ‘Piece of cake.'

. . . Oh yes, and a half-eaten slice of seed cake on the window-ledge. No prizes for guessing that, once analysed, the cake will turn out to be marinaded in enough arsenic (the white variety, as opposed to the brown variety commonly used in rat poison and weedkiller) to kill half of Bradford . . .

And the door opens, and a fussy little man with an egg-shaped head and enormous moustaches trots in, beams and introduces himself . . .

‘I think,' said Skinner, ‘I'd like to be sick now, please.'

 

The bounty hunter sat up.

So, he said to himself, this is Reality. Could have fooled me.

True, he wasn't seeing it at its most convincing. The electric storm still raging outside was every bit as melodramatic as one of its fictional counterparts. He'd heard one of the funny little old men who were gawping at him call the other one Igor. And there was something disturbingly familiar about the look of his feet.

Big shoes they wear in Reality. Almost like old-fashioned diving boots.

Very big . . .

‘Hey,' he said. ‘What's the big idea?'

One of the funny men took a step backwards. ‘How were I to know?' he stammered in a peculiar voice. ‘It were all genuine Yorkshire parts. Maybe he just sounds like a bloody Yank.'

‘Ask him, then. Go on, ask him.'

‘Tha ask him.'

‘He's thy bloody fast bowler.'

The bounty hunter was reassured. Maybe there was a passing similarity, but nobody ever talked like that in Fiction. He smiled.

‘Howdy,' he said. ‘Say . . .'

(‘That's never Yorkshire, young Norman.'

‘I dunno. Could be Harrogate. They talk bloody funny in Harrogate.')

‘Say,' continued the bounty hunter, reaching out a hand towards a large piece of ironmongery with a view to pulling himself upright, ‘can you folks put me on the right road for Chicopee Falls? Reckon I'm kinda out of my way here—'

‘Don't touch that!'

The bounty hunter raised an eyebrow. As he did so, something tore . . .

(‘It's them Co-op tea bags. Told thee they were weak as buggery.') . . . but he ignored it. Instead, he inspected the curious gadget he was holding on to. He had no idea what it was.

‘Don't touch that! It's t'random particle accelerator. If t'lightning shorts through that and tha's holding on to it—'

‘Hey up, Norman lad, tha never said tha'd got a random particle accelerator.'

‘Didn't ah? Well, tha knows Chalky Wainwright, as used to live across t'way from t'canning factory? Well, his dad—'

There was a blinding flash, as enough power to run Scotland for twenty minutes crackled across an inch of empty air and leapt joyfully towards the bare terminals of the random particle accelerator. The windows blew out
in a shower of razor-edged confetti. Quite a lot of things caught fire.

Chalky Wainwright's dad, whose superior Yorkshire intelligence had graduated from cat's whisker radios in the 'twenties into a staggering new vista of One Hundred and One Things A Young Man Can Make, had rigged up the particle accelerator out of cannibalised transistors, used HT leads, electric fire elements, a broken telly and twelve square yards of tinfoil, round about the time Harold Wilson had been enthusing about the white heat of technology. It had always been Chalky's dad's ambition to travel backwards in time; and there was a small but enthusiastic body of opinion which held that he hadn't simply walked out one day on the pretext of buying an evening paper and never returned, but had in fact achieved his aim and somehow made it back to Huddersfield, circa 1109, where he was currently running a thriving jellied eel concession in what would one day be Palmerston Street. All pure speculation, of course.

‘Igor.'

‘What?'

‘Where's he gone?'

‘Who?'

‘T'Yank, tha dozy pillock.'

Igor looked round. ‘What Yank, Norman lad?'

‘T'one we were building . . .'

‘Talk sense, Norman,' replied the older man sharply. ‘Who with any sense'd be building a bloody American?'

For a moment, Frankenbotham surmised that all the lightning they'd been having recently must have fried his assistant's brain. Then it occurred to him that, in order to reach an advanced age in the TV repair business north of Wakefield, you probably had to have survival instincts which would make the average gazelle look like a kamikaze pilot.

‘Tha's right, Igor,' he said slowly. ‘Nobody in their right mind'd be building an artificial Yank. Not,' he added, ‘in Dewsbury.'

Igor nodded conclusively. ‘Flamin' daft idea, if you ask me.'

‘Fancy a brew?'

‘Now tha's talking, Norman lad. Now tha's talking.'

 

Damn, thought Jane.

It was all very well to say, I know, I'll use the interface fault under the Library of Congress to slip into Fiction; but Fiction, she was beginning to realise, is big. Ever so much bigger than, say, Carlisle. This one book she'd wandered into, a single book out of countless hundreds of thousands (how many books were there? A million? Ten million? Apart from the guess that ISBN stands for Incredibly Seriously Big Number, she hadn't a clue) was easily as big as the human imagination, if not bigger. Every book can be that big, with the possible exception of
Teach Yourself Thumb-Twiddling
and the works of Jeffrey Archer. Accordingly, wandering into Fiction by the back door and expecting to fall over Regalian was rather like standing on the platform on Fulham Broadway station and expecting to come face to face with your second cousin from Toronto. Only somewhat less likely.

Oh well, she said to herself. Nothing for it but to go back again.

She turned round. One good thing about trackless wastes of snow is that you tend to leave footprints. All she had to do was follow them, and she could retrace her steps.

There were no footprints.

Odd.

Sure, if you wait long enough, the snow and the wind
will cover up your tracks. But that doesn't happen
instantaneously
. She had stopped walking, oh, about two seconds ago; and there were no footprints to be seen. A disturbing thought occurred to her.

Maybe the white stuff wasn't snow. Maybe it was paper.

As she entertained the thought, a thoroughly unpleasant but nevertheless familiar panic started to flow into her, filling her up like a kettle under a tap. Every author's everyday nightmare, the blank sheet of paper with no words on it, grinning horribly up at her from the jaws of the typewriter.

Blank white everywhere; featureless, virgin, without cardinal points or signposts. Stare at it long enough and you hallucinate watermarks. This, Jane had always believed, is where very wicked authors go when they die. This was what it was like in the Beginning, before there was the Word.

Indeed. Or the Middle. Or the End.

Welcome to the Columbus Experience. Sail too far across the ocean, and you fall off the edge. Go too far into Fiction, and you come to the edge of the page, the unimaginable void, the empty pages nobody has written on yet. As she stared at it, Jane reflected with a shudder that pre-Columbian mariners probably had the easy end of it. For them it was just a case of splosh-whoopsaaaaaagh-THUMP. Here, the rest was silence.

She sat down. The whiteness was making her snow-blind. If she stayed here too long, she'd forget everything. After that, she'd become invisible herself, and quite simply cease to be.

All in all, she'd rather be in Milton Keynes. This place had a lot in common with Milton Keynes, but at least Milton Keynes was a sort of pale grey, and some of the hard, flat surfaces had things written on them, usually in aerosol paint by people with limited vocabularies. Hey,
she thought, maybe if I can write something on this, I can get out of here. She rummaged in her pockets for a pen, lipstick, eyebrow pencil, bit of stick, nailfile; nothing. Not even the inevitable unwrapped, furry boiled sweet that lives in all pockets everywhere, provided you burrow deep enough.

‘Oh,' she wailed. The word seemed to drift away and seep into the vast whiteness, like water draining away into sand. Very apt metaphor, in the circumstances.

Jane lifted her head. Either she was imagining things, or something had just said Woof. As an unkind but truthful reviewer had once pointed out, imagining things wasn't exactly her strong point. Accordingly, the other theory, however improbable, must be the truth.

‘Woof. Woof.'

She narrowed her eyes against the blinding white glare and looked around. In the very far distance, she thought she could see a tiny dot. After she'd been looking for thirty seconds or so - this space reserved for substantial migraine - the little dot seemed to grow four legs. And a tail.

‘Woof. Woof. Woof.'

Jane tried to stand up; but that presupposed the existence of an Up to stand into, and there no longer seemed to be one. Imagine floating in an isolation tank of fairly thick custard; or rather, if you value the ability to sleep at night, don't.

It was a dog; a hairy, bouncy, chunky, substantial sort of a dog, with a fringe that came down over its eyes and a friendly pink tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth. It was the sort of dog you'd visualise curled up in front of the roaring log fire of your dreams; a Dulux dog, the kind you want to take for bracing walks through the virgin dew and throw sticks for. You could call it Rover without feeling guilty.

It trotted up, sat on its back legs, and said, ‘Woof.'

It had a barrel hanging from its collar.

 

Bloody odd ventilation shaft, Hamlet mused, as he hurtled downwards.

Admittedly, he could only spare about four per cent of his mental capacity for the task of analysing the problem - ever since he'd lost his footing and started to fall, the other ninety-six per cent had been fully occupied with thoughts of the
AAAGH! SHIT! I'M GOING TO DIE!
variety - but he had to admit that he was baffled. On the basis of the observational data he'd been able to accumulate so far, the shaft was very long, smooth-sided, and more or less spiral, like the slide at a fairground as conceived of by a very disturbed mind. As part of an integrated ventilation design concept, it left a lot to be desired.

It was very,
very
long. He hadn't been keeping a scientific record of how long he'd been falling down it (why is it that you never have a fully-calibrated chronograph handy when you most need one?) but he reckoned it was safe to say that this shaft didn't just connect 221B Baker Street with 221A Baker Street, or even the main drain. Bearing in mind that his calculations were unlikely to be all that precise, his best guess was an ETA in Australia in about two seconds.

Nope. This service, apparently, doesn't stop in Australia. Must be the through-drain. If you'd wanted to get off at Australia, you should have waited for the Super Shuttle.

Not for the first time, Hamlet regretted that he hadn't been born a thoroughbred action adventure hero. Your action adventure hero, falling down a shaft or drain, somehow manages to wedge himself against the sides, using his shoulders and feet, and then creepy-crawl back up again to safety, the quintessential human spider
coming back up the plug-hole. The more intellectual and introspective class of hero to which he belonged just keeps on falling, passing the time with complex analysis of his mental state and carefully worded commentaries on Life, Fate and stuff like that. And, when he finally hits the deck and goes flump, it's all cosmically significant and Means Something. Bloody cold comfort for a chap who, by this point, presumably looks like a dollop of strawberry jam, but there you go. We can't all be Arnie, can we?