My Hero (31 page)

‘Yes,' said Jane, slowly and loudly. ‘But who?'

‘Easy,' Regalian answered. ‘A ghost writer.'

A valid point Regalian has there, because writers never die.

Oh sure, there comes a day when they cease drinking and stop moving altogether, and after a while they start to whiff a bit and go all soft and squidgy, and unless something is done about it the public health people start sending you snotty letters; but the fact remains, writers enjoy a vaguely defined immortality. So long as their books survive, so do they.

Dead and alive, as it were. Or undead, if you prefer.

You can see where this is leading . . .

 

Cautiously, Dracula lifted the lid and peered out.

God, he muttered to himself, I
hate
Reality. It's cold, the satin in the coffin feels like sandpaper, and horrible people from Yorkshire peer down and stare at you like you were some sort of
freak
. . . Wouldn't be seen dead in a place like this.

Quite.

The
indignity
of it all. Bundled back into his coffin without so much as a quick nibble at a soft white neck, then bumped and jostled about for hours in what he gathered was something called the Postal System, and left somewhere. God knows where. A less even-tempered bloke might get quite angry.

Dracula, however, had always made a practice of not letting the sun go down on his wrath (or, for obvious reasons, on his
anything
); accordingly he'd taken a deep breath, thought a happy thought, sniffed for sunlight (all clear) and thought the screws out of the woodwork. And now here he was; a little bruised, a trifle battered, but all in one piece and ready for a hard day's night. He pushed aside the lid and scrambled out, snagging his cape on a splinter.

Because he'd never been in a sorting office before, he hadn't a clue what the place was. All he knew was that it felt
sinister
. The nearest he'd ever been to something like this was the crypt under the castle chapel back in dear old Transylvania. Crypts he felt at home with; cool, dark places with somewhere to put your feet up and a nice selection of packed lunches. This was different. There was a malevolence here he couldn't begin to understand. Gave him the creeps.

Buck up, he told himself. None of this moping. Let's bustle about and try and find something useful, like a door or a window.

And so he began his misguided tour of the building. He walked past the letter racks, the parcel shelves, the recorded delivery section . . .

The dead letter cupboard . . .

He glanced down.

 

COUNT VLAD DRACULA

To be held until called for.

 

He frowned. It wasn't a totally unfamiliar concept. Given his habit of going to sleep for long periods of time, he would often leave himself little notes - the deeds to the castle are in the safe, the back door key is on the hook in the scullery, the bin men call on Wednesdays, that sort of thing - and lodge them with lawyers or bank managers marked
Not to be opened for fifty years
. Presumably, this was one of those letters. Maybe - with any luck - it might tell him what he was doing here, and how he could get home again. He slid a finger under the flap and tore.

‘Slow down,' Jane muttered.

Titania frowned. ‘Sorry,' she said. ‘Where did you get up to?'

‘
Sound
. Before you carry on,' Jane continued, ‘I still don't get it. How do you know Dracula's going to be there, and how are we going to get this letter to him? It all seems a bit crazy to me.'

‘Basic authorship theory,' Regalian interrupted.

‘Ah,' said Jane wearily. ‘That old thing. Go on.'

‘It's perfectly logical,' Regalian said. ‘We use the dead letter system. Direct line from here to there.'

Jane scratched her neck just behind the ear, thinking. She could see the similarity between letters that nobody wanted and books that nobody would ever read; perhaps that was all the logic it took. She wasn't about to argue, but . . .

‘And Dracula?' she said. ‘Bit of a long shot, surely.'

‘Ah,' Regalian agreed, ‘there perhaps we're pushing our luck a bit, I'll grant you. What we're counting on is the system of exits and entrances.'

‘Equations,' said Titania helpfully.

‘Equations,' Regalian confirmed. ‘When you came into Fiction, that bounty hunter bloke - Max, was it? - got pushed out, or wanted to leave, one or the other. But he came back in when I did, which means somebody else must have been shot out into Real Life.' He paused, as if suddenly appreciating the flaw in his own argument. ‘The key word, I think, is life. Look at it this way. If you take young Hamlet's big question, to be or not to be, Dracula's a definite Don't Know.'

‘Floating voter,' Titania chimed in. ‘Ambivalent.'

Regalian nodded. ‘Good word. Ambivalent. So it's a reasonable bet that, in the absence of volunteers to be shot through into Reality, Dracula's a likely victim when the press gang comes round. There's all sorts of clever maths which Titania can show you if you suffer from particularly bad insomnia, but I think that's the bare bones of it. I have,' he added, ‘heard sillier arguments in my time, if that's any help. Plus, we do have basic heroism theory, which states that the daffier the plan . . .'

Jane sniffed. ‘This is obviously a complete waste of time,' she said. ‘Absolutely no way—'

‘Hey!' Titania stamped her foot, hating herself as she did so. ‘Shut up, you, and take dictation.'

 

Having read the letter through twice, Dracula put it down on the office table, furrowed his brows and thought for a moment.

It sounded all right. A great many things do, of course. ‘Just nip over there and secure those cannons, there's a good lad,' probably sounded reasonable enough to the commander of the Light Brigade.This is the triple-visaged goddess of Life in her aspect as Complete Bastard; you never know whether it's going to be all right until you try it. But still, it sounded all right.

The mission: to go to a specified address (for someone who can fly like a warp-engined bat, no big deal - and it was only a hundred or so miles away, scarcely long enough for the in-flight movie); to obtain access, again a piece of cake to the Count; to sit down in front of a keyboard and type in a few thousand words - and there was the truly amazing coincidence, because although he'd never even so much as mentioned it to anybody in passing, he'd always felt that, one of these days when the time was right and he didn't have much else on, he could sit
down and write a really cracking good novel, because it can't be
difficult
, can it?

Then, it seemed, all he had to do was bung the completed typescript in an envelope and post it off to the address given in the letter, and he'd have earned himself the Reward.What the Reward was, the letter didn't exactly say, but it stood to reason, didn't it, that in all probability it was going to be red, liquid and jam-packed full of corpuscles. Unlike relatives by marriage, vampires are exquisitely simple to choose presents for. So, Dracula muttered to himself as he stood in the sorting-office window and spread his cape, here's to it.

Blood for old rope, you might say.

 

Jane sat back, folded the paper neatly and watched it disappear.

‘Think he'll fall for it?' Skinner asked. ‘I don't. So maybe he's not too bright—'

‘Aristocracy.' Titania sniffed. ‘Inbred, the lot of them. Daft as a bottleful of ferrets.'

‘Hey,' Hamlet objected. ‘I heard that.'

‘Case in point,' Titania smirked. ‘Even when you're completely sane, what's the summit of your intellectual capacity? Telling the difference between a medium-sized bird of prey and a carpentry tool. Watch out, Einstein, here comes Hamlet.'

Jane frowned. ‘Settle down, you two,' she ordered. ‘The point is—'

‘Can we rely on the caped crusader to fall for the sucker ploy?' Skinner resumed. ‘Furthermore, even if he's that dozy, will he be up to doing the job?'

‘Good point,' said Jane, nodding sagely. She was thinking of the God-awful hole she'd written herself into; the fight between Regalian and Gordian in the arena of Perimadeia. Maximum security plot cock-up; escape is
impossible. If Dracula managed to sort that out, it'd be a miracle. And very, very humiliating.

‘Actually,' Skinner remarked, ‘I don't see that as a problem. I've always found that people who live by sucking blood are highly efficient.'

Titania sniffed. ‘That sounds like laying the groundwork for an Inland Revenue joke,' she said. ‘If I were you, I'd leave it in embryo.'

‘Get lost.'

It passed through Regalian's mind that, of all his many concerns, Skinner and Titania being a love interest was the least of them. Far from looking like an imminent pink hearts job, they sounded as if they were already married. He decided to call the meeting to order.

‘Well,' he said, ‘that's all we can do for the time being. If it's going to work, we'll know soon enough.'

‘Will we?' Jane's forehead wrinkled. ‘He's got a quarter of a book to write, hasn't he? That'll take him, oh . . .'

Regalian shook his head. ‘Time's different here,' he replied. ‘You've sent manuscripts to publishers, you should know that. My estimate, in fact, is any minute now . . .'

 

Dracula sat back in Jane's chair and grinned, cutting himself with his fangs as he did so. He didn't seem to notice. He was in a trance.

He'd been right. It wasn't difficult. Even though he'd had to go back virtually to the beginning and write the first three sections again, the words had dripped from his fingers as he typed. It was almost as if the characters had lives of their own.

A quick glance at the window revealed the first tell-tale smudges of pink. Dawn was on its way, time he was back under the bed. Pity. He was dying to read it through once more from the beginning. Boy, what a book!

As he lay luxuriously back among the fluff, odd slippers, dead beetles and other objects native to the space between bed and floor, he found himself wondering - again - why he hadn't done this before. Strange, the way people made out that there was some sort of mystique to novel writing, when it was easy as falling off a mantelpiece.

He'd even got a title:
Fangs For The Memory
. He liked that. Slick.

A serious problem with first novels, he knew, was the urge to make them thinly disguised autobiography. He'd resolved to avoid this at all costs and his hero, a tall, slim, good-looking young Transylvanian with a liking for fresh draught blood and a seven-foot wingspan, was about as unlike him as it was possible to get. To take only one example; Brad, his hero, impaled his enemies with birch stakes, whereas he'd always used hickory.

The other characters - Regalian, Jane, Skinner, Titania, Hamlet - had just kind of taken off of their own accord, but that was no bad thing. It allowed him to concentrate on Brad, his complex personality, his devastating taste in clothes, his lively wit, his success with women. For two pins, he'd start the sequel right now, while he was in the mood. He'd got a title for that, too; something along the lines of
The Vampire Will See You Now
. Needed fixing, maybe, but definitely along the right lines.

And then, he remembered, he'd be able to collect on the Reward.

Didn't seem fair, somehow; after all, he'd had such fun doing it. On the other hand, that's the writer's life for you. Half your time blissed out of your skull writing the book, the other six months feverishly spending the limitless wealth. It is, after all, a well-known fact that the average writer, on finding a genie issuing forth from a lamp he's been idly polishing and being asked to name his three
wishes, would be hard put to it to think of a single one.

Still, now he came to think of it, he was feeling decidedly peckish. A little mild necking would do no harm at all.

Cue the Reward, please . . .

‘
B
asic authorship theory,' Regalian answered.

Jane scowled. ‘I'm beginning to get a bit tired of that particular phrase,' she said. ‘Exactly which blindingly self-evident slice of dogma had you in mind?'

‘Dogma,' Regalian repeated thoughtfully. ‘Interesting word, that.'