My Hero

by Tom Holt

  ‘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 t
hen, 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 . . .

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘Basic 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.’

  ‘How much is that dogma in the window,’ Titania chimed in, ‘the one with the waggly—?’

  ‘Shut up, you. The main thing to remember,’ Regalian said, ‘is that this book will be Dracula’s first novel, right?’

  ‘Presumably.’

  ‘Oh, undoubtedly. Which is where basic authorship theory comes in. What you have to bear in mind is—’

  The ground vanished.

  For the first twenty-fifth of a second, nobody noticed. Inside the Slushpile, all surfaces are nondescript to the point of self-effacement. The proper adjective is bleak. After all, the place is little more than a rather more than usually desperate Job Centre, but without even the pretence of furniture or, indeed, walls. And in even the most godforsaken Job Centre in, say, Merseyside you’ll always find one human touch; a framed photograph of wife and children on someone’s desk, a postcard from some colleague’s holiday resort pinned up on a notice-board, a grey-leafed, cigarette-burnt avocado plant hiding in a corner. Nothing like that in the Slushpile. So, when the ground suddenly became transparent and faded away, there were no instantaneous cries of My God! Look! It was really only when they started to fall through an apparently empty void and the old thirty-two-feet-per-second-per-second routine cut in that anybody paid it any heed.

  ‘What the—?’

  ‘Oh, good, it’s worked.’

  ‘Oh Christ, we’re all going to—’

  ‘What you have to bear in mind,’ Regalian continued blithely, as an endless supply of nothing at all whistled past their ears, ‘is that everybody’s first novel invariably has the author as its hero. Which means—’

  ‘Aaaaaaagh!’

  ‘—That our friend with the pointy teeth will not only be in Reality, he’ll now be in Fiction as well. And that,’ Regalian added with a chuckle, ‘is where we’ll let him have his reward. Oh yes,’ he added, with a certain degree of satisfaction, ‘that’ll be a positive pleasure. Someone he can really get his teeth into.’

  Paul McCartney rarely goes shopping in Marks & Spencer these days. It’s been ages since Sean Connery dropped in to a bar for a quiet drink and some peace and quiet. For roughly similar reasons, Claudia sent Max down to the Slushpile to see to the prisoners. Being mobbed by hysterical crowds can be so wearing.

  He landed - no doors in the Slushpile, for the same reason that there are no window boxes on a submarine - a little bit off course; not on the deserted outskirts, where the prisoners had been dumped, but rather further in, which was a pity. Almost before he’d scrambled to his feet, a pack of scavenging characters came ambling up, eyes bulging, ribs visible in wasted carcasses, tongues lolling. He recognised them as heroines of attempted clog-and-shawl period romances, all naive innocence and demure cotton halter-neck dresses; but it was all right, he was wearing both his guns now, and after he’d shot five or six of them they went back the way they’d come, carrying their dead with them. They stayed pretty much out of his way after that, although he could hear the soft pad of their feet as they followed at a respectful distance. He did have an uncomfortable moment or two when a small knot of starved and crazy fugitives from the Danielle Steel cloning vats tried to jump him; even a .45 bullet isn’t guaranteed to stop a Redditch housewife’s idea of Joan Collins who hasn’t eaten for three years, and Max was glad he’d remembered his Bowie knife. He gave the science fiction compound a very wide berth, however. You can’t carry that much firepower and still walk upright.

  Arrived safely. Checked both guns loaded, knife handy down leg of boot. Assumed gunfighter’s roll.

  ‘Howdy,’ he said; and stopped, bewildered.

  Nobody here.

  Signs that they’d been there, not long since; chewed-through ropes and more discarded gags than a comedian’s dustbin. Just no prisoners, that was all.

  Rescued? Surely not. Eaten by characters? More likely, but if so, where were the bones? Even the fluffy kittens from the Children’s colony would have left a few scraps of bone, if only for later. Being held hostage? Could be. He clicked his tongue impatiently. The last time they’d used this place as a temporary holding cell, he’d had to go in with a special operations unit to free Superman from a mob of fundamentalist hobbits. With Gatling gun ammunition running at twenty dollars a crate, he wasn’t sure his budget would run to a repeat performance.

  Gosh-danged pesky characters, he muttered to himself.

  Whatever the situation, there was nothing to be gained from hanging about here. She would have to be told. The thought appalled him, but he had no option. It was rather like being Henry VIII’s fiancée, looking at the seating plan for the wedding breakfast and seeing that the president of the executioners’ co-operative is going to be sitting on the top table.

  Just as he was about to give the order to be beamed up, he noticed something skulking in a shadow out of the corner of his eye. Nothing unusual in that; an awful lot of skulking goes on in the Slushpile. It’s the nearest thing they have there to a rich cultural heritage. This, however, was skulking with intent to attract attention.

  ‘Howdy,’ he said.

  The skulker (skulcator? skulksman?) shuffled a few steps forward, hesitated like a hungry alley cat, and then darted back into the shadows. Max sighed. This sort of thing could go on all night if he let it. He had two options, one of which was to establish a bond of trust and confidence between himself and the shy, wild creature a few yards away. He opted for the other.

  ‘You in the shadow,’ he said, drawing his gun and thumbing back the hammer. ‘Come out before I blow your head off.’

  The skulkster quivered a little and then crept towards him on hands and knees. Max recognised it as a Comic Irishman; very much a discontinued line, suggesting it had been here a very long time indeed.

  ‘Top o’ the morning to ye, sorr,’ the creature hissed. ‘An’ will you be after bein’ Herself’s assisthant, faith an’ begob?’

  Max shuddered a little. A hundred years at least since anybody’s written a character like that. It’d be a kindness to put the poor thing out of its misery.

  ‘Sure am, stranger,’ he nevertheless replied.

  The creature shuffled nearer, until he could see the poor mad gleam in its eyes. A century living with its own dialogue had long since turned its brains to mush. Pity tightened his finger on the trigger, professionalism restrained it.

  ‘An’ if I was to be after tellin’ ye where thim new-comers might be after having got to,’ the relic wheezed on, ‘might ye not be afther considerin’ puttin’ in a good word with Herself for a pore ole comic relief that’s been here since there was afther bein’ snakes in dear ole Erin, begob and bejazus?’ Then it started coughing and snuffling. Max felt slightly sick.

  ‘Reckon so,’ he forced himself to say. ‘Figure the agent-lady’s always on the scoutaround for—’ He closed his eyes. ‘—promising young talent. Why don’t you-all tell me what’s on your mind?’

  The creature told its tale while Max listened, occasionally nodding while the translator circuits i
n his brain began to glow white hot. When the narrative had finally spluttered to its barely comprehensible end, he nodded again.

  ‘Thanks, partner,’ he said, ‘right neighbourly of you.’ He glanced down, and just as a fresh wave of revulsion started to course through him, an idea slipped in through the cat-flap of his mind. ‘Say,’ he enquired, ‘can you do Scottish too?’

  ‘Och awa’ wi’ ye, mon,’ drivelled the creature. ‘Do ye no ken frae ma accent I was born beside the bonny braes of Strannochmuir? Also Welsh, look you. And Nondescript Rustic, arr—’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Max broke in quickly. It was a long time since he’d eaten, but there was still something left inside his digestive tract, and he didn’t want it ending up all over his shoes. ‘Reckon that Scottish stuff’s what we done been looking for. Vacancy aboard the Enterprise for a chief engineer. Interested? If you are,’ he added rapidly, ‘just nod.’

  The creature nodded.

  ‘Right,’ said Max, as the transporter beam hit him. ‘We’ll let you know.’

  Six coffins . . .

  ‘Hello?’ Regalian shouted. ‘Anybody there?’ He desisted, and tried thinking instead. Logic: if this was, as he suspected, a coffin, then it followed that they were probably in a crypt. If that was the case, chances were there was nobody else in it with them; and if there was, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be helped out of his nice safe box by one of them.

  Think . . . It suddenly occurred to him that he knew how to get out of a coffin. You just apply your mind, and the screws that hold the lid on start to unscrew of their own accord. He tried it; and a moment later, he heard a tiny, distant tinkle, as of small metal objects falling on to a stone floor. He lifted his arms and pushed against the lid, which gave way. He sat up.