My Hero Tom Holt.

by My Hero (lit)

  He left the door alone, sat down in the middle of the floor and tried very hard to remember who he was. It didn't come easy. He no longer felt the slightest inclination to think of himself as a rogue and peasant slave, and the thought of his too, too solid flesh melting and resolving itself into a dew just made him want to find the guy who looked after the air conditioning and bash him into a pulp. With an effort, he throttled back on the adrenalin and made a conscious effort to face up to the moral dilemmas his situation posed.

  Moral dilemmas, as is well known, are like policemen; there's never one about when you need one. He was just turning over in his mind the moral ambivalence of ripping the guts out of total strangers when the door started to open. At this point instinct took over, and he sprang at the doorway like a tiger.

  'Only me,' said Rossfleisch's voice, and Hamlet froze in his tracks. All the Doctor had to do, he knew, was whistle. He subsided into a growling heap.

  'I thought you might be feeling a bit peckish by now,' the Doctor said, 'so I've brought you some nice raw meat and a cup of hot blood.'

  Hamlet snarled. He'd wanted to say thank you, politely, but somehow he couldn't manage it. He had the unpleasant feeling that the nicest thing he'd currently be capable of saying would be, 'GrrroARRRR!'

  'And when you've had that,' the Doctor went on, 'we must have a little chat about what I want you to do next. I think,' he added cheerfully, 'it's something you'll enjoy very much. Very much indeed.'

  * * *

  Jane looked up from the screen, lit a cigarette, and thought hard.

  Plots, she was always ready to confess, really weren't her thing. The broad outlines ('Well, there's this prince sort of person and he finds this magic ring, and he's got to take it to this sort of temple place before the bad guys catch him, and that's sort of it, really') she could just about manage, given time and encouragement; but when it came to what actually happened, the running around and toing and froing that one needs to fill in the awkward gap between the opening paragraph and the last page, she tended to find herself going with the flow; or, to be more accurate, the trickle.

  That approach, however, wasn't going to cut much ice in this case. She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and tried to think...

  So, we're in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and we want to get out of that and into Alice in Wonderland. This is, essentially, a continuity problem, and we need a link of some sort.

  She breathed in, inhaled a mouthful of smoke the wrong way, choked and stubbed out the dog-end. A link, between the two. Shouldn't be too hard, surely.

  Twenty minutes later, she came to the conclusion that it was probably a bit harder than she'd anticipated, but not completely insoluble. She got up, made a cup of tea, and sat down again.

  Fifteen minutes later, she remembered that she hadn't drunk her tea.

  Eight minutes later, she reviewed her progress so far. It consisted of the one word, Wonderland.

  In Wonderland, there is no here or there, only wherever and another part of the forest. In the kingdom of the imagination, the cock-eyed man is king.

  Let there, then, be a rabbit hole.

  * * *

  'If she thinks I'm going down there,' Regalian observed angrily, 'she's got another think coming.'

  Titania looked at him quizzically. 'I think we're meant to,' she replied. 'Otherwise, it wouldn't be there, would it?'

  'Not necessarily,' Regalian said. 'More to the point, did you see the size of that thing?'

  'Oh come on,' Titania objected. 'It was a big fluffy white rabbit with a comical hat and a big pocket-watch. You aren't going to tell me you're afraid of fluffy white rabbits, are you?'

  'I am when they're five feet ten inches tall,' said Regalian unhappily. 'Must have teeth like large chisels. If you think I'm scrabbling about down a long dark tunnel with those buggers roaming about...

  Titania shook her head. 'It's only a character,' she said, 'like you and me. I'm sure it means us no harm. It's from a children's book, after all.'

  'You read any children's books lately? Your average child is about as bloodthirsty an animal as you can find this side of a piranha colony. They have dragons in children's books, for God's sake, and wolves that eat grandmothers. No, I think I'll go the long way round, if it's all the same to you.'

  Titania was about to reply when there was a scuffling sound and the rabbit reappeared. Its big top hat was rather muddier than you see in the illustrations, and it had torn the sleeve of its frock coat on an underground root.

  'Are you two clowns going to stand around gossiping all day?' it demanded. 'Because if so, you can damn well find your own way. Oh my ears and whiskers,' it added dutifully, and vanished back down the hole.

  'All right,' Regalian conceded, 'maybe it's not exactly a wild rabbit. That doesn't alter the fact that we've got him to lug about with us.' He jerked a thumb at the recumbent Skinner. 'Sheer dead weight, he is.'

  'You shouldn't have hit him so hard, the poor lamb.'

  'That's beside the point. I say we wait till he wakes up, at the very least. Or else we find some rope to lower him down with.'

  Titania nodded. 'Rope,' she said, and there was rope. Regalian scowled.

  'Smartarse,' he said.

  There is a tide in the affairs of men, muttered Hamlet to himself as he balanced the chamber pot on the lintel, that, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

  Stepping back gingerly so as not to disturb the delicate equipoise of the chamber pot, he reflected bitterly that that was about the only quote from Shakespeare that wasn't in Hamlet, and it was the only one he had ever had the slightest use for. Would he, he mused, nevertheless be entitled to his staff discount?

  As befitted a graduate of the University of Wittenberg, he had calculated the physics of the thing to a nicety. He backed against the far wall, took a deep breath and started to bellow.

  Thanks to Dr Rossfleisch's unquestionable design flair (lung capacity increased by 27%) it wasn't long before somebody came. The inspection hatch in the door shot back, leaking light into the cell like a breach in the Dutch sea wall, and then slammed shut. There was a rattle of keys in the door. The door opened.

  Poetry in motion. The chamber pot, supported on a stiff piece of leather ripped out of Hamlet's left boot and jammed into the door frame, tottered and fell from its perch just exactly at the moment when Dr Rossfleisch's assistant walked under it, holding a portable cassette player and a torch. A thud and a crash and it. was all over.

  Pausing only to tread heavily on the cassette player, Hamlet scooped up the keys, bundled the assistant into the cell, locked the door and stood for a moment, the temporary victim of his own success. Since he hadn't imagined for one moment that such a hare-brained scheme would succeed, he hadn't wasted any mental energy on thinking what he would do after he'd broken out. He scratched his head, snagging a fingernail on a slightly proud rivet.

  Up the corridor, he asked himself, or down the corridor. That is the question.

  Oh for crying out loud, don't let's start all that again. He turned left and started to run.

  As he turned a corner, he could hear running footsteps coming up behind him. Bad déjà vu here; this was about the point in the proceedings when he generally got caught and sent to England. Ha, he said to himself, fooled you, I'm already in England. Talk your way out of that one if you're so damned clever.

  He gripped the torch he'd liberated from the assistant, flattened himself as best he could against the wall and waited. A few seconds later two men in white coats came flying round the corner, also clutching portable cassette players. They never knew what hit them.

  Gripes, thought Hamlet, this is so easy. If ever I get back to Elsinore, certain people are going to have to watch out, because there's a whole different way of going about things I never even dreamed of.

  Catching his breath, he ran on down the corridor, pausing only to smash any PA speakers he passed on the way. There didn't seem to be anybody about, and the way his luck was going
, this tunnel would pretty soon end in a door leading straight out on to the street. And to think, he mused as he ran, how most characters make such a song and dance about breaking out of nick. A doddle. Kids' stuff. Any fool can-

  He stopped dead in his tracks. He had reached the end of the tunnel and it was a wall. A dead end.

  There were footsteps down the corridor behind him; not so fast this time. It was probably safe to say that whoever his pursuers were, they had passed by the two men in white coats and were determined to learn by their mistakes.

  Think. Why go to all the trouble of building a corridor, just to end it with a blank wall? Architectural error? Job creation scheme? Fifty thousand bricks left over from the main job, waste not, want not? Improbable. There had to be something here he hadn't seen.

  Like, for instance, a secret passage.

  One of the drawbacks to secret passages, however, is that they're secret. If they weren't, they'd be painfully obvious passages and the builders couldn't charge nearly as much for them. An educated guess told him he had about forty-five seconds to work out what the secret was before the heavies arrived.

  Not for the first time, Hamlet found himself wishing he was back where he belonged. Where he came from, in fiction, the hero always finds the knob and lever that operates the hidden door, usually by stumbling against it or trying to hang his hat on it. Success is guaranteed, or else why the hell did the author put it there in the first place? In real life, there are no such guarantees. For all reality cared, he could spend the rest of his life down here buffing the walls and prodding the floor, and be none the wiser.

  Something inside him, probably one of those goddamn side effects, told him that this was the wrong attitude; that what he should do, in the circumstances was turn, face his attackers and beat the pulp out of as many of them as he could before one of them managed to switch on his tape recorder and operate the bomb. Who knows, continued the insidious little voice, you might get an opportunity to put your hands round Dr Rossfleisch's scrawny little neck. Now, wouldn't that be worth getting your liver blown out for?

  Briefly urging his inner voice to put a sock in it, Hamlet turned to the wall and tried running against it with his shoulder. To his pleasant surprise, it didn't actually hurt despite the terrific wallop when he made contact. That aside, however, there wasn't much to be said for it.

  He tried again, and again. Waste of bloody time.

  The footsteps were very close now. It was time, Hamlet conceded, to give it best, hold his hands up, go back to his cell and try again tomorrow. Obviously the rules of dramatic necessity didn't work here, and the sooner he accepted that fact the better. Accordingly, he stood back, put his hands behind his head in a gesture of submission and waited.

  Not for long. A split second later, a gaggle of five men in white coats came haring round the corner-

  -Saw him, tried to stop sharply on the smooth concrete floor, failed and piled up in a confused, high-velocity heap against the wall-

  -Which swung open, revealing a spiral staircase descending steeply into the darkness, down which they all fell, with much bumping and use of profane language; after which, the door slowly swung to behind them, and shut with a loud clunk.

  'Oh come on,' Hamlet said disgustedly to the heavens. 'There's no need to take the mickey.'

  Then, without any real urgency, he started on the long trudge back up the corridor.

  'No,' insisted Titania, 'it went this way.'

  Regalian stayed where he was. Quite apart from the fact that he was never at his best when down long, dark tunnels, scrabbling about on his hands and knees among rabbit droppings the size of pigeons' eggs and towing behind him a heavy, insensible body, he was beginning to feel ever so slightly sick of Titania's company. Four centuries of being the queen of the fairies had left its mark on her character, and he never had liked bossy women.

  Thank God, he murmured to himself, she's not my love interest; at least, not yet. There was plenty of time for the plot to demand an eternal-triangle situation. The very thought made him shudder.

  'Are you sure?' he asked.

  Titania clicked her tongue. 'Of course I'm sure. Besides which,' she added, 'if you hadn't been dawdling we wouldn't have lost the damn rabbit in the first place.'

  Regalian toyed with the idea of pointing out that he had been dawdling only because he was lugging along with him two hundred and forty pounds of sleeping novelist, which by rights was her responsibility anyway; but decided against it, on the grounds that life is too short, even if you're technically immortal. 'Sorry,' he mumbled.

  'Well, come on then, if you're coming.

  'I'm right behind you.'

  A certain time later, he observed that this seemed to be a very long tunnel.

  Some time after that, he pointed out that this appeared to be a very long tunnel indeed.

  A bit later, just as he was about to bring to Titania's attention the fact that this tunnel was, horizontally speaking, extensive, they came to a dead end.

  'Oh,' Titania said.

  'Quite.'

  'There's probably a door of some kind somewhere,' she continued, 'if only we knew where to look.'

  'You reckon.'

  'It's artistically right that there's a secret door.'

  Matter of opinion, muttered Regalian to himself. As far as he was concerned, poetic justice demanded that half a mile up the wrong tunnel, which she had insisted on following in the teeth of his advice, should end in a blank wall. On the other hand, he didn't exactly fancy retracing his steps, particularly as there wasn't enough room to turn round, which meant that instead of pulling Mr Skinner he'd have to push. On occasions like this, he was prepared to concede, there's no particular shame in admitting you were wrong.

  'In that case,' he said, 'we'd better find it, hadn't we?' They were still searching when Skinner finally woke up. It took them some time to calm him down and convince him that he was not, in actual fact, in his grave. They asked him if, by any chance, he could see anything that looked like a door.

  'No, sorry,' he replied; and then he remembered something, and his hands shot to the sides of his head.

  'It's all right,' Regalian assured him. 'I made her take them off.'

  'Thank God for that.' Skinner lowered his voice. 'Look,' he said, 'just what exactly is she doing here?'

  'She's the lo- I think she just wanted to come along for the ride,' Regalian answered. 'You know, a change is as good as a rest.'

  In the flickering light from a match clutched between his thumb and forefinger, Skinner glanced round. 'Funny sort of place to come for a holiday,' he observed.

  There was a cry of triumph from the wall face, and the two men craned their necks to look at the spot Titania was pointing at.

  'Look,' she said, 'it's a letter box.'

  'Get away, so it is. Any doors in the vicinity, did you notice? Only, all due respect, both of us are a bit chubby to be getting through letter boxes.'

  'Yes, but don't you see?' Titania demanded. 'Where there's a letter box ...'

  'I don't like the way this conversation is headed,' Skinner said loudly.

  'And,' Titania went on, 'here's a sort of brass plate thing, you know, like you get on the outsides of offices and old-fashioned houses ...

  'I really am getting a bad feeling about this.'

  'And - yippee! Hey, guys, there's a bell-pull. Where there's a bell-pull, there must be a bell. All we have to do is-'

  'Whatever you do, don't touch that bell..

  '-Ring it and see who answers.'

  There was a moment's silence, which Skinner broke by saying, 'She didn't pull it, did she? Tell me she didn't pull it.'

  From behind the wall came the sound of bolts being shot back and chains removed; and then the tunnel flooded with light.

  'Oh crap,' mumbled Skinner. 'I thought it was.' Silhouetted in the doorway was an outlandish, disturbing figure. Generally humanoid in overall appearance, it was dressed in a sort of dowdy Edwardian style. Instead of a hu
man head, a black rodent's snout poked out of the creased wing-collar and sniffed at them. In the back-light from the open door, they could see the glow reflected on two sharp, pointed front teeth.

  'Hang spring cleaning,' it said.

  'It could have been worse,' Skinner said a little later. 'It could have been Winnie the Pooh.'

  Regalian didn't bother replying. He was saving all his strength and concentration for his next attempt to chew through the ropes round his wrists.

  'It's a fair point,' agreed Titania loyally. 'I mean, yes, maybe we are stuck in The Wind in the Willows and maybe Mr Mole does have a pathological hatred of human beings and a gun, but at least we're in the right area, classic children's fiction. There may well be a connecting door or a-'

  'Don't tell me,' Regalian sighed. 'A looking glass. As in Through The. No, thank you very much. I've had enough to put up with as it is.'

  'Look.

  'And the same goes,' he added savagely, 'for wardrobes. Got that?'

  Titania wriggled angrily against the ropes. 'Well, that attitude's really going to help, isn't it?'

  'Helps me,' Regalian replied. 'Surly truculence. Can't beat it, in my experience.'

  'Nuts,' Titania replied. 'Instead of just sitting there making comments, you ought to be doing something. I mean,' she added scornfully, 'I had assumed you were meant to be the hero. 'You're expecting me to gnaw through ropes, aren't you?'

  Titania considered. 'It's a thought,' she said. 'It'd be better than lounging about practising your repartee.'

  'You people have no idea,' Regalian snapped. 'Did you know that there's more cholesterol in six inches of rope than four cream doughnuts?'

  'Spit it out, then. Honestly, if all you're going to do is complain-'

  'And,' Regalian went on, 'there's my teeth to consider. A fine hero I'd be, mumbling my way through the rest of the trilogy in a dental plate.'

  'Shut up and chew.

  'Yuk,' said Regalian, with his mouth full. 'Liquorice again. I can't be doing with bloody liquorice.'

  * * *

  Hamlet had been walking for hours, and his feet hurt.