My Hero Tom Holt.

by My Hero (lit)

  Characters in Fiction aren't much given to introspection, except in the line of duty. No character ever slumped across a bar at three in the morning and moaned, 'How come I've made such a fuck-up of my life?' for the simple reason that no character in the universe of poetry and prose ever fucked up his own life. That's what authors are for.

  Why, Titania mused nonetheless, me? Let's think about this.

  All right then, who is Titania? Well, she's this ravishingly gorgeous upper-class bint who falls for a funny, fat, middle-aged, working-class guy with artificially big ears. The term stooge tends to spring irrepressibly to mind. Great. This Is Your Life, and so on.

  So far, so comprehensible; because Skinner's (a) funny, fat, middle-aged and American (equivalent to working-class as far as suitability is concerned) and (b) the unwilling plaything of a malicious destiny, translated willy-nilly into an alien dimension in circumstances connected with a work of dramatic fiction. A nasty trick to play on a girl, but logical. It would explain why me rather than, say, Modesty Blaise or Anna Karenina. But.

  But it hadn't happened. There hadn't been any suggestion that she should fall for the poor sucker. All she'd done was tag along. The Jane creature had been the heroine, and she'd just been Spare Girl.

  Plausible enough in Reality; in Fiction, impossible.

  So?

  She looked up. A face was grinning at her from behind the stoop rail.

  'Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,' it said, and its voice sounded funny. It sounded like an actor.

  Golly, she remembered, that's my cue. Even before she found the place in her mind, even before her tongue started to move ...

  'What, jealous Oberon? Fairies, skip hence. I have forsworn his bed and company. Hey, what the ...

  The face came back with the next line ('Tarry, rash wanton'; a line she'd particularly hated ever since she'd found out that wantons are also little suet dumplings you get in Chinese soup) but there was something about it not quite, not altogether, not entirely

  It wasn't Oberon. That was, of course, a pretty sweeping statement, because Oberon rarely looked the same two days running; for the simple reason that he looked like whoever happened to be playing him at the time. Anybody can be Oberon - the postman, the milkman, the snotty clerk in the building society - provided he belongs to an amateur dramatic society and waits his turn. To be Oberon, all you have to do is say Oberon's lines, like that man was doing.

  But that man, nevertheless, wasn't Oberon. That was somebody else.

  She had an idea he answered to the name Max.

  Seven glasses of whisky later, Skinner suddenly found himself feeling strangely weary.

  'I think,' he yawned, 'I'll just go lie down. That's if you don't need me for ten minutes.'

  Jane, who hadn't spoken to him, or anyone, since they'd walked into the saloon, nodded her approval. Hamlet, who was playing poker with five savage-looking men in enormous hats, didn't look up. Titania had wandered off somewhere. This is the way the world ends, apparently.

  He wandered out on to the stoop, which was empty, and sat down in a rocking chair. Somebody had left a bottle of whisky and a glass handy, and there was a fine view down Main Street which, Skinner felt, was probably quite conducive to sleep. After a while, his head began to nod-

  -And to reverberate with strange words, words wanting to be said aloud. Alarmed, Skinner woke himself up. All alone. Main Street. Whisky. Probably needled whisky, accounting for hallucination of offstage voices. Nasty

  whisky. Sleep it off, wake up healthy and happy and sane. The words drifted back, lurked just out of his field of vision, crept up on him. Just before he drifted into sleep, they pounced.

  Just before, mind; not after.

  'I see their knavery,' Skinner mumbled (and a tiny part of his brain clung, as it were, to the door handle and screamed, Look out, you fool, they're coming to get you!). 'This is to make an ass of me, to fright me if they could. But I will not stir from this place, do what they can. I will Skinner you crazy bastard, get outa there, now before you drown in wet shit up and down here and I will sing...

  He raised his head and noticed, for the first time, that there was a girl asleep in the other rocking chair, the one opposite. At once his mind was full of voices. There was a rough, crude voice, hoarsely muttering the Elizabethan equivalent of Cor yeah, thassa bit of all right, innit? There was a high-pitched American voice saying, Nooo, you fucking idiot, it's Titania, you know her, get the hell outa there, something terrible's about to ... And there was a wordless braying sort of voice suggesting that what he really wanted, most in all the world, was a nice warm stall, fresh straw and a carrot.

  The girl sat up. Their eyes met. For a fraction of a second they shared the single telepathic concept, Oh shit!

  'What angel,' mumbled the girl, 'wakes me from my flowery bed?'

  The ninety-five per cent of Skinner's mind that was no longer his own yelled Cue! at him. He ignored it. Slowly he reached up and felt his ears.

  In a cloud of dust, a horseman thunders into town, draws up in front of the livery stable, and glances up at the clock.

  Five minutes to twelve. High noon.

  'Hell,' Regalian muttered under his breath. He reined in the horse and looked round, then caught sight of two familiar faces.

  'Howdy.'

  'Hello there.'

  For a moment he contemplated riding away, or steering the horse straight at them to ride them down. Pointless. Instead, he jumped down from the horse and tied it to the rail. Let them come.

  'You're late,' said Claudia. 'But we managed without you.'

  'You managed ... ?' Regalian caught his breath. 'But this is

  'Reality.' Claudia did her Cheshire cat impression. 'And Fiction too.' She looked up at the clock and smiled. 'You're just in time,' she said.

  'For the fight?'

  'For the wedding.'

  Something banged on the door of Regalian's brain demanding to be let in, but he ignored it. 'But the showdown,' he said. 'Surely ...' He hesitated. 'Claudia,' he went on, 'what are you playing at, you evil bitch?'

  Claudia tried to look offended but her smirk got in the way. 'Nothing at all,' she replied. 'Your friends are free to go. Any time they want to.'

  'But ...' He scowled. 'What wedding?'

  Claudia shook her head. Regalian noticed that Max had somehow disappeared. Kill Claudia! Now might I do it, pat..

  'Do you know,' she said, 'what day it is?'

  'What?'

  'The date. In real-time.'

  'No. Why?'

  Claudia's grin widened, threatening to unzip her entire face. 'June the Twenty-first,' she said. 'Midsummer's day.

  Ah well, things to do. No hard feelings?'

  'You bitch!'

  Jane's head nodded on to her folded arms. Despite the smoke and the noise and the piano still tinnily tinkling Dixie, she was tired. She slept.

  Hamlet leaned back in his chair while the poker game clattered around him, the players moving and grunting like robots, mechanical toys. He'd folded in this particular hand long since. His eyelids felt heavy. His eyes closed. The other players quietly got up and left. The saloon was empty.

  Except for a vague, almost translucent figure, like a huge mayfly, hovering in the cigar smoke. From a fold of his shimmering robe he took a small purple flower, which he proceeded to squeeze, like lemon over scampi, directly above the eyelids of the sleeping female. A moment later, he repeated the procedure with the male sleeper.

  He snickered; hna-hna-hna! You can't hope to do that convincingly unless you've spent at least three terms at Baddie School. It's all a matter of breath control and, of course, hours and hours and hours of practice.

  You could just about call this fleeting, ephemeral figure a fairy, just as you could theoretically describe Hitler as a statesman; after all, he was a man, and at various stages of his career he had quite a lot of states. This fairy, however, is different. He's the sort of fairy who, when assigned to tooth duty, would have with
him at all times a pair of big, rusty pliers.

  His name is probably Max.

  The clock ticked on. One minute to twelve. Twelve noon, or twelve midnight.

  Jane woke up.

  She couldn't remember having fallen asleep; but so what, she felt better for it. She remembered. And hey! the world was still here. She opened her eyes.

  Yowl

  She closed them quickly and started to rub. Soap!

  When it was safe to open them again, she discovered that she was looking directly into the eyes of.

  'Hello,' she said.

  'Hello,' Hamlet replied.

  There was still one small, hidden part of Jane 's mind that wasn't knee-deep in violet-scented pink goo, courtesy of the love-philtre. It was the part she used for being a writer.

  This is how it goes with writers, even piss-awful ones like Jane. There's this tiny hidden cell bunker-deep inside their heads which operates on totally different rules and sees things from entirely different perspectives. It's a bit like an embassy; regardless of its location, it's a wee sliver of somewhere else - sovereign territory, operating under its own jurisdiction. And, like an embassy, it's the last safe place to run to when things on the outside start to get hairy.

  Having barricaded herself in and jammed the mental equivalent of a chair under the door handle, the real Jane took a deep breath and called a staff meeting.

  Oh dear. In love again. Shit.

  Brain, she commanded, access memory for previous outbreaks of love and analyse.

  Computing.

  Well?

  You really want to hear this?

  Yes.

  You're the boss. You want them in chronological order, or by magnitude of fool made of self, or alphabetical, or what?

  Chronological will do just fine.

  Computing. Well, if we forget about teddy bears and music teachers for the time being, we start with Kevin. Remember Kevin?

  Jane shuddered. Let's skip Kevin, shall we?

  Good idea. That brings us on to Damian. Tall. Skinny. Unfortunate skin condition. Wrote poetry about derelict machinery and how dismal life is. Further analysis?

  Next, please.

  Fast-forwarding Damian, we come to Malcolm. World-weary, cynical, devil-may-care, affected a Franz Kafka dying-of-consumption cough, in reality brought on by smoking French cigarettes; worked in the pie factory at the bottom of Gough Whitlam Boulevard. Curious and really rather disgusting half-moon-shaped birthmark on his...

  Next, please.

  Is this really achieving anything? I mean, wouldn't you be more usefully occupied knotting sheets together and climbing out through your left ear?

  Next, please.

  If you insist. Ye gods, Stuart. Could we bypass Stuart, because if you throw up in here, I'm the one who's going to have to live with the smell.

  Further detail, please.

  Computing. Stuart, five foot four, fourteen stone, his determination to sample every new experience at least once finally led to his having a bath in, let's see, nineteen seventy-nine, March, to be precise. Owned a scruffy Toyota about seven years older than he was, on the back seat of which you could always be certain of finding the remains of the previous day's hamburger, usually at incredibly inappropriate moments. Arguably the nadir of your romantic career to date, although these things are necessarily subjective. Had enough? You realise we haven't even got through your teens yet.

  She hadn't; and so the catalogue continued...

  (And outside that small, safe place the rest of her gazed into Hamlet's soft, slugbelly-coloured eyes and sighed; and in the orchestra pit, the phantom violinists pulled on their asbestos gloves to protect their fingers from the glowing heat of tortured catgut ...

  That's the lot?

  Thank God. Unless you want Him included as well. You know, Mister Something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-Denmark-or-maybe-it's-just-time-I-changed-my-socks...'

  Not just now, thanks. Session ends.

  Logout sequence completed. Ciao and good luck.

  As she'd suspected; and the record confirmed it. Hopeless and feckless she may have been in her choice of kindred souls, but always consistent. There was a definite pattern to it (for a very general idea, imagine the brain of a Dalek linked up to a computer dating program) and Hamlet quite simply didn't correlate.

  Put-up job. Somebody's doing this to me.

  Guess who.

  And, the real Jane realised, as she gazed into Hamlet's eyes, sod all I can do about it.

  Help! Rescue!

  My hero

  Not just sheer vindictiveness. Not just an evil mind having fun moving the counters around.

  Fictional boy meets real girl; real boy meets fictional girl. They fall in love.

  Fiction mixed with Reality, Reality with Fiction. This is the way the world ends.

  Stands the town clock at one to noon? And will the shootout happen soon?

  But the clock also reads one minute to twelve at the end of Midsummer Night's Dream, just before Theseus 's iron-hand-of-midnight speech; that poetic and, in context, highly sinister version of Last orders at the bar, please. Then the play finishes, the happy-ever-after begins.

  Happy ending; highly subjective term. Happy for who? Ending of what?

  Even now, in the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, there was a tiny nodule in the most obscure box-room of Skinner's mind that said No, this isn't. And Titania doesn't, she goes back to Oberon and lives happily... And above all, I'm not. Not what? Can't remember. Just not, is all.

  The sky is a stained-glass window, all different shades of light and dark blue. The air is that heavy, sweet, fresh smell unique to midsummer midnight. The little white light in Skinner's brain flickers for the last time and goes out. A big stupid grin splurges across his face, like a custard pie from the hand of God.

  Cue Theseus, whose name is probably Max. He opens his mouth...

  'You bitch!' Regalian shouted, and ran.

  Where to, he wasn't sure, Fiction or Reality, all one big happy ... He stopped running, his breath coming hard. No point running. Main Street.

  What had the man said?

  A 11 you gotta do, son, is fight and lose. You know that. Fight and lose.

  He looked up; and he was facing Max. The clock started to strike twelve.

  Max, in black, two guns on his belt, looking more like Jack Palance than Mr Palance could ever hope to do even if he took lessons.

  The tumbleweed wobbled and fell over. Far away, the swinging door of the saloon banged in the wind. A bell rang. In the background, the wedding party stopped to watch; otherwise, the street was deserted, the way Main Street always is.

  All you gotta do is fight and lose.

  Yes! Restore Reality, have the hero die at the hands of the villain. Fat chance.

  'Okay, stranger,' Max drawled. 'This town ain't big enough for the both of us.'

  Basic authorship theory.

  The hero always wins. He has no choice.

  There are times when this can be a confounded nuisance.

  'Oh, I don't know,' Regalian replied. 'Tell you what, you can have the whole of the top bit, from the bank down as far as the general store and the watering trough, and I'll even throw in the big open space behind the smithy. You could build a whole factory estate on that if you wanted to.'

  Max didn't reply. On his right hand he wore a skin-tight black leather glove. It was hovering about an inch and a half above the pearl grips of his Peacemaker. He grinned.

  And the realisation hit Regalian like an express train hitting a cow on the line; he'll draw and I'll be faster, and I'll kill him. And that'll mean Fiction has won, and there'll be no more Reality, ever. Even if he manages to shoot me, I'm still a sodding vampire, I can't die. Not that it'll come to that, of course, because I'm the hero. And the hero's always faster on the draw. Always.

  From the direction of the upper saloon balcony, he heard the grinding click of a Winchester rifle being cocked. Of course, he realised, the sniper; th
e one who always gets shot and falls through the balsawood railings. Only he's not here to kill me, he's here to make sure, in case I miss... But I can t.

  I can 't, dammit. If I turn through a hundred and eighty

  degrees and shoot straight up in the air, the bullet will fall on his head and kill him. If I somehow manage not to shoot at all, he'll miss, his bullet will ricochet off a wagon wheel and come back and hit him straight between the eyes.

  This is the way the world ends; not with a whimper, but a bloody loud bang.

  And...

  Max went for his gun. And before he'd cocked the hammer, before the Peacemaker was even clear of the holster, the Scholfield was out and cocked and levelled at his heart and- There was absolutely nothing Regalian could do. He felt his finger tighten on the trigger, and the sear broke and (Max's gun was out now, and his thumb was on the hammer; too late, too late, too late) the hammer fell.

  The Scholfield cleared its throat.

  It had only one line, but it was a honey. When the film was over, it would be the line everybody would remember.

  'Click,' it said.

  The bullet from Max's gun - sterling silver, ninety-nine-point-nine per cent fine - hit Regalian smack in the heart. He jerked, hit the ground like a sack of potatoes and lay still.

  Max screamed, turned, raised the gun to put it to his head and fire it into his own ear. He pulled the trigger, missed; and the bullet went past him and hit Skinner on the saloon balcony. Crash! went those balsawood railings. Thump! went that heavy body.

  Horrified, Max tried to back away but there was nowhere for him to go. He threw the gun from him. It hit the ground, the impact jarred the hammer, a shot rang out; the bullet ricocheted off a wagon wheel, missed Hamlet's head by a fraction of an inch, sang off the tin-plate sign over Barker's Store, smashed through the window of the saloon and hit the pianola, which immediately began to play Buffalo Girl.