by Tom Holt
‘Oh for crying out loud,’ it said wearily. ‘Not another one. Not another ruddy ponce who thinks that sneaking round the back of the soft furnishings makes him invisible. Come out of there, you clown, I can see your blasted shoes poking out under the hem.’
The curtain twitched slightly, but that was all. The Thing shook its head sadly (And the neck swivels, muttered Norman’s subconscious. Ah well, too late now), selected a rubber hammer from the toolrack and applied it with modest but palpable force to where it calculated the kneecaps ought to be. Norman fell forwards through the curtain, barked his shin on the corner of the workbench and sat down clumsily in a big cardboard box full of offcuts.
‘Strewth,’ continued the Thing, looking round the shed. ‘This is a bloody odd book we’re in, if you ask me.’
‘Book?’
The Thing nodded. ‘Yeah,’ it said. ‘You know, the book we’re characters in. What’s it about, by the way? Nobody saw fit to tell me before I left. Sorry if I startled you earlier, by the way, but it all took me a bit by surprise. Didn’t know where I was for a moment back there. Still don’t,’ it added.
‘What’s tha mean, book?’ Norman mumbled. ‘This in’t a book, tha daft ha’porth. This is like I said. Dewsbury.’
The Thing frowned, making a sort of crinkling noise in the process and causing Norman to make a mental note never again to use cheap glue on a job like this. ‘Is that some sort of play or something?’ it said. ‘Because if it’s not a book, then . . .’
‘Tin’t a book,’ yelled Norman frantically. ‘Don’t tha understand? This is real bloody life!’
The Thing’s jaw dropped (although, thanks to Norman’s years of practice with the soldering iron, not off completely). ‘Real life?’
‘Of course it’s flamin’ real life.’
‘Oh.’ The Thing’s brows contracted again. ‘That can’t be right, surely. Are you pulling my leg?’
Norman, who had a pretty good idea of what would happen if anyone tried pulling the Thing’s leg (at least before the epoxy resin had a chance to dry), repressed an involuntary shudder. ‘Straight oop,’ he replied.
‘But that’s crazy. I’m a character. I can’t come into real life.’
In the middle of all this, something occurred to Norman that made him turn white as a sheet and loosened the joints on his knees. Something he should have noticed before - immediately, in fact - if only he hadn’t been sidetracked . . .
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Tha doesn’t sound Yorkshire.’
The Thing frowned. ‘What the hell are you blathering on about now?’ it demanded.
‘Tha doesn’t sound like tha comes from Yorkshire,’ Norman screeched. ‘Tha sounds,’ he ground on, articulating a fear that was beginning to gnaw his brain like worms in a rotten carcass, ‘like one of t’buggers on t’telly.’
The Thing shook its head. ‘Of course I don’t sound Yorkshire, I’m a Dane,’ it said. ‘Of all the damnfool . . .’
Norman’s grip on sanity, which had been at the fingernails-slipping-off-tiny-ledge stage for months now, finally gave way; as was only reasonable, in the circumstances. To have devoted his life to the project, sacrificed everything, finally pulled it off - only to discover he had in fact created an overseas player . . . With a yowl like a banshee suddenly realising that its parking meter has just run out, he wrenched open the shed door and fled screaming into the night.
Hamlet scratched his head, trying to ignore the fact that doing so made large bits of it come away in his hand. ‘Be like that, then,’ he said. ‘See if I care.’
He stood down and looked about him. In the corner of the shed, he noticed a biscuit tin lid, the shiny inside of which, he realised, would probably do service as a mirror . . .
‘Oh my God!’ he said.
Nor (let’s be honest about this) was he over-reacting. When a blunt, straightforward Dewsbury man builds a human being, he doesn’t muck about with frills and decorations. Function, rather than form, is his primary consideration. Where Leonardo or Benvenuto Cellini would have put in a few hours with the polyfilla, the palette knife and the 000-grade wire wool, Norman had made do with a lick of paint and a dab with the coarse sandpaper. The result was something that would have had the model-making team from Alien hiding under the bed calling for their mummies.
Hamlet sat down heavily and buried his face in his hands. Then, feeling slightly sick, he unstuck his hands and wiped them carefully on a bit of rag. He wasn’t vain, not exactly; but when you’re used to looking like Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson and Mel Gibson you do acquire a certain self-image. Looking in a mirror and seeing something that bears a close resemblance to the contents of a vulture’s Christmas hamper will therefore come as something of a blow.
‘Great,’ he muttered. ‘Marvellous. Now what the hell do I do?’
Hi, this is Cheryl from Central Casting. Do I get the impression you’re not thrilled with the part?
Hamlet looked up angrily. ‘You bloody well bet you do. What the hell am I doing here anyway? It may have escaped your notice, but this is real life.’
Well, yes . . .
‘In addition to which,’ Hamlet raged on, ‘I seem to have ended up in something that could pass for Burke and Hare’s bargain discount warehouse. Please get me back to where I belong immediately.’
No can do. Sorry.
‘What?’
There’s a reason, apparently. It’s just coming over the wire to me now, if you’d care to hold.
‘All right.’
Yes, here we are. ‘Serves you right.’ Um.You got that?
Hamlet’s jaw set in a grim line. Not straight, exactly, but grim. ‘I would like to speak to your supervisor, please,’ he said. ‘At once.’
Sorry, she’s at lunch. Look, we’ll call you back as soon as—
‘Oh no you don’t. Just tell me how I can get out of here and we’ll say no more about it.’
How can I put this? You’re stuck.
‘Stuck?’
Marooned.We don’t actually know how you got there, but we’re one hundred per cent certain sure you can’t get back. Well, there is a way, but it’s impossible. So we suggest you, er, make the best of it and try and enjoy yourself. Um, get a job, marry, settle down, that sort of thing.
‘Look . . .’
You really have just the two basic alternatives, Cheryl went on, with just a hint of something in her voice. Either you can suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or you can take arms against the sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them. Okay? Ciao.
‘Look . . .’ Hamlet waited for a moment, and then breathed a long sigh. Cheryl had broken the link and gone. He was stuck.
A few moments later, he found a paper bag, in which he punched two eyeholes. With that, Norman’s frayed old Gannex mac, a packet of sandwiches he found on the bench, twenty pounds in change liberated from the electricity meter and a bare bodkin, he set out to explore Reality.
He had the feeling he wasn’t going to like it much.
It wasn’t as if Jane didn’t like doing book-signing sessions. Perish the thought. Any opportunity to get out there and mingle with her public was, by definition, a rare treat. It’s the interface with the guys and gals who actually read the stuff that makes it all worthwhile.
It was just, she considered, as she gazed out of the bookshop window at the falling rain, that in her case it didn’t seem to work like that. She was painfully aware that her ability to clear a bookshop of all sentient life forms except the people who worked there had earned her the nickname Bomb Scare Armitage; and having to get up at six in the morning and sit through a four-hour train journey in order to do it struck her as a wee bit much.
Just as she was considering making herself a little nest out of copies of her book and going to sleep, a shadow fell across the signing table and she looked up.
A customer.
True, he was wearing an old coat that would have scared the most lionhearted of crows and he seemed to have a paper bag over h
is head; but since this was a specialist bookshop catering to the fantasy and science fiction trade, that wasn’t in itself surprising. What did disconcert her rather was the powerful smell of formaldehyde. Nevertheless . . .
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Who shall I sign it to?’
The paper bag twitched a fraction. ‘Just put To Hamlet, please.’
She had written To Ham when the celebrated cartoonist’s light bulb switched on in her mind. ‘Hamlet?’ she said.
‘Yeah.’ The eyes, visible through the holes in the bag, glowed dangerously. ‘We spoke only the other day. Or at least, you spoke. I sort of printed. On your screen, remember? ’
Jane nodded. ‘Hi,’ she repeated. ‘Well, hope you enjoy the book.’
‘It was just come wonder,’ Hamlet went on, sitting down on the edge of the table. ‘There I was, passing the door, and I saw this poster. And I thought, now there’s just the person who could help me out of this mess.’
Screaming Jesus, Jane thought, not another one. ‘You’re in a mess?’ she asked, as calmly as she could manage.
‘Figuratively and literally,’ Hamlet replied. ‘You wouldn’t want me to take the bag off, I promise you. Look, how soon will you be through here?’
As a variant on the old when-do-you-finish-work line, Jane reckoned, it lacked sparkle. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I am in rather a hurry today, so . . .’
Hamlet laughed grimly. ‘This isn’t a chat-up,’ he said, ‘believe me. Look, you really have got to help me, okay? I’ll do anything you like to make it up to you, if you’ll only—’
‘You could start by buying a copy of the book.’
‘Wait there. I’ll be right back.’
Jane had hoped that the diversion would have given her time to disappear into the stockroom and hide behind the piles of Stephen Donaldsons until he’d gone away; but in the event he was quicker than she’d expected at the cash desk, and the strap of her handbag had got hooked round the leg of her chair. As he waved the book and till receipt under her nose, all she could do was sit down again and smile weakly.
‘Now,’ said Hamlet. ‘It’s like this.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘I could a tale unfold,’ said Hamlet, ‘whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine.’
‘You could?’
‘Yeah. No sweat. Listen.’
In the beginning . . .
Was the Word? Not quite. To be strictly accurate, in the beginning was the Screen; and the screen was with God and the screen was God. And, admittedly, the Word moved upon the face of the screen, was put into pitch ten, italics, bold, right margin justify, macro/WORD and all the rest of it, but that came later.
Nowadays, the screen just thinks it’s God, particularly when you want to print out. In the intervening time, creation has become a routine, a simple task that anybody can perform, given (as a bare minimum) a sheet of paper and a pencil.
One small but energetic sect somewhere in Nevada believes that when people die, they are reincarnated as characters in books. Good people become heroes, bad people become villains, and people who have led wasted, pointless lives come back as the characters in unpublishable first novels written by accountants on the office WP. The members of the sect, convinced that they are God’s elect, firmly believe that they will be reborn as characters in the works of Jackie Collins. Admission to their prayer meetings is by ticket only, and there is a substantial waiting list.
They exaggerate, slightly. It is very nearly impossible for a human being to become a character, or vice versa; and on the rare occasions when it happens, it represents a serious fuck-up somewhere in the system, leading to quite forthright inter-office memos and the occasional departmental enquiry.
The vast majority of characters are, in fact, small slices of the life-force, ranking in the hierarchy some way below men and angels, but several notches above ghosts, poltergeists and things that go bump in the night. Although they have the potential for eternal life, their chances of immortality depend entirely on the skill of their creators and the commercial acumen of their creators’ publishers. They are nominally subject to the ordinary laws of physics and rules of causality, but if the copy editor and the reader don’t notice, they’re perfectly capable of wearing a green shirt on one page and a red jumper on the next page without even having to step into a telephone box to change.
Where they come from is largely a mystery. Some experts hold that they are parthenogenetically conceived in the mind of the author. Others maintain that every human being carries around with him millions of unfertilised character eggs, simply waiting for a stray experience or turn of phrase to float in through the eyes or the ears and set the whole process in motion.
A third body of opinion believes (correctly, as it happens) that the stork brings them.
Regalian had been Regalian for so long that he could barely remember being himself.
This is an occupational hazard of heroes of fantasy fiction, a genre which tends to come in eighteen-hundred-page trilogies, and the syndrome is usually referred to in the profession as ‘good steady work’. Nevertheless, it has its drawbacks, principally the disorientation effect when a hero comes off duty. It is disconcerting and often humiliating to come home after a day of strangling dragons with your bare hands to find you can’t get the lid off the pickled onion jar.
Regalian’s main problem was with doors. His character in the trilogy was three inches shorter than him, with the result that he was forever nutting himself on low door-frames.
A rather more insidious side-effect was the severe personality crises he tended to suffer when he was off work for more than forty-eight hours. The longer he was out of character, the more his own submerged personality tried to reassert itself; but since he was no longer entirely sure what it was, this caused various problems which he usually resolved by staying in bed with the radio on.
Jane’s four-day book-signing tour was, therefore, something of a trial for him - a cross between ice-cold turkey and a fortnight in a decompression chamber. By the end of the second day, his landlady had forced him to switch the radio off, he wasn’t really convinced he knew where he was, and he felt an unaccountable craving at the back of his mind to telephone someone called Valerie and explain that the whole thing with the budgerigar had been nothing but a silly misunderstanding. It was accordingly a relief when his bleeper went, indicating an urgent message from his Creator.
Even so, the decencies have to be observed.
‘This had better be bloody important,’ he snarled into the telephone. ‘Disturbing me on my day off. Aren’t you supposed to be in Stockport?’
‘I am in Stockport,’ Jane’s voice replied defensively. Because of the trans-dimensional shift and its peculiar effect on telephone signals, Jane’s voice had an echo on it like God saying, Testing, one-two-three, can you hear me at the back there? ‘Look, I need your help, something odd’s come up.’
The phrase something odd, magnified, echoed and distorted by being shoved backwards through the fabric of reality, can be very disconcerting indeed. Regalian raised an eyebrow and put his hand on his left temple to stop his head reverberating.
‘Could you,’ he asked pleasantly, ‘keep your voice down?’
‘Sorry. Really, I hate to bother you, but this could be rather important.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Right, it’s like this. There’s - oh nuts, my money’s run out. Could you call me back on 0167—’
The line went dead.
Regalian frowned. Jane was, by and large, a reasonably considerate author, and it was very unusual indeed for her to call her characters at home - probably, so the consensus ran, because she was sick to the teeth with them during working hours anyway. Rather important in this context could be anything from nuclear war to a firm offer for the film rig
hts. He needed to know more.
Five minutes later, the phone hadn’t rung again, and Regalian decided it was time to show a little initiative. Here again, the dislocation effect took its toll. Regalian the hero had more initiative than a busload of management trainees on an encounter weekend, and knew he’d think of something. The other Regalian scratched his head and wondered precisely what something might turn out to be.
Let’s think this through. What would I do in this situation?
Well. I’d know she was in Stockport.
Concentrate. I’d ride up into the hills, probably in the middle of the night during the worst electric storm in living memory, and consult some old crone who’d summon up spirits of the dead, and they’d say where she was. Piece of duff.
Regalian had been Regalian longer than it’s safe to be anybody, but even he had the notion that real life isn’t quite like that.
The part of him which wasn’t Regalian whispered, Phone the publishers.
So he did. ‘Publicity department, please,’ he said. ‘Quick as you like. Hello? This is the Benighted Realms bookshop in Stockport. Where the bloody hell has she got to?’
There was a confused buzzing at the other end of the line, from which Regalian was able to deduce that Jane was due at Dillons at half past twelve and Waterstone’s in Cheadle at two. He glanced at his clock, did the necessary mental arithmetic (his clock, of course, worked in Overtime, which is three hours plus one minute for each phase of the moons of Saturn ahead of Greenwich) and called directory enquiries for the number of Dillons, Stockport.
‘Hello, could I speak to Jane Armitage, please? Yes, she’s there doing a signing session.Yes, that Jane Armitage. Yes, I’ll hold. Regalian. Um, Harvey Regalian.Thank you.’
There was a long pause, during which Regalian could visualise bookshop staff looking under piles of books and in the dark corners of the stockroom; and then Jane came on, saying, ‘Yes?’
‘It’s me.’