by Tom Holt
‘Gosh.’ An impressed pause. ‘How did you know I’d be here?’
‘Call it heroic intuition. Look, what’s the problem?’
There was a long silence at the other end of the line, which Regalian charitably put down to Jane being asked to sign a book. ‘It’s a long story,’ Jane said at last. ‘And you might find it a bit difficult to believe. Are you ready?’
Regalian frowned. On the one hand, he badly wanted to know what was going on. On the other hand, it was his phone bill.
‘Call me back,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the number.’
This is America.
This is, to be precise, Chicopee Falls, Mass., and the year is 1959. Rifles for Cochise is playing at the Roxy, in gentle competition with West of the Pecos at the drive-in. In back yards all over town, small boys wave wooden tomahawks and shoot each other with diecast sixguns drawn from cardboard holsters. And in a nice house on the edge of town, a man who once wanted to be a writer but now does Westerns scowls at his typewriter and tries to think of some even vaguely original way for the good guy to outdraw the baddie.
Crack! Crack! Crack! The heavy Colt bucked in Slim’s hand like a Rio Pueblo bronc as his left hand brushed the hammer . . .
Oh for Christ’s sake. He stood up, ground out the twelfth cigarette of the day, and stared out of the window. In the glass he saw his own face; and, as he gazed at it in his distraction, it seemed to change into that of his hero. His useless, whisky-sodden, two-left-footed geek of a hero.
Howdy, partner.
‘Go play with yourself,’ Skinner growled.
Only being sociable, partner. Seems like you’re mighty cross-grained this fine April morning.
‘And whose fault is that?’ Skinner replied. ‘Just for once, why don’t you do like you’re frigging well told?’
I got my public to think of, bud.
Skinner’s eyebrows huddled together like frightened sheep. ‘One of these days,’ he said, ‘I’ll let you get on with it, and we’ll see just how fast you really are. What am I saying? Probably you’ll shoot your damn foot off just trying to get the gun out the holster.’
You sayin’ I ain’t fast?
The idiot in the window was giving him the eye, and it suddenly occurred to Skinner that he’d been making a mistake all these years. The sonofabitch character was in fact a villain, somehow miscast as a hero. That would account for his habit of running away from showdowns on Main Street, and wearing a black hat.
‘You? Fast? I’ve seen faster things climbing walls with their houses on their backs.’
You wanna put your iron where your mouth is?
Feeling incredibly foolish, Skinner reached out and opened the drawer where he kept the Scholfield. He’d bought it as a publicity thing, eight years ago, out of his advance money for Geronimo’s Nephew, and had tried to have as little as possible to do with it ever since. Firearms made him nervous, and rawhide brought him out in a little pimply rash. He was absolutely terrified of horses.
Nevertheless. The face in the window had got to him, somehow, and it was time he showed the evil sucker who was boss around here. He strapped the gunbelt round his waist - it took some doing; Wild Bill evidently didn’t believe in regular meals and starchy foods - lifted the gun out, lifted the catch to check it was empty, and slid it back into the holster.
‘You’re slow, Slim,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re so slow I could call you, listen to the third act of Lohengrin, and still blow your fucking head off. Okay?’
Sheer hatred flickered across the eyes in the window, and suddenly Skinner was very afraid, although what of, exactly, he didn’t know. Of its own accord, his hand went to the gun on his hip. The reflection in the glass did likewise, as reflections are wont to do . . .
BANG!
There was a hole in the glass, surrounded by concentric circles of shatter-marks, like the web of a slovenly spider. The reflection was looking down at his shirt-front.
Reckon you’ve killed me, Skinner.You gonna be sorry you done that.
Skinner looked at the window, and then at the gun in his hand. A little curl of grey smoke drifted out of the tiny gap between the cylinder and the barrel.
‘Hey!’ he said. ‘The gun wasn’t loaded.’
The hell it wasn’t, pard. Leastways, this side of the glass it was loaded pretty darn good.
‘Gee, Slim, I’m sorry. I didn’t think . . .’
Like I done said, Skinner.You gonna be real sorry.
The figure in the glass slumped and slid down under the windowsill. Instinctively, Skinner stepped forward, and . . .
And fell over a body.
‘Neat draw, mister.’
Skinner looked down at the corpse at his feet, and then realised. The voice had come from the gun.
‘Did you just say something?’
‘I said, neat draw. I exaggerated.’
‘Hey . . .’
‘I thought, it’s the guy’s first time, he needs his confidence boosting. Actually, if it hadn’t been for me you’d have blown a hole right through the five-day clock.’
Skinner looked round. He was on Main Street; not Main Street, Chicopee Falls, but generic, industry-standard Main Street; and, as the specification requires, a man in a black hat on a second-floor balcony across the way was aiming a rifle at him.
BANG!
And, as the specification insists, the man in the black hat, now deceased, fell forwards through the balcony rail, which collapsed like balsa wood around him. The sound he made as he hit the ground was a sort of lazy thump, like a windfall apple.
‘Now that was a neat draw, I gotta hand it to you.’
‘Hey, you!’ Skinner screeched. ‘Cut that out, you hear me?’
‘That’s gratitude for you,’ grumbled the Scholfield.
‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind taking your finger off my trigger, you’re choking me.’
It occurred to Skinner that at this juncture it might be politic to run away and hide behind something.
Having done so (something turning out to be the door of the livery stable; there were horses in there somewhere, but they didn’t seem inclined to bother him), he sat down on a pile of hay and did a bit of violent trembling. It didn’t help much, but he knew what was expected of him.
‘Are you planning on sitting there all day? Because I don’t know about you, but I need a good clean and a shot of oil. You’d better put the kettle on.’
‘Kettle?’
‘You have to flush me out with boiling water, otherwise I rust. I’d have thought you’d have known that.’
‘Hey.’ Skinner closed his eyes. ‘Have you got any idea what’s happening to me?’ he asked.
‘Sure.’
‘Well?’
‘Boiling water. A drop of Rangoon oil, if you’ve got it And you use a feather or something to get the bits of dust and crap out of my works. Then I might consider explaining.’
Skinner hadn’t the faintest idea what Rangoon oil was when it was at home, but he found a coffee pot and an iron stove with a broken leg, and there was water in the horses’ troughs. He scalded his fingers painfully trying to dribble water out of the pot down the Scholfield’s barrel.
‘That’s better. You’ve missed a bit down in the forcing cone, but you can do that later. Right then, why are you here?’
Skinner shook his head. ‘You tell me,’ he said.
‘You shot your hero. You’re not supposed to do that.’
‘But that’s crazy,’ Skinner replied. ‘People kill off their heroes all the time. Look at Shakespeare, for Chrissakes.’
‘Ah, but not personally. They get other characters to do it for them. Actually taking a gun and shooting them yourself is against the rules.’
‘What rules?’
‘Which means,’ the Scholfield went on, ‘you have to take his place. That’s only if he insists, of course. I guess Slim insisted. Probably he didn’t like you very much.’
‘But . . .’
‘And who can blame him? You really
made life hell for that sucker, believe me. How could you fail to notice he was meant to be a villain, for God’s sake?’
Skinner shook his head. As a method of field testing the maxim ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’, it was certainly thorough; but he couldn’t help wishing someone other than himself had got the job.
‘All right,’ he said wearily. ‘So what do I do now? And how do I get back home?’
There was silence for a moment as the Scholfield considered its reply. Tact comes as naturally to full-bore handguns as, say, ice-skating to African elephants, but there comes a time when an exceptional individual is prepared to stand up and break the mould.
‘In answer to your second question, you can’t. Turning to the first question . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Assuming you’re looking for a nice, simple, relatively painless answer to all your problems . . .’
‘Well?’
‘You could always try shooting yourself.’
‘. . . And he’s still there,’ Jane concluded. ‘Thirty odd years later.’ She paused. ‘Isn’t that awful?’
She waited for a reply. Eventually, she heard the sound of Regalian heaving a long sigh.
‘Sunny up where you are, is it?’
‘No, not particularly.’
‘Right, so we can rule out sunstroke. And it isn’t April the First, though it might conceivably be some forward-thinking individual getting his joke in early to avoid the seasonal bottleneck. Otherwise, I can only imagine you’ve been drinking.’
‘But . . .’
‘In which case,’ Regalian went on, ‘jolly good luck to you, I can see the merits of your chosen course of action. Still, I’d prefer it if the next time you ring me up to breathe gin fumes at me you don’t choose my day off. Goodbye.’
‘Hang on, will you?’
His author’s voice. Unwillingly Regalian paused, then put the receiver back to his ear.
‘Look,’ Jane said, ‘I know it all sounds a bit cock-eyed . . .’
‘Cock-eyed!’
‘. . . But I’m convinced. I don’t know why, but I am.’
‘You’re the fantasy expert.’
‘Yes,’ Jane replied. ‘But that’s got nothing to do with it. I swear to you, I believed him. I still do.’
‘Listen,’ Regalian said, ‘I’m holding my watch close to the phone so you can hear the ticking. Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine - there, another gullible idiot’s just been born, you have company.’
‘Look . . .’
Regalian sighed again. ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ he said. ‘You’re going to say you’re the writer and I’m just a poor bloody character, so why don’t I do like I’m damned well told.’
‘No,’ Jane said. ‘Actually, I wasn’t going to say anything of the sort.’
‘Weren’t you? Going to rely on innuendo and the unspoken threat, were you?’
‘I was going to say,’ Jane went on, ‘that that wasn’t all.’
‘You mean there’s more?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dear God,’ Regalian exclaimed. ‘Don’t you think there’s a risk of you wearing your imagination out if you carry on like this? I mean, you need it for work.’
‘Look . . .’
‘Go on.’ Regalian propped his feet on the table and unwrapped a toffee. ‘I’m listening.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Having extracted from Jane her solemn promise of assistance and ten pounds in change, Hamlet went in search of something to keep body and soul together. After weighing up the available alternatives, he decided on sellotape.
They were due to meet again at four in Cheadle, under the station clock. Until then, all he had to do was stay out of trouble and try not to shed too many component parts. Easy enough, he reckoned, for someone who had spent the last four hundred years wrestling with insoluble moral dilemmas and stabbing people. A change is, after all, as good as a rest.
He found a public lavatory with an empty booth, and sat for ten minutes or so taping himself up, until he resembled a transparent mummy or, if you prefer, a sausage in a skin. Provided that he avoided sudden movements and it didn’t rain, he was all right for the time being.
He left the lavatory and strolled down the street. Up till now he had been too preoccupied with his problems to pay much attention to his surroundings, and it suddenly hit him that here he was, in Real Life.
Gosh.
Oh brave new world, that has such people in it. Hitherto, he had spent his life in the company of characters. Now characters aren’t like people in many respects, and appearance is one of them. Characters, like film stars, are invariably strikingly handsome, meltingly beautiful, or at the very least charmingly ugly. You don’t tend to get many ordinary-looking characters. Even First Citizen and A Courtier tend to look as if they’ve just stepped out of an underwear advertisement. It was only when passers-by started giving him odd looks and crossing the street that he realised that he was staring.
Another thing that struck him forcibly was the total aimlessness of everything they did. Where he came from, all the world was a stage and all the men and women merely players; they had their exits and their entrances, and everything they did or said either advanced the plot, developed character or filled in the gaps with jokes. It meant that life was initially hectic and, once you’d been in the play a few times, mind-gnawingly repetitive. Out here, there was absolutely no way of knowing what anybody was going to do next. It was intoxicating.
‘God,’ he said aloud (he was, after all, Hamlet, and old habits die hard), ‘this is absolutely amazing! I want to stay here for ever and ever.’
He turned, and smiled winningly at a small child, who was prodding its mother in the ribs and drawing her attention to the fact that there was a man over there with a paper bag over his head. Because of the bag, the smile didn’t achieve much, and in any event the mother whisked the child away with the practised speed of a waiter on piecework; but Hamlet didn’t mind. It was all really fun. It was so much nicer than work.
Work, he thought. Let’s see, it’s half past three. Matinée time. Right now, I’d be starting that dismal bloody scene with the Players. Bugger that for a game of soldiers.
(And just then, at the theatre in Stratford on Avon, a very bemused actor playing Polonius was explaining to the Players that if Hamlet had been there, instead of having been called away to a vitally important business meeting, he’d have been urging them to hold, as it were, a mirror up to nature . . .)
He stopped in his tracks. Did he really have to go back? Why didn’t he just stay here, settle down, enjoy himself for once? Get a job in a building society and become the Relatively Cheerful Dane?
A stray atom of pollen drifted into his nose, and he sneezed.
It’s a sad fact of life that good noses are hard to come by; and in spare-part surgery, more than anything else, you get what you pay for. Norman Frankenbotham, struggling to make do on a pension, had had to settle for a job lot of nasal gear that had seen better days, and plenty of them. He’d done his best with polyurethane varnish and suture, and the result was fine for ordinary everyday breathing. Sneezes, however, are another matter; and if he’d had the chance for a quiet chat with his creation, Norman would have impressed upon him the vital importance of avoiding dust, pollen and similar irritants if he didn’t want to end up with a face like something dreamed up by Stephen King after a late night snack of extra mature Cheddar.
Hamlet froze; then, having looked round to make sure nobody was watching, he stooped quickly, feeling a few coils of sellotape giving way as he did so, retrieved the nose and sidled into a shop doorway, where he could examine the damage in the glass.
‘Oh budder!’ he exclaimed. ‘By doze!’
Having replaced the bag, he stepped back into the street, breathing through his mouth and walking very carefully. He had reached a decision. He was going home, whatever it took. The spirit may have been willing, but the flesh was just a smidge too weak for his liking.
‘Forget it,’ Regalian said. ‘There is absolutely no way . . .’
‘Please.’
Regalian drew a deep breath, intending to let Jane know, with map references, where she could put her suggestion. He hesitated.
‘Did you say,’ he whispered, ‘cowboys?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Like, um, John Wayne and, er, Gary Cooper and, you know, um, thing?’
‘Thing?’
‘Audrey Murphy.’
‘It’s Audie, not Audrey. Yes, just like them. Why?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
Like a fisherman detecting the faintest twitch on the line, Jane suddenly became alert. ‘There’s something, isn’t there?’ she asked. ‘You like the idea, don’t you?’
‘It’s the most stupid suggestion I’ve ever heard in all my—’
‘Clint Eastwood.’
‘Of all the hare-brained crazy schemes I’ve ever . . .’
Jane smiled into the telephone. ‘Admit it,’ she said, ‘you’re interested. You’re a secret Western buff, right?’
‘Absolutely not. We can’t get films over here. The inter-dimensional interface buggers up reception, you just get snowstorms.’
‘What is it, then? Books?’
‘I have better things to do with my time. For example, being sick, or falling out of trees, or catching diphtheria . . .’
Jane’s grin widened. ‘I know!’ she said. ‘It’s the music, isn’t it? You’re a country and western fan.’
‘No!’ There was a pause. ‘Not a fan, God forbid. Never in a million years.’
‘But?’
‘Occasionally,’ Regalian said defensively, ‘we do get the odd country song on the jukebox in the pub here. Once in a blue—’
‘You sing along, don’t you?’
‘I do not.’ Another pause. ‘I may hum, sometimes, but—’
‘There you are, then. Go on, be honest. You’re dying for an excuse to wear your cowboy boots.’
‘I do not possess a pair of—’
‘And your ten-gallon hat. And your buckskin shirt.’
‘Nor do I possess a buckskin shirt. They bring me out in a rash.’