by Tom Holt
‘Alternatively, you could go to bed and we could make a start in the morning. Have you considered that line of approach in any significant detail?’
‘I . . .’
‘Yes, I know, it’s a tricky decision to have to make, and I don’t want to rush you. Tell you what, you sleep on it and call me back tomorrow. Goodnight.’
‘I think,’ Jane said, ‘we should start right away, if it’s all the same to you. It’s really a question of how long things are going to hold together at this end.’
‘Hold together?’
Jane glanced at the figure stretched out on her sofa, reeking of preservatives and muttering softly about the pain in his seams. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we’ve got much time. So I’m going to make a start at my end. I’ll be about twenty-five minutes, okay?’
‘Okay,’ Regalian sighed. ‘Don’t use too many technical terms.’
Jane replaced the receiver and tottered wearily through into her workroom, where she plugged in the machine and slipped in the disk.
‘Inspiration, please,’ she said.
And, either by coincidence or some unaccountable cross-dimensional telepathy, inspiration came. It wasn’t particularly high-class inspiration; it bore the same degree of resemblance to the good stuff that works canteen coffee bears to the finest Arabica. But it did the job, in the circumstances, as far as the situation required.
Jane began to type.
Regalian slept, she typed. And, as he lay on his crude couch of z’myri hides, his bronzed limbs stretched out in slumber, he dreamed . . .
. . . Of a strange landscape, of a kind he had never seen before. It seemed to him as if he was walking down a dusty and deserted street, between rows of tall wooden-framed buildings with weird shiny squares set into their sides, like sheets of crystal. And he noticed that he was wearing some outlandish costume: a buckskin shirt fringed with strips of hide, a large, broad-brimmed hat, strange wide-legged trousers and long boots, and around his waist a thick, wide belt, from which hung a scabbard. But there was no sword in the scabbard; only a small, heavy iron object that looked something like a hammer.
He stopped walking. There were three men barring his way. They too wore the same outlandish garb, and the same strange instruments hung by their sides. Their swarthy faces were grim.
‘Howdy, stranger,’ cried the tallest of them . . .
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Howdy, stranger,’ said the tall man. Regalian blinked twice.
‘Sorry?’ he said.
‘I said,’ said the tall man, ‘howdy. You deaf or some-thin’? ’
Regalian smiled ingratiatingly. ‘I do beg your pardon,’ he replied, ‘I was miles away. My, what an attractive and pleasantly situated township you have here.’
Confused, the tall man turned to his colleagues and conferred briefly in whispers. ‘Yeah,’ he said eventually. ‘We reckon it’s kinda cute ourselves. Trouble is, we don’t take too kindly to strangers in these parts.’
‘Quite right, too,’ Regalian replied, nodding. ‘It’s always better to be cautious at first when meeting new people. A certain initial diffidence frequently proves to be the bedrock on which a lasting relationship of mutual support and trust is constructed, don’t you find?’
The tall man looked at him; rather as you’d expect a sentry to look when he’s issued his time-honoured challenge and been told, ‘Foe’. He didn’t seem entirely sure what he should do next, but he was a tryer. He cleared his throat nervously.
‘Reckon so, stranger,’ he said. ‘So why don’t you jes’ turn yourself round and head straight back out of town the way you jes’ done come?’
He hesitated, as if aware that he was laying it on just a bit too thick. Too late now, however, to do anything about it.
‘I quite agree,’ Regalian said. ‘What an eminently sensible suggestion, if I may say so. If one of you gentlemen would be kind enough to point me in the way of the next settlement down the line, I should be eternally obliged to you.’
This time, the tall man refused to be drawn, and there was an embarrassed silence; during which Regalian offered the three of them a peppermint. Eventually the man in the red shirt, who gave the impression of having learned his lines and being extremely loath to waste them, expressed the view that the town wasn’t big enough for the both of them.
‘Excuse me?’
‘You heard.’
‘Yes,’ Regalian answered, ‘but might I just briefly trouble you for a few words of explanation? You referred to “the both of us”, but, in point of fact, between us we number four. Which particular two did you have in mind?’
That, as far as the three men were concerned, put the tin lid on it. Without taking their eyes off Regalian, they started to back slowly away, and in due course backed right into the town watering-trough, fell over their feet and landed in a small, confused heap on the ground.
‘Hey,’ whined the tall man, from underneath his two associates, ‘that ain’t fair. That’s cheatin’.’
Regalian shrugged, drew his revolver and thumbed back the hammer. ‘You could say that,’ he replied. ‘Now, get up slowly, or I’ll blow your fucking heads off.’
The three men relaxed. Admittedly, they were being held at gunpoint at the mercy of their enemy, but at least they knew where they stood, or rather sprawled. Any minute now, one of them would try and go for his gun, there’d be some nice, familiar shooting and . . .
Quite so. For the record, the man in the red shirt went for his gun first, but he was so flustered that he dropped it on his foot. The tall man followed his lead, however, and was all poised for the nauseating sensation of hot lead punching holes in his body when he noticed that Regalian hadn’t moved. In fact, he wasn’t even looking in the right direction.
‘Hey!’ he shouted.
‘With you in a minute,’ Regalian replied over his shoulder. ‘Gosh,’ he added, ‘that really is a stroke of luck.’
The tall man froze, his revolver in his hand and levelled at Regalian’s heart. ‘Luck?’ he repeated helplessly.
Regalian nodded. ‘Absolutely amazing,’ he replied. ‘Look, you see that big white building with the horse and cart standing outside?’
‘The livery stable, yeah. What—?’
‘Well,’ Regalian went on. ‘Follow the line of the roof about seventy yards to the left and you’ll come to a low tree. Look over the top of that and you’ll see another tree, sort of roundish with a bald patch halfway up. Got that?’
‘Sure thing. What—?’
‘Now then,’ Regalian said. ‘Look closely at the lowest branch on the right-hand side, and if I’m right, and I’m pretty sure I am, the small green bird perched there is in fact a Jackson’s warbler. Now, according to Audubon . . .’
The tall man narrowed his eyes and stared; and just when he thought he could make out a small green blob, someone standing behind him fetched him a terrific crack with a pickaxe handle, and he fell unconscious on to his nose beside his two similarly concussed associates.
Regalian sighed, holstered his gun, and wiped a little oil ostentatiously off his hands. Then he nodded to the man with the pickaxe handle.
‘Not bad,’ the pickaxe-handle user said. ‘Against the rules, but who cares a damn, anyway?’
Regalian nodded, and then extended his hand.
‘Mr Skinner, I presume?’ he said.
Everybody knows that characters in books can do things that ordinary people can’t.
They can jump off tall buildings and survive. They can remember, word for word, conversations they had sixteen years ago. They can fire ten shots from a six-shot revolver without reloading. They can encounter historical figures who haven’t actually been born at the time the book is set. They can get from Paris to Marseilles faster than it would take a mortal just to get to the front of the checking-in queue, and still arrive cool, refreshed and without a splitting headache. They can even fade out at the end of Chapter Five hanging by their fingernails from a precipice and stro
ll on at the beginning of Chapter Seven in immaculate evening dress without a word of explanation.
This is called Dramatic Licence. If you want to be a character, you apply for one at your local Editing Station by lodging the appropriate application form in triplicate, five passport-sized photographs and the administration fee.
Woe betide the character whose licence is revoked, because he’ll never work in the business again. They don’t even tell you when they do it, so that the first you know is when you jump from the speeding train, hit the deck and go SPLAT!
The grounds for revocation are Byzantine in their complexity, but the gist of them seems to be that characters aren’t allowed to cheat; in other words, they can do impossible things, but only if they’re in character and appropriate to the situation and the general world-view of the book. Accordingly, James Bond can get away with things that would get Tom Sawyer struck off instantaneously, and the hero of a fantasy can do pretty well what he pleases provided that they’re the sort of thing he ought to be doing anyway. This, of course, begs the question; but, since there’s a fair chance that by the time a fantasy novel is past its first hundred pages only twenty per cent of the readers (not necessarily including the author) have the foggiest idea what’s going on anyway, the authorities are usually prepared to be flexible.
There’s flexible, however, and there’s being taken for a sucker; and if there’s one thing the Editorial Department can’t be doing with, it’s being taken for a sucker. If you anticipate trying that, make sure you have a real parachute handy before jumping, even if only to a slightly far-fetched conclusion.
For the record, there is an appeal procedure if you disagree with the revocation of your licence, and one of these days it’ll undoubtedly be tried out, just as soon as a disenfranchised character survives long enough to contact his lawyer.
‘So?’ Skinner asked. ‘What’s the plan?’
Regalian wiped whisky off his chin and shook his head. ‘There isn’t one,’ he said. ‘There’s only a plot.’ He gestured to the bartender for another, and sighed. ‘And that may be something of an overstatement,’ he added. ‘She’s absolutely bloody hopeless at plots. Usually we get to page three hundred and fifty and stop. When we’re absolutely stuck, she gets all mystical, which is a real drag, let me tell you. Millions of bloody adjectives. I try to ration her to three a sentence, but it’s an uphill struggle. ’
‘I see,’ Skinner said. ‘That’s going to make things awkward, isn’t it?’
‘Probably.’ Regalian sipped his whisky and shuddered. ‘Still, we can only give it a go, can’t we? We’re probably going to die in the attempt, but that’s the writing business for you.’
Skinner’s head dropped. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe I was hoping for too much. I thought you might know some sort of back way out or something; where the loose bricks are in the wall, if you see what I mean.’
‘There aren’t any,’ Regalian replied. ‘Except for the Library of Congress, of course, and that’s just a myth.’
‘Library of . . . ?’
The hero shrugged. ‘Old character’s tale,’ he explained. ‘According to literary tradition, there’s a weak spot in the fiction/reality interface somewhere in the cellars of the Library of Congress building in Washington. You know, where they have a copy of every book ever written, or something along those lines? The theory is that the concentration of so much fiction in one place has sort of rubbed a hole, and if you can find it you can get into any book you like, and out again too, presumably. But like I said, it’s just a legend.’
‘Pity.’
‘It is, rather. No, what I had in mind was something a bit more practical.’
Skinner finished his drink and propped his elbows on the bar. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Alice in Wonderland,’ Regalian said.
‘Come again?’
‘Alice,’ Regalian repeated, ‘in Wonderland. Now according to something I read in one of the technical journals, there’s a sporting chance that there’s an airlock in there somewhere, if only we could find it.’
Skinner raised an eyebrow. ‘Just a second,’ he interrupted. ‘Let’s just get this straight. You’re saying that if we could somehow get into Alice in Wonderland, there may be a way of getting home?’
Regalian shrugged. ‘Depends,’ he said, ‘on what you call home. If you’re lucky and there is an airlock in there, you’d probably find you’d come out again somewhere in the nineteen nineties. Still, at least it’d be the real world and you wouldn’t have people trying to kill you all the time.’
Skinner thought about it for a second or so, and then nodded. ‘What’ve I got to lose?’ he said. ‘All right, how does it work?’
‘Like this.’ Regalian leaned forward. ‘Now, you’ve read the book?’
Skinner nodded. ‘A long time ago, mind,’ he added. ‘On a train, I think.’
‘Wherever, it doesn’t matter. Now, do you remember the scene with the bottle marked DRINK ME and the cake marked EAT ME?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘Fine. That’s the stuff we need. One of them, haven’t the faintest which, makes you grow smaller. And it’s a known fact that if you’re small enough, you can get out of the system by crawling out the back of the word processor and down the electric flex. You’d have to take some of the other stuff with you so you could get back to normal size, but that’s no problem.’
‘I see,’ said Skinner, who knew as much about computers as, say, Orville and Wilbur Wright knew about flying a Boeing 747. ‘And this is known to work, is it? This crawling down flexes stuff, I mean?’
Regalian made a wry face. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘On account of there not being any characters small enough to fit in a cable or daft enough to try. But the theory’s one hundred per cent rock solid. Well, maybe eighty per cent, say mud solid. It’s the best offer you’re going to get.’
‘Then we might as well try,’ Skinner replied. ‘Since we’re going to get killed long before we get there . . .’
‘Quite,’ Regalian said. ‘Better to travel hopefully, as the saying goes. The real problem, of course, is getting out of this book and into Alice. That’s,’ he added with a sad smile, ‘one hundred and ten per cent impossible.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes. No question about that whatsoever.’
‘Oh.’
‘Which means we’ll have to cheat.’
‘I see. Is that possible?’
Regalian stood up and laid a dollar on the bar. The bartender picked it up without looking at it and wandered away. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘Cheating’s easy. Provided, of course, you follow the rules.’
The sun shone. Sheep bleated respectfully in neatly hedged fields on the hillside overlooking the old stone manor house, while carriage-wheels crunched on the gravel of the drive. Mr Darcy put on his hat and set out for his morning stroll. Another fine day in the works of Jane Austen.
BANG! Suddenly, the air in front of him grew thick, and out of it stepped a terrifying apparition. Horrified, Darcy started to back away, as the cloud of sparkling fuzz grew slowly more solid and resolved itself into two human shapes . . .
One tall and lean, one shorter, fatter and older; both dressed in crude working clothes of a design that Darcy had never seen before; both uncouth and desperate looking, with a wild gleam in their eyes.
He was just about to drop his stick and run when the taller man smiled, tipped his hat and said, ‘Good morning, Mr Darcy. Exceedingly clement weather for the time of year, is it not?’
And then, with a feeling of great foolishness and no little bewilderment, Darcy saw that the two men were in fact dressed in the latest London fashion, in long tail-coats and knee-breeches and tall black hats, and he recognised them as Mr Skinner and Sir Humphrey Regalian, the two gentlemen who had taken Ardleigh Manor for the summer.
‘Exceedingly clement,’ he agreed. They all tipped their hats again, and parted; Darcy to continue his stroll, Skinner and Regalian wandering
at no great pace towards the house.
‘How the fuck,’ muttered Skinner, ‘did you do that?’
Regalian grinned. ‘I cheated,’ he said. ‘It’s a piece of cake, like I said. Whether it actually gets us any further forward is another matter entirely.’
By way of explanation, he reached in the side pocket of his coat and produced a small, leather-bound book. Skinner opened it and nearly fell over.
‘Dear God,’ he said. ‘It’s my goddamn book!’
Regalian nodded. ‘More or less,’ he said. ‘We call it a monitor. It’s like a sort of teleprompter. You’ll see the pages in the second half of the book are still all blank.’
‘But it’s the book I was writing when I got into this mess,’ Skinner said, pointing to the first page. ‘I can remember every word of it.’
Regalian nodded. ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘And if you read on, you’ll find all your adventures over the last thirty-odd years, described in your own distinctive brand of uniquely vile prose. Now,’ he went on, ‘look up the last page with any printing on.’
Skinner did so; and read:
As Kid Regalian sat in the noisy bar of the Lucky Strike Saloon, his hand strayed to his pocket and he found himself looking at the book he had taken from the body of his first wife, the schoolmarm, on the day all those years ago when he had come home to find the place had been raided by Ragged Bear’s renegade Comanches. He glanced at the spine and made out, despite the charring and the bloodstains, the words ‘Pride and Prejudice’. Almost of its own accord the book fell open in his hands, and he began to read.
‘Mr Collins was not left long to the silent contemplation of his successful love,’ he read, ‘for at that moment the arrival of Mr Skinner and Sir Humphrey Regalian was announced, and he rose at once to greet them . . .’
‘Oh for Chrissakes,’ Skinner exclaimed. ‘We’ll never get away with this!’
‘You’d be amazed,’ Regalian replied, raising his hat and nodding affably to some large woman in a big puffy dress. ‘The only problem is that you can only go backwards. Logical, really; a character can’t read a book that hasn’t been written yet. Also, to be perfectly frank with you, it’s completely arbitrary which book you end up in.’