by Tom Holt
‘Is it? But I thought . . .’
Regalian smiled sheepishly. ‘Depends entirely on the book the character happens to be carrying in his pocket at the time,’ he said. ‘And that depends on who the character is, and his motivation and stuff like that. For some reason, it was dramatically right I should be reading—’ He indicated his surroundings with a broad, encircling gesture. ‘—this drivel while sitting in the Lucky Strike waiting for Butch Donovan to turn up for the big show-down. Just count yourself lucky. Given the circumstances, it might very easily have been the Bible, and then we’d really be in the smelly.’
All this was a bit much for Skinner, who basically wanted a quiet life with regular meals and a radio tuned in to the baseball. Instead of making any comment, therefore, he shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Thank you for explaining so clearly. What do we do now?’
Regalian returned the shrug. ‘I believe the phrase is, Go with the flow. Of course, it would help tremendously if we had access to a library.’
‘They’ve probably got a library in there,’ Skinner said, pointing with his cane at the big house. ‘That sort of library?’
‘It’ll do for now, I expect,’ Regalian answered. ‘Look, how about this? We go in, you keep them talking and I’ll try and sneak into the library and see if anything suggests itself. Okay?’
Skinner was about to reply when a voice inside his coat said, ‘Yeah, sounds fine. And if anybody tries anything, we’ll just blast our way out. In fact, we could save time and go in there shooting to start with.’
Skinner groaned. ‘Oh for Pete’s sake, you’re not still here, are you?’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you stay behind? I expect you’d have found some nice, compatible psychopath you could have teamed up with if only you’d looked hard enough.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed the Scholfield. ‘The thought did cross my mind. Still, stand by your man, that’s what being a personal sidearm is all about.’
Before Regalian could ask for footnotes, Skinner smiled weakly at him and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only my gun. Long story. It’s no bother really so long as you ignore it.’
‘Hey!’
Regalian nodded. ‘I know the feeling,’ he said. ‘I got lumbered with a magic sword once. Nattered away nineteen to the dozen when I was trying to sleep. As soon as the book was over I chucked it in a bush somewhere.’
‘Hey!’
The bounty hunter should have been played by Jack Palance; but, since Skinner’s works had never attracted the interest of a producer, he just looked like Mr Palance. Rather more, in fact, than Mr Palance ever did himself.
About twenty minutes after Regalian and Skinner left the Lucky Strike, he barged into it, accompanied by five heavies armed with rifles. He marched to the bar and attracted the bartender’s attention by poking a cocked .44 Frontier in his ear.
‘Okay,’ he purred. ‘The two guys who came in here earlier. One tall and thin, the other short and kinda fat, not much hair. Where are they?’
‘You just missed them, Mr O’Shea,’ the bartender replied. ‘Say, would you mind being a bit careful with that thing?’
‘Yes,’ O’Shea replied. ‘Now, you gonna tell me which way they went, or do I get careless?’
‘Um,’ said the bartender. ‘You’re asking something there, boss.’
‘Am I?’
‘Yeah.’
O’Shea nuzzled the barrel of the gun a little further into the bartender’s ear. ‘You’re right there,’ he said. ‘I’m asking where those two sons of bitches got to. I’m waiting. ’
‘You ain’t gonna like this.’
‘Try me.’
Slowly, trying not to move his head at all, the bartender pointed at a small, leather-bound book lying open on the bar top.
‘They went thattaway,’ he said.
Jane switched off the screen and sat back in her chair. From the spare bedroom came the disturbing sound of Hamlet snoring through a nose held on with Copydex and fishing line. No point in trying to sleep, even if she’d felt in the mood.
She had a bad feeling about all of this. All right, she had spoken blithely about bringing the boys home by Christmas, but she couldn’t help worrying about all the things that could go wrong. Regalian hadn’t exactly stressed these points, but he had dropped large hints; particularly about the risks involved in moving from one book to another. The theory alone was terrifying.
The main risk, according to Regalian, was snap-back. Because, when you broke into another book, you were simultaneously still in the book you came from, there was a material danger that you could be whisked back into your own book without any warning, simply because it was artistically right. The more books you broke into, the greater the risk became, obviously; although there was apparently a break-even point you could reach if you managed to jump far enough, by which stage you were so far removed from where you’d started that you were into the avant-garde and nobody would dare to presume to say what was aesthetically correct. This was, apparently, known as the Booker Effect.
The other nasty one was the principle whereby you could only go back, to a book written earlier than the one you were breaking out of. There was a loophole in this rule, Regalian had assured her; but it had never been tried in practice, and to make it work, it sounded as if you had to be one hell of a novelist. Jane had always been profoundly realistic about her talent, and the thought of the kind of writing she was going to be called upon to do made her feel distinctly uncomfortable.
Although she was ashamed to admit it, the part that really got to her was the thought that she was doing all this writing with no prospect whatsoever of anybody publishing it. Not that she was mercenary or anything; but the man at the bank who wrote her the letters with the word ‘unless’ in them undoubtedly was, and she did of course have a book of her own to finish. Added to which, there was a danger that if something went wrong, she was going to lose her hero; which would leave her in an embarrassing position, to say the least. It wasn’t that she was fond of him exactly, because he was only a character in a book - one that she’d dreamed up herself, at that - but she didn’t want anything nasty to happen to him, or at least not unless it got her out of a hole with her plot.
She glanced at her watch; half past five in the morning, that godforsaken hour of the day when you really, really want to go to bed, but you know in your heart that if you do, you’ll only lie there staring at the ceiling and listening out for the dripping tap and the milkman playing xylophone concertos with the milk bottles.
There was also the problem, she compelled herself to remember, of him next door.True, Regalian had mumbled something about fitting him into the plan somewhere along the line and maybe being able to do something with the Law of Conservation of Anti-Matter, whatever that was. In the meanwhile, however, she had as an indefinite house guest a tragic hero who was largely held together by blind faith and force of habit, and who smelt depressingly like the biology lab at school. And he wasn’t the least bit like Laurence Olivier in the film; not the film of Hamlet, anyway.
She made a cup of strong tea, ate four digestive biscuits and sat down in front of the screen again. By the time she’d logged in, and the machine had finished saying © Copyright DataZap Corporation 1995 All rights protected at her, she was fast asleep.
The machine, however, was on, and the last page of text was sitting there on the screen, winking its cursor and looking for mischief. And there’s a certain well-known author, a prolific writer under a wide variety of pseudonyms, who finds work for idle screens to do.
The keyboard started to type.
Having walked as far as the folly, Mr Darcy stopped for a moment to admire the view, and turned to return to the house.
BANG! There it was again. Being a product of the Age of Reason, and knowing full well that the peculiar visual effect he had experienced only a short while before was simply a product of his imagination, he forced himself to look straight ahead and walk on by.
&nbs
p; The peculiar visual effect (who was, incidentally, a dead ringer for Jack Palance) coshed Mr Darcy on the back of the head with the butt of a .44 Frontier and stole his watch. Then, grinning evilly, it strolled on down the hill towards the house.
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ observed the younger Miss Bennet pointedly, ‘that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’
She waited for some appropriate response, but none came. The visitor, she observed, was looking out of the window.
‘Would you not agree, Mr Skinner?’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ the visitor replied, and Miss Bennet made a mental note that she was probably wasting her time. Nevertheless, she persevered. Mr Skinner might be middle-aged and fat and have the manners of a dung-beetle but even so he was a young Greek god compared to the curate.
‘The young gentleman who has taken Netherfield Park . . .’ she started to say; but before she could develop the theme, Mr Skinner exclaimed loudly, using a word she wasn’t familiar with but whose general meaning she could deduce from context, threw himself under the big mahogany table and drew from inside his coat something that looked like some sort of gun. Miss Bennet edged forward slightly on her chair, intrigued. This sort of thing, she couldn’t help feeling, rarely happened at Longbourn.
‘The young gentleman who has taken . . .’ she repeated; and then the door flew open and the tall, better-looking one burst in, a book in one hand and Papa’s fowling-piece in the other. He seemed flustered, and Miss Bennet’s first instinct was to offer him tea.
‘Get down, for Chrissakes,’ screamed Mr Skinner. A moment later, the glass in the window shattered. Mr Regalian (a foreign-sounding name, Miss Bennet reflected, although the gentleman didn’t seem particularly out of the ordinary) hurled himself under the table, waited for a moment, stood up and fired the gun out of the window. Probably, Miss Bennet said to herself, he’s seen a partridge or something. Gentlemen, she knew, take sport very seriously and sometimes act unaccountably while under its influence.
‘The young gentleman who has taken Netherfield . . .’ she said.
‘This is more like it,’ said a small, metallic sounding voice from under the table. Miss Bennet raised an eyebrow. She was certain that the voice emanated from neither of the two gentlemen, and yet she had heard it quite distinctly. Would it, she wondered, be polite to ask for an explanation?
‘Shut up, you,’ snapped Mr Skinner irritably. ‘And this time, do as you’re damned well told.’
(His language, Miss Bennet said to herself, was not quite the thing; but no worse than some of the things she had overheard when the foxhounds had met at Netherfield the year before last. Gentlemen, she told herself, have a certain licence in these matters when indulging in sporting pursuits.)
‘Can I offer either of you gentlemen some refreshment?’ she volunteered. They ignored her.
‘How do you load these things?’ Mr Regalian said, staring at the gun in his hands.
‘Right,’ replied the metallic voice. ‘First, take your powder flask . . .’
‘What’s a powder flask?’
‘Oh for crying out loud.’
There were footsteps on the stairs. Goody, said Miss Bennet to herself, more visitors. This is turning out to be quite an eventful day.
‘They’re coming,’ Mr Regalian hissed. ‘Oh my God!’
‘I thought you were supposed to be a hero?’
‘There’s heroism,’ Mr Regalian replied, ‘and there’s getting killed sitting under a table. I’m afraid I’ve always specialised in forms of heroism where getting killed wasn’t obligatory.’
‘Here,’ replied the metallic voice, ‘grab a hold of my grips. You’ll soon get the hang of it. He’s useless.’
Mr Regalian reached over and took the peculiar-looking gun from Mr Skinner, who didn’t seem to mind in the least. Then the door opened again. It was not, as Miss Bennet had feared, the curate. Instead she saw a large, swarthy man with a grin on his face and another peculiar-looking gun in his hand. Gosh, thought Miss Bennet, perhaps the partridge has got into the house, like the time the fox ran into the drawing-room at Arnscot and the hunt chased it three times round the room before it escaped through the window.
There was a very loud bang.
The new arrival - could this, she wondered, be the mysterious Mr Derwent, who was supposed to have bought the Shirefield estate and have four thousand a year from his uncle in the West Indies? - ducked down behind the chaise longue, and shortly afterwards there was another loud bang. The teapot - best Wedgwood - disintegrated into small pieces. But there was no sign at all of any partridge.
‘The young gentleman who has taken . . .’ said Miss Bennet, but the rest of her sentence was drowned out by further loud bangs. A French clock, a mirror and the portrait of Sir Joshua Bennet over the fireplace went the way of the teapot.
The door opened yet again, and Miss Bennet saw, with an involuntary flutter of the heart, that Mr Darcy had entered the room. He didn’t, she noticed, look his usual immaculate self. In fact, his clothes were crumpled and muddy, and he was holding a bloodstained handkerchief to the side of his head and looked pale as death. Oh dear, thought Miss Bennet, he’s fallen off his horse again.
Displaying an impressive turn of speed, the swarthy man (who Miss Bennet had decided probably wasn’t Mr Derwent) jumped up, grabbed Mr Darcy round the neck and poked the muzzle of his gun in his ear.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Lose the iron or the dude gets it.’
Mr Regalian swore loudly, stood up and threw his gun to the ground. He must have forgotten to uncock it first, however, because it immediately went off, and a moment later the man who wasn’t Mr Derwent was hopping round the room on one foot shouting horribly, while the metallic voice was saying something about if you want a job done properly you might as well do it yourself. Grabbing the gun with one hand and Mr Skinner’s ear with the other, Mr Regalian rushed out of the door, and Miss Bennet heard the sound of running footsteps on the stairs. She turned to Mr Darcy and the stranger, who was now sitting in the coalscuttle holding his left foot and moaning.
‘The young gentleman who has taken Netherfield Park,’ she said, ‘seems little inclined towards society. Yet I have not altogether given up hope of our seeing him shortly at Longbourn.’
She paused. Nobody seemed to be paying her the least attention. As the youngest of five daughters, however, this was something she could easily relate to. She decided to stay with it and see what happened.
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .’ she said.
The laws of reality are bad enough. The laws of fiction are downright terrible.
In reality, things generally get worse, nothing ever goes entirely right, there is no free lunch, people fall out of love, pay taxes and die.
In fiction, right triumphs over wrong, long-lost brothers are united in improbable circumstances, everything works out all right in the end, and boy meets, loses and finally gets girl. Whether the participants like it or not.
The laws of fiction are unbendable, and there are no loopholes. Furthermore, even the timetable is beyond the control of the people involved, because things happen at the aesthetically correct time; not a page early, not a paragraph late. There are some things even the author can do nothing about.
One of them is about to happen to Skinner.
‘Talk,’ whined the Scholfield, ‘about a goddamn shambles. I was so ashamed I didn’t know what to do with myself. You guys had better get your act together, or—’
‘Shut up,’ Skinner said, ‘or I’ll saw your barrel off. Now then,’ he went on, turning to Regalian, ‘what do we do now?’
Regalian scowled. ‘How the bloody hell am I supposed to know?’ he replied, sitting down heavily under a chestnut tree, taking his left boot off and shaking it. ‘You think I do this sort of thing all the time?’
‘You’re a hero. Heroes are supposed to know these things.’
‘Get stuffed,’ replied the h
ero.
‘You’re formulating a plan of campaign, aren’t you?’
‘Get real. I’m trying to get this poxy chunk of gravel out of my - ah, that’s got it. Right, where were we?’
Skinner sat down beside him. ‘The next step.’
‘That’s what I wanted the book for,’ Regalian said. ‘Not that I’m admitting for one second that I have got a plan, mind. It’s just that, the moment I saw it in the library there, I thought it might come in handy.’
‘What book?’
‘This one,’ Regalian said, and held the volume out to Skinner. It was a first folio Shakespeare. Skinner recoiled as if he’d been handed a toad.
‘Absolutely no way,’ he said vehemently. ‘I absolutely refuse to set foot in there. It’s full of lunatics with damn great swords talking blank verse. The life expectancy of the guys in Shakespeare’s about on a par with the first day of Ypres.’
‘Actually,’ Regalian replied quietly, ‘I was thinking we could take it to a bookshop somewhere and sell it. It’s a first edition, and I gather they’re quite valuable.’
‘Oh.’
‘I thought some money might come in handy, you see. For food and things.’
‘Yes, quite. Sorry.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
Idly, Skinner opened the book. Shakespeare had always bored him silly, but a first folio isn’t something you come across all that often, and . . .
Idly, Skinner opened the book and began turning the pages, his mind slanting back to those days long ago when he had sat in the little timber-framed schoolhouse in Dalhoxie County and listened to Miss Withers, the schoolmarm, reciting her favourite speeches. He could almost hear her high, shrill voice dwelling on the metre and the cadences, bringing to that small, remote building a faint echo of the wooden O, and beyond it, the field of Agincourt, the ramparts of Dunsinane, the wood near Athens . . .