My Hero

by Tom Holt

Jane Armitage, a writer of sensational popular fiction, was born on the same day that Albert Skinner, a writer of sensational popular fiction, became marooned on the Other Side.

  It might, of course, simply be a coincidence. By the same token, the stars might just conceivably be the holes in the sky that the rain comes through. Neither proposition, however, is one you’d be advised to bet next month’s rent on.

  Having looked round to make sure the coast was clear, Hamlet rolled up his sleeves, took a firm hold on the pickaxe handle, and swung.

  Indecisive and vacillating? He’d give the smug bastards indecisive and vacillating. Most other characters of his acquaintance, stuck in this ghastly position, would just roll up in a ball like a hedgehog and wait to be rescued. Not Hamlet.

  He was digging a tunnel.

  Where exactly he was digging it to, he wasn’t quite sure. What he knew about multi-dimensional spatio-temporal physics could have been written on the back of a postage stamp with a thick-nib marker pen, but that was neither here nor there. Isaac Newton, he argued, knew bugger all about gravity until the apple hit him. It was probably something you could pick up as you went along.

  More to the point; what was he going to do with all the earth?

  Sherlock Holmes, fortunately, was out on a job somewhere, which did at least mean he had the run of the place until he got back. Investigations in Holmes’ bedroom had produced a significant number of socks, each of which (Hamlet estimated) would hold at least a pound and a half of soil. Once the socks were full, he could hang them up with clothes pegs from the curtain rail, and nobody would be any the wiser.

  There were times, he realised, when his own ingenuity quite frightened him.

  Another slight problem was the fact that 221B Baker Street was on the first floor.

  Who was it (Hamlet asked himself, as the pickaxe blade hurtled downwards) who described a problem as a good idea just waiting to happen? Not Shakespeare, for a start. That dozy old windbag never ever said anything practical, just a lot of dreary waffle about Life and things. All he had to do was to break through the ceiling into Mrs Hudson’s sitting room and then carry on vertically downwards after that. Piece of cake. Obviously, he’d have to find some cunning way to conceal what he was up to, but that ought not to be difficult. How many people look up at their ceilings more than once a year anyway?

  The pickaxe blade connected with the floor, hit something hard and bounced back, nearly skewering Hamlet’s head with the other end. Puzzled, Hamlet bent down and prodded at the place under the carpet he’d struck at. Sure enough, he felt something under there; something flat and smooth. Curious.

  With infinite care and a pair of scissors, he began prising up the carpet tacks, keeping each tack safe for the time when he’d have to put the carpet back. Since Holmes appeared to be a fairly observant sort of chap, it would be vitally important not to leave any clues as to what he’d been up to, such as the carpet rolled back and a gaping hole in the floorboards.

  What on earth could it be? As he plied the scissors, he tried to call to mind the various categories of article that people usually stash under the floorboards. Tin trunks full of gold coins. Illegal arms caches. Dismembered corpses. None of these seemed to fit in with Holmes’ public image, but on the other hand, if you go to the trouble of shoving something away under the rug, the chances are that you don’t want people to know about it. Maybe the only reason why nobody usually associated the name Sherlock Holmes with suitcasefuls of detonators and Semtex was that nobody as yet had thought to prise up his floor.

  It was a manhole cover.

  Hamlet sat back on his heels and scratched his head. Yes, he muttered to himself, quite. Why would a world-famous detective living in a first-storey apartment have a manhole cover in the middle of his floor? Only one way to find out. He grabbed the handle, braced his feet and pulled.

  There was a hole. Not an unreasonable thing to expect to find under a manhole cover, at that. Hamlet knelt beside it and peered down.

  Instead of the bird’s eye view of Mrs Hudson’s sitting room he’d expected to see, there was what looked for all the world like a steel-lined ventilation shaft; the sort of thing, in fact, that Our Hero always finds, conveniently situated behind a flimsy chicken-wire grating, in the makeshift cell the villains leave him in after he’s been captured, and which always and without exception comes out in the control room of the chief villain’s underground command centre. Hamlet sighed. Welcome, he said to himself, to Thrillerland.

  Just because it’s there, Hamlet thought, doesn’t mean I have to go down it. I could put back the cover, replace the carpet and make myself a nice strong cup of tea.

  On the other hand, he mused, stroking his chin, someone’s obviously been to a lot of trouble to put it there. And this is, after all, fiction, where everything has a purpose. Whoever built this ruddy thing is probably waiting for me at the other end right this very minute, tapping his foot and looking at his watch.

  As he knelt and pondered, a vision floated into his mind of a crowded auditorium, a proscenium arch and a spotlit figure in black centre stage with a skull in his hand. Indecisive and vacillating. Well, quite. The sort of man, in fact, who’d uncover a perfectly good ventilation shaft and then sit on the edge of it agonising for half an hour until the villain came back again and caught him. Not ruddy likely.

  ‘Here goes,’ he said aloud; and then, a moment later, ‘Down the hatch.’ He stayed where he was.

  Who the devil would want to build a ventilation shaft slap bang in the middle of Sherlock Holmes’ living room floor?

  Good question. There is a difference, after all, between being dynamic and positive, and not looking both ways before stepping out into the road and getting run over by a passing truck. Perhaps we should just hold our water and think this one through a little longer . . .

  He froze. From the stairwell came the sound of footsteps: the heavy clunk he recognised as Holmes’ size eights, and a sharper, more clopping noise that suggested high heels. With an economy of movement that would have done credit to the proverbial drain-ascending rat, Hamlet jumped to his feet, swung himself into the mouth of the shaft, braced his knees against the sides and let go.

  By a dramatically permissible coincidence, at that very moment in a cellar under a warehouse in Rotherhithe, Professor Moriarty was writing a cheque.

  The cheque was for sixty-two pounds, drawn in favour of Jas. Harris & Co., Builders, Baker Street. The invoice that lay beside the cheque book on Moriarty’s desk read:

  To supplying and installing at 221B Baker Street while the tenant thereof was otherwise engaged a steel-lined ventilation shaft connecting directly with your secret underground lair; to include drawing plans, furnishing materials, all incidental works and making good; prompt settlement will oblige.

  Moriarty blotted the cheque, folded it and slipped it into an envelope. That, he muttered to himself, was the easy part.

  Claudia closed her eyes and counted up to ten. Then she opened them again.

  ‘Just run that past me one more time, Sher,’ she said. ‘And this time, don’t bother explaining how you know, because it makes my head hurt.’

  If Holmes was offended, there was no indication in his dark, enigmatic face. An eyebrow may have quivered for a fraction of a second; a corner of a lip may have twitched. Nothing more.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘To recapitulate, then; the man Skinner - who, as is painfully apparent, is the key to this whole rather intriguing conundrum - is presently “holed up”, as I believe the expression is, in Piglet’s house at Pooh Corner. I suspect that he is in company with a female person, quite possibly Titania the Queen of the Fairies. I trust,’ he added sardonically, ‘that you had already reached that conclusion. The evidence admits, after all, of only one possible interpretation.’

  Claudia nodded impatiently. ‘The other guy,’ she said. ‘The he-man type with the beard.’

  ‘Regalian?’ Holmes leaned back in his chair, his fingertips touching. ‘I
suggest you look for him at Skinner’s last-known address in Chicopee Falls, Iowa, at some point circa June 1959. Quite elementary, of course.’

  ‘Fine. And the writer, whatsername.’

  ‘Jane Armitage.’ Holmes shrugged. ‘I scarcely imagined you would wish me to insult your intelligence by pointing out that she is to be found somewhere in the Retreat from Moscow in Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece.’ He allowed himself a visible smirk. ‘Do you wish me to name the novel, or are you—?’

  ‘All right,’ Claudia snapped. ‘So cut to the chase.Where is he?’

  ‘You mean Hamlet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Well?’

  The great detective shifted in his seat. ‘You know my methods, my dear Claudia. Apply them.’

  ‘You mean you don’t know.’

  ‘The precise location,’ Holmes said slowly, ‘may perhaps still elude me . . .’

  ‘He was here only a few goddamn hours ago. You can’t have lost him already.’

  Holmes’ brows twitched like curtains. ‘The crude mechanical details,’ he said, trying to sound bored, ‘I prefer to leave to the official police. Once the underlying cause has been uncovered—’

  ‘Wonderful.’ Claudia got up and snapped her fingers round the handle of her organiser bag. ‘I hire the so-called best detective in all fiction to find someone, and he says, Have you tried the cops? Next off, you’ll be suggesting we phone round the hospitals.’

  ‘My dear lady,’ Holmes growled ominously. ‘Had you been listening while I explained to you the precise sequence of events . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ Claudia snapped. ‘If I’d wanted a history lesson I’d have called in Harvard. I want to know where the schmuck is now.’ She paused. ‘Do you happen to know that, Sher?’

  Holmes pursed his lips. ‘When one has eliminated the impossible . . .’ he began.

  ‘Save it for the customers,’ Claudia snarled from the doorway. ‘I’m disappointed in you, buster. They told me you were good. I’m going to find this sucker myself, and I don’t expect to receive a bill. So long.’

  The door slammed. After a few moments of complete stillness, Holmes opened his eyes, leaned his head back, and shouted.

  ‘Watson!’

  The doctor’s head appeared through the doorway. ‘Yes, Holmes?’

  ‘Get me an aspirin.’

  Moriarty drew the collar of his coat close to his cheeks and shivered; unaccountably, since it was a warm night.

  ‘All there, I trust?’ asked his companion, politely.

  Moriarty nodded, and shoved the thick sheaf of Treasury bills into the side pocket of his coat. ‘In the coach,’ he muttered, trying not to catch the other man’s eye.

  ‘Undamaged?’

  ‘I believe so, yes,’ replied the Professor, trying his best to keep the distaste out of his voice.

  The other man reached out a hand and took Moriarty’s shoulder between forefinger and thumb. His grip was like ice and steel.

  ‘For your sake,’ he said, ‘I do hope so. I know where you live, Professor. Good evening.’

  With a swirl of a black cloak, the man seemed to vanish into the fog. A moment later, Moriarty heard the clop of hooves on cobbles, and earnestly thanked God that he was alone. He started to walk briskly in the direction of Whitechapel.

  Back in his secret lair, he pulled out the big bundle of money and opened his safe. As he counted the notes through, he noticed something he’d previously overlooked. An envelope.

  His hands trembled as he tore it open. But, on closer inspection, it turned out to be completely innocuous. Train and steamer tickets; a hotel reservation; guide books, even. As he cast his eye over the accompanying letter, his face relaxed into a gentle, amused smile.

  He had not, as he had feared, incurred the wrath of his awesome customer; quite the reverse. As a token of esteem and thanks for a job well done, he was being treated to the winter holiday of a lifetime, all expenses paid, in the romantic splendour of the Swiss Alps. First class travel and accommodation in Interlaken, followed by three weeks of luxury at an internationally-acclaimed hotel a mere stone’s throw from the awe-inspiring natural grandeur of the Reichenbach Falls.

  Gosh, thought Professor Moriarty. Things are looking up.

  Regalian threw back the curtains and stared uncharitably at the sunrise.

  It was, he admitted, the real sun. All the same, to someone brought up on the sunrises of heroic fiction, it was damned unconvincing.

  Where I come from, he muttered to himself, sunrises are retina-scorching coruscations of vivid red fire boiling tumidly out of cloudy crucibles, not something like a motorway service station version of a poached egg. We, of course, only have sunrises when the dramatic situation requires them. The rest of the time we just switch on the lights.

  He picked up his coffee cup and his plate of toast and sat down on the window seat, looking out over Main Street. Another day, he reflected, and nothing is going to happen unless I make it happen. What a depressing prospect.

  He had, after thirty-six hours of patient argument, threats and blatant disregard of the rules of chronological physics, managed to patch through a telephone call to Jane’s number in 1996, only to get the answering machine; which suggested, in the circumstances (she had a deadline for her new book which she could now only possibly hope to meet by writing it while orbiting the planet at light speed), that Jane had gone charging off on her own to mount some sort of amateur rescue bid; which was silly. She had no qualifications for that sort of work whatsoever. True, by virtue of being a writer of fantasy fiction she wasn’t exactly a stranger to weird and dangerous experiences - he recalled vividly her description of the time her publishers had sent her to a science fiction convention in Congleton, where she’d spent a harrowing weekend surrounded by four hundred and sixty-two self-proclaimed representatives of the Klingon Empire - but there’s a material difference between boldly going and making a complete bloody fool of yourself. And there are some things which really do have to be left to the professionals.

  Such as heroism.

  Being a hero isn’t something anybody can do. True enough, once in a lifetime a quiet, mild-mannered newspaper reporter can save a child from being run over by a negligent steamroller. If on the strength of that the reporter buys himself a cape and a pair of tights and tries jumping off tall buildings, however, he is likely to find out two things in pretty short order; the second of which is the folly of pushing one’s luck.

  It’s different, of course, for heroes.

  Heroes have nine lives, rubber kneecaps, diplomatic passports, an uncle on the board of magistrates, an exercise book permanently in place down the back of their trousers and a sick note signed by God. In a cosmology where everybody knows his place, it is immutably ordained that the guards the hero has to stalk and silently kill before scaling the castle wall are the only two in the whole brigade who happen to be stone deaf and crippled with arthritis. Even the most lacklustre hero has available to him resources on a scale which would put Spielberg into immediate bankruptcy, while the household names have more doubles and stunt men than Napoleon had Old Guards at Waterloo. The only sure-fire way to kill a hero is to lock him up for six months in a room with no mirror.

  For the first time, he noticed in the corner of the room a big cabinet radio, the kind that hums for thirty seconds and then plays Glen Miller, regardless of where the dial is pointing. Perfectly normal thing to find in a house of the period.

  In the bicycle shed of Regalian’s subconscious mind, an idea stirred. At that particular moment, it bore as much resemblance to a workable plan of action as the first ever single-cell organism to a Nobel prizewinner, but everything has to start somewhere.

  Basic authorship theory; the hero rises to the occasion. The grottier the occasion, the more outstandingly brilliant and innovative the hero’s response; and the laws of physics, generally speaking, are happy to come along for the ride. Set a hero a sufficiently nasty problem, and the
re’s virtually no limit to what he can achieve. Provided, of course, that the odds are sufficiently stacked against him.

  The difficulty is, therefore, not that the task confronted is impossible; but whether it’s impossible enough. Luck, like a Russian car, generally only works if you push it.

  It’s basically the same inverse feasibility matrix that you find when you want to borrow money. Try and borrow fifty quid from your bank to pay the rent, and you’re a no-good loser. Ask to borrow fifty million to take over a moribund company, and you’re a respected financier. Raise a forced loan of five hundred billion to pay the interest on the fifty zillion you borrowed last week, and you’re a Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  Having made himself a strong cup of coffee, Regalian sat back and thought hard . . .

  Jane paused, knocked a substantial quantity of compacted snow off her left boot, and stared at the signpost. It depressed her.

  She wasn’t obsessive about her art, God knows; you can’t afford to be, if you’re a professional. But there were some things that did offend her sense of basic craftsmanship, and this was one of them.

  The sign read:

  MIDDLE BIT BYPASS

  Characters for Chapters 23-47 are advised to leave at Junction 12

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘I gor?’

  No reply.

  ‘Igor?’

  The howl of the wind in the fir trees. The rippling crash of the thunder. The pecking hammer of the rain on the shed roof, like a spectral Fred and Ginger doing the Tap Danse Macabre.

  ‘Igor, tha daft booger, what’s tha playin’ at?’

  The bounty hunter flickered.

  Imagine a double-sided mirror. He was on both sides simultaneously.

  Half of him, during this strange moment of transition, was in Fiction, half in Reality. He’d never been in Reality before, in whole, part or instalments. A less completely focused individual might have paused to look around, admire the scenery, take an interest. He didn’t. Understandable; when the SAS are parachuted in miles behind enemy lines to blow up a bridge or rescue a hostage, they don’t make detours to take a look at interesting old churches or unusual rock formations. Likewise with the bounty hunter, only more so.