by Tom Holt
‘Christ,’ said Skinner, dusting plaster out of his hair. ‘How in God’s name did we get here?’
‘Coincidence,’ Regalian answered. ‘Time-honoured literary device. Everybody all right? Good. Nice to see you all again.’
‘Coincidence?’ Jane shrieked. ‘Come off it, there’s got to be more to it than that. Last thing I knew, I was in this Raymond Chandler book, and Philip Marlowe’d just shot me.’
‘I was being poisoned to death in an Agatha Christie.’
‘Were you really?’ Regalian looked at them both. ‘How did you come to be there?’
‘Well—’
‘Because,’ said Claudia, entering melodramatically through the lightning hole in the wall, ‘I sent you there. Hello, everyone.’
For every exit, an entrance.
It was a pool, and he was floating.
Or it was a sky, and he was a hawk with its wings spread, hovering motionless in the warm wind, a still point in an infinity of movement. Or it was the vast firmament itself, and he was a lone star surrounded by infinite blackness. That was nearer the mark, he reflected bitterly. Certainly, there was nobody to share his solitude. He had outlived them all, presumably. He invariably did.
As the focus sharpened, he became aware of the wood and satin around him, the sides of the box pressing his arms on both sides, the lid inches from his face. The confinement irritated him. He sniffed like a dog, but couldn’t smell light. It was time to wake up.
Count Dracula, dead and alive, began to move in his coffin. Slowly, to begin with; even after all this time, he still savoured the first pleasure of movement after sleep with the intensity of a gourmet. He allowed his fingers to flex and stretch, like the claws of a cat extending. He tasted the sensation as his fingernails pressed into the satin lining. Touch is the first of the five senses to go, and the last to return. Of the five, it had always been his favourite.
He could feel the blood begin to move again inside his veins. Ah, the wonder of it! The sheer sensual pleasure of life, his great weakness, his addiction. It was at times like this that he almost believed it was all worth it. That was an illusion which rarely lasted for long, but he liked to make the most of it.
Time to leave this little cosy cell. He concentrated his mind, visualised the screws turning unassisted in the wood until the lid was unsecured. He could hear them dropping to the stone floor. He smiled; then he lifted his hands until he could feel the lid, and pushed up.
Funny . . .
Unseen hands grabbed the lid and pulled it out of his grasp. Perplexed, he opened his eyes, and found that he was staring up at a face.
Urgently he tried to sit upright, but the effort was too great and he sank back, snarling noiselessly like a dying fox. The face . . .
There were two of them now; one round, moon-shaped, with a squat snub nose and enormous thick-lensed spectacles, all under an ancient, oil-stained flat cloth cap; the other thin, lined, ancient, a cigarette stub apparently glued to the bottom lip. Their eyes seemed to bore into him, like a wooden stake.
‘Igor.’
‘Yes, young Norman?’
‘Tha knows what’s happened.’
‘What?’
‘Dozy boogers’ve delivered t’wrong bloody crate, that’s what.’
‘Tha reckons?’
‘Look at it, will tha? Does that look like a bloody flatpack wardrobe to thee?’
Count Dracula cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. The faces glowered at him.
‘Bloody ’ell,’ growled the old one. ‘Another flamin’ southerner.’
‘Excuse me,’ Dracula insisted. ‘This isn’t Transylvania, is it?’
‘Tha what?’
‘Transylvania,’ the Count repeated helplessly. ‘You know, down from Hungary and across a bit.’
The younger face scowled at him. ‘Nay, lad, this is Dewsbury.’
‘Yorkshire.’
‘Yorkshire?’ Dracula mouthed the unfamiliar syllables as if carefully spitting out a gnat. ‘England?’
‘We’ve got a right one ’ere, Norman lad. Tha’s right, choom. Yorkshire, England. Where was it tha said tha was from?’
‘Trans—’ Dracula gave it up. ‘Europe,’ he said.
‘Figures.’
‘Look at ’is clothes, for pity’s sake.’
For the first time in several centuries, Dracula became suddenly aware of his black, silk-lined cape and shiny black shoes, and wished his working clothes were - well, a trifle less flashy. A nice, comfy old raincoat, perhaps, or a properly broken-in tweed jacket, with leather patches on the elbows. And a flat cap too, of course.
‘If tha’s coom to t’wrong address, tha can bloody well pay thy own return postage,’ said the round face. ‘Ah’ve only got me pension, tha knows.’
Dracula licked his lips, which were as dry as paper. Suddenly he felt horribly thirsty. ‘Excuse me.’
‘Now what?’
‘Could I trouble you gentlemen for, um, something to drink?’
‘Huh? Such as?’
‘Bl—’ Dracula clamped his mouth shut on the word, biting it in two. ‘A glass of milk would be fine,’ he said meekly.
‘There’s tea in t’pot,’ grunted the old one. ‘’Tis cold, mind.’
‘That’ll be fine, really,’ Dracula whimpered. ‘I’d be ever so grateful.’
He lay back in the coffin and wished he was dead.
A brief note, in passing, about the Scholfield.
Developed in 1875 as Smith & Wesson’s answer to Colt’s classic Peacemaker series, the Scholfield model was a heavy-calibre, top-break high-quality service-type revolver, featuring double as well as single action lock operation, an improved cylinder latch and simultaneous ejection of the spent cases. Although less powerful than the Colt, it probably deserved a better reception than it in fact received. However, with the military content to perservere with the single-action-only Colt, and the civilian market dominated by the Hartford marketing machine . . .
Yes. Quite. That’s a bit like devoting the whole of your guide book entry on Florence to the corporation dump; factually accurate, but somehow missing the point.
Which is, that the Scholfield is the only personal sidearm so far invented whose IQ rating would qualify it for Mensa membership. Forget your smart missiles; compared with the Scholfield, smart missiles are Laurel and Hardy. The only reason Scholfield revolvers don’t dominate all the top-league chess championships is that the only way they’d be able to move the pieces around is by shooting them.
Puzzled? Something wrong here? You can’t come to terms with the concept of a weapon that’s smarter than you are? Think. Weapons are for fighting; but when fighting occurs it’s not the weapons that get hurt, is it?
Claudia.
So far, we’ve only taken note of her in her capacity as the universe’s foremost, pushiest, most go-getting agent; a significant role, heaven knows, but really only a sideline, ancillary to her principal field of activity.
Claudia has this production company, A. C. Productions. It hasn’t actually produced anything yet, but the same goes for 99.997% of all production companies everywhere.
She also has a Property; quite possibly the hottest property in the cosmos. All she’s waiting for is the right time and the right people.
The time is now. The people are here.
Roll ’em.
‘Hello, everyone,’ said Claudia. She was smiling. When agents smile, wise men and women hide under things or charter fast aircraft; but this was a special smile. Her face looked like a black hole with a star just disappearing down it.
Regalian looked at her. ‘I know you, don’t I?’ he said. She nodded.
‘Everybody knows me,’ she replied. ‘Oh, excuse me just one moment.’
She stooped down and picked something up off the floor. It was the Scholfield. She thumbed back the hammer and pointed it at Regalian’s head.
‘Hey . . .’
‘Later,’ she said. ‘I’m on a tight schedule. No
w then, everybody, listen carefully. I expect you’d like to know why I’ve brought you all here.’
Skinner nodded cautiously, his eyes fixed on the revolver. There was something about the gun’s manner he didn’t like. He knew, of course; you don’t spend thirty-six years with a chatty handgun without being able to sense its moods. The Scholfield was . . .
In love?
Oh dear. It was probably the masterful way she’d swept it off the ground and jerked the hammer back. At last, he could hear the gun saying to itself, at last I’ve found a soulmate, a megalomaniac psychotic with a steady eye and sweaty palms. Skinner sucked his teeth thoughtfully.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘if we could start with how you brought us here, that would probably be quite helpful. If you don’t mind, that is.’
‘Sure.’ Skinner’s guess was right. Tight schedule or no tight schedule, Claudia wasn’t the sort of girl who’d pass up on a chance to dwell on her own cleverness. ‘I bought the rights.’
‘What? To Agatha Christie? And Sherlock Holmes?’
‘No.’ Claudia’s smile broadened, until the doomed star went supernova. ‘To you.’
‘I beg your—’
‘You’re in Fiction, right? You’re all fictional characters. So, I bought the rights. I own you.’
‘You can’t own us!’ Jane snapped. ‘We’re human.’
‘So? I bought the human rights. Sure, I know they’re supposed to be inalienable, but everything has a price.’ She grinned. ‘In this business, anyway. And that means,’ she continued, twitching the gun an inch or so until Jane could see straight down the muzzle, ‘I can do anything I want with you. Including change the ending. That’s a threat.’
Jane, who was on the point of being extremely eloquent, decided not to be.
‘Anyhow,’ Claudia went on, ‘all I had to do then was bring you all together. Wasn’t difficult. In fact, Regalian here made it very simple by rigging up that bomb contraption. All I had to do was nudge you two into Agatha Christie and slide you across into Chandler. He was in Sherlock Holmes already. I’d already sent Max to bring Regalian back out of Reality, but I needn’t have bothered, since as it turned out he did that for me.’
Regalian quivered slightly. ‘Max?’
‘The bounty hunter. Sorry if he was a nuisance.’
‘Max?’
Claudia shrugged. ‘It happens to be his name. Where’s he got to, by the way? Anybody seen him?’
‘I threw him out of that window there,’ Regalian said. ‘I expect he’s all right, though. He seems pretty hard to damage.’
As if on cue, the bounty hunter limped through the door, trailing his left leg.
‘Hi, Max.’
‘Howdy.’
Claudia frowned. ‘Max, dear,’ she sighed, ‘I know you’ve been under cover for rather a long time, but I do hope you haven’t gone completely native.’
‘It’s been thirty-six years years, ma’am. A body kinda gets used to it.’
‘Max, please try and speak something approximating to English, or if you can’t, just keep quiet and kill people when I tell you to. Thirty-six years,’ she added with feeling. ‘That’s ever such a long time, isn’t it?’
Hamlet, who had spent the last few minutes trying to work out who was who and what was going on, interrupted. ‘Just a minute,’ he said. ‘Are you trying to say it was you . . . ?’
‘Ah!’ Claudia beamed ironically. ‘That faint tinkling sound you just heard, ladies and gentlemen, was the penny finally dropping, proving that gravity always gets its coin in the end. Now then, are we all with it and up to speed? Then I’ll begin.’
‘Just a minute.’ This time it was Titania. ‘I still don’t follow. Odd, because usually I’m quite fluent in gibberish. Mind you, it helps if it’s spoken in a strong sane accent. What do you want us for?’
Claudia breathed in. The expression on her face suggested that her patience was overdrawn to the point of demanding the card back. ‘If you’d let me get a word in,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell you. I have this project.’
‘And?’
‘And I need you for it. Actually you weren’t my first choices, but Costner was busy, Redford was quite keen but something cropped up and Streisand’s people kept making difficulties and Connery was just too expensive . . . You’ll do.’
‘What for?’ Titania insisted.
‘Cute little property I own the rights to.’
‘Which is?’
Claudia stopped smiling and looked grave; messianic, even. She looked like a cross between Jesus Christ and Richard Attenborough receiving an award.
‘The end of the world,’ she said.
It was some time later.
‘Blackcurrant,’ mumbled Regalian with his mouth full. He spat out a wad of hemp fibre and returned to his task.
‘I still don’t get it,’ Titania went on. ‘I mean, if the ghastly woman wants us for this project of hers, why whisk us away to this place—’
‘Wherever it is,’ Jane interrupted sourly. Her gag had tasted of peppermint, and she loathed peppermint. ‘Nobody saw fit to tell us where we are. It’s as bad as going by train.’
‘—And leave us here? Doesn’t make sense. And all that garbage about owning the rights to the end of the world.’
Regalian chewed. The way he saw it, he only had one pair of jaws. He could use them for explaining, or he could use them for gnawing his way through a thick, tough, blackcurrant-impregnated rope. He knew precisely where they were, and he had a pretty shrewd idea of why they were there. In due course, he would have to explain to the others, and put up with their reaction. His chief regret at present was that the rope wasn’t thicker.
As for Jane; she spat a couple of times to clear at least some of the foul taste out of her mouth, and found herself looking at Regalian.
Her hero.
Gosh.
In all the excitement of materialising and being threatened with guns and then scooped up by some agency she hadn’t even tried to understand and deposited here, whatever here was - it had, well, slipped past her attention that here she was, suddenly, face to face with her character. Her hero. The closest thing, she supposed, to her child; except that in Bloodblades of Shimmaroon she’d pegged his age at thirty-six . . .
Pause for thought. The recurring number thirty-six; if there was any correlation between real and fictional, Regalian was born the year Skinner disappeared. Gosh, she thought. Nuts, she thought.
Her hero. Flesh of her brain, blood of her imagination - it was little short of a miracle, given her powers of character-drawing, that he could walk in a straight line without falling over or bumping into things, and yet there he was, tall, strong, wise, resourceful, handsome, courageous, tied up with rope . . . I did that, she told herself, with my little Apple. Or did I?
My dream man? My wish-fulfilment? When I made you, did I really want you to abseil in through my window and carry me off to the Castle of Flangorien, far beyond the twin seas of Ghar? Now then, be honest.
But you aren’t him. I tried to make you my dream lover, but that’s not how you turned out. I tried to make you the man I’d want to be if I was a man, but you wouldn’t play ball with that, either. And I don’t think I was being unreasonable; I didn’t insist that you stay home and do your homework, or try and force you into medical school. When I was a young girl, staring at the walls and dreaming, I started to write a book, just for my own amusement, and you were there. Perhaps it was just that you were young then, too; but when, on a freak million-to-one shot, the twelfth publisher I sent my outline and sample chapters to wrote back and offered me a contract . . .
Jane looked away. She remembered.
We like the book, they said. We think you’ve got something there. We like the imaginary world, and the kingdoms and the battles and the dragon and the wizards and the mages and the princesses and the long-lost princes disguised as swineherds and the Talisman of Jarg and the Nine Rings of Being and the Death’s Head of Khong, which will look great on
the cover and, if we strike lucky, maybe we can have T-shirts too, perhaps even key-rings. But you’ve got to fix the hero. The hero sucks. Sorry.
No problem. I can fix the hero. You want to see how quickly I can fix the hero? Wait there, I’ll be right back.
And so, my hero, I fixed you; I fixed you good. I think it was round about then that I lost you as well, stopped hearing you in my head as my fingers peck-peck-pecked at the keyboard. No matter; I could imagine, which is almost the same thing but not quite. And now, ten books later, we meet and I don’t recognise you at first. My, haven’t you grown.The beard suits you.You’ve lost weight. And whoever gave you the idea you could wear green with your complexion?
My hero. I don’t know what to say.
‘God,’ Regalian spluttered, ‘but I hate blackcurrant.’
I must remember that, Jane told herself. And then it struck her that, unless he was doing a very good job of controlling his emotions (improbable), he hadn’t shown the slightest interest in her. You’d have thought - Jesus, I’m practically this guy’s god. I created you, buster.
But not in my own image.
Yeah. So what? If on day minus one God had managed against all the odds to get a contract on the basis of a synopsis and ten chapters and they’d told Him, God, we love it but lose all the goody-goody stuff, wouldn’t He have done the same? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was negotiable. It always is.
‘Jane,’ my mother always used to say, ‘Jane, when are you going to grow up and make something of your life?’ Hey, Mum, your wish is granted. Admittedly, what I’m making of my life is a pig’s ear, but you never properly defined something. All your fault.
Maybe he isn’t mine. Maybe he belongs to my editor and the publicity department and the marketing boys and the art department and the sales reps and W. H. Smith and maybe, even, the goddamn readers, but not to me. Maybe, my hero, you belong to you. In which case, go write yourself.