by Tom Holt
Skinner nodded. ‘That’s my place over there,’ he said. ‘Look, where it says Wtt Earp Propr CLOSED. Hey, I never knew it used to be the sheriff ’s office.’
‘You learn something new every day,’ Claudia replied cheerfully. ‘Pretty futile under the circumstances, but it’s the right attitude. Congratulations, Mr Skinner, Ms Armitage, on a job well done.’
Jane stared. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Your quest,’ Claudia replied. ‘Your mission, to rescue our tubby friend here and bring him back into Reality. I had every confidence in you, of course.’
‘I . . .’ Skinner tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t. He was home, dammit; the question which still nagged away at him was, which home? Yes, it was Chicopee Falls, the armpit of Iowa, his Real home, but it looked uncommonly like the ghastly places he’d spent the last thirty-six years dodging about in, through and round. And the trouble was, he couldn’t tell them apart any longer. And yes, he was home; it was no more and no less of a homecoming than that of the man returning unscathed from the War to find his street flattened by a land-mine, or pulled down to make way for Progress, or simply painted another colour and sold to the upwardly mobile. Turn your back for more than a minute and Home changes. ‘Gee,’ he said. ‘Good to be back.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Hamlet.
‘Sorry, we’re neglecting you,’ Claudia said, smirking.
‘I couldn’t help noticing,’ Hamlet said, ‘that we’re standing in front of a saloon.’
‘Quite right.’
Hamlet nodded. ‘I’m going to have a drink,’ he said. ‘What a perfectly splendid idea,’ Claudia said. ‘You won’t mind if I don’t join you, I’ve got a few things more to see to. Come along, Max.’
They were halfway down the steps before Titania called out, ‘Excuse me.’
‘Yes?’
‘Does this mean we’re not prisoners any more?’
Claudia shrugged. ‘Up to you entirely. I’ve finished with you, you see. If I were you, I’d enjoy the rest of your life. Ciao.’
Alone on the stoop, Titania watched them ride away. Inside the saloon, she could hear Hamlet’s voice asking everyone what they were having, the pianola still playing Dixie, Jane asking where the Ladies’ was. No reason, she told herself, why I shouldn’t go through and join them. No reason why I should, either.
No reason . . .
Ever since she’d found herself involved in this strange sequence of events, she’d been waiting for the reason; the oh-so-that-was-it reason, the answer to the question Why me? And now the world was about to end - was ending, in fact - and she still couldn’t see the answer. A very good reason for not seeing something is because it isn’t there.
A wagon rolled by, piled high with logwood and chased by three small children and a dog. She waited for it to become relevant to the story. It didn’t. It just kept rollin’.
Welcome to Reality.
In Reality, there is no plot. In real-life newsreel footage of the bomb going off, the fatal shooting, the tanks rumbling through the rubble-strewn street, there’s always one little man, quietly dressed and respectable, standing peacefully at the edge of the picture and looking the other way. In Fiction, he couldn’t exist. Everybody is involved. They have their exits and their entrances.
This is Reality, and I have no part in it. Oh, she wasn’t naive, she’d heard stories; innocent ingénues fresh from the country, young and easily led, get roped in as last-minute love interests because the editor has pointed out to the author that he’s got an all-male cast, and then get quietly forgotten about and abandoned at the end of Chapter Twelve. That’s Fiction. Fiction’s a bitch and then you’re cut. Reality . . .
Characters in Fiction aren’t much given to introspection, except in the line of duty. No character ever slumped across a bar at three in the morning and moaned, ‘How come I’ve made such a fuck-up of my life?’, for the simple reason that no character in the universe of poetry and prose ever fucked up his own life. That’s what authors are for.
Why, Titania mused nonetheless, me? Let’s think about this.
All right then, who is Titania? Well, she’s this ravishingly gorgeous upper-class bint who falls for a funny, fat, middle-aged, working-class guy with artificially big ears. The term stooge tends to spring irrepressibly to mind. Great. This Is Your Life, and so on.
So far, so comprehensible; because Skinner’s (a) funny, fat, middle-aged and American (equivalent to working-class as far as suitability is concerned) and (b) the unwilling plaything of a malicious destiny, translated willy-nilly into an alien dimension in circumstances connected with a work of dramatic fiction. A nasty trick to play on a girl, but logical. It would explain why me rather than, say, Modesty Blaise or Anna Karenina. But . . .
But it hadn’t happened. There hadn’t been any suggestion that she should fall for the poor sucker. All she’d done was tag along. The Jane creature had been the heroine, and she’d just been Spare Girl.
Plausible enough in Reality; in Fiction, impossible.
So?
She looked up. A face was grinning at her from behind the stoop rail.
‘Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,’ it said, and its voice sounded funny. It sounded like an actor.
Golly, she remembered, that’s my cue. Even before she found the place in her mind, even before her tongue started to move . . .
‘What, jealous Oberon? Fairies, skip hence. I have forsworn his bed and company. Hey, what the . . . ?’
The face came back with the next line (‘Tarry, rash wanton’; a line she’d particularly hated ever since she’d found out that wantons are also little suet dumplings you get in Chinese soup) but there was something about it not quite, not altogether, not entirely . . .
It wasn’t Oberon. That was, of course, a pretty sweeping statement, because Oberon rarely looked the same two days running; for the simple reason that he looked like whoever happened to be playing him at the time. Anybody can be Oberon - the postman, the milkman, the snotty clerk in the building society - provided he belongs to an amateur dramatic society and waits his turn. To be Oberon, all you have to do is say Oberon’s lines, like that man was doing.
But that man, nevertheless, wasn’t Oberon. That was somebody else.
She had an idea he answered to the name Max.
Seven glasses of whisky later, Skinner suddenly found himself feeling strangely weary.
‘I think,’ he yawned, ‘I’ll just go lie down. That’s if you don’t need me for ten minutes.’
Jane, who hadn’t spoken to him, or anyone, since they’d walked into the saloon, nodded her approval. Hamlet, who was playing poker with five savage-looking men in enormous hats, didn’t look up. Titania had wandered off somewhere. This is the way the world ends, apparently.
He wandered out on to the stoop, which was empty, and sat down in a rocking chair. Somebody had left a bottle of whisky and a glass handy, and there was a fine view down Main Street which, Skinner felt, was probably quite conducive to sleep. After a while, his head began to nod—
—And to reverberate with strange words, words wanting to be said aloud. Alarmed, Skinner woke himself up. All alone. Main Street. Whisky. Probably needled whisky, accounting for hallucination of offstage voices. Nasty whisky. Sleep it off, wake up healthy and happy and sane.
The words drifted back, lurked just out of his field of vision, crept up on him. Just before he drifted into sleep, they pounced.
Just before, mind; not after.
‘I see their knavery,’ Skinner mumbled (and a tiny part of his brain clung, as it were, to the door handle and screamed, Look out, you fool, they’re coming to get you! ). ‘This is to make an ass of me, to fright me if they could. But I will not stir from this place, do what they can. I will Skinner you crazy bastard, get outa there, now before you drown in wet shit up and down here and I will sing . . .’
He raised his head and noticed, for the first time, that there was a girl asleep in the other rocking chair, the
one opposite. At once his mind was full of voices. There was a rough, crude voice, hoarsely muttering the Elizabethan equivalent of Cor yeah, thassa bit of all right, innit? There was a high-pitched American voice saying, Nooo, you fucking idiot, it’s Titania, you know her, get the hell outa there, something terrible’s about to . . . And there was a wordless braying sort of voice suggesting that what he really wanted, most in all the world, was a nice warm stall, fresh straw and a carrot.
The girl sat up. Their eyes met. For a fraction of a second they shared the single telepathic concept, Oh shit!
‘What angel,’ mumbled the girl, ‘wakes me from my flowery bed?’
The ninety-five per cent of Skinner’s mind that was no longer his own yelled Cue! at him. He ignored it. Slowly he reached up and felt his ears.
In a cloud of dust, a horseman thunders into town, draws up in front of the livery stable, and glances up at the clock.
Five minutes to twelve. High noon.
‘Hell,’ Regalian muttered under his breath. He reined in the horse and looked round, then caught sight of two familiar faces.
‘Howdy.’
‘Hello there.’
For a moment he contemplated riding away, or steering the horse straight at them to ride them down. Pointless. Instead, he jumped down from the horse and tied it to the rail. Let them come.
‘You’re late,’ said Claudia. ‘But we managed without you.’
‘You managed . . . ?’ Regalian caught his breath. ‘But this is . . .’
‘Reality.’ Claudia did her Cheshire cat impression. ‘And Fiction too.’ She looked up at the clock and smiled. ‘You’re just in time,’ she said.
‘For the fight?’
‘For the wedding.’
Something banged on the door of Regalian’s brain demanding to be let in, but he ignored it. ‘But the show-down, ’ he said. ‘Surely . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Claudia,’ he went on, ‘what are you playing at, you evil bitch?’
Claudia tried to look offended but her smirk got in the way. ‘Nothing at all,’ she replied. ‘Your friends are free to go. Any time they want to.’
‘But . . .’ He scowled. ‘What wedding?’
Claudia shook her head. Regalian noticed that Max had somehow disappeared. Kill Claudia! Now might I do it, pat . . .
‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘what day it is?’
‘What?’
‘The date. In real-time.’
‘No. Why?’
Claudia’s grin widened, threatening to unzip her entire face. ‘June the Twenty-first,’ she said. ‘Midsummer’s day. Ah well, things to do. No hard feelings?’
‘You bitch!’
Jane’s head nodded on to her folded arms. Despite the smoke and the noise and the piano still tinnily tinkling Dixie, she was tired. She slept.
Hamlet leaned back in his chair while the poker game clattered around him, the players moving and grunting like robots, mechanical toys. He’d folded in this particular hand long since. His eyelids felt heavy. His eyes closed. The other players quietly got up and left. The saloon was empty.
Except for a vague, almost translucent figure, like a huge mayfly, hovering in the cigar smoke. From a fold of his shimmering robe he took a small purple flower, which he proceeded to squeeze, like lemon over scampi, directly above the eyelids of the sleeping female. A moment later, he repeated the procedure with the male sleeper.
He snickered; hna-hna-hna! You can’t hope to do that convincingly unless you’ve spent at least three terms at Baddie School. It’s all a matter of breath control and, of course, hours and hours and hours of practice.
You could just about call this fleeting, ephemeral figure a fairy, just as you could theoretically describe Hitler as a statesman; after all, he was a man, and at various stages of his career he had quite a lot of states. This fairy, however, is different. He’s the sort of fairy who, when assigned to tooth duty, would have with him at all times a pair of big, rusty pliers.
His name is probably Max.
The clock ticked on. One minute to twelve.
Twelve noon, or twelve midnight.
Jane woke up.
She couldn’t remember having fallen asleep; but so what, she felt better for it. She remembered. And hey! the world was still here. She opened her eyes.
Yow!
She closed them quickly and started to rub. Soap!
When it was safe to open them again, she discovered that she was looking directly into the eyes of . . .
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ Hamlet replied.
There was still one small, hidden part of Jane’s mind that wasn’t knee-deep in violet-scented pink goo, courtesy of the love-philtre. It was the part she used for being a writer.
This is how it goes with writers, even piss-awful ones like Jane. There’s this tiny hidden cell bunker-deep inside their heads which operates on totally different rules and sees things from entirely different perspectives. It’s a bit like an embassy; regardless of its location, it’s a wee sliver of somewhere else - sovereign territory, operating under its own jurisdiction. And, like an embassy, it’s the last safe place to run to when things on the outside start to get hairy.
Having barricaded herself in and jammed the mental equivalent of a chair under the door handle, the real Jane took a deep breath and called a staff meeting.
Oh dear. In love again. Shit.
Brain, she commanded, access memory for previous outbreaks of love and analyse.
Computing.
Well?
You really want to hear this?
Yes.
You’re the boss.You want them in chronological order, or by magnitude of fool made of self, or alphabetical, or what?
Chronological will do just fine.
Computing. Well, if we forget about teddy bears and music teachers for the time being, we start with Kevin. Remember Kevin?
Jane shuddered. Let’s skip Kevin, shall we?
Good idea. That brings us on to Damian. Tall. Skinny. Unfortunate skin condition. Wrote poetry about derelict machinery and how dismal life is. Further analysis?
Next, please.
Fast-forwarding Damian, we come to Malcolm. World-weary, cynical, devil-may-care, affected a Franz Kafka dying-of-consumption cough, in reality brought on by smoking French cigarettes; worked in the pie factory at the bottom of Gough Whitlam Boulevard. Curious and really rather disgusting half-moon-shaped birthmark on his . . .
Next, please.
Is this really achieving anything? I mean, wouldn’t you be more usefully occupied knotting sheets together and climbing out through your left ear?
Next, please.
If you insist.Ye gods, Stuart. Could we bypass Stuart, because if you throw up in here, I’m the one who’s going to have to live with the smell.
Further detail, please.
Computing. Stuart, five foot four, fourteen stone, his determination to sample every new experience at least once finally led to his having a bath in, let’s see, nineteen seventy-nine, March, to be precise. Owned a scruffy Toyota about seven years older than he was, on the back seat of which you could always be certain of finding the remains of the previous day’s hamburger, usually at incredibly inappropriate moments. Arguably the nadir of your romantic career to date, although these things are necessarily subjective. Had enough?You realise we haven’t even got through your teens yet.
She hadn’t; and so the catalogue continued . . .
(And outside that small, safe place the rest of her gazed into Hamlet’s soft, slugbelly-coloured eyes and sighed; and in the orchestra pit, the phantom violinists pulled on their asbestos gloves to protect their fingers from the glowing heat of tortured catgut . . .)
That’s the lot?
Thank God. Unless you want Him included as well. You know, Mister Something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-Denmark-or-maybe-it’s-just-time-I-changed-my-socks . . .’
Not just now, thanks. Session ends.
Logout sequence completed. Ciao an
d good luck.
As she’d suspected; and the record confirmed it. Hopeless and feckless she may have been in her choice of kindred souls, but always consistent. There was a definite pattern to it (for a very general idea, imagine the brain of a Dalek linked up to a computer dating program) and Hamlet quite simply didn’t correlate.
Put-up job. Somebody’s doing this to me.
Guess who.
And, the real Jane realised, as she gazed into Hamlet’s eyes, sod all I can do about it.
Help! Rescue!
My hero . . .
Not just sheer vindictiveness. Not just an evil mind having fun moving the counters around.
Fictional boy meets real girl; real boy meets fictional girl. They fall in love.
Fiction mixed with Reality, Reality with Fiction.
This is the way the world ends.
Stands the town clock at one to noon? And will the shootout happen soon?
But the clock also reads one minute to twelve at the end of Midsummer Night’s Dream, just before Theseus’s iron-hand-of-midnight speech; that poetic and, in context, highly sinister version of Last orders at the bar, please. Then the play finishes, the happy-ever-after begins.
Happy ending; highly subjective term. Happy for who? Ending of what?
Even now, in the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, there was a tiny nodule in the most obscure box-room of Skinner’s mind that said No, this isn’t. And Titania doesn’t, she goes back to Oberon and lives happily . . . And above all, I’m not. Not what? Can’t remember. Just not, is all.
The sky is a stained-glass window, all different shades of light and dark blue. The air is that heavy, sweet, fresh smell unique to midsummer midnight. The little white light in Skinner’s brain flickers for the last time and goes out. A big stupid grin splurges across his face, like a custard pie from the hand of God.