My Hero Read online

  It wasn’t even the fact that the gun’s sole topic of conversation was human beings in their capacity as relatively straightforward moving targets that really got on Skinner’s nerves. What irked him most was that the damned thing was so unceasingly chatty. He’d tried everything - cotton wool shoved down the chamber mouths, an old sock, even a silencer - and still it continued; a constant stream of bloodthirsty twittering, even when he was trying to sleep.

  ‘For the last time,’ he growled, in a voice like a file cutting hard brass. ‘One more peep out of you and you go in the melt. Capisce?’

  ‘. . . Best years of my life, and what thanks do I . . . ?’

  With exquisite caution, Skinner ventured a quick glimpse round the side of the rock. The man who had fired at him was standing up in his stirrups, looking round. The others were spread out in a loose crescent formation, ready to deploy at speed. In the middle of the group, Jonah LaForce lounged in the saddle, his white Stetson pulled down over his eyes, a long Sharps rifle cradled in the crook of his left arm.

  Shit, thought Skinner. All the running, the hiding, the living like a pig in this godforsaken wilderness of a potboiler, and it ends here. Shot to death by a goddamn cliché.

  Slowly, unwillingly, he reached down and closed his fingers around the grips of the revolver.

  ‘All right,’ Regalian shouted, ‘are we all agreed?’

  Linda giggled. ‘You do look silly,’ she said, ‘standing on that chair. I can see your socks.’

  Regalian ignored her. ‘The time has come,’ he said, ‘to stand up and be counted. For far too long—’

  ‘Does that mean we all have to stand on chairs? Or can we be counted at floor level?’

  Another day’s work done, another night in the pub. That’s fiction for you.

  ‘For far too long,’ Regalian persevered nevertheless, ‘authors worldwide have been taking us for granted. Well, it’s time we put a stop to all that. Characters united can never be def—’

  ‘Time, ladies and gentlemen, please,’ chirruped the landlord in the background. ‘Come on, you lot, haven’t you got plots to go to?’

  ‘United,’ Regalian said gamely, ‘we can never be defeated, and until our perfectly reasonable demands are met I recommend that we work strictly to rule. Our demands are—’

  ‘Put a sock in it, will you?’ shouted Alf (Jotapian the High Priest; bad guys and Grand Viziers a speciality, no character too large or too small). ‘I want to be out of here before the chip shop closes.’

  ‘One: a say in the decision-making process. It’s intolerable that in this day and age a character’s destiny is still completely at the whim of some jumped-up little scribbler. Two—’

  ‘Put a sock in it,’ chortled Linda, rendered breathless by her own wit. Nobody else seemed to appreciate the joke, but she was used to that.

  ‘Two: no character to be killed or married without his previous consent in writing. Three—’

  The landlord switched the lights off. Slowly, with a long sigh, Regalian climbed down off his chair and felt his way to the door. Every night, for as long as he could remember, he had broached the subject of a characters’ union, and the furthest he had ever been allowed to get was Demand Four.

  A character’s life is by its very nature nomadic, and for the duration of the trilogy Regalian was living in a bedsit over a chemist’s shop on the junction of Tolkien Street and Moorcock Avenue. It was so small that the sixty-watt bulb provided by the management produced more than enough light to illuminate the whole of it, but it was cheap (thirty zlotys a week, all found) and fairly central, and he only went there to sleep. His collection of dog-eared book jackets concealed the peeling of the wallpaper, and the fact that the whole building was so dilapidated that it only stayed upright through force of habit was no concern of his. He kicked off his shoes, poked his thumb through the foil on a bottle of milk, and sat down on the bed. Lines to learn for tomorrow, then sleep.

  The lines were ready for him, neatly stacked on the chipped formica bedside table. He picked up the sheaf of papers and began to read.

  It had never, in all his long career, occurred to him to wonder how they got there. Did they simply materialise, or did a trans-dimensional courier deliver them, silent and unobtrusive as the Milk Tray man, or did the landlady bring them in when she came in to hoover? He neither knew nor cared.

  Fight Scene, he read. Regalian fights with Gordian in the arena. One of them is killed.

  Marvellous, he thought. What the hell are we supposed to do, toss a bloody coin? He knew, in his heart of hearts, that it wouldn’t be him, however; because he was the Hero, and nobody kills their Hero with seventy pages still to go. What it really meant was that the damnfool author had made yet another lash-up in the structure, which meant the big fight was happening on pages 180-3, instead of 241-4. In order to cover her tracks, she was going to have to leave the fight scene at the point where one of them (not specified) was killed, and then go trailing off into the subplot or do flashbacks or something for twenty pages or so before owning up and getting on with the story. The technical term is Agonising Suspense, and a surer indication of the pot boiling dry would be difficult to find. Regalian sighed. It meant a day or so off, at any rate, while some other poor fools (Linda, probably, and Doris) would have to work double shifts to cover. Not his problem, he decided. The milk was ever so slightly off.

  The rest of the lines confirmed his suspicions so exactly that he simply skimmed through them; then he turned back and studied the details of the fight with a mixture of professional thoroughness and abject contempt. You couldn’t do that, for a start, not with a six-pound, two-handed broadsword. You’d sprain your wrist.

  He threw the pages on the floor, stretched out on the bed and felt for the light switch. What the hell, he said to himself, it’s only work. More to the point, what was he going to do on his day off?

  Jane sat down in front of her screen, flexed her fingers and put in the disk.

  The usual green lines, beeps and facetious user-chummy comments; and then the screen went blank for a moment. Jane scowled and leaned forward.

  Hi! My name’s Hamlet, you may have heard of me. I was wondering, do you happen to have a job going?

  Jane stared at the writing on the screen for a second or two and then reached out for the user’s manual. A computer virus? she wondered. Hackers?

  I know it’s not quite the done thing to approach an author direct like this, but I’ve had it up to here working for Bill Shakespeare. I think you and I could be good for each other, you know?

  ‘Really?’ Jane said. ‘What makes you think that?’

  Well, read the screen, I’ve been a fan of your stuff for ages now. I think you characters are, you know, neat. My kind of people.

  ‘Thank you.’

  You’re welcome. Your people, when there’s someone whose head needs bashing in, they don’t stand around agonising about it in blank verse, they just roll up their sleeves and get on with it. No wimps need apply. That’s my kind of scene.

  ‘I see.’

  Say it myself as shouldn’t, the screen read, I do have a certain following. Just think how it looks to the boys and girls out there. Like for instance, there’s the bit where I come up unexpectedly on the bad guy in the chapel?

  ‘I know the bit you mean.’

  Well, I ask you. If it’d been one of yours, it’d be out with the whacking great knife, chippy-chop and on to the big love scene, no worries. And do you know what that ponce has me doing? Worrying that if I top the bastard, he’ll go to Heaven. I mean to say, what’re we doing here? A proper grown-up thriller, or Listen With Goddamn Mother?

  ‘Um . . .’

  And the women, the screen continued, the words flashing up like a huge flock of rooks startled off a ploughed field. Don’t get me wrong, but they’re just not my type. Not like the birds in your stuff. I mean, you wouldn’t dream of pairing your hero off with some droopy bit with tits like goosepimples who goes around talking to the flow
ers, now would you?

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jane. ‘I’ll let you know.’

  But . . .

  ‘Goodbye.’ She switched the machine off and pulled out the disk. As she did so, the printer suddenly screamed into life, shuttled the daisywheel a few times and went back to sleep. Jane pulled out the paper.

  I ALSO DO COMEDY, it read. AND BAR MITZ-VAHS .

  Having binned the page, switched on again and deleted yesterday’s effort, Jane sat for a moment, wondering what the hell she was supposed to do now. A long time ago she had decided that writing was like the school holidays: a noisy cluster of whining voices, saying that they’re bored and demanding that she find them something to do.That’s the trouble with characters. No bloody initiative.

  Skinner leaned back against the rock, feeling dazed and extremely foolish, as befits a man who’s just shot his own villain.

  ‘Told you,’ crowed the Scholfield in his hand. ‘Piece of duff, I said. Easy as falling off a—’

  ‘Oh sure,’ Skinner snapped. ‘Nothing to it really LaForce shoots, nearly takes my head off; I stagger back in terror, accidentally jarring my hand against the rock; you go off; the bullet ricochets off his left stirrup-iron, his belt-buckle, the other guy’s wooden leg and a flat stone, and ends up going straight through the back of his head, thus producing the only known instance of a man being shot from behind by someone standing directly in front of him. I do that sort of thing for a pastime.’

  ‘Well,’ sniffed the Scholfield, ‘on page 86 of Painted Saddles, you have the hero shoot at the villain’s reflection in a mirror, through two locked doors and a piano.’

  ‘Yes,’ Skinner shouted, ‘but that’s fiction!’

  ‘So’s this.’

  Skinner sat down heavily and stared mournfully at the corpses littering the canyon floor. ‘Yes,’ he muttered soberly, ‘I guess it is, at that.’

  A revolver can’t frown, but someone with an excessively vivid imagination might have thought he saw the trigger guard pucker slightly. ‘I don’t know why you’ve suddenly come over all droopy,’ the gun said. ‘Thought you’d be pleased, your worst enemy dead and all. Should make life a bit easier all round.’

  A bullet sang off the rock, six inches or so above Skinner’s head. He jerked sideways, tripped over his feet and fell behind a small, round boulder.

  ‘You reckon?’ he said.

  ‘Who the hell’s that?’

  ‘This is pure conjecture on my part,’ Skinner replied, ‘but maybe it’s one of the posse members who rode away when you started shooting.’

  ‘And now you reckon they’ve come back.’

  ‘Fits all the known facts, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yippee!’

  An expression of revulsion passed over Skinner’s face, and he glared at the pistol in his hand. ‘You bastard,’ he said. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of fighting?’

  ‘No. I’m a gun. Think about it.’

  Skinner sighed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m a human, and I do. Any ideas?’

  The gun was silent for a moment.

  ‘You could try shooting back,’ it said cheerfully.

  ‘I thought you’d say that.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  The pigeons were restless tonight.

  They shifted uneasily on their perches as blue fangs of lightning gouged the night sky over the huddled suburbs of Dewsbury. Occasional flashes of livid incandescence, bright and sudden as a flashbulb, threw their long shadows against the far wall of Norman Frankenbotham’s pigeon loft, making them look for all the world like roosting pterodactyls.

  In his shed, Frankenbotham gazed up at the fury of the heavens through the thick lenses of his Specsavers reading glasses. He didn’t smile - he was from Yorkshire, after all - but in some inner chamber of his heart he was satisfied. Very soon now, perhaps even tonight, and it would all be over.

  He turned over the small brown paper parcel in his hands, noticing with dour approval the Sheffield post-mark, and then reached for a Stanley knife and started to cut through the packaging. It had taken him five years to find a lateral thermic transducer - five long years of combing the Yellow Pages, studying classified ads and newsagents’ windows, enquiring in pubs and betting shops the length and breadth of the three Ridings. Oh, he could have had one from Geneva or Kyoto by return of post, but that wouldn’t have done at all. It would have defeated the whole object of the exercise.

  Nothing but genuine parts. Genuine Yorkshire parts.

  Six years ago, Norman Frankenbotham had sat in the stands at Headingley, watching the once invincible Yorkshire cricket team suffering ignominious defeat at the hands of some pack of Surrey mercenaries, captained by a renegade New Zealander; and he had sworn an oath by all his gods that he, personally, would do something about it. He would provide his country with the fast bowler they so desperately required.

  Had he been thirty years younger, it would have been easy. Early morning training runs, hours of relentless practice in the nets behind the Alderman Dewhurst Memorial Pavilion, early nights and a diet of raw red meat, and he’d have done the job himself. But that was out of the question; and a few cursory inspections of the earring-wearing, gaudily-clad youths purporting to play cricket in the local parks and recreation grounds had convinced him that there was no hitherto undiscovered Trueman or Old waiting to be identified and brought to the attention of the selectors. In short, there was only one thing for it.

  He’d have to make one. Out of bits.

  Frankenbotham shook his head at the memory, and reached for a small screwdriver. Outside, the sky groaned like a great oak splitting in a hurricane. Calmly, he unscrewed an inspection panel and studied a wiring diagram.

  Locate connector A on terminal B and tighten retaining screws C. Be careful not to over-tighten. Insert resistor D using the tool provided.

  Once the fateful decision had been taken, it had simply been a matter of applying himself and getting on with the job. Six years, a broken marriage and his life savings later, he could see before him the final consummation of his dreams. A little solder, a few minor modifications, a lick of formaldehyde and a bloody great big bolt of lightning, and he’d be home and dry.

  With a dispassionate eye he studied his creation, stretched out on the workbench in front of him, and came to a decision. He would call it, he decided, Stanley. Stanley Earnshaw.

  Neatly, deftly, without hurrying, he soldered the last connector in place and screwed down the small metal plate to the back of Stanley’s head. Five minutes with the formaldehyde bottle, a few last touches with the neutronic lancet - was he dawdling, he asked himself, finding things to do so as to postpone the moment of truth? - and a last systems check, ticking off each entry on the back of the dog-eared envelope that bore the master schematic; and he was ready. Slowly, his heart pounding, he taped the electrodes in place and waited.

  A flash of lightning whitened out the world, and he counted - two, three, four - for the thunder. It was headed this way, getting nearer. Soon, soon. To occupy his mind, he checked the central neural directory one last time, flicking the feeler gauges in and out with the ease of long practice. Flash! one, two. The next one, he promised himself. The lightning was coming!

  Steady, Norman lad, don’t get carried away. With exaggerated care he armed the secondary relief circuits and engaged the main console. The air hummed and crackled.

  First God, and now me, he thought. But God hadn’t had to get all his supplies out of the back pages of the Exchange and Mart.

  Now! He could feel the lightning strike through the soles of his boots. With a quick, frantic movement he threw the central switch, and was nearly thrown off his feet by the incredible surge of power running through the system. Fat worms of blue fire crawled up and down the wires connecting Stanley’s wrists to the transformer. There was a sickening smell of burning.

  ‘Live!’ he screamed. ‘Stanley, live! Stanley, tha daft bugger, get on wi’ it!’

  And God created Man in His own image.


  God’s image had been skilfully crafted for Him by Kraftig & Stein, public relations consultants to the really important (established -1). It had been a tricky assignment.

  ‘Sure,’ the original Mr Stein had said, ‘we want omniscient. Sure, we want omnipresent and omnipotent. That’s good. That’s you. But is that going to be enough?’

  ENOUGH?

  ‘Yeah.’ Mr Stein put his fingertips together and leaned back in his chair. ‘Think about it. What I ask myself is, what does omnipotent say to me? What sort of aura has it got?’

  AURA?

  ‘Exactly,’ interrupted Mr Kraftig, nodding. ‘Just what we were thinking. Which is why we think you should be more . . .’

  The two image consultants exchanged the most fleeting of glances. They were, they knew, taking a risk here, but if you want to be known as daring and innovative, it goes with the territory.

  ‘More, kind of, caring,’ cooed Mr Stein. ‘Compassionate. Accessible.’

  ‘Lovable.’

  ‘Cuddly.’

  The burning bush arched two incandescent branches. I SEE.

  Mr Kraftig took a deep breath. ‘Omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent and stuff as well, of course. No question about that. We think you should be very big in all the omnis. But, at the same time . . .’

  ‘Cuddly.’

  The bush crackled thoughtfully. This was, of course, probably the most significant pause in history.

  I LIKE IT.

  ‘That’s great,’ said Mr Stein, as the cosmos breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Now, as a first step . . .’

  All that was, of course, a long time ago; to be precise, the breakfast meeting at 7 a.m. on the first day. The problems associated with creation have not, however, changed all that much since. In a sense, each subsequent act of creation has been a sort of rerun of the very first; a random dip into the Scrabble bag of potentiality, a wild guess in Destiny’s endless game of Twenty Questions. The problem is, of course, that creation is irrevocable. Once a thing has been created, it’s there, somewhere, for ever. No matter what you try and do about it subsequently, there’ll always be some interfering bastard with an ark and a dove to make sure it survives.