A Blink of the Screen (13 page)

G. M.
T
HE
I
NDEPENDENT
F
ANTASY
R
OLEPLAYING
M
AGAZINE
,
O
CTOBER 1988

I’ve tinkered with it since, and I can see it needs further tinkering. Once or twice I’ve thought about extending it into a novel, and then thought better of it. But I’ve always had a soft spot for this story
.

Dogger answered the door when he was still in his dressing gown. Something unbelievable was on the doorstep.

‘There’s a simple explanation,’ thought Dogger. ‘I’ve gone mad.’

This seemed a satisfactory enough rationalization at seven o’clock in the morning. He shut the door again and shuffled down the passage, while outside the kitchen window the Northern Line rattled with carriages full of people who weren’t mad, despite appearances.

There is a blissful period of existence which the Yen Buddhists
¹
call plinki. It is defined quite precisely as that interval between waking up and being hit on the back of the head by all the problems that kept you
awake
the night before; it ends when you realize that this was the morning everything was going to look better in, and it doesn’t.

He remembered the row with Nicky. Well, not exactly row. More a kind of angry silence on her part, and an increasingly exasperated burbling on his, and he wasn’t quite sure how it had started anyway. He recalled saying something about some of her friends looking as though they wove their own bread and baked their own goats, and then it had escalated to the level where he’d probably said things like Since you ask, I do think green 2CVs have the anti-nuclear sticker laminated into their rear window before they leave the factory. If he had been on the usual form he achieved after a pint of white wine he’d probably passed a remark about dungarees on women, too. It had been one of those rows where every jocular attempt to extract himself had opened another chasm under his feet.

And then she’d broken, no, shattered the silence with all those comments about Erdan, macho wish-fulfilment for adolescents, and there’d been comments about Rambo, and then he’d found himself arguing the case for people who, in cold sobriety, he detested as much as she did.

And then he’d come home and written the last chapter of
Erdan and the Serpent of the Rim
, and out of pique, alcohol, and rebellion he’d killed his hero off on the last page. Crushed under an avalanche. The fans were going to hate him, but he’d felt better afterwards, freed of something that had held him back all these years. And had made him quite rich, incidentally. That was because of computers, because half the fans he met now worked in computers, and of course in computers they gave you a wheelbarrow to take your wages home; science fiction fans might break out in pointy ears from time to time, but they bought books by the shovelful and read them round the clock.

Now he’d have to think of something else for them, write proper science fiction, learn about black holes and quantums …

There was another point nagging his mind as he yawned his way back to the kitchen.

Oh, yes. Erdan the Barbarian had been standing on his doorstep.

Funny, that.

This time the hammering made small bits of plaster detach themselves from the wall around the door, which was an unusual special effect in a hallucination. Dogger opened the door again.

Erdan was standing patiently next to his milk. The milk was white, and in bottles. Erdan was seven feet tall and in a tiny chain-mail loincloth; his torso looked like a sack full of footballs. In one hand he held what Dogger knew for a certainty was Skung, the Sword of the Ice Gods.

Dogger was certain about this because he had described it thousands of times. But he wasn’t going to describe it again.

Erdan broke the silence.

‘I have come,’ he said, ‘to meet my Maker.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I have come,’ said the barbarian hero, ‘to receive my Final Reward.’ He peered down Dogger’s hall expectantly and rippled his torso.

‘You’re a fan, right?’ said Dogger. ‘Pretty good costume …’

‘What,’ said Erdan, ‘is fan?’

‘I want to drink your blood,’ said Skung, conversationally.

Over the giant’s shoulder – metaphorically speaking, although under his massive armpit in real life – Dogger saw the postman coming up the path. The man walked around Erdan, humming, pushed a couple of bills into Dogger’s unresisting hand, opined against all the evidence that it looked like being a nice day, and strolled back down the path.

‘I want to drink his blood, too,’ said Skung.

Erdan stood impassively, making it quite clear that he was going
to
stay there until the Snow Mammoths of Hy-Kooli came home.

History records a great many foolish comments, such as, ‘It looks perfectly safe’, or ‘Indians? What Indians?’ and Dogger added to the list with an old favourite which has caused more encyclopedias and life insurance policies to be sold than you would have thought possible.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that you’d better come in.’

No one could look that much like Erdan. His leather jerkin looked as though it had been stored in a compost heap. His fingernails were purple, his hands callused, his chest a trelliswork of scars. Something with a mouth the size of an armchair appeared to have got a grip on his arm at some time, but couldn’t have liked the taste.

What it is, Dogger thought, is I’m externalizing my fantasies. Or I’m probably still asleep. The important thing is to act natural.

‘Well, well,’ he said.

Erdan ducked into what Dogger liked to call his study, which was just like any other living room but had his word processor on the table, and sat down in the armchair. The springs gave a threatening creak.

Then he gave Dogger an expectant look.

Of course, Dogger told himself, he may just be your everyday homicidal maniac.

‘Your final reward?’ he said weakly.

Erdan nodded.

‘Er. What form does this take, exactly?’

Erdan shrugged. Several muscles had to move out of the way to allow the huge shoulders to rise and fall.

‘It is said,’ he said, ‘that those who die in combat will feast and carouse in your hall forever.’

‘Oh.’ Dogger hovered uncertainly in the doorway. ‘My hall?’

Erdan nodded again. Dogger looked around him. What with the telephone and the coatrack it was already pretty crowded. Opportunities for carouse looked limited.

‘And, er,’ he said, ‘how long is forever, exactly?’

‘Until the stars die and the Great Ice covers the world,’ said Erdan.

‘Ah. I thought it might be something like that.’

Cobham’s voice crackled in the earpiece.

‘You’ve what?’ it said.

‘I said I’ve given him a lager and a chicken leg and put him in front of the television,’ said Dogger. ‘You know what? It was the fridge that really impressed him. He says I’ve got the next Ice Age shut in a prison, what do you think of that? And the TV is how I spy on the world, he says. He’s watching
Neighbours
and he’s laughing.’

‘Well, what do you expect me to do about it?’

‘Look, no one could act that much like Erdan! It’d take weeks just to get the stink right! I mean, it’s him. Really him. Just as I always imagined him. And he’s sitting in my study watching soaps! You’re my agent, what do I do next?’

‘Just calm down.’ Cobham’s voice sounded soothing. ‘Erdan is your creation. You’ve lived with him for years.’

‘Years is okay! Years was in my head. It’s right now in my house that’s on my mind!’

‘… and he’s very popular and it’s only to be expected that, when you take a big step like killing him off …’

‘You know I had to do it! I mean, twenty-six books!’ The sound of Erdan’s laughter boomed through the wall.

‘Okay, so it’s preyed on your mind. I can tell. He’s not really there. You said the milkman couldn’t see him.’

‘The postman. Yes, but he walked around him! Ron, I created him! He thinks I’m God! And now I’ve killed him off, he’s come to meet me!’

‘Kevin?’

‘Yes? What?’

‘Take a few tablets or something. He’s bound to go away. These things do.’

Dogger put the phone down carefully.

‘Thanks a lot,’ he said bitterly.

In fact, he gave it a try. He went down to the hypermarket and pretended that the hulking figure that followed him wasn’t really there.

It wasn’t that Erdan was invisible to other people. Their eyes saw him all right, but somehow their brains seemed to edit him out before he impinged on any higher centres.

That is, they could walk around him and even apologized automatically if they bumped into him, but afterwards they would be at a loss to explain what they had walked around and who they had apologized to.

Dogger left him behind in the maze of shelves, working on a desperate theory that if Erdan was out of his sight for a while he might evaporate, like smoke. He grabbed a few items, scurried through a blessedly clear checkout, and was back on the pavement before a cheerful shout made him stiffen and turn around slowly, as though on castors.

Erdan had mastered shopping trolleys. Of course, he was really quite bright. He’d worked out the Maze of the Mad God in a matter of hours, after all, so a wire box on wheels was a doddle.

He’d even come to terms with the freezer cabinets. Of course, Dogger thought.
Erdan and the Top of the World
, Chapter Four: he’d survived on 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth, fortuitously
discovered
in the frozen tundra. Dogger had actually done some research about that. It had told him it wasn’t in fact possible, but what the hell. As far as Erdan was concerned, the wizard Tesco had simply prepared these mammoths in handy portion packs.

‘I watch everyone,’ said Erdan proudly. ‘I like being dead.’

Dogger crept up to the trolley. ‘But it’s not yours!’

Erdan looked puzzled.

‘It is now,’ he said. ‘I took it. Much easy. No fighting. I have drink, I have meat, I have My-Name-Is-TRACEY-How-May-I-Help-You, I have small nuts in bag.’

Dogger pulled aside most of a cow in small polystyrene boxes and Tracey’s mad, terrified eyes looked up at him from the depths of the trolley. She extended a sticker gun in both hands, like Dirty Harry about to have his day made, and priced his nose at 98p a lb.

‘Soap,’ said Dogger. ‘It’s called soap. Not like
Neighbours
, this one is useful. You wash with it.’ He sighed. ‘Vigorous movements of the wet flannel over parts of your body,’ he went on. ‘It’s a novel idea, I know.

‘And this is the bath,’ he added. ‘And this is the sink. And this is called a lavatory. I explained about it before.’

‘It is smaller than the bath,’ Erdan complained mildly.

‘Yes. Nevertheless. And these are towels, to dry you. And this is a toothbrush, and this is a razor.’ He hesitated. ‘You remember,’ he said, ‘when I put you in the seraglio of the Emir of the White Mountain? I’m pretty certain you had a wash and shave then. This is just like that.’

‘Where are the houris?’

‘There are no houris. You have to do it yourself.’

A train screamed past, rattling the scrubbing brush into the washbasin. Erdan growled.

‘It’s just a train,’ said Dogger. ‘A box to travel in. It won’t hurt you. Just don’t try to kill one.’

Ten minutes later Dogger sat listening to Erdan singing, although that in itself wasn’t the problem; it was a sound you could imagine floating across sunset taiga. Water dripped off the light fitting, but that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was Nicky. It usually was. He was going to meet her after work at the House of Tofu. He was horribly afraid that Erdan would come with him. This was not likely to be good news. His stock with Nicky was bumping on the bottom even before last night, owing to an ill-chosen remark about black stockings last week, when he was still on probation for what he’d said ought to be done with mime-artists. Nicky liked New Men, although the term was probably out of date now. Jesus, he’d taken the
Guardian
to keep up with her and got another black mark when he said its children’s page read exactly like someone would write if they set out to do a spoof
Guardian
children’s page … Erdan wasn’t a New Man. She was bound to notice him. She had a sort of radar for things like that.

He had to find a way to send him back.

‘I want to drink your blood,’ said Skung, from behind the sofa.

‘Oh, shut up.’

He tried some positive thinking again.

It is absolutely impossible that a fictional character I created is having a bath upstairs. It’s hallucinations, caused by overwork. Of course I don’t feel mad, but I wouldn’t, would I? He’s … he’s a projection. That’s right. I’ve, I’ve been going through a bad patch lately, basically since I was about ten, and Erdan is just a projection of the sort of macho thingy I secretly want to be. Nicky said I wrote the books because of that. She said I can’t cope with the real world, so I turned all the problems into monsters and invented a character that
could
handle them. Erdan is how I cope with the world. I never realized it myself. So all I need do is be positive, and he won’t exist.

He eyed the pile of manuscript on the table.

I wonder if Conan Doyle had this sort of problem? Perhaps he was just sitting down to tea when Sherlock Holmes knocked at the door, still dripping wet from the Richtofen Falls or whatever, and then started hanging around the house making clever remarks until Doyle trapped him between pages again.

He half rose from his chair. That was it. All he had to do was rewrite the—

Erdan pushed open the door.

‘Ho!’ he said, and then stuck his little, relatively little, finger in one wet ear and made a noise like a cork coming out of a bottle. He was wearing a bath towel. Somehow he looked neat, less scared. Amazing what hot water could do, Dogger decided.

‘All my clothes they prickle,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Did you try washing them?’ said Dogger weakly.

‘They dry all solid like wood,’ said Erdan. ‘I pray for clothes like gods’, mighty Kevin.’