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pleasure to work with you.”

 
     
    CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    T HE BAR WAS called The Queen Victoria. Occasionally Niles found himself wondering if the owners had been at all inspired by Eastenders .
    It seemed unlikely, somehow – the people who ran it were a friendly gay couple from Oregon, rather than ex-pats wanting to create a taste of home – but at the same time, the dark, wood-panelled walls, the charmingly imperial decor and the faintly musty carpeting might have been pulled in from a fictional reality.
    Which was, he thought, oddly fitting. After all, The Victoria was where Niles went to drink with Bob.
    Aside from Ralph, Bob Benton was the only other Fictional Niles knew. Which made it all the more curious that, over the course of the past ten years, he had assumed the post of Niles’ best and only friend.
     
     
    B OB B ENTON’S FICTIONAL biography went as follows: he was a ‘bio-chemist’ – an update from the original origin given to him in the early ’forties, when he’d simply been a pharmacist – who’d discovered a concentration of ‘formic ethers’ that had given him fantastic strength. Donning a costume with a skull and crossbones on the chest, a yellow cape, and a domino mask, he set out to protect the citizens of Bowery Bay – a city invented especially for the television series Benton had starred in – as The Black Terror.
    Benton’s real-world origin story was significantly more complex.
    As a character existing in the public domain, The Black Terror could – within reason – be used by anybody, with no fear of legal action. As with Frankenstein or Charlie Chan, anyone could put out a Black Terror comic, or a Black Terror movie. The Black Terror TV show in the ’sixties, starring Lyle Waggoner as Benton and Peter Deyell as his young ward Tim, had been popular enough to create a wave of ‘Terrormania’ across the United States, and while there were plenty of attempts to cash in on the situation, only the official merchandise and tie-ins – starring copyrighted characters and locations created for the show like Commissioner O’Driscoll, Terrorgirl and Swing City – shifted significant units.
    More than twenty years later, ParaVideo Entertainment examined the phenomenon and decided that it might be worth making a Black Terror movie, complete with the kind of big budget and big stars that would, hopefully, re-ignite the ‘Terrormania’ phenomenon. After all, while they couldn’t hold the copyright on The Black Terror, they could certainly hold the copyright on a Fictional for at least as long as his contract lasted, if not longer – and it would be that Fictional on whom the action figures, T-shirts and other merchandise would be based. Legally, it was foolproof.
    So the first Robert Benton – chemist for a pharmaceutical firm, general polymath and citizen of a dark, neon-lit and grimly camp metropolis named Cryme City – was born, in early 1988. The next year, The Black Terror earned almost $500 million at the box office, and nearly twice that in merchandise, making a continuing franchise inevitable. Over the next nine years, Robert Benton made three more films, although as time went on the direction became increasingly shoddy. The later episodes pushed the formula so far towards camp comedy – of a particularly ill-conceived sort – that the fourth film, The Black Terror And Tim, barely made a profit on the domestic front. It was decided that Robert Benton would be released from his contract, but given first refusal on any new sequels, should the studio ever feel the need to make them.
    One year later, the first Robert Benton committed suicide. He left no note.
    When the second Robert Benton – Bob – heard the news, he felt as if he himself had died.
     
     
    “S EE, I ALWAYS knew.” Bob said quietly, taking a long sip of his beer – he preferred the real thing, rather than ginger ale or apple juice.
    He’d picked up the taste after The New Adventures Of The Black