by H. G. Parry
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by H. G. Parry
Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio
Cover illustrations by Trevillion, Arcangel Images and Shutterstock
Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Parry, H. G., author.
Title: The unlikely escape of Uriah Heep / H. G. Parry.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Redhook, July 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019000762 | ISBN 9780316452717 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316452724 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Characters in literature—Fiction. | Ability—Fiction. | Family secrets—Fiction. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PR9639.4.P376 U55 2019 | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000762
ISBNs: 978-0-316-45271-7 (hardcover), 978-0-316-45272-4 (ebook)
E3-20190619-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Millie
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Millie
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Lydia
Chapter XV
Millie
Lydia
Chapter XVI
Millie
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Millie
Chapter XX
Lydia
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Lydia
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Millie
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Millie
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Acknowledgments
Discover More
This is for my sister: teacher, writer, Time Lord, Jedi Knight. Thanks for being wise, funny, and brave.
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Dr. Charles Sutherland, age twenty-six
Notes for article “The Autobiographical Form in Great Expectations and David Copperfield”
Think about the nature of memory, guilt, irony, self-reflective narrative voices.
Child David as victim, drawn directly from Dickens’s memories. But child Pip as criminal, also based partly on autobiographical material.
Cf. Hodgins, esp. 267–89.
I don’t know. Sometimes I think my brain opened as far as it could go when I was about seventeen, and its doors have been just stuck there ever since. And now they’re ossifying and collecting cobwebs, and things are spilling in, swirling around for a bit, and then flying out again. And someday they’ll start to swing slowly shut, and I’ll be left in the dark with nothing but a few rustling fragments of thoughts that get thinner and weaker every time I use them. Like tea leaves.
And sometimes I think I can do anything.
Brilliant, Charley. That is probably called the human condition. And you should probably just get back to work.
What about Uriah Heep? How does he fit in?
I
At four in the morning, I was woken by a phone call from my younger brother. He sounded breathless, panicked, with the particular catch in his voice I knew all too well.
“Uriah Heep’s loose on the ninth floor,” he said. “And I can’t catch him.”
My brain was fogged with sleep; it took a moment for his words to filter through. “Seriously, Charley?” I said when they did. “Again?”
“I’ve never read out Uriah Heep before.”
“True, but—you know what I mean.” I rubbed my eyes, trying to focus. The bedroom was pitch black and cold, the glow of the digital clock the only fuzzy source of light. Next to me, I heard Lydia stir and turn over in a rustle of sheets. I had a sense then of being suspended between two worlds: the sane one in which I had fallen asleep, and Charley’s, reaching to pull me awake through the speaker of my phone. It was a familiar feeling. “That’s Dickens, isn’t it? You know you and Dickens don’t mix—or… mix too well, or whatever it is the two of you do. I thought you were sticking to poetry lately. Those postmodern things that read like a dictionary mated with a Buddhist mantra and couldn’t possibly make any sense to anyone.”
“There is not a poem on earth that doesn’t make any sense to anyone.”
Even half-asleep, I could recognize an evasion when I heard it. “You promised. You promised it wouldn’t happen again.”
“I know, and I meant it, and I’m sorry.” He was whispering, presumably trying not to alert the security guards roaming the university campus—or perhaps not to alert Uriah Heep. “But please, please, Rob, I know it’s late and you have work tomorrow, but if they find him here in the morning—”
“All right, all right, calm down.” I forced exasperation out of my voice. There were times when he needed to hear it, and times when it would only tip him over the edge, and right now he sounded dangerously close to the edge. “You’re in your office? I’m on my way. Just try to keep an eye on him, and be down to let me in the building in ten minutes.”
He sighed. “Thank you. Oh God, I really am sorry, it was only for a second…”
“Ten minutes,” I told him, and hung up. I sighed myself, heard it go out into the darkness, and ran my hand through my hair. Oh well. It wasn’t as though I was surprised.
“It’s my brother,” I said to Lydia, whom I could sense watching me with sleepy concern from the other side of the bed. “He’s having a crisis.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’ll be fine.” Lydia didn’t know the form my brother’s crises took, but it wasn’t the first time he’d phoned me with one. It wasn’t even the first time in the middle of the night. I had no idea who used to help him while he was living in England,
but since he’d come to Wellington, I seemed to be on speed dial. “He just needs some help with a problem. You know how he is.”
“You’ve got a trial this morning,” she reminded me.
“I know,” I said. “I’ll make it. Go back to sleep.”
“You can’t fix all his problems for him. He’s twenty-six.”
“I know.” She was right; he did need to learn to deal with these things himself.
Uriah Heep, though. I’d never read Dickens myself, but I’d learned to have an instinct for the names, and that one didn’t sound promising.
My brother works as a lecturer at Prince Albert University of Wellington, which I can, as I promised, drive to from my house in about ten minutes, provided I stop only to pull on a pair of shoes and shrug on a coat over my pajamas. It’s a tricky road in the dark, skirting the central city and winding up into the foothills of Kelburn. I missed a turn, and found myself on the wrong side of the botanic gardens. Wellington’s like that. The city itself is nestled between the harbor and the hills: too far one way, and you hit the ocean; too far the other, and you’re facing a wall of impenetrable forest sloping up into the clouds. It’s not a good place for my brother, whose relationship with “too far” has never been a healthy one.
The campus is perched halfway up the Kelburn hills, a tumbling assortment of buildings on either side of the road connected by an overpass. They’re old buildings, by New Zealand standards, but they probably don’t seem that way to Charley. Until three years ago, he’d been at Oxford, where referring to a building as old meant someone was studying in it a thousand years ago. I’d been there on a family visit once, and had felt the dust-stifled weight that comes from centuries of scholarship and ancient stone. I wasn’t certain I liked it. It felt too much as though it had come from the pages of a book. The Prince Albert campus, just over a hundred years old, still feels as if it was built by people. Most of its office blocks started life as a settler’s house, and even its grandest buildings are infused with the labor of Victorian colonials re-creating England in basic scaffolding. When I think of Oxford, I think of the still peace of the summer air; here, the air is never still, and rarely peaceful. That particular night, it was raining lightly, and the streetlights caught the drops in a mist of silver. When I got out of the car, the haze clung to my face and stung like ice.
I think Charley had the door to the English department open before I could even knock. In the light spilling from the corridor behind him, I could see his eyes huge and appealing, his unruly mess of dark curls and baggy sweatshirt making him look smaller and younger than he was. He’s very good at that. It didn’t mean I wasn’t going to kill him this time—I was—but maybe not when he was completely beside himself with worry.
“He got away from me,” Charley said immediately. As usual in a crisis, he was talking almost too fast to be understood. “I tried to stay with him, but I had to call you, and… and my cell phone was in my office, so I had to go there, and then once I called you I tried to find him again, and he…”
“Hey, slow down.” My left shoe had a hole in it I hadn’t noticed until I ran through the puddles. I could feel my wet sock squelching inside it now. “Take a breath. He has to still be in the building, right? He hasn’t got a card to swipe out, and the building locks down after dark?”
“That’s right,” Charley confirmed. He took a deep breath, obediently, and released it. It didn’t help. “Unless he breaks a window, or someone left one open—”
“Any sign of that?”
“No. And I’ve looked in every room. But I can’t find him.”
“We’ll find him,” I assured him. “Don’t worry. It’s only some nasty Victorian with no eyelashes.” I’d Googled the character on the way here, which might have contributed to the wrong turn I’d taken. Apparently he was an ugly redheaded clerk who tries to ruin the lives of the main characters in David Copperfield. Also, there was a rock band named after him, which sounded cool. “Not like that time you brought Dracula out of his book, when you were eight.”
“Vampires have weaknesses,” Charley said darkly. “Stoker wrote them in. People are far less predictable.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “Come on. Let’s start in your office.”
I’d never been in Charley’s office before, but it was exactly how I’d pictured it: complete chaos. Mugs littered the desk and peered out from bookshelves, books spilled from every nook and cranny, and the computer was buried beneath pages of scribbled notes. The battered armchair by the window was the only thing clear of clutter, because it was obviously where he sat in order to clutter everything else. It was a Charley-shaped hole in the mess, like an outline at a police crime scene.
There was no sign of a wayward Dickensian villain, but I could smell the faint tang of smoke and fog that I’d learned to associate with Dickensian England, amid the more usual smells of books and stale coffee.
“What were you doing here at four in the morning, anyway?” I asked. I was out of breath: we’d climbed the stairs to the ninth floor so as not to alert Uriah Heep of our coming. The elevators were notorious for breaking down in this building anyway. I remembered that from my undergraduate days, although my classes had usually been at the law campus in the central city.
I’d never been in the English department, and right now it was eerie in the dark. Reception was locked off, and the corridors were a labyrinthine world of shadows.
“I was finishing an article,” Charley answered. “Well, I was starting it, actually. Someone wants it by next week, for an anthology. And I just—I don’t know, I’d actually proposed something about the autobiographical form in David Copperfield and Great Expectations, but I became very interested in how Uriah Heep was functioning as a scapegoat for middle-class anxieties in David Copperfield, and the means by which he’s constructed as a threat to the social order, and I was reading and thinking about him quite closely—”
“And he sprang off the page,” I finished grimly. I’d heard it before. “You couldn’t just put him back?”
“He was too fast. He knew what I was going to do, and he wasn’t going to let me.”
I shook my head. “You shouldn’t be here in the middle of the night.”
“I got caught up.” He sounded apologetic. “Anyway, it’s better to work when no one’s around, in case something like this happens.”
“I suppose, but you know it’s more likely to happen when you’re tired. And definitely when you’re caught up.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“Never mind.” I picked up a paper from the top strata covering the desk, filled with the least legible version of Charley’s handwriting. LOOK AT pg. 467, it began. Model clerk—model prisoner—Heep is his own parody—becomes what people expect him to be—commentary on 19thC hypocrisy—fear of squiggle squiggle—shape-squiggle—squiggle David’s own squiggle—like Orlick and Pip from GE—Fitzwilliam writes on this in squiggle—“You say you were thinking about him as a threat to the social order?”
He nodded unhappily.
The figures Charley summons from books are always colored by his interpretations. Charley calls it postmodernism at work. The last thing we needed was for this latest one to be colored by danger, however theoretical.
“All right.” I tried to think. It was hard, when I had been sound asleep twenty minutes ago. Unlike Charley’s, my brain doesn’t work well in the hours before dawn. “You know this character. Where would he go?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t go near an English department in the book. I suppose we just have to look for him.”
“Charley—!” I bit back a surge of temper just in time. It was more than temper, really. I hated this. I’d always hated this, but I hated it more now, here, in my city.
I looked out the office window. Beyond the campus, the ground dropped away dramatically, and Wellington spread out like a blanket. Down in the distance, I could see the glittering lights of the central city, and past them the long curve of the har
bor and the dark of the ocean. Outside the mess my brother worked in, it all looked impossibly clean and young and bright.
“Do you think we should check the library?” Charley asked.
I forced myself to focus. “Would he want to get to the library? Is that where you think he’d go?”
“Possibly. I have no idea where he’d go.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Charley, I have a big trial coming up in a few hours. I’m expected at the courthouse at nine. It’s my job. There are people depending on me. I can’t just keep looking all night!”
“I said I was sorry! I knew I shouldn’t have called you.”
“You shouldn’t have had to!” So much for keeping exasperation out of my voice. I had never been very good at that. “How many times does it take? Just keep your thoughts under control when you read a book! It shouldn’t be so hard!”
“Maybe you should go. I can deal with this myself. It’s not your problem.”
“It is my problem, though, isn’t it? It’s always my problem. You make it my problem when you bring these things into my city and into my life.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“It doesn’t matter what you mean! It’s what you do. It’s what you always do.”
“I said I would deal with it myself,” Charley said. His face had hardened. “I shouldn’t have asked you to come here. Just go home, Rob. I mean it. I don’t need your help.”
I might have gone. I don’t think I would have—I hope I wouldn’t have. But I was furious, and I could already feel fury pushing me to say and do the things I tried to avoid. It just might have propelled me out the door.
Except, just for a moment, I looked at Charley again. There was something there, in the tilt of his head and the lines of his face, that I’d never seen before. Something hard, and cunning. There was a glint in his eyes that could almost have been malice.
All at once, Charley’s notes flashed up before my eyes, and I felt cold.
Shape-squiggle. If my brother’s handwriting hadn’t been so terrible, I might have worked it out sooner.
As I said, my brother’s creations are always colored by his perception of them. Sometimes this is slight, and manageable: a shift in personality, or a blurring of appearance. But some colorings are deeper and stranger, and the deeper he gets into literary theory, the stranger they become. Traits that are metaphorical in the text become absurdly, dangerously literal. A shy character may come out invisible. A badly written character might come out flat. The Phantom of the Opera walked in a little cloud of darkness, and all Charley could say about it was that it was a half-baked theory about pathetic fallacy and his concentration slipped.