by H. G. Parry
Dickens, as far as I know, has no shape-shifters in his books. But somehow, Charley’s Uriah Heep had come out as one. And he had been standing in front of me from the moment I entered the building.
“Where’s my brother?” I said slowly.
The thing that wasn’t Charley looked confused. He did it well—he got the nose wrinkle just right—but it didn’t matter. I knew now. “What are you talking about?”
“You weren’t down at the door because you were waiting for me.” I could feel the pieces start to fit, the way they did on a good day in court when a hostile witness said just the wrong thing at the right time. “You were down there trying to get away before I arrived. Sometime after Charley called, you took him out of action somehow and stole his key card. But I arrived too soon, didn’t I? You had to let me in, and bluff it out. That’s why you told me to leave; that’s why you’re trying to provoke an argument. You need me to storm out and leave you here alone, so you can get away.”
He shook his head. “Rob, you can’t possibly…”
“You should have known me better than that,” I said. “Or Charley should—I suppose you know me from his memories. I wouldn’t leave him in danger just because he was getting on my nerves.”
“You’ve done it before,” Charley said. My stomach twisted, because I knew what he meant.
“Yes, I have,” I admitted. “And that’s why I’d never do it again. Where is he?”
I didn’t wait for the impostor to lie this time. I pushed my way past him, out into the corridor. “Charley!”
The corridors were lit only by the light spilling from Charley’s office. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I heard a faint sound in response.
“Very well.” The voice from behind me wasn’t quite my brother’s anymore. I turned around quickly, and the face wasn’t my brother’s either.
For the record, Uriah Heep is a very ugly character. He had a face like a skull—cadaverous, I think the Internet had said—and a skeletal body to match: tall, pale, thin, with red hair shaved far shorter than I’d thought the Victorians went in for, and reddish eyes without eyebrows or eyelashes. His jeans and sweatshirt had changed with him to a black tailcoat, funereal garb. His limbs twitched and writhed, apparently without his input; I thought, inexplicably, of the branches of the tree at the back of our childhood house. I was more interested in the knife in his hand. It was a modern box cutter, and he held it like a dagger in my direction.
“I should have known better, Master Robert,” he said, “than to think my umble self could fool a gentleman of your station and fine schooling. Do forgive me, won’t you, Master Robert? It was on account of my being so very umble and unworthy.”
“Don’t give me all that.” I mastered my shock, and hardened my tone. “I don’t even like Dickens. Where’s my brother?”
“Oh, you mustn’t think I’ve hurt Master Charles,” Uriah said, with a laugh like someone grating iron. His voice was honey and rusty nails. “No, no, someone in my umble position—”
“God, literary critics must have a field day with you,” I groaned.
I saw it then: a flash of hatred, right across his face. And then, all at once, the knife was at my throat, and I was against the wall of the corridor opposite, a bony hand on my shoulder holding me there. It was so quick, I didn’t even have a chance to flinch. The blade touched my neck; it stung, but didn’t cut. My heart was beating so loud and fast it filled my entire body.
“I never asked for this,” Uriah hissed. “I never asked to be poor, and ugly, and the villain of the piece. I never wanted to be obsequious, and insincere, and deadly. I never wanted to fall in love with a woman that was always destined for the hero of the novel.”
“I’m sure you didn’t,” I managed. It was my best attempt at conciliation. It might have been better to keep quiet. “But that’s not our fault.”
“Master Charley brought me out.” His face, inches from mine, melted from the shadows. “And now he wants to put me back in. In my place. Just as everybody’s done, all my life. Well, I won’t go, do you hear me? I won’t. This world out here—it hasn’t been written yet. For all I know, I can write it for myself. I don’t have to do what the story says. I can do whatever I want.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. “You’ve got a lot to learn about the world out here, don’t you?”
The blade dug deeper. A thin drop of blood was suddenly warm on my throat, like a shaving cut. Whatever Charley had managed to do to Uriah Heep, he was no longer merely a nasty Victorian with no eyelashes.
“Look, fine.” I tried to speak very carefully, without my voice trembling. “Go, if you want. Just tell me where my brother is.”
“Why should you care? I’ve seen you, you know, in his memories. You don’t like him. You wish he’d never come here.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Yes, it is.” Uriah shook his ugly head. “You’ll be better off without him anyway, with what’s coming. He’s going to be right at the heart of it. Stay out of it, keep your head down, and don’t look too closely at what’s going on, that’s my umble suggestion, Master Robert.”
Curiosity momentarily overcame my fear. I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said, Master Robert. You stay out of it. It don’t concern you. And you won’t want it to.”
“What doesn’t concern me?”
“The new world,” he said. “There won’t be a place for you in the new world.”
Down the corridor, one of the doors burst open. I turned toward the sound on instinct before I had registered what it was. My brother came out.
It was definitely my brother this time. He was wearing the same clothes as the Uriah Heep version of him had been—maybe those were all the clothes of our world that thing had known well enough to copy. His hair was the same mess of curls in need of a haircut. But I had been right. He did look different. His face was softer, and less sure of itself, and his eyes lacked that touch of cunning I’d seen in the copy. I suppose in a Dickens novel evil is real, and it shines out.
He stopped short at the sight of us. The knife was still at my throat, even though Uriah Heep turned to look at him at the same time I had. Then he raised his head.
“Let him go.” His voice had that touch of an English accent I’d noticed at odd times since he returned from overseas. “I’m here now. It’s over.”
“With all due respect, Master Charley,” Uriah said, “you were here at the start. I tied you up and put you in a cupboard.”
“Well,” he said rather weakly. “I’m back again.”
I took a chance then. Uriah was looking the other way; even had he not been, my heart was now beating so fast I couldn’t have held still a moment longer. I grabbed Uriah’s wrist and wrenched the knife away from my throat.
Uriah lunged forward with a hiss. But I was prepared for his wiry strength this time, and adrenaline was flooding me with strength of my own. I kept a tight grip on his wrist, twisting it farther away from me; at the same time, I grabbed his other arm and clung on for grim life. It really was like holding a writhing skeleton. His bones stood out through his clothes, and his unearthly wail was that of a specter. The knife clattered to the floor.
“Now!” I snapped. “Put him back!”
“No!” Uriah cried. There was hatred there—seething hatred—but also real despair. It made me feel sick, despite myself. “You have no idea what it’s like in that book. They always win. They all hate me and I hate them and they always win!”
“I know,” Charley said. He sounded unhappy too. “I’m truly sorry.”
He reached out and touched Uriah on the shoulder, and deep concentration swept over his face. And suddenly my hands were closed around nothing at all. There was a flare of light, and between one heartbeat and the next Uriah Heep had vanished. His screams lingered even after the sound of them had faded, like the smell of Victorian smoke and fog still clinging to the air.
Lydia was righ
t. I really did need to start letting Charley sort these things out for himself.
II
I was four and a half years old when my brother was born. He nearly died before he drew his first breath. Everybody thought he was dead, for a long time—complications during delivery, the doctor said. They had abandoned all efforts to resuscitate him, and wrapped him in a blanket, ready to be taken away and cremated or whatever they do to infants. My mother was holding him when he started to cry. Everyone thought it was some kind of miracle, and most of them were sure he’d suffer some kind of long-term brain damage. That’s very funny, in retrospect.
I wasn’t one of those there to see the miracle. I was meant to be. He was born at home, in our rambling old house out in the country; the plan was for me to be there, too, to pace the living room with my father while my mother fought to bring him into the world. For some reason, they thought this would be good for me. But he came early, by quite a bit—setting the pattern for the rest of his development, though certainly not his punctuality—and I had been sent to stay for the weekend with Grandmother Sutherland. I remember being brought to see him the next day, bundled up in his crib in the room I had helped paint for him. Apparently all I could talk about before he came was the fact I was going to have a little brother; apparently I was very excited about it. And yet, I must not have really understood what it meant, because I remember being silenced by surprise and awe at the sight of him: how real and solid he was and yet how small and fragile, the way his huge, dark eyes reached into mine and tugged at my heart. I’d expected the baby to have blue eyes, like me. I remember that Mum and Dad left the room for some reason, perhaps to go get my things out of the car, and he began to whimper fearfully at being on his own. And I remember knowing, at that moment, that I would do anything—I would kill the whole world—to keep him from being scared or hurt.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m here. I’ll look after you.”
I can’t remember if he quieted at the sound of my voice; probably not. He never really gave me moments like that. But I remember I was going to be the best elder brother ever. I wasn’t one of those children who was jealous of a new baby in the house. I was going to teach him everything I knew.
At eight months old, he began talking. Really talking. If he ever needed the usual infant sound play and noises, he worked them out himself, in his head, without any help from us. When he spoke his first words, they were in proper sentences, and grew more proper by the day: he’d be so frustrated with himself if he didn’t know the word for something, or if the syntax was wrong. About that time, I taught him the names of all the colors in his room, which was mostly yellow. I think that was the last time I ever taught him anything.
By two years old, he was reading my books. By three, he had read most of our parents’. People started to call him a prodigy; others, more cautiously, used the term “highly gifted.”
And at four, he began to bring people and things out of books. It started small. There would be scents lingering in the air after he’d been reading: a cake baking, fresh country grass, ocean spray. Our mother found him with a funny-looking paperweight one day; when she asked where it came from, he said, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” And then, one day, she walked in to tell him dinner was ready and found him playing with the Cat in the Hat.
Most people, I think, would be justified in losing their head when their four-year-old conjures a Dr. Seuss character from thin air. Mum, impressively, kept hers. She told him firmly to put the cat back right now; I doubt Charley had any idea he could do so, but he obeyed, and found he could. Then she took him by the shoulders and told him that he was never to bring anything out again. Ever. To be fair to him, I think he really tried, and still does. But, apparently, there are some things even he can’t do.
I wasn’t there for the arrival of the Cat in the Hat either. I seem to miss all the family stories. This time, I was at a friend’s house, in town. Mum told me about it when I got back, and she told me that it needed to be a secret. Charley would be taken away from us if I told anyone, she said. We all had to keep him safe.
There were plenty of times when I thought I wouldn’t have minded Charley being taken away, as long as it wasn’t anywhere too horrible. I didn’t understand, growing up, why everything was so easy for him, even things that weren’t physically possible. I was confused, and then I was resentful, and then I was bitter. Gradually, the protective hold he’d taken of my heart loosened, or I learned to ignore it. I wanted to show him things, and instead he kept trying to show me. He wasn’t what I’d been expecting in a little brother.
When he was thirteen, he left to study at Oxford, on the other side of the world. I left that same year to study law in Wellington, an hour’s drive away. I fell, with increasing delight, into a world of courtrooms and cafés and city streets; he was enveloped in books and language and ancient halls. Outside of Christmas holidays and birthdays, we had almost no communication with each other. When he phoned me late at night from England three years ago, I almost didn’t recognize his voice.
“Hi, Rob,” he said. “It’s me. Um. I don’t know if Mum and Dad have told you, but I’ve just been offered a position in Wellington. I’d be flying over to take it up next month. Is that all right with you?”
“Why wouldn’t it be all right with me?” I said, and knew my whole life as I had built it was over. Charley couldn’t help it; I understood, even at my most bitter, that this was true. It was nothing he did, or at least nothing he did on purpose. It was simply what he was. He had come into the world trailing dreams and stories and improbabilities, and I knew he would come into my city doing the same.
III
He caught me just after I phoned you,” Charley explained as we drove along the predawn road. Wellington was barely stirring below us; a few lights were beginning to flicker on in windows, and the sky had an orange-gray sheen that promised a rainy morning. “He had a knife—I suppose he’d found it in the storage closet. He tied me to the radiator with those plastic ties that only pull one way. I’ve always hated those things. They’re just a smug reminder that sometimes life doesn’t allow a do-over.”
I shook my head. “Is that in character? Tying people up with plastic ties?”
“Actually, I think that’s my fault too,” Charley confessed unsurprisingly. It had to be, didn’t it? “I was formulating an idea about how Uriah Heep and Orlick from Great Expectations are both shadow versions of the main characters—I think some of Orlick got mixed up with Uriah. It’s the sort of thing Orlick does to people.”
I had no idea who Orlick was, and didn’t care. My heart was still pounding. “Just… stay away from the Victorian melodrama late at night. If you absolutely have to work with narrative, go for the Jane Austen. The worst that can happen there is a broken heart or two.”
“That’s an oversimplification of Austen,” he said distractedly. He was rubbing his wrists where the plastic ties had bit them.
“Then leave the oversimplifications alone! Honestly. You made Uriah Heep a shape-shifter?”
“I just meant that he shaped himself to conform to society’s expectations, but did so in a way that was a parody of those expectations and a means of rising above them. It was metaphorical.”
“Then stay away from the metaphors too,” I said. “At least outside business hours. I mean it. That one wasn’t just irritating, it was dangerous.”
“I’m sorry.” He paused. “Are you sure he didn’t hurt you?”
“Of course I am, idiot.” He’d already asked me this five or six times, in between apologies. Charley takes contrition to excess. It makes it hard to be angry with him, but very easy to be irritated. “He barely touched me. You’re the one who looks like he can’t see straight.”
“I’m much better now.” He’s always light-headed after he puts something back, and a bit tired. It doesn’t seem to bother him as much as it does those around him. “You didn’t need to drive me home, honestly. I could have ridden.”
�
��You do realize the wind got up to a hundred kilometers an hour last week, don’t you? And you’re talking about riding uphill roads into the bush?”
Charley shrugged. “I could manage. It’s a moped, not a bicycle.”
“It’s a death trap. That thing should have been scrap metal years ago. Either the brakes don’t work, or you’ve yet to reliably master them. Besides, by your own admission, you’ve been awake for two nights running. Letting you get on that thing would constitute criminal negligence.”
“I got you out of bed at four in the morning to chase a Dickensian villain through Kelburn campus. I think you could actually murder me at this point, and not a jury in the country would convict.”
I snorted at that, despite myself. “Please don’t think I’m not tempted. You’re very lucky I got it out of my system with the Uriah Heep version of you, and now I can’t be bothered going through it all again. How’d you get out of the closet?”
“Oh,” he said with a yawn. Now that the excitement had died, he was fading fast. “There were copies of Le Morte Darthur in there. It took me a while to reach them with my hands tied; in the end, I had to kick the shelf over. But once I did, I could read out Excalibur, and then it was easy to cut myself free.”
I stared at him. “You pulled out Excalibur?”
“There’s a turn coming up,” he reminded me, and I quickly put my eyes back on the road. We were winding up into the bush that bordered the city. Parliament was at the bottom of the hill, as was the district court where I was due in just a few short hours.