by H. G. Parry
“Will he remember that?” Millie asked. “I’ve never seen anyone go back into a book, much less come out again. Do we remember the last time?”
“They remember everything,” I told her. “We used to end up with Sherlock Holmes around for tea on a regular basis when we were growing up. He always remembered the time before.”
“That’s the problem,” Charley said. “Uriah will hate me even more now—which is saying something. And I’ve never been trying to get information out of a character before. I always just see what they have to say.”
“Well,” Millie said encouragingly, “let’s see what this one has to say. Do we want to tie him up?”
We must have looked startled. Millie shrugged. “In my book, I used to get tied up whenever someone wanted to ask me questions.”
“I never thought I’d say this,” I said. “But Charley was right to pull you out of there.”
Uriah Heep came into existence in a flash of light: tall, thin, cadaverous, his shock of red hair even wilder than before. We had set up a chair for him, where we could watch him from the couch. Clearly the aim was good, because he arrived as if thrown into it, legs spread-eagle and fingers wrapped around the seat. When his grip shifted, I saw the thin residue his hand left, like a snail’s trail. The same thing had been on my sweatshirt after he grabbed me in the English department. I have no idea what that was about. Dickens.
Somehow, we all rose to our feet. It was instinct, as though we were in a room with a poisonous spider. Uriah Heep was not nervous. He looked momentarily surprised, and then his gaze hardened on Charley.
“Master Charley,” Uriah said slowly. His eyes flickered to me and then Millie.
“Don’t even think about making a run for it this time, all right?” Charley said, more sharply than I’d expected from him. “There are three of us. We’re going to notice if you change into somebody else.”
“I would never think of running, Master Charley,” Uriah said, with simpering innocence. “Not when you caught me and umbled me in so workmanlike a fashion last time. Very good work, Master Charley, hurting such a poor, low-down creature.”
Charley looked rather stricken. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to.”
“Oh, I know,” Uriah said. For a moment, there was a flash of hatred in his eyes. “I know.”
Millie stepped forward then. “Mr. Heep,” she said, with the polite-but-firm bossiness I recognized from her books. “We’ve a few questions to ask you, if you don’t mind.” Despite her jeans and hoop earrings, she was suddenly every bit the 1930s girl adventurer.
“Of me?” Uriah’s mouth gaped, and two hard creases appeared in the sides of his cheeks. It took me a moment to realize this was his smile. “Now what could such fine folk have to ask of my umble self?”
“I say,” Millie said to Charley. “You made a terribly accurate job of him.”
“I think too accurate,” Charley said ruefully. “Honestly, if you’re right about this other summoner, I don’t know how he manages to make the constructs do what he wants. Mine just seem to do their own thing.”
“My own thing, Master Charley?” Uriah repeated. “Oh no, no. I’m quite at your disposal, I’m sure.”
“You tied me up and put me in a closet!” Charley reminded him.
Uriah only smiled.
“Mr. Heep, you said something was coming,” Millie said. “We know what you mean now. Rob’s met your counterpart, the one who belongs to the other summoner. You can see flashes from his mind, can’t you? You know something about what’s being planned.”
“I can see things,” Uriah said. “And I can tell you about them, of course I can. But I want something in return, Master Charley. Nothing at all, really, just a little promise for old Uriah.”
“What do you want?” Charley asked.
“I want you to promise not to put me back.” Suddenly, he was as hard as flint. “I want you to swear, on whatever you hold sacred, that I will not be going back to that book again.”
Charley frowned. “Back into David Copperfield?”
“David Copperfield,” Uriah spat. His limbs twitched in disgust. “It isn’t even my book. It’s his. Always his. I want out of it. I want to be taken to the Street, and I want to be given my freedom there.”
“What does it feel like, when I put you back?” Charley asked. His guard dropped as curiosity overcame him. “Do you wake up back in your book?”
“I’ll answer that, too, Master Charley,” Uriah said. “To the best of my umble ability. When you promise not to put me back.”
“Oh, never mind,” Charley said. “I’ll ask Mr. Holmes.”
“Death,” Uriah said. “It feels like death.”
Charley fell silent. I didn’t like the look on his face.
“You can’t leave him out of his book,” I said bluntly. “You can’t even consider it. He’s too dangerous.”
“It’s not as dangerous as it might seem,” Millie said. My heart sank. I’d hoped for her support in this. “This isn’t the same Uriah Heep as you have at work, remember. He has nothing to do with the summoner. Charley made him. He’s a nasty piece of work, I’ll grant you, but that goes for half the inhabitants of the Street. We usually manage to avoid bloodshed. I’m more concerned about the fact that the other Uriah will be able to see through him as well. We’ll be wide open.”
“We are anyway,” Charley said. “The summoner must know where the Street is. If I can feel the pull of it, so can he—and certainly his characters can. If he means any harm to you at all, it’s only a matter of time.”
“That means the Street is already in danger,” I pointed out. “That doesn’t mean that you should increase the danger.”
“It means that Uriah Heep is not that dangerous.”
“He tried to kill us.”
“He didn’t kill us, though,” Charley said. “I don’t think that’s in him. Not that what is in him is very pleasant, but I don’t think we can pretend our lives are at stake.”
I wasn’t so certain about that. Charley wasn’t the one who’d had a knife at his throat. He hadn’t felt the murderous fury vibrating along the blade.
“I suppose we could keep him out of his book without letting him come to the Street,” Millie said pragmatically.
Uriah shook his head. “I want to go to the Street. And not locked up in a basement somewhere. That’s also a condition.”
“God, he’ll be asking for a Jacuzzi next,” I sighed.
Uriah cocked his head to one side. “What might one of those be, Master Sutherland?”
“I thought you knew pretty much everything Charley knows?” I said sarcastically.
“I know many things, Mr. Sutherland,” Uriah said. His face rippled, wavered, and then, horribly, shifted to take the shape of my brother’s. Not the shape he’d taken last time, when he’d fooled me for so long. This version was a child, probably no more than eleven or twelve. In fact, exactly twelve. I remembered. The young Charley’s face, grotesque on the elongated body, gave me a hard smile. “Many things.”
To my surprise, Charley reacted before I could. “Stop it!” he snapped.
“Don’t let him get to you,” Millie said. “He’s just trying to hurt you. It’s what he does. We can’t help how we’re written.”
“I know,” Charley said. “But stop it. Change back, please.”
Uriah looked at him a moment longer, then did so.
“Thank you.” Charley was calm again now. Only the slightest catch in his voice gave him away. “Now. If we were to give you the freedom of the Street—”
“You can’t,” I repeated.
I think that was the first time Charley had ever ignored me. All the times he was lost in a book and oblivious to the whole world didn’t count. Something has to be heard to be ignored. He heard me this time, and he ignored me.
“If we gave you the freedom of the Street, would you promise not to hurt its inhabitants?”
“Oh, I can’t promise not to hurt anyone, Master C
harley,” Uriah said. “You heard this fine lady here. It’s how I’m written. Someone so umble as me can’t fight how they were written, can they?”
“I have no idea,” Charley said. “Maybe. But will you promise not to betray the Street to the other summoner? The rest, I think, we could probably deal with. Can we?” he asked Millie.
“Shape-shifting, obsequiousness, and leaving slime trails over things are pretty much par for the course on the Street,” Millie confirmed. She seemed to make up her mind; her own head raised with a bounce of curls. “And to be honest, if he’s staying out, it’s best we keep an eye on him. We can keep him watched without having him locked up—he’d have a job trying to get the better of Dorian Gray or the Artful Dodger. If you want to make the deal, we’ll look after him.”
“You can’t possibly mean that,” I said.
“Oh, thank you,” Uriah said. His limbs twitched again as he looked up at Millie, and this time his gaze was both adoring and covetous. “Such a good, beautiful lady, being so kind to umble Uriah…”
“Oh, do shut up,” Millie said, rolling her eyes. “There’s a good chap. Just promise you won’t talk to the other summoner.”
“I wouldn’t talk to the other summoner,” Uriah said. I actually believed him. He said it too bitterly to be lying. “They’re worse than Mr. Dickens, trying to make us fit their stories.”
“All right,” Charley said. “Then, if you tell us what we want to know, I promise not to put you back into your book when you’re done.”
“This is ridiculous!” I burst out. “You have no way of knowing he’ll keep his word. You have no way of knowing if you can trust what he tells you.”
“We could draw up a legal contract, Mr. Sutherland,” Uriah suggested. “Your intern could look it over.”
“Neither you or Eric are bound by contractual law,” I returned. “You’re not even bound by the laws of physics. You’re figments of Charles Dickens’s imagination. I wouldn’t be so smug about it. How do you know Charley and Millie will keep their word?”
“Oh, their sort always do, Master Robert,” Uriah said obsequiously. “Good, honorable gentlefolk, always so kind to poor Uriah. Of course they’ll keep their word. Besides, if they don’t, they’ll never get another word from me. They might need me later, and they know that if they’ve already put me back once, I won’t help them. And they need my help. They don’t have a choice. Do you, Master Charley?”
“No,” Charley said. “We don’t.”
He sat down in the armchair, opposite Uriah. Charley still tends to sit cross-legged on chairs and tables—we never did manage to train him to use the furniture properly. This time, his feet were firmly on the floor, and his muscles were coiled to run at the first opportunity. But still, he sat, and looked at Uriah face-to-face.
“So,” he said. “The summoner. What do you know about them?”
“Not very much,” Uriah said. He leaned back and crossed his arms. “I only have glimpses, flashes. When I came through last time, I felt my other self in a room. He’s there all the time he isn’t working or with the summoner—he isn’t put back, because they have him in the law firm now, and it’s easier to keep him out than make sure he’s read out the same each time. There are a few of them, there in the dark, sleeping on old mattresses. Very dark there, and cold. The rest are taken out and put back in as they’re needed.”
I had a sudden, unwanted image of Millie, and Dorian, and even the Artful Dodger and those weird Darcys. I imagined them lying on dirty mattresses somewhere—I thought of the basement of our childhood house, which had been a mess of cobwebs and moss and old boxes nobody ever looked through. I had always hated going in there. Once, when I was six, the door had swung shut and locked while I was down there looking for my rugby ball, and I had screamed and pounded on the door for what seemed like hours (it was about ten minutes) before Dad heard me from the hallway. I was shaking and crying when he let me out, and he had to soothe me for half an hour before I calmed down.
“That’s terrible,” I conceded. “It sounds like a child abuse case.”
“Oh, they’re not children, Master Sutherland,” Uriah said bitterly. “They’re criminals, all of them. The best criminals in literature, right off the page.”
“What are they needed for?” Charley asked.
Uriah tilted his head a little to one side. “Ah. That’s interesting. Just crime, at first, I think. Thefts, housebreakings, swindles, and so forth. I’m surprised you haven’t thought of it, Master Charley. It’s a perfect scheme. They can’t be caught: they don’t exist. By the time the police are looking for them, they’re back in their books, just so many printed words on a page.”
“But that’s not what you were talking about,” I reminded him. “You said something big was coming. Something we would be in the middle of.”
“That’s in his head very clearly, Master Sutherland,” Uriah said. “Something coming. He clings to it in the dark, the way we cling to our revenge in our book. It’s the only hope he has. He calls it the new world.”
“And you don’t know what that is?”
Uriah shook his head. “But it’s something very big. And it involves you, Master Charley. He thinks about you all the time. You’re the key to everything.”
“Why is he at my law firm?” I asked.
The blood-red eyes rolled in my direction. “Why, because you’re Master Charley’s brother, of course. Why else?”
“I assumed that much. But I’ve been his brother for a while. Why now? And why watch me, rather than Charley?”
“Well, as to the second, Master Robert, the summoner probably feels that Master Charley would recognize Uriah Heep in his office. He doesn’t know you would. He doesn’t know I exist, and that you’ve seen me.”
“But Eric must know,” I said. “If you know he exists, he must know that you do. Wouldn’t he tell the summoner?”
“Apparently not, Master Robert.”
I put this aside for now. “And my first question? Why now?”
“I can’t answer as to why the summoner is interested in you all of a sudden,” Uriah said. “But you’ll find that many things will begin to happen now. I told you. It’s coming.”
The new world. Millie had been right. Under the circumstances, it would probably not be a good thing at all.
“You said ‘he’ doesn’t know you exist,” Millie said after a while. “You mean the summoner? You know it’s a ‘he’ we’re looking for then?”
He gave her the Uriah Heep equivalent of a smile. “That’s clear in the other Uriah’s head, too, Miss Radcliffe-Dix.”
“Can you tell us where the summoner is?” Charley asked.
This was what he had been waiting for, evidently. His shoulders twitched convulsively with excitement, and he sat forward.
“He’s there right now,” Uriah said. “It isn’t so dark this time. There’s a window—I’ve seen what’s outside. I can tell you that, if you want. But first, I want to be taken to the Street. I want to be given lodgings there. And I don’t want to see any copies of David Copperfield anywhere in the vicinity.”
“I thought you trusted us,” Millie said, not without irony.
“We all trust each other, I hope,” Uriah said, widening his eyes. “But I don’t see why we shouldn’t all be careful. I’m sure you wouldn’t break your promise to old Uriah, but he’s so very umble you might forget, mightn’t you?”
“I’m insulted,” Millie said dryly. She glanced at Charley. “What do you think?”
“No,” I warned. “Don’t even think about it.”
It was then that Millie’s phone rang. She checked it, then glanced at us. “Sorry, chaps,” she said. “Just a moment.”
“Take all the time you need,” Uriah said, generously.
I turned to Charley as Millie stepped away. “You can’t do this.”
“I don’t see that we have a choice,” Charley said. He glanced at Uriah as he said it, but didn’t lower his voice. “We need his help.
”
Millie came back almost at once, before I could reply. “That was Dorian Gray,” she said to Charley, rather than to me. “There’s been another shift.”
“You mean like when we were there?” he asked. “When the Street extended?”
“Rather larger than that. I need to get back. Uriah can come, too, if he must, but I need to be there.”
“I’ll come,” Charley offered. “I might be able to help.”
“You can’t,” I said to him. “It’s past nine. Lydia’s expecting us to drive out to Mum and Dad’s—Mum and Dad will expect to see you too.”
“You go. I’ll make it up to them next month.” I didn’t miss the guilty glance at the floor. “You can’t deny this is rather important.”
“You can’t deny that they’d kill you if they found out what you were doing.”
“You can’t tell them,” he said at once. He caught himself. “I mean—please, Rob, don’t tell them. They wouldn’t understand.”
“They’d understand perfectly. So do I. You’ve always wanted this, haven’t you?”
“Reality to shift?”
“Don’t give me that. It’s an excuse. You’ve always wanted an excuse to show off what you’re capable of. You couldn’t just settle for being a literary prodigy, could you? You had to have this as well.”
Charley sighed. “Can we please not argue in front of Uriah Heep?”
“Oh, don’t stop on my account,” Uriah Heep chimed in from the chair. “It’s no bother at all.”
I ignored this. Privately, I was annoyed at myself; I was so frustrated, I’d forgotten Uriah was even there. “So you’re not coming to see Mum and Dad? And you don’t want me to explain why?”
“I can’t. Tell them I’m sorry for letting them down—”
“Oh, don’t be. It isn’t like it’s the first time, is it?” And I was annoyed at myself for that too.
“Charley, you can ride with Uriah and me, then, if Rob’s not coming,” Millie said. If she was bothered by my withdrawal, she wasn’t showing it. I don’t think she cared if I was there at all. “Not to worry. I’ll drop you home again when we’ve sorted this. We should be back in time for tea.”