The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  “I’ll explain about both later,” Millie said to Charley quickly, seeing his eyes widen. “Go on, Miss Matty, do.”

  “Mr. Maui said that while he was in bird form, he’d seen one of the disappearing characters—the ones that come and go. They, it seems, told him of the coming of the new world. They said, most specifically, that it was coming here.”

  “Here, as in the Street?”

  “Here, as in Wellington, I believe. I found the phrasing peculiar. A new world, surely, means that the whole world changes, not merely a single city?”

  Millie had to agree that it did. “Did he say what character?”

  “I believe he was unacquainted with them. But for Mr. Maui to have imparted the information to the duke, he must, after all, have been concerned.”

  “Or up to something,” Millie said. “He’s a trickster god, after all.”

  Maui was one of the more mysterious figures she had encountered—and she herself had met with him only once or twice, as a slight, tattooed Māori man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans. Most of the time, he lived as a bird in the surrounding bush, and Dorian had given up trying to track him. Nobody even knew where he had come from: a child’s picture book, possibly, but sometimes Millie wondered if he had been here longer than any of them, perhaps even before printed words had come to New Zealand. For all she knew, there were several of him. If she’d asked, he would probably have lied just for fun. She didn’t, though, think he was lying in this case, or up to any tricks. It tallied too well with every other source of the rumor.

  “I do hope the world doesn’t change,” Miss Matty said. She took a sip of her tea. “I know we must move with the times, but they seem to move so fast.”

  The public house, a dark, low-ceilinged Elizabethan building lit by a haze of candles, was beginning to fill with diners of various shapes and sizes by the time they reached it. Lancelot and the Scarlet Pimpernel drank foaming beer by the window, Lancelot discoursing on the relative merits of broadswords in heavily accented Middle English. The Artful held court at a table in the corner, hiding a ball under a cup and shifting it rapidly as the Darcys watched. The White Witch sat alone at the bar, as cool and forbidding as a 1940s noir heroine. (“The silver Harley-Davidson on the curb is hers,” Millie explained. “Cheaper than reindeer, and it does better in traffic.”)

  They found a place at a heavy wooden table upstairs, by the latticed windows overlooking the Street. Unusually, the afternoon sun was gleaming in. It seemed, as light and dark sometimes did on the Street, to have a quiet, numinous significance that went beyond the physical.

  “How is there food here?” Charley asked, before Millie had even sat down. He seemed oblivious to the curiosity he was inspiring; his own was spilling out in all directions. “Is that fictional as well?”

  “That would be jolly helpful,” Millie said. “So of course not. It’s more or less provided by Dorian and me. I’m an accountant, so I earn a reasonable amount, considering I have no rent to pay. Dorian does something complicated online with stocks and shares that brings in rather more. It might not be entirely legal. Frankly, I was jolly near bankrupt trying to keep this place together before Dorian came, which is why I don’t question his help as long as the portrait doesn’t give me cause for alarm. The Artful goes out to the shops first thing every morning—that’s when you must have seen him. I don’t suppose you do fictional food?”

  “As far as I know, there’s no reason I can’t,” Charley said. “But I can’t. The one time I tried, my chocolate cake tasted like paper and glue. I suppose a Marxist reading of baked goods isn’t very appetizing. Or I’m just not very food minded.”

  He didn’t eat very much of the enormous helpings of meat pie, mashed potatoes, and mushy peas that came to their table, or the stout pale pudding, studded with raisins, that followed it. That, though, was probably because he was too busy looking out the window.

  “It’s a lot of work, this place, isn’t it?” he said abruptly.

  “Yes.” She was unsurprised that it had taken him so long to think of this. To him, deep down, they were all still just illustrations come to life. “A few times I’ve thought it wasn’t going to work at all. But it has to. This is the first safe place any of them have ever had. Before it came, we were all scattered across the world, alone and vulnerable—and the world isn’t built for most of us to survive in. Some had a terrible time before the Street came into being.”

  “Like Miss Matty?”

  “Like Miss Matty,” Millie agreed. “Or worse. They have all the problems of illegal immigrants, to start with: no documents, no money, nobody to support them. Many of the others don’t look quite human; some of them have inexplicable abilities; none of them age. If they’re fortunate, they’ll find other book characters to help them, but before the Street that was almost impossible. Most didn’t even realize there were any others like them. They were alone in the world, and frightened.”

  “Frightened of what? What are they hiding from?”

  “What are you hiding from?” Millie countered. “You’re not a fictional character, but you’re a summoner. You hide as much as any of us. What are you afraid of?”

  “Oh God. Everything.” He considered the question seriously. “I’m afraid of being taken away and experimented on, obviously. But it’s more than that. I’m afraid of being noticed. I’m afraid of being at the center of a new world where I’m hated and feared for what I can do.”

  “They’ll fear you here if they find out what you are, I’m afraid,” Millie said. “Summoners were only a legend to most of them. Lancelot knew of one, in the 1600s, but she was burned as a witch and all the characters she read out with her. Perhaps you and this other summoner are the first since she died hundreds of years ago. Everybody here comes from one-offs—random acts of reader connection. There are rumors of more, further back, when the written word was in its infancy. A lot of what was seen as magic in early history was probably really summoning: people reading dragons out of books, and the like.”

  “It would be like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Charley said. “People write about fairies; because they’ve been written, they’re read out of books; and then they’re in the world, and people write stories about them. We’ve read our own myths into the world.”

  “But as for the rest of it—they’re afraid of real people for the same reasons you are. It’s not hypothetical to some of them, you know, the experimentation. Heathcliff was captured and experimented on during the 1940s—he won’t talk about it beyond that, not even to say which country it was, but the scars are still there. And they’re all afraid of being hated. There are still so few of us, you know. Even now, with the Street, we’re frightfully vulnerable.”

  “I felt this place arrive,” he said. “Two years ago. It was an autumn night, wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” she confirmed. “Just after midnight.”

  “I’d fallen asleep at my desk. It was a frosty night, and the moon was full. I woke up, for no reason, and I knew something important had happened. I just… I never knew what it was. Or I was afraid to. I tried to ignore it. I felt the pull of it, and I wouldn’t listen.” He shook his head. “Where did all this come from? It must come from somewhere.”

  “Where do any of us come from?” She buttered her third slice of bread, not looking at him. It wasn’t a question any of them were comfortable answering. “Where do we go back to? Where did you pull me from, all those years ago?”

  “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “I never know. The simplest answer is that you’re only a manifestation from my mind. If I were to send you away again, you would disappear. I could remake you again, and you’d remember me, but only because I can remember. But I don’t altogether trust simple answers. Where do you think you come from?”

  “My book.” Her stomach tightened at the question, which she knew she had invited. “We remember our books. We remember being pulled from them. We think about returning to them. But we don’t like to think about wha
t that means too deeply. Books, after all, are just words.”

  “I don’t know,” he repeated. “We’re all just words. I say that all the time. I feel it, very strongly. But I don’t quite know what it means.”

  Millie didn’t either. She felt that was true of a lot of things these days.

  “That’s one reason I don’t want them knowing what you are,” she said, with a nod at the other diners. “They don’t like questioning their own reality. I hope that if I just don’t explain you, they’ll assume you’re a reading from some obscure book and ignore you. These people are an unruly batch, for the most part. Their grasp on the world can slip at the slightest nudge. I love them all, but they can be dangerous.”

  “They’re wondrous,” Charley said. He caught himself, and flushed. “I didn’t mean to word that as though you were intellectual curiosities. I know you’re not. But this place is fascinating. All of it.”

  “I know,” Millie said wryly. “You just spent half an hour downstairs talking to the Duke of Wellington about the political slant of his characterization.”

  He winced. “Sorry. I don’t usually talk too much. Only when I’m nervous, or the other person in the conversation is fictional. And I’m only articulate in one of those two situations.”

  “Don’t be sorry! He was thrilled. Nobody ever wants to hear him talk about his time as prime minister. They don’t even want to hear about Waterloo. He’s our only nonfictional occupant; I always think he might be lonely.”

  “I haven’t read a lot about the Duke of Wellington, but I think he’s from Simon Fitzpatrick’s seminal biography. There’s that slight Conservative bias the reviewers picked up on.”

  “Well, it’s not surprising. History is every bit as much of a story as fiction. There’s no reason a reader can’t construct their own Duke of Wellington just as clearly as they might construct their own personal Uriah Heep. If you’re wanting some sort of theory about what we’re made of, old thing, that’s the best I can do. We’re half words, and half thought.”

  “The point where language and interpretation meet,” Charley said, with what might almost have been yearning. “One of my colleagues—Beth—does a lot of work around ideas like that: semiotics, and reader response.”

  “She’d like to meet the Implied Reader,” Millie said. “The man without a face outside, who wants to watch the office? He’s a product of—what is it again?”

  “Iser’s phenomenological theory of reader response?” Charley said, his face kindling again. “Truly? How strange.”

  “I’ve never really understood it,” Millie said. “I’m an accountant.”

  “It’s not complicated. It’s just the idea that every book has an implied reader—a sort of imaginary person the author has in mind while he’s writing. I supposed in the Implied Reader’s case, that wasn’t visualized terribly distinctly.”

  “Poor chap,” Millie agreed. “He’s really just middle-aged, white European, and middle class.”

  “I wasn’t really thinking of Iser, though,” Charley said. “Or of critical theory at all. I was thinking of Dickens. You know, chapter forty-four of Great Expectations.” Millie had already noticed that he liked to try for a tactful middle ground between implying people must have read the same books as him and implying they hadn’t. “Estella tells Pip to put him out of her thoughts. And he says, ‘Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here.’ He goes on, but it begins with reading. He knew, didn’t he, Dickens? The way we imbue words with our own desires.”

  “He did,” Millie agreed. This, too, veered close to dangerous territory.

  Perhaps Charley read this on her face, or felt her discomfort along the thread that connected them; at least, he changed the subject.

  “I don’t want to sound alarmist. But if we had to defend the Street from the summoner, who would we be able to muster?”

  She noted, and accepted, that he had said “we.” “Let’s see. Heathcliff, of course. He’s not necessarily effectual so much as frightening in a psychopathic domestic-abuse sort of way, but he’ll be first to attack and he has great physical strength. Matilda, though I hate to bring even Roald Dahl children into danger.”

  “She’s from a children’s book,” Charley pointed out. “That makes her by definition more capable than most adults. Who else? Did Miss Matty really say we had Maui?”

  “We don’t have him. He has his own life, and it doesn’t have a lot to do with a Victorian street. His ties to the land go far deeper—in general, the Street tends to attract the nineteenth-century British texts before any others. But he may join forces with us, if it comes to defending anything more than the Street. He’s unpredictable. We do have Lancelot—the genuine medieval article. The Scarlet Pimpernel. The White Witch, if we can persuade her.”

  “Can she turn people to stone?”

  “Fictional people—which might be enough, for what the summoner can muster. She’s tried it on real people many times. She would try it on us, I imagine, except she accepted a similar agreement to Dorian Gray’s in exchange for the protection of the Street. I have her wand in my cupboard. Still, I try to keep her away from Mr. Tumnus.”

  His eyes widened. “Mr. Tumnus is here?”

  “Number 17. God knows how he survived long enough to make it here—most of the obviously magical creatures have a very difficult time of it in the real world.”

  “Can we please, please,” Charley said seriously, “go to tea with Mr. Tumnus?”

  “If you like. I warn you, though, he burns the toast. And the sardines are tinned.”

  “I don’t care.”

  She didn’t either—not just about the sardines but, suddenly, about any of it. It didn’t matter who was real, or where they came from. They were here. The sun was still shining, Charley’s exhilaration was spilling down the invisible link that connected them, and there was an adventure ahead of her. She just didn’t feel fictional.

  It was probably for that reason that when Dorian came by their table, wineglass in elegant hand, she didn’t think to tighten her defenses.

  “Millie,” he said. “Dr. Sutherland. I thought you might care to know, Millie, that Huckleberry Finn called in moments ago. The offices in question seem abandoned, but it will be difficult to be certain until the shop on the ground floor closes. I do, however, happen to know of both a concert and a rugby game in the city tonight. Lambton Quay will be flooded with people on their way to and from the railway station. I doubt you’ll have the opportunity for any practical adventuring.”

  “Bother,” Millie sighed. “That’s a bit of bad luck. Still, there’s tomorrow. We should be able to break in then. Lambton Quay is reliably deserted on Sunday nights.”

  “Yes. I rather like to see a street without people on it. It’s so entirely pointless.” He looked at Charley, and shifted his voice abruptly. “This street suits you, you know.”

  Charley blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  “It suits you. Call it an aesthetic observation; a place can suit a person aesthetically as well as a pair of trousers or a jacket. This street looks well on you. Its lights, its shades, its cobbles. We’ve never found someone whom it fits. It’s not quite sordid enough for me, not quite I-say-old-chap enough for Millie. Not wild enough for Heathcliff, not refined enough for the Darcys. Even the Artful Dodger doesn’t feel entirely suited to it, and he’s our one Dickensian original. But it fits you very well.”

  “Thank you,” Charley said uncertainly.

  “Oh, it’s not a compliment to fit something, unless that something is either very expensive or very cheap, and this is neither. It’s interesting, though. Of all the perfectly respectable fictional people in the world, many of them Victorian, why you? A flesh-and-blood human, who can pass through our wall like fiction.”

  “Well, if we knew that,” Millie said, “we’d know a lot more about this place than we do.”

  But she knew what Dorian meant. Th
e lights and shades he had spoken of didn’t just seem to fit Charley; they altered to fit him. They lightened when he smiled, and darkened when he was uneasy. It didn’t surprise her: he was a summoner. But it bothered her that Dorian had noticed, still more that he had commented. To be more precise, it bothered the part of her that was still Millie Radcliffe-Dix, girl detective. It made that part of her sit and exclaim, in the Jacqueline Blaine parlance she did her best to shake, “Hello! I say, what’s that?”

  Since she wasn’t one to wonder such things quietly, she asked as much, after Charley left to go home and feed Henry. By that time, it was deep into the evening, and the lamps were burning.

  “What are you playing at, Dorian?”

  Dorian turned his blue eyes on her, the picture of innocence as only a man without a conscience could be. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Don’t give me that.” She folded her arms, and heard her bracelet jingle on her wrist. “Is it Uriah Heep that bothers you? Because I think he bothers everyone. It’s sort of what he does.”

  “How kind of you to ask. But no, that little crawling person is no bother to me at all. Frankly, he’s so uniquely hideous he becomes rather decorative. No, I’m more concerned about the person who brought him out. He did bring him out, didn’t he, Millie? And he did it on purpose.”

  “Yes,” she said. She wished, not for the first time, that Oscar Wilde had given his protagonist less intelligence, or that Jacqueline Blaine had been less scrupulous about allowing hers to lie. “He did. For goodness’ sake, though, Dorian, keep that to yourself.”

  “He’s a summoner,” Dorian said. “Another one. You’ve known this for years, haven’t you? That’s why you’ve been watching him.”

  “He summoned me,” she said. “When he was six years old. That’s why he can get through the wall. But he’s not the one we’re searching for. He didn’t summon this place.”

  “I never thought he did. He wouldn’t have stumbled into it the way he did had he known it was here.”