by H. G. Parry
“Then what was all that about it fitting him?”
“I was merely making an observation. This place does fit him, and he fits it. And we know so little about either.”
“I know about Charles Sutherland. He summoned me. I have a good deal of him in my head—the six-year-old, at least. And I’ve kept my eye on him a few years since. I would know if he weren’t what he seemed to be.”
“People change a good deal in twenty years, you know. Not me, obviously. But most people.”
“He’s a good sort, Dorian. And what he can do is jolly useful.”
“It’s jolly dangerous,” Dorian countered. For the first time, something serious crept into his voice. “You say he is what he seems to be. Suppose that he is. Dull people sometimes are, just to give fair warning. What he seems to be is a person who can bring people like us out of our books and put them back. For people like us, that’s the equivalent of power over life and death. You knew that, or you wouldn’t have kept it from us all.”
“He can’t put you back. Only his own readings.”
“As far as he knows, perhaps. He hasn’t begun to experiment yet. But very well, suppose he can’t. Then what did he do with the Hound of the Baskervilles? He doesn’t strike me as the type to be able to kill a Gothic hound.”
She thought of Henry, back at the book-infested house. “Altered it, that’s all. Reread it. Made it less dangerous.”
“Then he could do the same to us?”
“If he could, he wouldn’t. Why should he?”
Dorian shrugged. “Why should anyone do anything?”
“You really don’t like him.”
“I don’t like people who hold the power of life and death over me, or even the power to make me less dangerous. It’s an idle fancy of mine, but idle fancies are all we have to cling to in this uncertain world.”
“I hold the power of life and death over you, Dorian,” she reminded him. “I hold your soul.”
“Oh, that’s different,” he said airily. “We’re old friends, aren’t we, Millie?”
“Do stop being so Gothic,” Millie sighed. “It’s not half as attractive as you think.”
Before she fell into bed, Millie opened her wardrobe door to make a special scrutiny of the picture of Dorian Gray. She was used to the grotesque features, even the rather horrible way she could still see traces of the Dorian she knew lurking in them. She looked at them now with purpose, making sure she could see no new traces of any planned mischief or cunning or deception in them.
She didn’t see any of those, all of which she had some experience with in the past. Instead, as she examined the faded blue eyes in the sagging face, she saw something else. It was difficult to make out, except as something altogether ugly and troublesome. She had seen it before at times, but not on Dorian’s face, and certainly not the face of his soul.
It was fear, she decided, after a while. That was what it was. Jealousy, and hatred, and fear.
XII
Our parents’ house—our childhood home—is just over an hour’s drive from Wellington along the Kāpiti Coast. As a teenager, this felt like the length of the country. I loved our house, and the farmland around it, but I wished with all my heart that it was closer to civilization. I don’t wish that anymore. Now, I appreciate the way the city falls away as we drive, opening up into ocean on the one side of the road and steep fields dotted with gorse and sheep on the other. Coming up the winding gravel driveway and seeing the old oak tree waving from the back of the redbrick house always feels like slipping into a pair of comfortable slippers. Admittedly, it’s easier to feel all this when I don’t have to live here.
Mum and Dad were out front to welcome us: Dad tall and friendly, Mum petite and smiling. Chocolate and Tatty-Coram, the two Labradors, tried to bowl us over; my old cat, Patchwork, ignored me entirely. We took a plate of scones in the living room, its pale yellow walls and sloping ceiling unchanged since before I was born. Sitting on the couch, I had a strange hyper-real moment when all the days and years of my life rolled into one, and I didn’t know if I were myself at four, at ten, at fifteen, at eighteen home for the holidays. The afternoon sun was just beginning to slant through the blinds, and the warm, sweet smell of cut grass blew through the open window.
“I love your garden,” Lydia said, glancing out the window herself. “The flowers are beautiful.”
“You two really need to tend to your own garden,” Dad said, with his usual tact. My father is the kindest man in the world, but when I was a child trying to clean my room, he would always find the drawer I forgot, and he hasn’t changed. “The last time we saw it, the weeds were being strangled by the weeds.”
“That actually seems like a system that would work pretty well,” I said. “Let them take each other out.”
“Excellent,” Mum agreed. “The trouble is, the peas and potatoes and petunias get caught in the cross fire.”
“It’s Rob’s fault,” Lydia said. “He said he wanted a house with a garden. Then he discovered he hated gardening.”
“We could have told you that,” Dad said. “He made that same discovery in this very house every spring.”
Lydia grinned. “What about Charley?”
“Charley—” Dad chuckled, a touch nervously, and I saw him make that quick spontaneous mental revision we all have to make sometimes when we talk about Charley outside the family. Charley’s patch of childhood garden was always insanely beautiful, but that was because every year he neglected to plant anything for weeks and then read out The Secret Garden in a fit of remorse. “He wasn’t much for gardening either. In fact, I don’t think Charley saw much of the outside of the house at all, from his vantage point behind a book. He probably couldn’t even describe it.”
“The old tree,” I said, despite myself. It felt like a betrayal of our childhood not to mention the tree. “He could tell you about the tree.”
“Right, of course,” Dad agreed. “You used to climb that thing all the time when you were little. I don’t think you played in it much after Charley started school, though.”
“Well,” I said. “Charley and I didn’t play together much at all after he started school.”
“It’s a shame he’s not here now,” Lydia said, too casually. “Why isn’t he, Rob? Did it have anything to do with what happened the other night?”
I gave her a warning look, which she returned innocently. “No. Of course not. He had somewhere he needed to be, that’s all. I don’t know details. He’s organizing a conference, apparently.”
It was all, strictly speaking, true.
“Do you hate gardening as well, Lydia?” Mum cut in. Clearly, without knowing details, she had detected dangerous ground. “Or does your poor wasteland hold some hope of salvation?”
Lydia seemed distracted by the question, but I knew her too well to relax. “I don’t know, really. I don’t know anything about them—my mum wouldn’t let any of us near the garden at home in case we killed the tomatoes. I thought I’d give it a try now that the evenings are getting longer, but I don’t know where to start.”
“I can show you what I’ve done, if you’d like,” Dad offered. “See if we can work out what’s salvageable.”
“I’m sure Lydia can work it out for herself, Joe,” Mum said.
“No, I’d love to see it,” Lydia said. I shot her a look; it was probably true that she would, given that our garden was exactly as described, but she sounded once again a little too innocent.
I stood as Lydia and Dad left, and wandered over to the bookshelf. When I was little, it had stood in my parents’ room; at some point they moved it out, I think so that Charley wouldn’t go into their bedroom looking for the Dickens, and now it spanned the wall by the hearth. There were more books upstairs, of course, but these were the favorites. David Copperfield sat next to Great Expectations on the middle shelf; on the bottom shelf, with some of our other children’s books, were two of the Millie Radcliffe-Dix Adventures. Perhaps I needed to read those as w
ell.
Mum watched me from the couch, a slight smile on her face. Her gold hair, streaked with silver now, glinted in the sun. “Bring back memories?”
“I don’t think I read many of these.” I had read quite a bit growing up, but I’d been oddly furtive about it. It happens, when your little brother is onto Dostoyevsky while you’re struggling to tackle The Hobbit. Even as an adult, I’d never read Dickens, because a little voice in my head always whispered that it was too hard for me. I was a reasonably respected lawyer in one of the best firms in the city, and I still heard it.
I think Mum understood this. She drew her feet up onto the couch, and rested her chin in her hand. “I know we covered the bottom shelf. Do you remember when I used to read you both A Lion in the Meadow?”
I did have to smile at that. “I think every child in the country remembers being read A Lion in the Meadow. That, and Maui and the Sun, and Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy.”
The yellow picture book was sitting there, next to The Cat in the Hat. In the story, a little boy tells his mother there’s a lion in the meadow. She thinks he’s making up a story, so she makes up one of her own. She gives him a matchbox, and tells him there’s a dragon inside it that will scare off the lion. But it turns out to be true, and the dragon grows too big.
“That’s the danger of stories,” Mum said. Lydia and I weren’t the only ones thinking about Charley, obviously. “They bring things into the world, and they can’t be put away again.”
“It all works out for the best,” I said. “The boy and the lion become friends. The dragon stays where it is, and nobody minds.”
“The boy, his mother, and the lion don’t,” Mum said. “I don’t know how the dragon felt about it.”
If I’m strictly honest, and not feeling sorry for myself, I don’t really think that our mother cares more about Charley than she does about me. But he belongs to her, and I belong more or less to Dad. We felt that instinctively in childhood; it solidified when she was the one to go with Charley to his first few years at Oxford, when he was too young to go on his own. If he takes after anyone in our family, he takes after her—though I’ve inherited her temper. We spent my adolescence in some impressively blazing arguments.
“About Charley—” I began.
“Yes,” she said immediately. “Where is he?”
I ignored the question—or, more precisely, I avoided it. I’m good at that, apparently. “Did you never wonder how it is that he can do what he does?”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“He—” I lowered my voice, though I knew it couldn’t carry outside. “He fabricates living characters out of words and meaning. It’s impossible.”
“It’s always been impossible,” she said. “I don’t recall you ever questioning it before.”
“I’m not questioning it, exactly. I just—when I was growing up, I just accepted it. Then he was away overseas for so long—it was part of our childhood, that was all. It almost felt like something I’d imagined—the way we used to play pirates by the old tree. But since he’s come back—”
“What’s he done?” Mum said. Her eyes, blue like mine and Dad’s, had narrowed suspiciously.
“Nothing.” She wouldn’t believe this, of course. “Well. There was Uriah Heep last week—”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” She shook her head. “I thought it was something, from Lydia’s question. I suppose it could be worse. If he could just learn to want to suppress it…”
I don’t like what it says about me that even now, fully grown and in the midst of disaster, I liked it when Charley was in trouble and not me. “He says he does.”
“No, he says he tries to suppress it. He believes he should suppress it, for his own sake and most of all for ours. Not the same thing. Really, he wants to exercise his power very badly. And as long as he wants to, incidents will keep happening.”
“But why can they happen at all? I assume it has to do with how advanced he always was.”
She shrugged. “Oh, not necessarily. There are a lot of intelligent, precocious children—even at Charley’s level. We met more than a few ourselves, over the years, raising him. There’s no recorded evidence of precocity giving them the power to read things out of books.”
“There’s no recorded evidence of Charley having the power to read things out of books,” I pointed out. “We saw to that.”
“That’s true.” She sat forward in her seat and put her mug on the coffee table. “Rob—this might not be any of my business, but what does Lydia know or suspect?”
“Nothing. I mean—Charley called me up in the middle of the night to help catch Uriah Heep, so she knew something was wrong. She has no idea that something was David Copperfield’s metaphorical shadow self.”
“He needs to stay away from psychoanalytic theory,” she said absently. “It always was a weakness. If Lydia does need to know about him, you know—”
“She doesn’t,” I interrupted. My stomach had tensed. “Why would she?”
“You’re all but married to her. You must be intending to tell her sometime.”
“I’m not, in fact. Why should she have to know?”
“You can’t expect her to marry you and not know. It’s a part of this family.”
“It wouldn’t be if he could just keep it under control. He could, you know. We all have things we want to do, and just don’t. You said it yourself: he doesn’t try hard enough.”
“I didn’t exactly say that,” she said. “But I’m not talking about him right now—”
“Yes, you are. We wouldn’t be talking about Lydia if it weren’t for him. She wouldn’t have questions about him if he weren’t here providing them.”
“But he is, and he is what he is, and there’s no way around it. That’s why you won’t tell Lydia, isn’t it? You’re still hoping that Charley will grow into being an acceptable version of unusual—rather brilliant, but not actually given to bending the laws of reality—and you can have a normal life with a career and family without having to deal with Sherlock Holmes coming to visit.”
Said out loud, even as sympathetically as my mother said it, it sounded stupid. “I’m trying to protect her. Charley too—it’s dangerous for anyone to know what he can do, even Lydia, you’ve always said—but mostly her.”
“I’d rather nobody knew,” she conceded. “But you and Lydia have been together a long time now. I trust her if you do, and I know you do. And as for protecting her—from what? What Charley can do is maddening and nonsensical and inconvenient, but it isn’t often dangerous.”
Not until now. If we were right, it had become so in the last few days. I wasn’t only protecting Lydia from the truth anymore. I might actually need to protect her life.
I fell back into the argument I would have given last week, before Uriah Heep. It still held true, at the deepest level. “If she knows, one of two things happens. She can’t accept it, and I’ve lost her. Or she can accept it, or at least will try to accept it, and I’ve brought her into something strange and chaotic that she’ll have to live with and keep secret for the rest of her life. Either way, it ruins everything.”
“You can’t keep trying to live in a fantasy world where everything’s normal, Rob. You’ll break in two.”
I laughed, despite myself. “I’m the one accused of trying to live in a fantasy world?”
“Fantasy is relative,” Mum said, with a wry smile.
“It wasn’t far from my life, you know, when Charley was overseas. At least if he was summoning anything then, I didn’t know about it.” I sighed, just once. I knew how the question would sound, but I couldn’t resist asking. “Why did he come back?”
“He got a job here.”
“That’s an effect, not a cause. He’s brilliant. He could have got a job anywhere.”
“I presume he wanted one here, where he could see us more often. Your father and I wanted him here where we could see him more often as well, I’m afraid. Did you really never miss
him, the ten years or so he was in England?”
“I suppose so,” I said uncomfortably. Of course I did. Things were simpler when he wasn’t around, but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel the gap he left behind. “I didn’t really know him anymore.”
She rolled her eyes—another trait I’ve inherited from her. “You lived with him until you left home. You know him fairly well. And from someone who lived with him a few years longer, he didn’t change that much in the intervening years.”
“We weren’t particularly close in the couple of years before I left home either.”
“I know.” Her face turned thoughtful—even wistful. “You know, we’ve often wondered if we made a huge mistake sending you two to high school together. Your father and I, I mean. We’ve asked ourselves if everything that went wrong between the two of you since couldn’t have been avoided if we’d just made sure you weren’t ever in the same classrooms.”
I didn’t know what to say. “We’re okay,” I settled on, awkwardly.
“You’re both magnificent,” she agreed. “But we wonder all the same. We had our reasons for doing it, which felt sound at the time. Mostly, though, we thought he’d be better where you could look after him. And that wasn’t fair to either of you, especially you. I should have remembered that teenagers have enough problems of their own to deal with.”
I could hear Dad and Lydia outside. They wouldn’t be gone much longer: the garden isn’t that big. And I still didn’t have an answer to what I had really wanted to ask. “I was just wondering where he came from, that was all.”
“Where he came from?” She was looking at me seriously now. “What exactly are you asking?”
What, indeed? “He just—it seems to come out of nowhere. All of it: the reading, the abilities… I know you keep telling me to stop pretending we’re normal in this family, but really, apart from Charley, we are. He doesn’t even look like us.”
“It doesn’t matter. He’s still part of this family.”
“I know!” I heard my own voice sounding defensive, and realized it was because Mum’s was accusatory. More accusatory, perhaps, than my comment had warranted. “I wasn’t trying to disown him. I’m not a monster—he’s my brother. I care about him; I’m not trying to wish him away. I was just… wondering what might have caused him to be so different.”