by H. G. Parry
Charley exhaled with a sigh. “There. I’m not so good with objects—it’s hard to find one significant enough to connect to. I was practicing that all last night.”
“It’s jolly useful,” Millie said. “Well done. Where’s it from?”
“The Secret Garden,” he said. “And before you ask, I made sure I brought out the key as well.”
Racks of designer clothing and spindly mannequins make a terrifying forest at night. I was glad to go up the stairs behind the counter to the second floor, which the light of Millie’s flashlight revealed to house a perfectly ordinary open-plan office waiting for an occupant. The circle of Millie’s flashlight, darting distractingly over the room, revealed nothing more incriminating than the odd yellowing phone book or mound of dust. It had the sweet, stale smell of a secondhand shop.
“I’ll bet this is frightfully expensive for what it is,” Millie said. “Central-city office space is at a premium these days.”
“I like the view,” Charley offered. “The side that looks through to the harbor, not the Lambton Quay side that overlooks the McDonald’s.”
“You’re not here to buy it,” I reminded them. “Is this what you were looking for?”
“Not quite,” Millie said. “I think I was expecting something a little more like a smugglers’ cave. I suppose they could have taken everything with them when they left. If the summoner puts characters back into books when they’re not required…”
“Eric doesn’t go back into his book,” I said, against my better judgment. “Not according to Uriah Heep. And he told me he was living nearby. With friends, he said.”
That could have been a lie, of course. I was used to being lied to in my line of work. But it hadn’t felt like that. He had almost been asking for help.
There was enough light coming from Lambton Quay to make out shapes in the dark; the cubicle nearest me was lit by the yellowing electric glow of a streetlight. It was probably that alone that made me look at it. When I saw it, my immediate temptation was to hurry them out before either of them saw it too.
“Charley?” I said instead. “Why does this book have your name on it?”
A hardcover sat propped on the edge of an otherwise-empty shelf. A thick book, white letters on a green spine. Dickens’s Criminal Underworld, by Charles Sutherland.
“Because it’s mine,” Charley replied. He said it slowly, almost hesitantly. “It’s my first book. It originated in my PhD thesis. I don’t… what could it be doing here?”
I remembered it now. He’d been nineteen. He’d already coauthored a book called Dickens as Author (I remember, because what kind of title is that?) and published a handful of papers, but this was his first glossy critical book all to himself. The copy I’d been given had seemed to glow with pride. This copy looked battered by repeated use. The dustcover had come off, leaving it naked and balding around the corners.
“Pick it up,” Millie urged Charley.
“I don’t understand,” Charley said. He ran his hand gently over the cover, then tentatively picked it up. I half expected the world to shiver, but of course it didn’t. It was only a book.
“Did the summoner leave it here?” I asked.
“Maybe.” Charley let the cover fall open in his hands. “I just don’t—”
And then, just like that, Charley and Millie were gone. No flare of light, no breath of air. I was alone in the room. No. Not alone. Something was in there with me.
Something spilled from the book, and now blanketed the entire room. I could see it, and feel it: a smoky haze in the air, a clammy chill on my skin. But more than that, I could sense it, on the level that dogs whimper at thunderstorms and cats are beside themselves in terror after an earthquake. I’d never been sensitive to earthquakes or thunderstorms; according to Lydia, I sleep through both, quite happily. I was sensitive to this.
“Charley?” I called.
My chest felt squeezed in a vise; my limbs were weak and shaky. I understood now what it meant to be beside yourself with terror. My soul was trying to leap from my body. I could hear my own voice screaming at me, and it was someone far away. Get out, it was screaming. Get out.
I couldn’t leave. Charley had disappeared; I had to find him, and Millie too. I couldn’t leave the building. But I couldn’t stay either. I couldn’t breathe.
I was in a perfectly modern office building, in the middle of central Wellington. My own office was a few doors down. There was nothing uncanny here. There couldn’t be. This wasn’t my brother’s world. It was mine. All we’d done was open a book.
It was at that point that my phone rang.
I fumbled for it in my coat pocket. I didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?”
“Hey, Rob.” It was Charley. “Are you still in the building?”
“Of course I’m still in the building! Where are you? Whose phone are you using?”
“Millie’s—I left mine at home. I’m right outside. Come out—I put the door up again for you.”
“Don’t move until I get there,” I told him. I tried to pretend it was for his benefit, and not because, at that moment, I needed him more than he had ever needed me.
The fog was all the way down the stairs, through the designer boutique on the ground floor. I had to stop in the middle of the stairwell to double over and wait for a flood of nausea to pass. I could see Charley outside on the pavement once I was in the shop, but the city outside looked as though I was seeing it through a heat haze.
The green Secret Garden door was there, as Charley had said. I wrenched it open and all but collapsed into the street. The cool air and streetlights caught me like a safety net. At once, the disorientation dissolved.
Charley’s face lit when he saw me.
“There you are!” he exclaimed, as though I was the one who had disappeared. “Are you all right?”
I didn’t choose to answer this. I wasn’t at all sure I was. “Where were you?” I demanded. “You just vanished!”
“I’m sorry.” His face dimmed. I don’t know why I sounded so angry. I had actually never been more pleased to see him in my life, and for some reason that infuriated me. “It must be like the wall into the Street. It took Millie and I, but not you. It took me a while to find the way back out, or I would have—”
“The way out of where? Where have you been?”
“I’ll show you. It should work the same as the wall, even if—do you want to give me your hand?”
“There isn’t anywhere to go. It’s just a building. A building filled with smoke.”
“It’s not. It’s quicker if you let me show you. I don’t know how much time we have. Millie’s gone on ahead to explore.”
I didn’t want to be shown anything. I wanted to go home. I don’t know what I had been prepared for, but it wasn’t this. The foundations of my reality had been shaken too much already this week; one more tremor could bring them crashing down entirely.
Charley offered his hand. I took it.
Hand in hand, we stepped through the ivy-covered door, and for the second time that week I found myself in another world.
My first impression was that we had traveled back in time. I felt a wave of vertigo as I stepped over the threshold, and the shop was gone; in its place, an old Victorian building blossomed around me. It seemed to correspond to the framework of the modern shop—I recognized the cornices from upstairs, and the wooden staircase was in the same place as the stairwell I had come down moments ago. Charley’s green door was still mounted in the middle of the wall, but the glass storefront had been replaced by a single, dust-streaked window. I think some of the yellow light streaming through was still from the streetlight, but I couldn’t be sure.
We couldn’t have gone back in time. In the nineteenth century, the city was still a fledgling colonial settlement; this building would still be new, if it existed at all. We stood in a derelict. Even the air was too cold, and heavy with fog. Like the Street, it could have come from the pages of a Dickens novel.
Besides, there were the books.
The walls were covered with books. They were everywhere, teetering up to the ceiling in wobbly piles—paperbacks, hardbacks, reference books, pocket books. I had seen such a concentration of books in one place only, and that was in my brother’s house.
“It’s incredible,” Charley said, “isn’t it?”
That wouldn’t have quite been my word. “What is it?”
“It’s the interior of Fagin’s house in Oliver Twist. The house where he keeps his gang of criminal youths, where he hides his treasure under the floorboards. From what we can tell so far, it overlays the entire Lambton Quay building, upstairs and down.”
“It’s a reading?”
“A very precisely shaped reading. It’s—you know when you read about a character’s house, but it’s only half-described, so you fill in the blanks with memories of a house you’ve lived in instead? It’s a little like that. It’s a reading of Fagin’s house, influenced just enough by this building to fit inside it. But, Rob—I don’t think this was read directly from Oliver Twist. I think it was read from my critical analysis of Oliver Twist, in my book.”
“This came out of that book we found? Your book?”
“When I opened it. It was waiting.”
“But you didn’t read it out.”
“No. The summoner had already done that. This is why we can’t sense where it is, the way we can the Street. It’s not here, most of the time. It’s hiding, waiting to come out.”
“Like a picture in a pop-up book?”
Charley actually laughed, the kind of laugh that comes from a bubble of excitement bursting. “Yes. Just like a picture in a pop-up book. When you open the book, the reading is released. Only it’s not quite real yet. It’s a step ahead of the Street. The Street exists, but just outside of the real world. This overlays reality, but it’s insubstantial. Millie and I can enter it—we can’t not—but you couldn’t even see it.”
“I saw something,” I said grimly. And I had felt it. I had nearly thrown up.
“But the pop-up book,” Millie said. She was standing on the staircase, her flashlight still in hand. “How was that done?”
“I suppose you could trap an interpretation before you’ve realized it,” Charley said. “Like biting back a word that’s on the tip of your tongue. You could form a thought, and not frame it. And perhaps it would then be trapped in the pages of the book, ready to come to life. But I have no idea how you’d go about doing that deliberately. The degree of control it would take… not even control, the degree of understanding…”
“You’re actually happy, aren’t you?” I said.
He caught himself. “I’m not happy about what it’s being used for. I’m not happy at all, exactly. It’s only the scope of what’s been done here. It’s exciting. I’m just—”
“Excited?”
“I’m sorry. Sometimes I forget not to be.”
“Both of you need to come upstairs,” Millie interrupted. Her face was unusually grim. “Charley, you need to see this. I think I’ve found where your intern sleeps, Rob.”
The staircase we had climbed in the real world, only minutes before, was now dark and dangerously rickety underfoot. It turned twice in a very small space, leading out to a low-ceilinged room that had never seen office furniture in its life. Inside were three rough beds, made of old sacks stuffed with paper and straw. Dried crusts of bread and orange peel peeked from the folds in the blankets as they might in the nest of a burrowing animal. That explained at least some of the smell. I wasn’t sure I wanted an explanation for all of it.
“It’s as Uriah said,” Charley said. The excitement had died from his face. “The summoner keeps them here unless they’re being used, or put back in their books.”
“Like tools,” I said. “Or portable devices.”
“The windows are barred,” Millie said. “Had you noticed? And the door to this room was bolted from the outside. You can see Lambton Quay out the window, with that haze upon it; that must be what Uriah saw through Eric.”
These windows, unlike the one downstairs, had been rubbed clean. I saw the clean, well-lit streets, the trees that line the center, the electric glow of bookshops and boutiques and the McDonald’s further down, and felt sick.
“‘We talk about the tyranny of words,’” Charley said, “‘but we like to tyrannize over them too.’”
“That sounds like Dickens,” I said.
“It’s David Copperfield. Except he didn’t quite mean this.”
“And those are the words over there,” Millie said, with another sweep of her flashlight.
There they were. As below, the room was crowded with books, ringing the walls like a surrounding army. And anything could come out of any one of them.
“It’s an arsenal,” I said.
“It’s a jolly impressive one,” Millie said.
“We need to get out of here,” I said. “Right now.”
“Quick look,” Millie said briskly. “Then we’ll go.”
Charley moved toward the closest wall of books. His fingers trailed the spines and sent a whisper of dust into the air. “The Dickens novels are over here,” he said. “At least, a few of them.”
I found more Dickens, as Millie scanned her flashlight along the wall. They were a mixture of paperback and hardback, clearly bought at different times from different places, and clearly well thumbed—nothing like the pristine bound set that I’d grown up with.
“There are some other Victorian novels over here too,” Charley said. “The rest are just a mixture. A lot of crime novels.”
The title on one of the spines caught my attention. I pulled out the The Hound of the Baskervilles and threw it to Charley. “I recognize this one,” I said grimly.
He balanced the spine in his hand, letting it fall open where the pages naturally parted. “It’s earmarked here. Look at that.”
Part of the text was underlined in pencil on the page. I didn’t bother to read it, because on the opposite page was a full-color illustration of a monstrous creature. Its gaping mouth glowed, and flames wreathed its head. I’d seen it before, when it attacked my brother’s flat. It was now living in his kitchen.
“Is that Henry?” Millie asked, her eyebrow raised as she peered over his shoulder. “I must say I prefer him the way he is now.”
“So do I,” Charley said ruefully. He closed the book. “Well, we’ve confirmed who sent Henry. That doesn’t really help much, but it’s something.”
“We’ve seen this place too,” Millie said. She looked with disgust at the mildewed walls. “What a frightful hole. If there’s nothing else, we need to put a stop to this person keeping characters here. We’re not tools or… playthings for their amusement.”
But there was something else. We were downstairs, almost out the door, when it caught Millie’s eye. “I say,” she said. “What’s that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I’d begun to relax, knowing we were almost out again without anything untoward happening. I could feel reality tugging me back from the other side of the walls. “There’s no time. We can’t rely on the summoner being gone forever.”
She ignored me, and stepped forward to investigate. Charley followed and so, after a moment’s internal cursing, did I.
It was a trapdoor, in the far corner of the room. It stood out against the floorboards, and against the rest of the house: older, worn, scarred. Even closed, I could feel darkness yawning behind it.
“We’re on the ground floor,” Millie said. “This must go underground, to a cellar of some kind.”
“This isn’t from Oliver Twist,” Charley said. He bent to touch it, then drew back his hand and folded his arms tightly instead. “At least, not directly. Perhaps it’s metaphorical.”
“A metaphorical underground cellar,” Millie said. She ran her flashlight over the iron bolts that fastened it, then crouched down and took hold of one. “Very Jungian.”
“You said Fagin kept treasure under the
floorboards in Oliver Twist,” I reminded him.
“Not through a trapdoor,” Charley said. “Only in a small gap. But perhaps. It could be that. Or it’s some kind of… I don’t know, undertone. Something the summoner sees as lying beneath the narrative. Or it’s just a trapdoor.”
I didn’t want to go down there. I knew that as strongly as I’ve ever known anything in my life. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, to stop Millie from opening that door. Charley spoke first.
“There’s someone down there.”
Millie turned, her hand still on the iron bar. “Really? Are you quite sure?”
“No.” He was frowning at the door. “I don’t see how I can be. But I feel very strongly that there is. Sort of the way I could feel the Street was there, or you.”
“I can feel the Street too,” Millie said. “And the connection between us. I must say, I can’t feel what you’re talking about here.”
“I think we need to get out of here,” I said. “Honestly. Right now, if not sooner.”
“You’re rather nervous, aren’t you?” Millie said curiously, turning her flashlight on me.
“Rob was trapped in a basement when he was six,” Charley said absently. His attention was elsewhere. “And now he hates basements.”
“That has nothing to do with it!” I felt unaccountably betrayed. “How do you know about that, anyway? You weren’t even two.”
“Well, we don’t know what’s under there,” Millie said. She ran one hand over the pitted wooden trapdoor. “But it will probably be more of a cellar than a basement. Perhaps a dungeon.”
I waved her flashlight beam away from my face. “My feelings have nothing to do with the basement, cellar, or dungeon. We’ve stepped outside reality. We’ve broken into a place that shouldn’t exist. Someone could come for us at any time—Charley thinks that someone’s already here. We can’t go down there.”
“I can,” Millie said. She clapped me on the shoulder. “Buck up, Rob. We’ve come this far. Anyone down there must already know we’re here; they’d have stopped us, if they wanted to or were in a position to do so. If we go quietly, I don’t think we need to worry.”