by H. G. Parry
“Danger?” Mum repeated.
Dickens seemed to see her and Dad for the first time. “Forgive me.” He inclined his head to Dad, then took Mum’s hand in his own and bowed over it extravagantly. “Mr. Sutherland, Mrs. Sutherland. I am delighted to see you here. I’m certain Dr. Sutherland will be as well, when he awakens.”
“Don’t be too sure about that,” Dad said dryly. “I’m sure he knows full well the trouble he’ll be in.”
“How is Rob in danger, Mr. Dickens?” Mum asked.
“I’m not,” I said firmly. “I’m really not. The Street might be in danger—”
“Of course the Street is in danger,” Dickens said. “Your brother knows that very well. He left it on fire. His fears are for you.”
“Why? I have nothing to do with this. This is about his world, not mine. It always has been. What possible cause could he have to worry about me?”
“As usual,” came a familiar voice, “you have seen, but you have not observed.”
I have no idea how long he had been there. He might have come into the world at the same time as Dickens, while my parents and I argued outside in the olive-green waiting room, or at that very moment. But the curtain surrounding Charley’s bed swished back with a flourish, and Sherlock Holmes peered around it. Next to Dickens’s yellow waistcoat and flamboyant hair, he looked as sleek and dark as a jaguar. The animal, not the car, although that would fit too.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” I was determined not to be shaken. “Not you too.”
“Rob,” Mum admonished me. She rubbed her brow, but kept her voice calm. “Just… be polite to Mr. Holmes, won’t you? He can’t help being here.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Sutherland,” Holmes said graciously. “It’s been a very long time since we’ve met, has it not? I believe not since Oxford. And longer yet since I’ve seen Mr. Sutherland.”
“Not since that time you came for Christmas,” Dad confirmed. Strangely, the sight of the new arrival seemed to settle him. He’d always got on with Sherlock Holmes. “Good to see you. No offense, but there aren’t any more of you gentlemen, are there?”
“I doubt Dr. Sutherland will be summoning any further apparitions,” Holmes said. “He’s very tired.”
This, after all, must be what it feels like to be mad. “He’s in a coma. Why are either of you here at all? I suppose I understand you,” I added to Holmes. “He always calls you. But—”
“Yes,” Holmes agreed. “When you do not hear him, he does.”
I ignored this. I was talking to Dickens now. “I don’t understand what you’re doing here. Charles Dickens. What was he thinking?”
“He was not thinking, Mr. Sutherland,” Dickens said. “He was dreaming. Dreams, after all, are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality—”
“Dreaming of what?”
“He knows who the summoner is.”
My heart quickened. Beside me, I felt Mum put her hand on my arm—for support or to warn me, I’m not sure. “Who? Who is he?”
Dickens gave me a look of exasperation. “I cannot read his thoughts as though from a page. I have only partial knowledge of the landscape of his brain, and right now it is a peculiar landscape of ideas and thoughts and notions half-remembered. I only know that he knows, and that his last conscious thought was that he needed desperately to tell you. That is why we’re here.”
Mum’s grip tightened on my arm. “Rob? Do you know who he’s talking about?”
“I have no idea!” I turned to Holmes and Dickens, mostly so I didn’t have to look at my parents. I was so tired of feeling inadequate, and knowing that I was. “If Charley’s trying to tell me something through you two, I don’t understand it. I don’t understand you. I’ve never understood you.”
“Calm yourself,” Holmes said, not unkindly. “Emotions are antagonistic to clear reasoning.”
“That’s not what Charley says,” I returned. I felt, illogically, that I was scoring a point. “He says that feelings are a mind picking up on things it doesn’t always understand.”
“Perhaps. But if so, they are a poor substitute for true understanding.”
Dad stepped between us and held up his hands, as he might if I were fighting with Mum or Charley. In a way, I suppose I was. “Okay, steady. Let’s back up and calm down. Do we really need to know who this summoner is right now? Isn’t that a problem for another time? Rob’s right here. He isn’t in any danger at the moment. None of us are. We just need to sit tight, and try to get through this.”
I felt myself calm against my will, as I had that day in the basement when I was six years old. Dad’s voice has always been able to do that for all of us, even Charley. Unfortunately, I wasn’t six years old anymore.
“I think we are in danger, though,” I said with a sigh. “I think the whole city is. And so does Charley, clearly. I do want to find the summoner—I’ve been looking myself. But I don’t know who he is.”
Holmes sat in the plastic foldout chair opposite me and steepled his fingers. Dickens watched him with mild curiosity.
“Sutherland,” Holmes said. “We do not know what deductions your brother has made about the summoner: he is not conscious to communicate them. But we know he has made them. Therefore it must be possible to deduce the summoner’s identity from the information available.”
“There is no information. We don’t know anything.”
“We do. We know, for example, that it is someone widely read, with an extensive knowledge of literary theory. We know that whoever it is knows where Dr. Sutherland lives, and knew that he would be at home the night they sent the Hound of the Baskervilles to his door. It is probably, then, someone who knows him, possibly someone from the university.”
For God’s sake. “They certainly have some connection to the university,” I said. “Frankenstein said that someone at the university requested Charley’s medical records recently.”
In truth, I hadn’t thought about that fact since I was told it earlier that day. Too much else had been happening, and had happened since. But I wasn’t about to be outdone in detection by Sherlock Holmes. And yes, I do realize that could be considered ambitious.
Holmes didn’t seem irritated by my interruption. His eyes gleamed. “Interesting. Why should they do that?”
“Well, I requested his records to find the other summoner,” I said. “I thought there might be something that marked Charley for what he is. Perhaps there is, and the summoner was looking for it too.”
Holmes dismissed that. “But they have been using his book for at least two years. The thought must have entered their head that he was a summoner before now; it more than likely originated their use of his book in the first place. If they wished to confirm it by such means, they would have done so long ago.”
“Does it matter?” Dickens pointed out. “Surely the clue to take is that the summoner either is hiding in the university themselves, or has someone there who can work for them as Rob’s intern does. Millie believed the former, given that the summoner would likely wish to observe and work with Charley directly. She suspected Troy Heywood.”
“The postgraduate student?” That startled me. It cast my meeting with him earlier that day in quite a different light. “Why him?”
“Troy had in his possession a copy of the textbook the summoner is using. He has had it for some time.”
“Which should be a very good argument for his innocence,” Holmes said, with a trace of impatience. “Given that the summoner was using a different copy entirely.”
“I know that Dr. Sutherland is fond of Troy Heywood,” Dickens said. “But—”
“Fondness does not cloud my reasoning,” Holmes said, “even if it were to cloud Dr. Sutherland’s. Sentiment is foreign to me. It is grit in a sensitive instrument. I leave such things to your novels.”
“Are you describing my novels as sentimental?”
I
felt the need to interject. “Well, everyone sort of does that. Even I know about the death of Little Nell.”
He dismissed this. “They are also intricately plotted, and a plot is exactly what you are trying to uncover. I believe Troy is a part of it.”
“I have no doubt that you are a very clever man,” Holmes said, “and very skilled at your own trade. But your trade is fiction.”
“As is your own!” Dickens retorted. “You are fiction. Your cases are fiction. The London you know like your own mind is fiction. The world we seek to prevent is fiction. What the summoner is planning is an act of story.”
“Stop it!” Dad ordered, before Holmes could respond. “What are you two doing fighting? Aren’t you both parts of Charley’s mind?”
Mum laughed. “Joe. Have you met Charley?”
“Apparently he wasn’t who I thought he was,” Dad replied, and Mum’s face went quiet.
Something inside me went quiet too. Involuntarily, my eyes flickered toward Charley: not the parts of him that were awake and arguing, but the body lying in the hospital bed. I tried to see him not as my younger brother, but a figment pulled from thin air in infancy and overlaid with years of growth and experience. Unfortunately, this was completely counterintuitive. He looked like Charley. I was used to his face: the details of it weren’t unfamiliar, or even interesting. He was real. It’s hard not to feel someone’s physical reality when they’re lying hooked up to machines monitoring every beat of their heart and fluctuation of their blood, and when you’re watching them intently for every tiny sign of movement or discomfort or life. And I could hardly convince myself he was only a physical shell, when he was usually all thoughts and visions and ideas.
And words. Always words.
David Copperfield. Chapter One. I am Born. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
“What is it, Sutherland?” Holmes asked. He was watching me carefully.
I drew a deep breath, then released it. The sharp, chemical air of the ICU filled my lungs. “Nothing,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
“I’m sorry,” Dad said to me quietly. He still didn’t look at Mum, though, and he hadn’t once looked at Charley. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Dr. Sutherland did not believe the summoner was Troy Heywood, or that Troy was connected with the summoner,” Holmes said. If I didn’t know better, I would say that he was helping me. “Was he likely to have been wrong?”
“Charley’s not usually wrong,” I said, with only a touch of bitterness. “Not like that. He sees things, when he’s not off in a dream. If he was actually looking at Troy, then he would probably have seen him clearly. He’s more likely to overlook someone else.”
“Now,” Holmes said quite softly. “Think. What did your brother discover before he fell unconscious? What was he saying?”
“I wasn’t paying attention.”
“He believes you never pay him attention. If there were ever an opportunity to prove him wrong, Sutherland, this would be it.”
I gritted my teeth, but I closed my eyes. Because of course I paid Charley attention. Everybody did. He was difficult to miss.
And he had, as Holmes said, been falling unconscious. He had nearly died. Of course I had been listening to him.
“I told him it was lucky Beth did have an afternoon class.” My eyes flew open. “Or else I wouldn’t have been called to the university. That was what was bothering him.”
Holmes nodded. “And why would that bother him?”
The answer came almost while I was still speaking. “Because she doesn’t have an afternoon class. She doesn’t have any classes. The receptionist said she would be in her office because she doesn’t teach today. She could have taken him home.”
“But instead,” Holmes said, “she called you. And because of that, you were with him when the Jabberwock attacked the Street.”
It was true. It was the only reason I was with him. I hadn’t even spoken to him for a week before that. “That’s why he thinks I’m in danger. Because Beth didn’t just send Charley to deal with the Jabberwock. She made certain I was there as well.”
“Could she have requested Charley’s medical records, and sent Uriah Heep to your work?”
“I don’t see why not. Not under her own name, perhaps, but if she took the time to get to know the system…”
“She might be one of the summoner’s creations,” Dickens said. “Like Eric.”
“I looked her up when I was searching the university database for anyone with skills like Charley. For that matter, Dorian was keeping an eye on the English staff before we found the Street. I would swear her career at least was real. She isn’t like Eric. She’s been working and publishing for years; people in the community know her. She has all the right skills. I think it’s her. It’s always been her.”
“Very good,” Holmes said.
I didn’t even have it in me to resent being talked to like a student who’d made a clever answer. I could see it. Facts were lighting in my brain, and they made a pattern, stretching out across the past week like points on a map of the city. This must be how Charley felt the moment he called something into being. It would have been exhilarating if what I could see by their light wasn’t so terrifying.
“Troy said Beth had borrowed a book from him a few days ago,” I said. “It was Charley’s book, wasn’t it? Dickens’s Criminal Underworld. We took her copy on Sunday. When I phoned on Tuesday, she was searching for it in Charley’s office—clearly, she didn’t find it. She resorted to borrowing the library’s copy from Troy. Last night, she took her own back. That’s why Troy was taking the library copy back from her today. She had no further use for it.”
“Largely supposition,” Holmes said. “But not unlikely.” He cast a glance at Dickens. “There is his place in the plot, Mr. Dickens. A supporting character, not a protagonist.”
“Every supporting character is the protagonist of his own story,” Dickens replied, somewhat haughtily.
I ignored them. “They said he was male. David Copperfield, Eric… they always referred to the summoner as ‘he.’”
“So they did,” Holmes said. His eyes were unreadable. “These are very deep waters.”
“Wait a minute,” Mum said. “Are you talking about Beth White? At Charley’s work? An older woman, with a cardigan?”
“That’s her. Do you know her?”
“She called at Charley’s place when we were visiting him, a few weeks ago. Do you remember, Joe? She said she’d heard a lot about us. About all of us.”
“God.” Beth White. She had been there at the house the day the Hound of the Baskervilles came too. She had been there from the first. “I’m an idiot.”
“You are not entirely to blame, Sutherland,” Holmes said generously. “Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.”
I chose not to dignify this with a response. “It’s happening tonight, isn’t it? The new world.”
It was Dickens who replied. “She has the book now. And she almost certainly knows that your brother is powerless to stop her after her attack on the Street. Yes. I imagine she won’t wait very much longer.”
I checked my watch belatedly. The sun would be setting out there. I don’t know if that mattered: there wasn’t, after all, a deadline for shifting reality, and it didn’t need to be done under cover of darkness. It could be any moment.
“I need to phone Millie,” I said. “At least, I need to try. Whatever state the Street is in, she needs to know this.”
Dickens nodded. His face was still and grave. It could almost have been the frontispiece from the book I’d seen. “Go. We will keep vigil here.”
It took me a moment to realize what he meant. Vigil, because Charley was at the heart of this all, and he couldn’t be left unguarded while I left the ICU to phone Millie. I glanced at him, motionless and remote in a swathe of machinery. Between Charles Dickens and Sherlock H
olmes.
“We’ll stay too,” Mum said. “Be careful, won’t you?”
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
I went all the way to the edge of the car park this time, almost to the road. Cars rushed past, the roar of their engines mingling with the wind. The hospital was in an old, run-down part of the city, but I could see the lights of Courtenay Place down the far end of the road. In the cooling dusk, it was a long, glittering stream of traffic and nightclubs.
It had been dusk when the Hound of the Baskervilles attacked, dusk on the Street when we fell through the wall for the first time. The time between day and night. Liminal space.
Millie still wasn’t answering her phone. It went straight to voicemail, a clear indication that she was outside reality. I tried three times, with increasing fury, as though how hard and fast I dialed would make the slightest bit of difference. I just didn’t know what else to do.
I was about to go back inside when it came to me. Beth had phoned me that afternoon, mere hours ago. She had called the same phone I held in my hand. She might, of course, have been calling from her office, in which case it was not of much help. But when I checked the call log, I saw that the number was that of a cell phone. I called it.
I didn’t expect her to reply. After all, she had quite a lot to do this evening, if she was indeed planning on unleashing a new world. To my astonishment, she answered almost at once.
“Hello?”
I was so startled, my voice disappeared. I’m not sure how I found it again. “Beth, it’s Rob.”
“Hello, Rob,” she said calmly. “How’s Charles?”
“Well, not good, actually.” There was a note of distraction in her replies, perhaps as though she was driving at the same time. Otherwise she sounded perfectly normal. “You heard he was taken to the hospital, right?”
“I did. The entire department did. The hospital phoned to ask about his collapse earlier today. I’m so sorry. I thought something wasn’t right—that was why I phoned you.”
“Yes,” I said. “Thanks for that, again. Um. What did you tell the hospital? Did you—?”
“I’m so sorry, Rob, I’m afraid I can’t speak right now,” she said. “May I call you back in ten minutes?”