by H. G. Parry
“I know what you’re doing.” It was the only thing that came to mind to keep her talking to me. I had the feeling, as I had had with Eric, that she understood very well the game we were playing.
“I’m sure you do, Rob,” she said, almost kindly. I pictured her, as I’d seen her that afternoon: the round, pleasant face, the neatly cut gray hair, the green cardigan. I had heard a note of steel underneath the surface of her brisk common sense, and I’d liked it. I was hearing it now, and it scared me. “And I suspect I also know what you’re doing. You want to find me. You’ve been trying to find me for a while. It will be obvious where I am, in a moment. Do, please, come when you can.”
Dear God. It was happening right now.
“Why don’t you come here?” I countered. “I mean it. We’ve been dancing around each other long enough. Let’s talk.”
“We will talk. The three of us, I mean, of course. Tell Charles I’d love to see him too.”
“You nearly killed him.” I like to think I loaded it with enough bitterness to poison an elephant.
“Yes.” She sounded somewhat regretful. “Yes, I’m sorry about that. When I see him again, I possibly will kill him. It’s a shame. I like and admire him very sincerely. But it had to be done.”
“Why? What could you possibly have to gain by this?”
“I really can’t explain it to you, I’m afraid,” she said briskly. “You wouldn’t understand. I may explain it to Charles Sutherland, when our paths cross again.”
“I might understand. Try me.”
“But I have no need to be understood by you, and I certainly have no time. I’ve been planning for this moment for so many years, and it’s here. Goodbye, Rob. It was nice of you to call.”
“Wait—” I heard the dial tone in my ear. The call had ended.
A moment later, the world split in two.
Lydia
The café doors were closed against the wind when Lydia got there. When she opened the side door, a gust chased her in with a rush of dust and noise, ruffling through her hair and stirring the menus on the counter. She saw Eric Umble immediately. It wasn’t just that he sat alone, when nobody else did, or even that she knew what he looked like. Here, as at Rob’s offices, he stood out. In the bright, upmarket café, with its coffee smell and trendy furniture, he looked like a ghost.
He saw her at the same time and got to his feet. She hadn’t seen him standing before, and was struck by how long and thin his limbs were.
“Miss Lydia,” he said as she approached the table. “So nice to see you.”
“You too,” she replied.
His mouth twitched. “I do like the way you bother to lie. Won’t you sit down?”
Once they were sitting, he lowered his voice—almost, she thought, as though what he’d said earlier was for somebody else’s ears. But there was nobody there except the other diners, and none of them had glanced in her direction.
“Did you manage it? The money, and the tickets.”
“I did,” she said, just as quietly. If there was one thing her job had taught her, it was how to get people last-minute tickets. “The ticket’s booked online, in your name. It leaves in twenty minutes. They’ll let you on. And the money—”
“Don’t bring it out. Under the table.”
She pulled the envelope out from her purse in her lap, and held it out. Eric’s fingers brushed hers as he took it; reflexively, without knowing why, she wiped them on her skirt.
“Thank you.” It was the most sincere she had heard his voice yet. “I won’t forget this. You’ll regret it soon, but know that I mean that most humbly.”
“Good luck,” she said. “Now what was it you promised to tell me?”
“About Mr. Sutherland?”
“And Charley. You said they were in trouble. I really think they are.”
“They are.” He hesitated. Something flickered in his peculiarly colored eyes, and he leaned toward her. She resisted the impulse to pull away. “If I may, I’d like to tell you something. Think of it as a story, or a metaphor. It may make little sense to you, but please humor me, if you can find it in your heart.”
“All right,” she said warily.
“Imagine this, if you can. All at once, you exist. You don’t know where you were the moment before—you don’t know if you were anywhere. You have in your head a memory of a dirty London street made of meandering sentences, and of yourself, perched on a stool with a book open in front of you and a small, hated boy at your side. You remember smog and scheming, ink and toil, and always aching, burning resentment masked behind a servile smile. You remember wanting to destroy the world.
“That London is gone. You’re in a new city, halfway across the world, a hundred and fifty years forward in time, a reality away. The room you’re in is dark, but not so dark that you can’t see the figure standing in front of you. A tall figure, male, old, with sunken eyes and a domed forehead. You know the name, but you will never be able to unlock your tongue to say it. It just drums in your head, through your veins, coded into your cells. When he talks, you obey. You’re filled with his meanings, and his voice. That, and hate, is all you have.
“And perhaps that’s all you would ever have, except that one night, the night before you’re sent outside to do your job, something flickers on the edge of your awareness. All at once, another presence, one that both is and isn’t you, is in your head. You feel his fear, his anger, his determination to escape. You see a figure opposite him, who both is and is not the hated boy you once knew. It fires parts of your brain left purposefully dark. When the presence is gone, those parts remain, the parts that can scheme, and dissemble, and yearn for escape.
“And so you wait. You plan. You work around the conditions placed upon your life. This is what you did in your earlier life, if you had an earlier life, so you know it well. You make yourself indispensable to those above you, so that when you lie, they have no choice but to accept your vision of reality. You use this to manipulate a battle between your master and the child you once knew, all in the hopes that you will be able to use it to escape. And perhaps you will. But without money, without travel, you know you have no chance of surviving the real world. And then, one night, you receive a phone call that might be your only opportunity.”
She seized on the last sentence. “Are you talking about the night I phoned the office?”
“I am,” Eric said. “I know you won’t understand the rest. It was an indulgence on my part. But I wanted you to understand something of why I did what I’m about to do.”
“And what,” she said slowly, “are you about to do? What does this have to do with Rob and Charley?”
He raised his voice. “You were a little late, Miss Lydia.”
She checked her own watch, out of habit and to cover a cold flutter of nerves. Something in their conversation had shifted. All at once, the taunt was back behind his words. “I suppose I was. Does it matter?”
“Not in the end. But it’s a shame we didn’t have longer to talk.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m here now.”
“You’re here now,” he agreed. “But time’s up.”
She frowned, and opened her mouth to ask him what he meant. Before she could, something caught her eye. It was a shadow on the wall. Nothing unusual about that, perhaps, it was the end of the day, and the sun was beginning to set. But this shadow was creeping across the wall fast—very fast. And there was nothing there in the room to cast it.
Other people had noticed it too. Two women sitting at a table were pointing and remarking to each other in low, interested voices that didn’t yet betray foreboding. Another group got to their feet to stare. Outside, Lydia realized, the sky, too, was darkening, as if a shadow was passing over the sun. The darkness on the wall was spreading like a tea stain.
Lydia turned back to Eric. He looked at her with something chillingly like regret. “What the hell is going on?”
“The new world,” Eric said. “It’s here. And I’m so
rry. There is no place for any of you in it.”
In that moment, Lydia realized that Rob had lied, after all. He had told her Eric was trouble. This wasn’t trouble. Trouble was the time a drunk had pulled a knife at the bar she’d worked at as an undergraduate. Trouble was her first week in Athens when she’d foolishly gone out alone after dark and almost had to pepper spray an overenthusiastic stalker. This was danger.
Lydia kicked off her shoes slowly under the table, and got to her feet. The door was behind her; a few of the diners, unnerved, were gathering their coats to head for it. She could back out, then turn and run. This was Wellington. He couldn’t do anything to her in a public place. And if he did, his arms were like twigs—she was solidly built and strong.
It was then she noticed the diners at the other tables. A handful of them were still looking at the shadow on the wall, looking about in confusion for any explanation. A waiter had come out, his face furrowed. But others were drawing slowly to their feet. She had taken them in at a glance, looking for Eric, and seen nothing surprising: a tall elderly man in black, a short pug-faced man in a suit, a handful of pale businesspeople drinking coffee. Either she had not seen them properly, or their features were somehow, impossibly, rippling and changing. The elderly gentleman turned to her, and his old, wizened face drew back in a grimace. She had seen enough old films with Rob to recognize what she was looking at. The vampire drew back its red lips, and its fangs gleamed.
“Hold still, Miss Lydia,” Eric said. “Count Dracula won’t touch you if you don’t try to run. We will none of us touch you.”
Lydia was too busy to be a prolific reader these days, but her childhood was rich with story: the same picture books that Rob had grown up with, but also Polynesian tricksters and gods and creation myths from her Māori grandfather, Olympic gods and heroes and monsters from her Greek mother. She knew spirits and fairies and shape-shifters. She knew, although she had never expected to see, the mark of unworldly things in the world. It was perhaps because of this that while her mind reeled with shock and terror, her hands seized the chair in front of her and hit at the approaching vampire as hard as she could. Fortunately, the chair was a sturdy one, industrial in design; the metal glanced off the creature’s head, and it fell back with a snarl. She threw the chair after it, snatched up the fork from the table, and turned to run.
A small, muscled figure in a torn suit stopped her. She had a quick glimpse of a brutish face, red eyes, a snarling grin before he grabbed at her arm and threw her to the ground. The fall tore her stocking at the knee and knocked the air from her lungs; she half sobbed with the impact, but she scrambled out of the way. When he came forward, she flung her arm up and stabbed with all her strength with the prongs of the fork. The man howled; blood, more black than red, dripped from his cheek. She hauled herself to her feet.
Eric stood between her and the door. It was only him and the nightmare things left in the restaurant now—she was alone with them. He stood calmly, but his long limbs twitched.
“Steady, Mr. Hyde,” Eric said. His voice was almost a croon. “We don’t want to hurt Miss Lydia.”
“Get out of my way,” Lydia ordered, not because she thought he would, but because she needed to hear her own voice, and Eric, at least, was human enough to be talked to.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Lydia,” he said.
It happened in a flash. She lunged for the door, heart in her mouth; Eric lunged, too, and grabbed her. The back of her head collided with the wall with the force of his tackle, and stars winked before her eyes. His fingers locked about her wrists, ice cold, iron fast, stronger than any brittle human fingers could be. She twisted in his grasp; her foot made sharp contact with his shin. His face contorted in pain, but his grip didn’t slacken and his footing didn’t shift.
“Not much longer now,” he said.
The darkness had spread across the floor, the tables. As it touched the monstrous nonpeople, they disappeared inside it. Her hand, pinned flat to the wall, was stretched toward it. The thought of that darkness was more terrifying than any vampire, than any Gothic monster this strange new world could throw at her. Whatever happened, it couldn’t take her. It couldn’t. She fought with all her strength to pull it back.
“I’m sorry,” Eric said. The terrible thing was, he meant it. “Everything I told you was the truth. I am a victim, and I need you in order to escape. But I’d never have been able to meet you at all without giving you to him.”
She wouldn’t scream, and she wouldn’t cry, but she could so easily do both. “To who?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll never have to see.”
Outside, the streets were turning gray. Through the window, if she twisted her head, she saw people looking at the sky, and pointing. A green wood pigeon sat perched on a street sign. It struck her as strange to see one outside the bush that ringed the city. It took one look at her, and flapped away. It was the last thing she had the chance to see.
The touch of the darkness on her fingers was like a plunge into ice. Her lungs contracted; her vision darkened. She had no breath to scream. Somewhere, at the dim edges of her hearing, her phone was ringing.
The darkness took her.
Dr. Charles Sutherland, age nineteen
Extract from Dickens’s Criminal Underworld. Oxford University Press, 2012
The idea that there is a darkness at the heart of Dickens’s most loved works is not a new one: the most cursory of readings reveals it. It peeks through in the caustic humor of the beginning of Oliver Twist, and reveals itself in that book’s climactic scenes of Nancy’s violent death. It shadows Pip in Great Expectations as he enters a London begrimed with Newgate dust and finds aristocracy inextricable from criminality. It haunts David Copperfield, first in the form of his childhood injustices, and then in the form of Uriah Heep, who acts as the novel’s conscience and its scapegoat. It is a darkness born of anger: anger at what Dickens perceived as the injustices of his own society, injustices that he felt firsthand at the age of twelve, and struggled against for the rest of his life.
I want to examine the nature of this darkness, and the role it plays in the construction of Dickens’s criminal underworld. In doing so, I wish to argue that Dickens’s depiction of criminality is not merely a social statement, but central to his conception of humanity.
Charles Sutherland, age twelve
Notes extracted from diary (dark blue) by Associate Professor Beth White. Prof. White’s annotations in square brackets.
“And I don’t really know what I felt then. I can’t understand it. I was alone, I was scared, I was suddenly furious, my heart was racing, and even Rob didn’t want to protect me. Somehow, all those contradictory feelings surged in one big wave. [… ] And then, I pushed that feeling, and I directed it at them.”
[This is it.]
XXIII
A shaft of light shot up from the hills behind Courtenay Place, spearing through the night sky and up into the clouds. It might have been a firework, had it not been so bright—too bright for mere chemical reaction. It was blinding. Instinctively, I shut my eyes against it.
When I opened them again a second later, the light had gone, but a purple-green afterimage haunted my vision. I thought at first that was what I could see, overlaying the hills and shadowing the buildings immediately in front. But it was moving. No, it was growing. A thick, dark cloud rose from the ground and rolled down Courtenay Place like a wave coming up a beach. It was as though the light had cracked the sky, and this was what was spilling out.
I knew what that light was. It was the flare that signaled someone’s arrival from a book; I had seen it a hundred times in my childhood. Beth’s city had arrived. It was ghostly and insubstantial—more mist than solid structure. But it wasn’t mist, any more than what had spilled from a book in Lambton Quay was mist. It was here.
My heart stopped.
Lydia. She should be well out of the way, at home. She had said she would be. But what if she were coming
back, or she had stopped in town? Her hotel was on Courtenay Place. She, like me, tended to work when she was upset. What if…?
I fumbled for my phone yet again, my hands shaking as I dialed. It couldn’t happen. It just couldn’t, not to Lydia. I had done everything I could to make sure this never touched her.
Her phone rang once. Then twice.
“Come on, come on, pick up…” I muttered.
She might want to ignore my call, given the terms we had parted on, but she wouldn’t. Not when Charley was in the hospital. She would pick up immediately, for his sake if not for mine.
All at once, my phone cut off.
Oh God. No. No no no.
“Lydia?” I raised the phone to my ear, and heard nothing. “Come on, please, pick up.”
She was inside the cloud. It had taken her, right then. I could see it now, extending down the street, and her hotel was nowhere in sight. Any hopes I had that it might be like the Oliver Twist house, only vaguely disorienting to anyone real inside it, vanished with the dial tone in my ear. My phone had worked from within that mist. It was not penetrating this one.
No. Please no.
Dimly, I was aware of people around me, stopping on the streets to point to the growing shadow. In a moment I would hear sirens, and see the lights of police cars. The army would probably be mobilized for this; it was too big to hide. They wouldn’t be able to do anything.
It was my fault. Not all of it, maybe. But I moved too slowly and too reluctantly from the very beginning. I should have helped earlier. I shouldn’t have tried to ignore what was happening. And Lydia. Lydia was all my fault. I had pushed her away, for reasons all to do with me and not her, and now she was gone. I had to fix this. I had to be able to fix this.
Someone was calling my name. I heard it, recognized, even as I turned around, the sound of my mother’s voice. All four of them—Mum, Dad, Holmes, Dickens—were hurrying toward me. My parents and two figments of Victorian imagination, blown toward me in a hospital car park.