by H. G. Parry
He turned to me with a frown. “How did you know that?”
“It was in your lecture this morning. The bit I heard. I did listen, you know. Why would Beth bring you here?”
“I don’t know. I wrote about it in my book as a place where the rich and the criminal collide. But I’ve talked about Satis House with Beth, once or twice. To her, it’s about the past slowly poisoning the present.”
“You academics and your metaphors.”
He didn’t get the chance to reply. The doors to the house had opened, and two figures were coming across the courtyard. They were children.
I say children, but one of them was really a young man, well built and strong jawed. He wore his hair the way I had worn it at fifteen or so, only much smoother, and his eyes as they looked out of his face were as blue as mine. In fact, he would have been the mirror of me at fifteen, if I had been a little better looking, a little cooler, a lot more sure of myself. And the smaller boy…
“Oh,” Charley said quietly.
I blinked, and felt cold. It was me at fifteen. A confident, mature, perfect version of me at fifteen. And the boy—he must have been ten or eleven, logically—was my brother. In some ways he looked older than ten—the pale, pointed face was older, indefinably so, as was the way he carried himself. But he was tiny, even for that age; his limbs were thin and stunted, like those of a bonsai tree.
“That’s us,” I said flatly.
“Yeah,” Charley said. “That’s… I’m sorry.”
“Do you have something to do with them?”
“My… um. My old diaries went missing from my house a few months ago. I got them when Mum and Dad moved, mostly because they were too horribly embarrassing to risk anybody seeing. I assumed they were somewhere about—I never know where anything is. But… Beth was at my house the day before they vanished. She asked what they were. In retrospect, given what she is, it would have been very easy for her to have someone break in and take them. I think those are from my first day at high school.”
“How do you know that?”
He nodded at the younger boy unhappily. “He’s just had his hair cut. I never had it that short again. And… that was my new watch. It broke on that first day, when a couple of the kids tripped me up and I landed on it wrong.”
“You never told us that.”
He shrugged.
I looked at them critically. “I did not look like that at fifteen. I was pudgy, and had spots.”
“You probably still do, on other pages. When I was mad at you.”
“And your ears never stuck out like that.”
“Okay, just shut up. This is so embarrassing.”
“Why do you even have diaries? That’s such a girl thing.”
“I liked words, okay? I was ten. I didn’t know someone was going to steal them sixteen years after the fact and bring them to life.”
The two figures came to the gate. They each carried a candle, and it illuminated their faces. In the case of the elder, this cast the perfect features in a forbidding light; in the younger, it made the cheekbones too sharp and the eyes too large and dark.
“Hey,” I said, trying to make my voice sound something between friendly and firm. It was hard, when what I felt was something between terror and revulsion. “I assume Beth sent you?”
They looked at me.
“They don’t talk?”
“Well, they’re from my diary entries,” Charley said. “Those weren’t exactly masterpieces of eloquence and erudition. I only vented a few paragraphs, most days, and not usually with dialogue.”
“Next time, write more or not at all. Why are they here? She could have sent anybody. Why them?”
“She’s trying to unnerve us, I think. Or show off. Or both. Try to ignore them.”
The older boy—the one who was me—reached out and unlatched the gate. He pushed it open, loosely, and beckoned to us with one hand.
“Looks like we’re supposed to follow them,” I said.
The characters who had walked us here had disappeared. It was just us, and our peculiar echoes.
It was dark inside the house. The smaller boy held back and closed the door behind us, just to make doubly certain of that. By the lights the children carried, I could make out corridors and rooms, but they all were unlived-in, and they all were cold. Intellectually, I knew they had only come into being an hour or so ago. They looked as though they had been neglected for years.
Straight ahead was a staircase. The little boy tried to get up the stairs at the same time as the older; the older coldly shoved him to one side, and he stumbled back. On instinct, I caught him by the shoulder, but he flinched away. He shot me a fearful glance, then quickened his pace to catch up with his brother.
“What did I do to you on your first day of school?” I asked. That one look had hurt more deeply than I wanted to admit.
“Nothing,” Charley said firmly. He looked as uncomfortable as I was. “Ignore them. You didn’t do anything.”
“Was that the problem?”
“There was no problem. I was young, that’s all. So were you.”
But I hadn’t been, I realized. Not to him. To a ten-year-old, fifteen is ancient.
I was desperately glad that I had kept no journals or diaries while I was in high school, or ever. I would hate for Charley to see either of us through my eyes.
We went up one flight of stairs, down a corridor, then up another. Still, there was no sign of life but the two figments leading the way, and they weren’t exactly alive. And then, at last, we stopped at a door, and the other Rob opened it.
It wasn’t like the other rooms in the house. Those were musty, stifled with cobwebs and old furniture. This room was gray and bare. Although we were indoors, I could feel rain in the air, the heavy damp of a rural winter. The floor beneath my feet was harder and more unforgiving than the wooden boards in the corridor, and when I looked down, I saw it was shimmering intermittently into tarmac. Shadows danced on the walls, and from somewhere distant there came voices and the harsh, mocking laughter of children.
“This doesn’t look like Dickens,” I said.
“No,” Charley said. He looked sick. “No… this is me.”
It was only then that I saw the young boy standing by the window.
It was Charley again, a little older than the one who had shown us in, with his face starting to lose some of its childhood roundness and his hair grown out again. Like the other, he was in a school uniform, but this one was wearing the dark trousers and blazer that marked the privileged ranks of Year Thirteen. He seemed clearer than most of Beth’s readings. The waxy, unfinished look was still there, but there was more feeling in his face.
“Hey there,” I said to the boy uncertainly.
“Hey,” he replied. His voice was as young as the rest of him; given that, it was startling to hear it so hard and bitter.
“So where are you from?” I asked. “How old are you?”
“Twelve,” he said. “I’ll be thirteen soon.”
“Oh,” the real Charley said quietly, beside me.
“What?” I started to ask, then looked closer. Charley’s birthday was in August, toward the end of winter, which meant this one was probably from June or July; that would account for the chill in the air. Year Thirteen. His trousers, I noticed, were torn at one knee.
“Oh,” I repeated.
Somehow, it wasn’t a surprise. It seemed as though things had always, inevitably, been circling that day.
Diary Charley spoke before either of us could say anything more.
“Why did you have to come here?” he demanded. It might have been my imagination, but I felt the room tremor.
“Beth invited us,” I said. I nodded at Charley. “At least, she invited him.”
“That’s what I meant!” It was the tone I’d sometimes heard lurking in Charley’s voice when someone was being frustratingly slow. When I was being frustratingly slow. “Why did you have to come? She’ll send me back now. It’s n
ot fair. I did everything she asked. I don’t want to go back.”
“Back where?”
“I don’t know. Death. Oblivion. Some kind of postmodern textual unreality. I don’t care. I won’t go.”
“Why would she send you away?” Charley asked his younger self.
“Because she doesn’t need me anymore! Not if she has you.” His skinny shoulders rose and fell as he caught his breath. “I’m not going back. I’ll kill you first.”
The room definitely rippled this time. I saw the windows flex and crack. The cellar in Lambton Quay had trembled as we waited for the summoner to come, I remembered. It had shivered exactly like this.
This wasn’t the summoner, though. This was a preteen boy. More than that, it was Charley, in some shape or form. And God knows what he had been through, if the basement room in the Oliver Twist house was any indication. Belatedly, I took in how painfully thin he was, and the dark circles under his eyes.
“Calm down,” I said to him. “Look, you don’t need to kill anybody. We can help—”
“Get away from me!” I’d put out a hand instinctively; the child had shied away as if from a blow. Hurt and anger were brimming in his eyes. “I don’t want your help! I hate you!”
I flinched back, despite myself.
“Don’t listen to him,” the real Charley said to me. “Of course I don’t hate you.”
“He does,” I said, with a nod at the diary child. He glared at me. “And he’s you, isn’t he?”
“He isn’t me.” I could hear some of the child’s vehemence in his own voice. “Neither of those two diary fragments are me. I’m me. I’m right here. This is Beth’s reading of my writing—it’s a character, or an implied author, or some combination of both, I don’t know. It isn’t me.”
“You’re saying there’s no truth in him?”
“There’s truth in anything! It’s the truth of a single moment in time. It’s… it’s as if someone made a painting of you, based on a photograph. The photograph would be an accurate picture of you; the painting would be a valid interpretation of that photograph. Nobody’s lying. But that painting isn’t you, not all of you. It’s just a picture.”
“Unless it’s the picture of Dorian Gray. Then it’s a picture of your soul.”
He shook his head. “Does this really matter?”
“You tell me. Why is Beth doing this?”
Charley opened his mouth to reply, but I never heard what he would have said. At that moment, Beth came into the room.
XXVI
This is what happened on the day that Beth had pulled from Charley’s diary. It’s not that exciting, or that terrible. I tried to tell myself Charley had forgotten all about it. I suppose what I had hated most about Uriah Heep knowing about it is that it meant Charley remembered very well.
It was during our last year of high school, when I was seventeen. Thankfully, that year we only shared history together, at which he was only a moderate genius; he was in a different English class, and I did my best to take as many non-arts subjects as I could so I would find myself sitting across the classroom from him as infrequently as possible. (This is why I have fourteen credits in economics, and never learned French.) Most people didn’t talk to me about him, unless he’d done something particularly brilliant that week. He’d been with us for two years already; the novelty had worn off. But still, everyone knew who he was, and who he was to me.
Up until then, he’d been picked on a bit, but he was too young, I think, to feel like a fair target to the other kids. At twelve, he was the same age as the new Year Nines coming in, and some of them that year were vicious. I chased them off, when I saw them, but I didn’t always see them. I didn’t hang around with my little brother at lunch or anything—I mean, who does?
One day, I saw a bunch of them ganging up on him behind the bike shed. It was just kid stuff—they had him cornered, clutching his books to his chest as they snatched at his backpack, and when one of them shoved him, he overbalanced and went down. He wouldn’t put out his hands to catch himself, because it was raining and he was trying to keep The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from going in a puddle, so it must have hurt. I heard him start to cry out and then bite it back. He caught my eye, and I knew he saw me. I saw mingled relief and shame on his face, and I knew he thought I was coming for him.
But I didn’t go to him. I don’t know why. I would have, normally, without thinking. He had just got full marks on a test I had done badly in, which might have had something to do with it. People had been teasing me about him lately, for reasons that really had nothing to do with him, but with a feud between me and Jono Maxwell over First XV rugby team. I was a teenager. I really don’t know the reason. I just know I felt a surge of anger, and that surge carried me right past him. I felt his eyes on me the whole time, even when I had turned the corner and I was well out of his sight. I wanted to go back with every step. I didn’t.
Later, I found out that before things had gone any further, a tall, sharp-eyed man had appeared on the scene, dressed in old-fashioned clothes, and broken things up. The Year Nines swore that he had materialized out of thin air, but nobody believed them, obviously. After break, Charley came back to history with the rest of us. His trousers were torn at the knee, he was limping a little, and I could tell he had been crying. But he sat down, did his work even more quietly than usual, and never said a word to me about what had happened. Nobody else ever noticed a thing.
There was nothing much to notice. It was nothing. Just stupid kid stuff. Everyone gets into fights at high school. But I always hated it when Sherlock Holmes came, after that. He had protected Charley that day; I hadn’t. And we all three knew it.
XXVII
She came through the same door we had entered, silently flanked by teen Rob and ten-year-old Charley. By the window, twelve-year-old Charley took a step back.
I don’t know what I had been expecting. I suppose, now that Beth had been revealed as the mysterious other summoner, I thought she would look a little more like a villain from a story. Perhaps I thought that now, in her own world, we might be able to see her as Eric and the others saw her, however and whoever that was. But she looked exactly the same as she had when I saw her a few hours earlier. Short and plump, the edges of her crisp haircut just brushing the collar of her green cardigan. Her blue-gray eyes now seemed hard to me, glittering in her kindly face, but that might have been my own imagination. She was not a monster. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Charley, after all, is her rival summoner, and I couldn’t quite see him as a hero at this moment. He was in pajamas.
“Hello, Charles,” she said. Even her voice was the same as it had been. “It’s nice to have you finally see me. And Robert, of course.”
“It’s a bit different from the last time I came to your house,” Charley said. “You know, when I came to drop off the last of the honors essays, and you offered me tea.”
“I could do the same here. I have plenty of books hereabouts. One of them is bound to contain a kettle and some tea bags. The cup of tea is an English tradition. Steeped in symbolism. Served with irony.”
“Actually, I don’t want to be flippant about this,” Charley said. “Not here. Not in front of him.”
Twelve-year-old Charley glared at him, but didn’t speak.
Beth smiled a little. “Very well. I don’t need to introduce you, do I? You’ve met young Charles Sutherland?”
“I have,” he said. “Put him away. He’s grotesque.”
“He’s yours,” Beth said. “So are the other two. I read them from your words. I’ll put those two away, if you like.” She didn’t wait for an answer. There was a flash of light, and at once cold, perfect Rob and tiny, fearful Charley were gone. I felt a weight lighten on my chest. Perhaps it was guilt.
The other diary Charley, the one by the window, stayed quiet. But I was watching him, and I saw him give a tiny convulsive shudder.
“I only brought those two out to be hospitable,” Beth said. “But this one�
� he’s the key to it all, isn’t he? Charles Dickens in the blacking factory. Charles Sutherland in the playground. The anger of a brilliant, sensitive twelve-year-old at being thrown away.”
“I wasn’t thrown away,” Charley said. He glanced quickly at diary Charley, then away again. “It was one time. One day.”
“And for Dickens it was one year,” Beth said. “It doesn’t matter. It only takes one moment. One moment of realizing that you are alone, and that survival requires both strength and power. I’m still using this one. Not for much longer, I trust.”
“Using him for what?” I said. I heard my voice tight with anger. “He’s a child.”
“He’s a good deal more than that,” she said. “He’s angry, and hurt, and dangerous, and he wants to destroy the world. But you’re quite right, Robert. He’s not enough for what I need. Helpful, but not perfect.”
“I never wanted to destroy the world,” Charley said. “Not even… I never did. I can’t remember what I wrote in that diary, but that’s a complete misreading.”
“Is it?” Beth said. “Feel free to try to correct it. I don’t care about it anymore. It’s served its purpose. It’s you I want, Charles.”
“You tried to kill him,” I said, bluntly. “Twice. Once with the Hound, once with the Jabberwock.”
“Those weren’t true attempts to kill him,” she said. “I knew he would be too strong for that. Frankly, I was surprised that the Jabberwock managed to put him into a coma. Surprised, and most concerned. For both of us.” She turned to Charley, and her voice became softer, less dismissive. “I was never going to kill you like that, Charles. I simply had to distract you until I could bring this city about.”
He shook his head. “You had to distract me with Victorian monsters.”
“You would have tried to stop me. Out in that world—the old world—you might have succeeded.”
“So why wouldn’t you kill me? Kill me, or talk to me. We saw each other most weekdays—neither would have been difficult.”
She ignored the first question. “I wasn’t quite ready to talk to you. It’s taken me so many years to get this far. I meant to spend at least another month perfecting this city, more likely two. I must admit, too, that part of me wanted to see how good you were, even to push you to become better than you thought you could be. You’re very good, Charles, but your technique still needs work.”