by H. G. Parry
“I helped,” the diary Charley spoke up, almost defiantly. “I couldn’t see through your eyes, but I could guess what you’d do sometimes. It helped.”
“I saw you once.” The memory struck me suddenly. Of course. I might have recognized him, even through hat and glasses, if I had had any notion that such a thing were possible. It was before Eric came to work, but even afterward, I would never have expected to see an adolescent version of my brother in the streets. “You were outside the courthouse, the day it all started. You were watching me.”
Diary Charley cast a quick, guilty look at Beth. “I just wanted to see you,” he said. “That’s all. I just wanted to know what you looked like.”
“And I made quite sure he never did it again,” Beth said smoothly. I saw her jaw twitch. “It wasn’t exactly this one you saw. He’s been read in and out several times since then. This version is rather more pliable.”
Dear God. “You really do think you can do whatever you like to these people, don’t you?” I said. I didn’t bother to wait for an answer, or to keep disgust out of my voice. “So you sent the Hound to attack us when Eric told you we were onto you; you sent the Jabberwock to tear up the Street when you were ready to make your final move. Didn’t you care that it might mean turning the Street against you?”
“It pushed some of its inhabitants toward me,” she said. “Fear is a wonderful recruiting tool. But I don’t care about the Street. The Street was an experiment—an accident, if you prefer. Its inhabitants are literary misfits, figments of undisciplined imaginations. I’ve watched it grow for the last two years, and learned to factor it into my equations, but I have no desire to make an alliance with it. I gave its inhabitants that impression at times, I know. It was a lie, to keep them at bay. I’ve only ever cared about this city.”
“I understand that,” Charley said. Even now, he sounded hurt and bewildered, rather than angry. “Not all of it, but enough. I understand how you’ve made this place. I understand how I could be a threat to you. I think I even understand what my diary version is doing here. I just don’t understand why. Why would you do any of this? What do you want?”
“Have you never wanted to escape into a good book, Charles?” she said.
“Often. I try not to let that book escape into downtown Wellington. Really, Beth, why? I thought we were friends.”
“We were much closer than friends,” she said. “We still are. We are nemeses.”
Charley shook his head. “Real people don’t have nemeses.”
“No,” Beth said. “They don’t. I think it’s time you stopped calling me Beth, or at least stopped thinking of me as such. There was a Beth, but I am not she—well, not really. Not entirely.”
“Would you like to unpack that sentence a little?” Charley said after a brief pause.
She gave a small smile. “It might help if I told you who Beth was. Could you bear with me, if I did? It may take a while.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“No,” she agreed. “You’re not.” She nodded at diary Charley. I saw a shadow pass over his young face briefly—it might have been pain, or just reluctance—before he turned his head sharply toward the door we had entered through. It closed over and vanished without a trace or seam.
I blinked, startled, but Charley didn’t seem surprised. “You could have just locked it,” he said.
“Shut up,” diary Charley said. His voice was tight—with anger, I thought, until I looked a little closer, and realized how white he had become. Whatever Beth was making him do, it was draining him like a battery.
Beth paid him no attention. She was already talking to us. “Beth White was born in 1856,” she said. “The elder daughter of a Glasgow merchant. Her father was the kind of man Dickens would have loved to write about: extravagant, florid, filled with amusing quirks of depravity, and entirely worthless. Her mother was too weak to oppose him. Beth grew up in a soup of fog, near poverty, and fear.”
“Who was she to you?” I asked.
Beth didn’t answer directly. “When she was four, Beth began to bring things out of books. Little things, then bigger things. I’m sure it was the same with you, Charles. Her father tried to make her stop, but she loved it so much. They were an unhappy family; book characters were her friends, her playmates. When her father was drunk and unruly, she could call upon them to defend herself. Perhaps she did so one too many times. One day, when she was barely thirteen, her parents put her on a train to London and sent her away to find her own living. It was common enough practice in those days.”
“Thrown away,” Charley said, almost too quiet to hear. And the walls sighed around him.
“I don’t know what happened to them,” Beth said. “Such things were difficult to trace, in those days. I never saw them again.”
“You mean Beth didn’t,” I said.
She nodded. “You’re quite right. Thank you for the correction. Beth didn’t.”
“What happened to Beth then?” Charley asked.
Beth laughed. “Oh, a good deal happened to Beth then. She learned to take care of herself. She was very gifted, of course—as you are, Charles, but unlike you, nobody was rearing her for Oxford. At first she made her living on the streets, picking up what work she could. For a long time, she gave up summoning entirely; she had learned her lesson about standing up for herself, and in any case she didn’t love books anymore. She didn’t love anything. Her entire life was a means to an end, and that end was so very… meaningless.” She shook her head, with a note of impatience. “What happened to Beth isn’t important, apart from this. One day, she began to bring people out of books again. Her readings weren’t particularly skilled—more feeling than scholarship—but they had a certain life that I’ve never been able to replicate. When they were good enough, she began using them to commit criminal acts. Nothing large scale that would attract attention—certainly not in London, that cesspit of humanity. It was profitable, to an extent, though she cared less about that than she should; for the most part it just amused her to set Daniel Quilp loose in Piccadilly and see what happened. And then, one day, she made me.”
“Moriarty,” Charley said. “The Napoleon of crime.”
The woman who wasn’t Beth smiled. “Yes. And may I say, Dr. Sutherland, that it is a dangerous habit to finger books in the pocket of one’s dressing gown.”
Charley looked at her for a moment, then reached into his pocket and drew out a book. It was a small paperback, well-worn. He laid it faceup on the table between us. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.
I stared at him. “Where did that come from?”
“I had it in my bag, in the back of your car. I got it out just before we came in. It was what Eric was trying to quote: “He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of them.” It’s about Moriarty. I wasn’t sure—it isn’t the only place to use that phrase—but I had suspicions it might be useful to have. The irony is, I only put it in there this afternoon because Beth asked me to write that essay on the criminal world of Sherlock Holmes. I was going to do it tonight.”
Beth-Moriarty’s smile stayed in place. “How did you know?”
“You started with the Hound of the Baskervilles. That might have been directed at me—I’ve talked about my early reading experiences with that book often enough, but it wasn’t, was it? We wondered all along why all your readings were Victorian: Conan Doyle, Dickens, Lewis Carroll. It wasn’t because of me. It wasn’t because you were a Victorian specialist. It was because you were a Victorian. A Victorian university professor, well respected in your field, secretly running a ring of criminals that nobody would ever be able to trace to you…” He shrugged. “I said Conan Doyle was trying to warn the world about academics, didn’t I?”
“You’re quite right. I congratulate you. You’re always such an intellectual treat, Charles. I say, unaffectedly, that it would be a grief to me to be forced to take any extreme mea
sure.”
I felt as though I were in yet another world again. I didn’t know how much longer I could take these constantly shifting realities. “You’re Professor Moriarty?”
“I was summoned forth as Professor Moriarty,” Beth-Moriarty confirmed. “Yes. Beth waited a long time to do it. She encountered Moriarty in print, in the last month of 1893. Beth was thirty-six years old, bitter and angry at the entire world. Victorian London did not bend over backward to accommodate women from the poorhouse who understood the nuances of the written world. She perhaps gave in to anger too easily and without purpose, but that’s understandable. I doubt you can imagine, Charles, what it is like to have all your gifts—intellectual as well as magical—and be relentlessly denied the use of every single one. That month, Sherlock Holmes died in the pages of The Strand, and Moriarty was the man who killed him. The allure of him, to Beth, was almost overwhelming: the man who could defeat everything that Sherlock Holmes represented. Order, empire, masculine intellect. But she held back from summoning him. Perhaps she was afraid of him, on some level. She held back as the Victorian age came to an end, and everything began to change. She held back for years. Until one night, when bombs were falling and the world seemed drawing to an end. That night, her fear and despair were great enough to overcome any fear she had of the Napoleon of crime. She wanted the old world back. She was alone, and powerless, and she summoned the most powerful creation she knew.”
“The First World War,” Charley said. “That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? That’s what you were born from. The longing for a simpler kind of evil.”
“The Great War, it was called then. It sent shockwaves through the world. Certainties broke down. Stories that had already been changing were now changed forever. Dickensian sentimentality passed out of fashion; so did villains, and so did heroes. The birth of the modern world. Everything became so much more complicated.”
“‘Always 1895,’” Charley said.
I was still trying to keep up. “What?”
“It’s a poem. About Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and 221B Street. It begins:
Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
“That’s rather sentimental, isn’t it?” I heard my mouth say, as if quality of verse were an all-consuming issue at present.
“I didn’t say it was a good poem. But it’s a poem that confuses history and story. It’s about longing for an age that never actually existed. Like Sherlock Holmes’s London. Or Dickens’s.”
“Beth longed for Moriarty,” Beth-Moriarty said. “She was afraid, and she reached for him. But Moriarty is a vague figure in the Sherlock Holmes canon, isn’t he? All we know of him, beyond his career as an elderly professor, is that he is, as you said, the Napoleon of crime. The spider at the center of the web. A brain of the first order. A genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. What we think about when we think about a criminal mastermind.”
“Like the Jabberwock,” Charley said. “Archetypal evil. The shorthand for absolute terror.”
Beth-Moriarty inclined her head. “Beth, foolish woman, invested herself in him very heavily. She had been lonely for a long time. Perhaps she thought she was in love with him. She didn’t really want him. She wanted to be him.”
“She got you instead,” I said.
“She did. Her exact doppelgänger, in many ways: in appearance, in knowledge, in skills. But also Moriarty. So much more ruthless and ambitious than she knew how to be. It frightened her. She tried to put me back.”
“You didn’t want to go back?” Charley asked.
“There is no back!” Beth-Moriarty snapped. It was the first trace of anger I had seen on the mild face. “There’s nothing. We’re not summoned from anywhere. We’re created, of pure thought and idea, from the words on a page. When we’re dismissed, we’re destroyed. We go nowhere. I had just been called into existence. I was not going to be destroyed.”
“Do you know that?” Charley asked. “Truly? I’ve been wondering about it, and that sounds logical, but I know Millie feels—”
“Feeling doesn’t matter,” Beth-Moriarty said. “I am a logician, a scientist, a philosopher, and a scholar. I know the world. I know it is impossible to be taken from or put back into a book. A book is paper and words, nothing more. She was going to destroy me.”
Her face rippled; for just a second, someone else looked out from behind the round face. Then it passed, and she spoke again with perfect calm.
“That is where Beth’s story ends,” she said. “I killed her as the bombs fell. I hid her body in the rubble, and I took over her life. It was her fault. She should not have tried to take mine.”
“But you’re a summoner,” Charley said. “That was what confused me. Is it possible for a literary character to be a summoner as well?”
I held my breath at that, but Beth-Moriarty only smiled.
“Oh yes,” she said. “They have what their reader can give them. If they’re created by a summoner, and that summoner pours enough of themselves into them, there’s no reason they can’t inherit that particular quirk. You’ve seen a little of what your diary self can do. I can summon perfectly well. It served me well, over the years. I studied the burgeoning fields of literary criticism, and I honed my skills. I studied the literature of the new age, and kept my affiliation with the old to myself. Time passed by, but I never aged along with it. Times changed; when necessary, my identity changed with it. I became one of the first female professors of literature at Oxford, when it became inconspicuous to do so. I kept reading. By the turn of this century, I had a network of unreal criminals that spanned most of London. It was not enough. I did not believe I had a book to return to, as I said, but I also had no desire to live in Beth’s world. Victorian London is my city; not the sordid reality of Victorian London, but the literary version, as interpreted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Moriarty’s world. The world of Victorian fiction. You’ll understand my interest in your work.”
“You read my book,” Charley said. “Dickens’s Criminal Underworld. That was when you noticed me.”
“Quite. I read it three years ago. It wasn’t my field, as far as the universities knew, but I retained a private interest in Victorian London. I recognized what you were at once. There’s a certain style to the analysis that is very pure, very organic, yet utterly sound—Beth, without the benefit of your education, had it in her readings. You wouldn’t recognize it in mine anymore. It’s the mark of an immature summoner, before they learn to exert the control I’ve perfected over the years.”
“Before you start manipulating words to your own ends, you mean.”
“You would call it that. I visited your colleagues and old professors at Oxford, and what they told me about you confirmed my deductions. But, of course, they also told me you had accepted a post in New Zealand. I was fortunate the opportunity came to follow you here so quickly.”
“My book was about Dickens, not Conan Doyle,” Charley said.
“Yes. I’ve been urging you to write on Conan Doyle’s criminal world, you remember, but you never have. You’re meant to be writing a paper at the moment, of course. I might have waited for that, but since you told me I was likely to be disappointed…”
“Conan Doyle doesn’t have a criminal world, not the way Dickens does,” Charley insisted. I had the feeling this was an old argument, and also that this was a strange setting to be having it in. “Sherlock Holmes stories are logic puzzles: his criminals are problems that only exist to be solved. Moriarty is a product of intellect, not of Victorian social evils. Beth, I’m not just saying this as a point of academic dispute. I’m saying it because I don’t think you realize what you’ve created here. There’s a darkness in Dickens’s city that isn’t there in Conan Doyle’s. This place is alive, and it’s dangerous. There isn’t a great criminal mind in control of all the ev
il here; evil is everywhere.”
She ignored him. “I wasn’t only trying to create this city for the years I’ve been here, you know. I was investigating you. This isn’t only Dickens’s city; it’s also yours. In order to understand it, I had to understand you.”
My heart skipped. In my decision that Charley shouldn’t know what he was, it had, stupidly, not occurred to me until this moment that of course Beth-Moriarty might tell him.
“This doesn’t matter,” I said.
Beth-Moriarty looked at me, and her lips curved very slightly. I saw the world’s greatest criminal mind then. It was as monstrous as I could have wished.
“I learned quite a lot from your book itself,” she went on. “I learned far more from working with you in person. But there was still something missing. That was why, that day at your house with your postgraduate student, I was interested to hear of the existence of your old diaries. It was an easy matter to have them stolen; the Artful Dodger has broken into far more secure homes than yours. You just didn’t seem quite right. Charles Sutherland, linguistic prodigy, born to Susan and Joseph Sutherland… It was just a little too simple. I found a lot, from those diaries. Finally, I found what I was looking for.”
“Found what?” Charley asked.
“You aren’t Susan’s child,” Beth-Moriarty said. “Nor Joseph’s, but I’m more interested in Susan.”
“Shut up!” I cut in. “I’m warning you—”
“Oh, Robert,” Beth said, with a mock-fond sigh. “I found you in those diaries as well, you know. I hadn’t realized your importance until then; it was why I sent Uriah Heep to watch over you, so late in the game. Hush now, though. This is strictly between people who aren’t real.”