by Vivian Shaw
He nodded unhappily.
The figures Charley summons from books are always colored by his interpretations. Charley calls it postmodernism at work. The last thing we needed was for this latest one to be colored by danger, however theoretical.
“All right.” I tried to think. It was hard, when I had been sound asleep twenty minutes ago. Unlike Charley’s, my brain doesn’t work well in the hours before dawn. “You know this character. Where would he go?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t go near an English department in the book. I suppose we just have to look for him.”
“Charley—!” I bit back a surge of temper just in time. It was more than temper, really. I hated this. I’d always hated this, but I hated it more now, here, in my city.
I looked out the office window. Beyond the campus, the ground dropped away dramatically, and Wellington spread out like a blanket. Down in the distance, I could see the glittering lights of the central city, and past them the long curve of the harbor and the dark of the ocean. Outside the mess my brother worked in, it all looked impossibly clean and young and bright.
“Do you think we should check the library?” Charley asked.
I forced myself to focus. “Would he want to get to the library? Is that where you think he’d go?”
“Possibly. I have no idea where he’d go.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Charley, I have a big trial coming up in a few hours. I’m expected at the courthouse at nine. It’s my job. There are people depending on me. I can’t just keep looking all night!”
“I said I was sorry! I knew I shouldn’t have called you.”
“You shouldn’t have had to!” So much for keeping exasperation out of my voice. I had never been very good at that. “How many times does it take? Just keep your thoughts under control when you read a book! It shouldn’t be so hard!”
“Maybe you should go. I can deal with this myself. It’s not your problem.”
“It is my problem, though, isn’t it? It’s always my problem. You make it my problem when you bring these things into my city and into my life.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“It doesn’t matter what you mean! It’s what you do. It’s what you always do.”
“I said I would deal with it myself,” Charley said. His face had hardened. “I shouldn’t have asked you to come here. Just go home, Rob. I mean it. I don’t need your help.”
I might have gone. I don’t think I would have—I hope I wouldn’t have. But I was furious, and I could already feel fury pushing me to say and do the things I tried to avoid. It just might have propelled me out the door.
Except, just for a moment, I looked at Charley again. There was something there, in the tilt of his head and the lines of his face, that I’d never seen before. Something hard, and cunning. There was a glint in his eyes that could almost have been malice.
All at once, Charley’s notes flashed up before my eyes, and I felt cold.
Shape-squiggle. If my brother’s handwriting hadn’t been so terrible, I might have worked it out sooner.
As I said, my brother’s creations are always colored by his perception of them. Sometimes this is slight, and manageable: a shift in personality, or a blurring of appearance. But some colorings are deeper and stranger, and the deeper he gets into literary theory, the stranger they become. Traits that are metaphorical in the text become absurdly, dangerously literal. A shy character may come out invisible. A badly written character might come out flat. The Phantom of the Opera walked in a little cloud of darkness, and all Charley could say about it was that it was a half-baked theory about pathetic fallacy and his concentration slipped.
Dickens, as far as I know, has no shape-shifters in his books. But somehow, Charley’s Uriah Heep had come out as one. And he had been standing in front of me from the moment I entered the building.
“Where’s my brother?” I said slowly.
The thing that wasn’t Charley looked confused. He did it well—he got the nose wrinkle just right—but it didn’t matter. I knew now. “What are you talking about?”
“You weren’t down at the door because you were waiting for me.” I could feel the pieces start to fit, the way they did on a good day in court when a hostile witness said just the wrong thing at the right time. “You were down there trying to get away before I arrived. Sometime after Charley called, you took him out of action somehow and stole his key card. But I arrived too soon, didn’t I? You had to let me in, and bluff it out. That’s why you told me to leave; that’s why you’re trying to provoke an argument. You need me to storm out and leave you here alone, so you can get away.”
He shook his head. “Rob, you can’t possibly…”
“You should have known me better than that,” I said. “Or Charley should—I suppose you know me from his memories. I wouldn’t leave him in danger just because he was getting on my nerves.”
“You’ve done it before,” Charley said. My stomach twisted, because I knew what he meant.
“Yes, I have,” I admitted. “And that’s why I’d never do it again. Where is he?”
I didn’t wait for the impostor to lie this time. I pushed my way past him, out into the corridor. “Charley!”
The corridors were lit only by the light spilling from Charley’s office. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I heard a faint sound in response.
“Very well.” The voice from behind me wasn’t quite my brother’s anymore. I turned around quickly, and the face wasn’t my brother’s either.
For the record, Uriah Heep is a very ugly character. He had a face like a skull—cadaverous, I think the Internet had said—and a skeletal body to match: tall, pale, thin, with red hair shaved far shorter than I’d thought the Victorians went in for, and reddish eyes without eyebrows or eyelashes. His jeans and sweatshirt had changed with him to a black tailcoat, funereal garb. His limbs twitched and writhed, apparently without his input; I thought, inexplicably, of the branches of the tree at the back of our childhood house. I was more interested in the knife in his hand. It was a modern box cutter, and he held it like a dagger in my direction.
“I should have known better, Master Robert,” he said, “than to think my umble self could fool a gentleman of your station and fine schooling. Do forgive me, won’t you, Master Robert? It was on account of my being so very umble and unworthy.”
“Don’t give me all that.” I mastered my shock, and hardened my tone. “I don’t even like Dickens. Where’s my brother?”
“Oh, you mustn’t think I’ve hurt Master Charles,” Uriah said, with a laugh like someone grating iron. His voice was honey and rusty nails. “No, no, someone in my umble position—”
“God, literary critics must have a field day with you,” I groaned.
I saw it then: a flash of hatred, right across his face. And then, all at once, the knife was at my throat, and I was against the wall of the corridor opposite, a bony hand on my shoulder holding me there. It was so quick, I didn’t even have a chance to flinch. The blade touched my neck; it stung, but didn’t cut. My heart was beating so loud and fast it filled my entire body.
“I never asked for this,” Uriah hissed. “I never asked to be poor, and ugly, and the villain of the piece. I never wanted to be obsequious, and insincere, and deadly. I never wanted to fall in love with a woman that was always destined for the hero of the novel.”
“I’m sure you didn’t,” I managed. It was my best attempt at conciliation. It might have been better to keep quiet. “But that’s not our fault.”
“Master Charley brought me out.” His face, inches from mine, melted from the shadows. “And now he wants to put me back in. In my place. Just as everybody’s done, all my life. Well, I won’t go, do you hear me? I won’t. This world out here—it hasn’t been written yet. For all I know, I can write it for myself. I don’t have to do what the story says. I can do whatever I want.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. “You’ve got a lot to learn abou
t the world out here, don’t you?”
The blade dug deeper. A thin drop of blood was suddenly warm on my throat, like a shaving cut. Whatever Charley had managed to do to Uriah Heep, he was no longer merely a nasty Victorian with no eyelashes.
“Look, fine.” I tried to speak very carefully, without my voice trembling. “Go, if you want. Just tell me where my brother is.”
“Why should you care? I’ve seen you, you know, in his memories. You don’t like him. You wish he’d never come here.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Yes, it is.” Uriah shook his ugly head. “You’ll be better off without him anyway, with what’s coming. He’s going to be right at the heart of it. Stay out of it, keep your head down, and don’t look too closely at what’s going on, that’s my umble suggestion, Master Robert.”
Curiosity momentarily overcame my fear. I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said, Master Robert. You stay out of it. It don’t concern you. And you won’t want it to.”
“What doesn’t concern me?”
“The new world,” he said. “There won’t be a place for you in the new world.”
Down the corridor, one of the doors burst open. I turned toward the sound on instinct before I had registered what it was. My brother came out.
It was definitely my brother this time. He was wearing the same clothes as the Uriah Heep version of him had been—maybe those were all the clothes of our world that thing had known well enough to copy. His hair was the same mess of curls in need of a haircut. But I had been right. He did look different. His face was softer, and less sure of itself, and his eyes lacked that touch of cunning I’d seen in the copy. I suppose in a Dickens novel evil is real, and it shines out.
He stopped short at the sight of us. The knife was still at my throat, even though Uriah Heep turned to look at him at the same time I had. Then he raised his head.
“Let him go.” His voice had that touch of an English accent I’d noticed at odd times since he returned from overseas. “I’m here now. It’s over.”
“With all due respect, Master Charley,” Uriah said, “you were here at the start. I tied you up and put you in a cupboard.”
“Well,” he said rather weakly. “I’m back again.”
I took a chance then. Uriah was looking the other way; even had he not been, my heart was now beating so fast I couldn’t have held still a moment longer. I grabbed Uriah’s wrist and wrenched the knife away from my throat.
Uriah lunged forward with a hiss. But I was prepared for his wiry strength this time, and adrenaline was flooding me with strength of my own. I kept a tight grip on his wrist, twisting it farther away from me; at the same time, I grabbed his other arm and clung on for grim life. It really was like holding a writhing skeleton. His bones stood out through his clothes, and his unearthly wail was that of a specter. The knife clattered to the floor.
“Now!” I snapped. “Put him back!”
“No!” Uriah cried. There was hatred there—seething hatred—but also real despair. It made me feel sick, despite myself. “You have no idea what it’s like in that book. They always win. They all hate me and I hate them and they always win!”
“I know,” Charley said. He sounded unhappy too. “I’m truly sorry.”
He reached out and touched Uriah on the shoulder, and deep concentration swept over his face. And suddenly my hands were closed around nothing at all. There was a flare of light, and between one heartbeat and the next Uriah Heep had vanished. His screams lingered even after the sound of them had faded, like the smell of Victorian smoke and fog still clinging to the air.
Lydia was right. I really did need to start letting Charley sort these things out for himself.
if you enjoyed
GRAVE IMPORTANCE
look out for
THE DEVIL YOU KNOW
Felix Castor: Book One
by
Mike Carey
Felix Castor is a freelance exorcist, and London is his stomping ground. The supernatural world is in upheaval and spilling over into the mundane reality of the living, and his skills have never been more in demand. A good exorcist can charge what he likes—and enjoy a hell of a lifestyle—but there’s a risk: Sooner or later he’s going to run into a spirit that he can’t handle.
After a year spent in “retirement,” Castor is reluctantly drawn back to the life he rejected and accepts what should be a simple exorcism case—just to pay the bills. Trouble is, the more he discovers about the ghost, the more things don’t add up. This new case is rapidly turning into the “Who Can Kill Castor First Show,” with demons, were-beings, ghosts, and a ruthless East End gang boss all keen to claim the big prize.
But that’s business as usual; Castor knows how to deal with the dead. It’s the living who piss him off.
CHAPTER ONE
Normally I wear a czarist army greatcoat—the kind that sometimes gets called a paletot—with pockets sewn in for my tin whistle, my notebook, a dagger, and a chalice. Today I’d gone for a green tuxedo with a fake wilting flower in the buttonhole, pink patent-leather shoes, and a painted-on mustache in the style of Groucho Marx. From Bunhill Fields in the east, I rode out across London—the place of my strength. I have to admit, though, that “strong” wasn’t exactly how I was feeling; when you look like a pistachio-ice-cream sundae, it’s no easy thing to hang tough.
The economic geography of London has changed a lot in the last few years, but Hampstead is always Hampstead. And on this cold November afternoon, atoning for sins I couldn’t even count and probably looking about as cheerful as a tricoteuse being told that the day’s executions have been canceled due to bad weather, Hampstead was where I was headed.
Number 17, Grosvenor Terrace, to be more precise: an unassuming little early Victorian masterpiece knocked off by Sir Charles Barry in his lunch hours while he was doing the Reform Club. It’s in the books, like it or not; the great man would moonlight for a grand in hand and borrow his materials from whatever else he was doing at the time. You can find his illegitimate architectural progeny everywhere from Ladbroke Grove to Highgate, and they always give you that same uneasy feeling of déjà vu, like seeing the milkman’s nose on your own firstborn.
I parked the car far enough away from the door to avoid any potential embarrassment to the household I was here to visit and managed the last hundred yards or so burdened with four suitcases full of highly specialized equipment. The doorbell made a severe, functional buzzing sound like a dentist’s drill sliding off recalcitrant enamel. While I waited for a response, I checked out the rowan twig nailed up to the right of the porch. Black and white and red strings had been tied to it in the prescribed order, but still… a rowan twig in November wouldn’t have much juice left in it. I concluded that this must be a quiet neighborhood.
The man who opened the door to me was presumably James Dodson, the birthday boy’s father. I took a strong dislike to him right then to save time and effort later. He was a solid-looking man, not big but hard-packed, gray eyes like two ball bearings, salt-and-pepper hair adding its own echoes to the gray. In his forties, but probably as fit and trim now as he had been two decades ago. Clearly, this was a man who recognized the importance of good diet, regular exercise, and unremitting moral superiority. Pen had said he was a cop—chief constable in waiting, working out of Agar Street as one of the midwives to the government’s new Serious Organized Crime Agency. I think I would have guessed either a cop or a priest, and most priests gratefully let themselves go long before they hit forty; that’s one of the perks of having a higher calling.
“You’re the entertainer,” Dodson said, as you might say “You’re a motherless piece of scum and you raped my dog.” He didn’t make a move to help me with the cases, which I was carrying two of in each hand.
“Felix Castor,” I agreed, my face set in an unentertaining deadpan. “I roll the blues away.”
He nodded noncommittally and opened the door wider to let me in.
“The living room,” he said, pointing. “There’ll be rather more children than we originally said. I hope that’s okay.”
“The more the merrier,” I answered over my shoulder, walking on through. I sized the living room up with what I hoped looked like a professional eye, but it was just a room to me. “This is fine. Everything I need. Great.”
“We were going to send Sebastian over to his father’s, but the bloody man had some sort of work crisis on,” Dodson explained from behind me. “Which makes one more. And a few extra friends…”
“Sebastian?” I inquired. Throwing out questions like that is a reflex with me, whether I want answers or not; it comes from the work I do. I mean, the work I used to do. Sometimes do. Can live without doing.
“Peter’s stepbrother. He’s from Barbara’s previous marriage, just as Peter is from mine. They get along very well.”
“Of course.” I nodded solemnly, as if checking out the soundness of the familial support network was something I always did before I started in on the magic tricks and the wacky slapstick. Peter was the birthday boy—just turned fourteen. Too old, probably, for clowns and conjurors and parties of the cake-and-ice-cream variety. But then, that wasn’t my call to make. They also serve those who only pull endless strings of colored ribbon out of a baked-bean tin.
“I’ll leave you to set up, then,” Dodson said, sounding dubious. “Please don’t move any of the furniture without checking with me or Barbara first. And if you’re setting up anything on the parquet that might scratch, ask us for pads.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And mine’s a beer whenever you’re having one yourself. The term ‘beer’ should not be taken to include the subset ‘lager.’”