The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  “Oh,” Charley said. He looked surprised, but pleased. “Yes, of course. Whenever you want.”

  “Not this weekend, though,” I added. “Because Lydia’s visiting her sister tomorrow, and I’ll probably have work to do.”

  “No,” he said quickly. “No, of course not. I’ll probably be working too. But sometime.”

  I wondered, not for the first time, why I always felt the need to punish my brother for being too willing to come when I called.

  The Left Bank Arcade is just a collection of redbrick and wooden shops off Cuba Street: an overflowing bookstore, a wool shop, a jeweler, a couple of arty designer clothes shops, and one or two restaurants. Lydia thinks it’s ramshackle and charming. I don’t think about it very much at all. At this time of evening, the shops had just closed, and it was more or less deserted.

  “What are you expecting to find?” I said as Charley stepped forward and looked around. “The Artful Dodger having dinner at the Mexican place?”

  “I still think I saw some version of the Artful Dodger buying muffins around the corner,” Charley reminded me. For someone who deals with metaphors for a living, he can be very literal. “And we did spend yesterday evening with the Hound of the Baskervilles. But no. Mr. Holmes said it was an impossible street.”

  “There are no streets here,” I said. “It’s just a square.”

  “He said past the bookshop.”

  “The bookshop’s closed. It’s all closed.”

  “Well, we’re not trying to buy a book, Rob,” Charley said patiently.

  I hate it when my younger brother speaks to me as if I have the IQ of a cabbage. Even now, it freezes my brain completely. He knows this, of course. It’s the closest he ever comes to picking a fight with me.

  Charley wasn’t capable of letting me feel condescended to for more than a minute. “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” he said, by way of apology. “Except that it must be here, somewhere.”

  “I thought you felt you were being pulled here.”

  “It’s only a tug, not a map reference. And I’ve been resisting it for so long. It’s hard to suddenly start to listen. What’s that?”

  I looked at where he was nodding. “That? What do you mean, what is it? It’s the alley. Have you really never seen it before?”

  “I’ve tried to avoid this place, remember? Even the bookshop. It felt dangerous. What is it?”

  I had actually never thought about what the alley was. I had no idea if that was the name for it. It wasn’t strictly an alley, but I’d never called it anything. It’s just a short tunnel through two buildings. The question threw me, because I was so clearly expected to know more.

  “It’s just leftover space,” I hazarded. “It connects the Left Bank Arcade with Victoria Street. People cut through it to get to Cuba Street, if they’re coming from that direction. Sometimes homeless people sleep there.”

  This was a description, not a definition, but Charley didn’t seem to notice. “Can we look at it?”

  I laughed. “I can’t imagine anyone would stop us.”

  Entering the alley is a plunge from shabby, sunny courtyard to urban grime. The roar and swish of cars from the road and the low thrum of a generator fill the space. Pipes snake overhead, and the walls on either side are awash with graffiti. It’s not a very literary location. My only memories of it involve being very drunk in first year, so my brain couldn’t help but supply vivid images of what exactly the sharp, sickly smell in the air might be.

  From the interest on his face, Charley was seeing something different. “It’s a liminal space,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A threshold. A gap between two places or states of being. Like the time between night and day, or a secret passage between the walls of a house.”

  “I know what liminal means,” I said, although I hadn’t heard that application of it. “Why does that matter?”

  “It probably doesn’t. I just like liminal spaces. They’re important in literature—in all branches of culture, really. But in story and folklore, they’re where the impossible happen. The spaces between.”

  “Pasifika culture has a concept called the va,” I said, despite myself. It was something we’d learned about in law school. “The space between two people, or cultures. Sort of an imaginary landscape, made up of the social, personal, and spiritual bonds that comprise the relationship.”

  “Really? I’ve never heard that before.”

  “That’s because you’re embarrassingly English. I wouldn’t believe you grew up here sometimes, except I was there.”

  “Well, it’s fascinating. So could you see conversation as navigating a liminal space?”

  I shrugged, already wishing I hadn’t spoken. “I suppose so. I think the only thing that happens in liminal spaces in modern cities is they collect rubbish.”

  The place was strewn with it, tied up in plastic supermarket bags. People seemed to be using the alley as their own personal dumping ground.

  “And homeless people, you said,” Charley reminded me. “Anthropologically speaking, ‘rubbish’ is just a word for material unwanted or out of place. Forgotten things that slip between the cracks. That’s what we’re looking for.”

  I had stopped listening. Something had caught my eye, between the gaps in the rubbish. I nudged one of the bags with my shoe.

  “What are you looking at?” Charley asked.

  “Nothing.” He waited, and I shrugged. “There’s an extension cord going through the wall here. There’s something odd about it. I don’t know what. I suppose there’s no reason it shouldn’t be here, except that I can’t tell where it’s going…”

  Charley crouched down beside it. I had wanted to do that myself, but had been too embarrassed. People did pass through here, sometimes.

  “Oh,” he said after a moment. His breath caught. “Oh, I see it.”

  “What do you see?”

  “There is something odd about this cable,” he said. “It’s going through the wall.”

  “Cables go through walls all the time.”

  “No, they don’t. Cables go through holes in walls.”

  I felt a chill. Because he was right, by a pedantic twist of grammar. There was no hole in this wall. There wasn’t even a kink in the plastic where the cable entered the wall. That was what looked so odd. The cable slipped through brick as though it wasn’t there.

  “It is there, though,” I said as if someone had argued otherwise. I touched the wall above it, leaning over the rubbish bags, and felt it rough beneath my palm. I hit the surface hard, just to be sure, and my hand made a satisfying smack against the brick. “That’s a wall.”

  Charley stood slowly. “I know.” He reached out, and laid his hand against the wall.

  His hand went through it.

  He jerked it back immediately, at the same time as I made a convulsive movement forward. We stared at each other, and then at the wall. I tried to think of something to say.

  “That was strange,” Charley said, before I could.

  “It was.” I felt cold. “Is it—is that wall not real? Is it an illusion?”

  “No,” he said. “No, you were right before, it’s a real wall. I felt it, while my hand was passing through. The layer of paint over top, and the brick underneath. It’s just—it’s also a real door.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know.” He shook his hand, as you do to shake off pins and needles. “I think we’ve found it.”

  It wasn’t a street, at least not yet. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with literary characters, or books, or the Hound of the Baskervilles. But I didn’t argue. It was certainly impossible.

  Charley broke the silence. “I’m going through, if I can.”

  “You can’t. I mean—physically, you probably can, for all I know. But it would be stupid.”

  “I know.” He really did. His jaw was set the way it always used to when he was trying to be brave. “But I’ve tried
to avoid being stupid for two years. I think it’s better to do it now and get it over with. Do you want to try to come through as well?”

  “How? You saw—it doesn’t want me. It’s just you.”

  Story of my life, I thought. I didn’t mean it, but the metaphor was too neat not to think it.

  “Well, my clothes are going through,” Charley said. “Thank goodness. So it’s not just me, it’s things that are in contact with me. I think I could probably bring you through as well. If you hold on to me, and don’t let go. You would really have to not let go, though.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t.”

  Which meant that I had already made the decision, didn’t it? It would have been nice if my brain kept me informed.

  “Give me your hand,” I said. “Before I change my mind.”

  That made him smile, just a little. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. I should be trying to talk you out of it.”

  “You’d succeed. But I’d come back later. I know I would.”

  He held out his hand, and I took it. A breeze blew through the passage, stinging grit against my face. In the distance, a busker was playing a guitar; someone was laughing. The world had never been more real. I remembered, for no reason at all, that I was supposed to pick up bread on the way home.

  We went through the wall.

  VII

  I felt nothing. My vision went dark for a moment, as though I’d passed through a shadow; perhaps there was a tiny jolt, more emotional than physical. It seemed to take no time at all, and yet when my eyes cleared, it seemed as if a great deal of time had passed. The light was different: lower, quieter, more golden, more shadowed. The air was colder, and still. It even tasted different, pungent with smoke and fog.

  We stood in a long, narrow, crooked street; a Victorian street, or older, paved with cobblestones and flanked by teetering buildings. The lower stories of the buildings were old storefronts—a sweet shop, a saddlery, an umbrella shop—but the upper floors looked residential, with windows open and wash hanging out. Lampposts lined the side of the road, their glow hard to make out against the twilight. The air was hazy with fog.

  “Oh,” Charley said.

  I had to swallow a few times before I could speak. Fog and bewilderment caught in my throat. “This is completely…”

  “It’s beautiful.” His face, when I looked at it, was soft with wonder. “Don’t you think it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

  “It’s a very nice thing,” I said. “What is it? Is… are we in England?”

  I knew the answer before I spoke. England hadn’t looked like this in at least a hundred years. I’m not certain England had ever, quite, looked like this. It was a little too much like an illustration of Victorian London, complete with a sepia tone and a misty, unfinished look to the buildings stretching into the distance.

  “It’s not England,” Charley said, without taking his eyes from it. “I don’t know where it is. I think I’ve seen it before, someplace, or something very like it. Perhaps in a book.”

  “But this isn’t a book.” I resisted the urge to grab him. He was right there. I only felt that he was drifting away. “This is real. We came through the wall. And there’s a street back here. What looks like a street from a hundred and fifty years ago. This… you know this is not remotely normal, don’t you?”

  “No,” he said, but distractedly. “No, I think—”

  He stopped, and so did I. Doors were opening, and shutters on the windows above our heads.

  “Charley…”

  “I see them,” he replied.

  I saw them too. Figures were coming toward us out of the mist: a little old woman in a shawl, a little girl in a blue dress, a man in a red velvet cape with a sword at his side. A woman in a white leather jacket stalked toward us, at least seven feet tall, her stark white face and black hair both beautiful and terrible. Three men in breeches and cravats emerged from the same house as if in one movement, their classically handsome faces oddly identical. From the sidewalk, grinning and leering, was a young urchin that I knew, having seen the musical Oliver!, must be the Artful Dodger. And those were the ones who were remotely human. One man passed the nearby lamppost, and I recoiled as the light fell on a face that was no face, only a blank, featureless white globe, curved like an eggshell or thin porcelain.

  Of these, one stepped forward.

  From the first glance, I knew he wasn’t real. He was a figment, the kind Charley pulled from books, larger than life and more vivid. His rugged, swarthy features had the air of something elemental, half-animal and exotic. Still, he might have passed for an unusually well-built man, if it hadn’t been for his eyes. Under the bristling black brows, they burned—literally burned—with flickering black flame. Something like that is hard to ignore.

  Charley frowned, then his face cleared. “Heathcliff,” he said, with something like awe.

  I recognized the name, though I’d never read Wuthering Heights and knew nothing about its antihero save that he was a bit of a lunatic. Through my unease, I felt a thrill. It was only the third time I knew we were certainly standing in the presence of someone else’s reading.

  “What can you mean by this?” the figment demanded. His extraordinary eyes flared. “Why have you come here?”

  As usual when Charley is confronted, his assurance faltered. Some of the exultation died from his face. “I—we came through the wall.”

  “Of course you came through the wall! And for what purpose did you come through the wall? You have the look of no fictional characters I have ever read. Explain yourselves!”

  I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir, because I’m not myself, you see. God knows where that quote came from, or why I had it in my head.

  “We’re not,” Charley answered. He was growing nervous, which never boded well for his ability to explain anything. “Fictional. I mean—we just—”

  The man took a step closer to him. “How dare you enter this place? Speak!”

  “Hey!” Somehow, I found myself moving between them. Anger of my own had flared in my chest. “Back off.”

  The man’s hand flashed into his coat pocket, and suddenly I was looking down the barrel of a pistol. Not just a pistol. On either side of the barrel were two long, spring-loaded blades. My heart jumped.

  “Heathcliff!” one of the strangely identical men called from the door. His voice was deep and resonant, and could have come from the BBC; so, for all its anger, could Heathcliff’s. “Have some decorum, man, for pity’s sake.”

  “Pity!” the man snorted. “I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething; and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain.”

  This, by the way, was the book Charley read cover to cover three times one summer holiday at the beach, when he was eight. Sometimes, I’m amazed he turned out as well as he did.

  I took advantage of Heathcliff’s distraction, and grabbed at the barrel of the gun. I don’t know what I was thinking. Perhaps I meant to wrench it from his hand, but if so I only knocked it sideways. The explosion of the gunshot was so loud it shook every nerve in my body. The spring of the knife blades rebounded; Heathcliff let out a snarl of pain as a line of blood streaked across the back of his hand. The pistol scuttered through the air and across the cobbles.

  He looked at me then with real rage on his face. His teeth bared.

  “Charley,” I said without looking behind me. “Get out of here. Now.”

  “Not without you.”

  “Of course not. I’m coming with you. Just—”

  And then Heathcliff reached for the lamppost next to him, tore it from the earth, and brought it down toward my head.

  I should have been used to things like this. There are no rules to what a fictional character may or may not be able to do, given the right reading. But this was so unexpected, so completely insane, that I almost didn’t duck out of
the way. When I did, it was a split second too slow. I felt the edge of the iron catch my temple—glance it, really, but a glancing blow from an entire lamppost wielded by an enraged Victorian antihero is pretty significant. Pain exploded in my head; I stumbled, and hit the ground hard. My vision flickered, and red dots danced in my eyes.

  “Stop!”

  It was a female voice: clipped, English accented, and ringing with authority. “Heathcliff, you put that lamppost down this instant! You know how difficult those are to come by.”

  The man glowered, his eyes burning. Then, to my astonishment, he lowered the lamppost. I stayed tensed.

  “These two came through the wall,” he said. “They could offer no explanation. Their souls have no calling to this street of—”

  “Oh, do shut up, there’s a good chap.” The owner of the voice stepped forward out of the fog.

  From the sound, I’d expected someone old-fashioned, out of an Edwardian novel: her voice had same the precise, period-drama ring of the others. She was a perfectly ordinary woman, about my age, the sort of young professional you’d see on Lambton Quay any day of the week. She wore a well-cut gray suit with a long coat and scarf, her dark hair was twisted neatly at the back of her head, and her makeup was perfectly applied. (Trust me, you don’t live with Lydia for four years and not know more about makeup than you want to.) The only odd thing about her was the way she strode across the cobbles to the giant named Heathcliff and folded her arms.

  “You know I keep telling you not to attack anything that moves,” she said. “This is why we don’t let you out of the Street. It’s like when you started throwing knives in the supermarket.”

  “It’s not like the supermarket!” he protested. “They’ve intruded! They came through the wall and couldn’t explain why they were here.”

  “Heathcliff does have a point”—one of the identical men spoke up—“alongside his collection of misanthropic Byronic neuroses. The newcomers might be dangerous.”

  “They’re not,” she said. “I know these fellows. They’re quite harmless. Where’s your knife-gun, Heathcliff?”