The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  “It fell in the gutter,” Heathcliff muttered.

  “What a shame. Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll find it again.” She turned to us, and looked us up and down. The confidence on her face slipped when her eyes fell on Charley, only briefly, then she pulled it back about her like a coat on a cold day. Her lips curved very slightly. “You can get up now, Rob. Nobody’s going to kill you.”

  “Yet,” Heathcliff said, with dark menace.

  I got to my feet awkwardly. My head was still spinning. “I don’t understand. How do you know us?”

  “He knows me too.” She looked at Charley. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes…” Charley said. He was staring at the woman in growing wonder. “Yes, I do. But you can’t—”

  “You’re Charles Sutherland,” she said. “And I’m Millie Radcliffe-Dix.”

  VIII

  I was there when Millie Radcliffe-Dix came out of her book, though until that moment I’d forgotten about it. It wasn’t anything unusual, by Charley’s standards.

  We shared a room in those days: Charley hated being alone in the dark. Well, maybe alone wouldn’t have been so bad, but we could never be quite sure that he was. When he was four, he came into my room three nights in a row because there was a monster in his wardrobe. Dad found it hiding on the fourth day. It was from Frankenstein, which he’d been strictly forbidden from reading before bed. I’m not sure why he couldn’t just put it back: I asked him about it a couple of years ago, and he could only vaguely remember the whole thing.

  “I think I didn’t have a strong enough conceptualization of what it was,” he said. “You have to understand where something fits before you can put it back. That, or I was just scared.”

  Our parents moved him into my room after that. I didn’t mind, not then. I kicked up a fuss when I turned thirteen, by which time he was eight and old enough not to conjure his worst nightmares—or at least to put them away himself without too much bother.

  At this point, I was ten and he had just turned six. We were doing our homework in our room in the evening, me at the desk, Charley stretched out on the floor. There was a brief flare of light, and I heard Charley say, “Oh!” rather quietly.

  I turned and saw a little girl, maybe my age or a little older, wearing a short green dress with green-and-black-striped stockings and a sturdy pair of boots. Her brown hair hung in curls about her face, which was mischievous and freckled. There was a tawny-haired monkey sitting on her shoulder. She wasn’t from around these parts.

  “Charley!” I complained. “What the heck?”

  “I’m sorry,” Charley said, but he didn’t sound entirely sorry. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “I should jolly well hope you did mean it,” the little girl said. She sounded older than her age, and very English. “I was about to be captured by a horde of smugglers.”

  “I know,” Charley said. “That’s where I was up to. And I think I did mean to pull you out. I sort of called out to you to look out in my head, and there you were.”

  “You were supposed to be doing your math assignment,” I said to him, rather self-righteously, considering I had been drawing pictures of dinosaurs on my own homework sheet. (Charley, thank God, never went through the dinosaur phase I did. I mean, can you imagine?)

  “I was going to,” he said. “I just wanted to finish the chapter.”

  “You could at least have been reading something good.” Again, this was a bit much coming from me, who at the time only read books about dinosaurs. “Not the umpteenth Millie Radcliffe-Dix Adventure.”

  “They are good,” he protested.

  “No, your brother’s right,” said the girl who was presumably Millie Radcliffe-Dix. “They’re awful trash. They’re formulaic, badly plotted, and entirely without literary merit.”

  “I don’t care,” Charley said complacently. “I like them. They’re like the books I used to read, when I was younger.”

  “You’re six,” I informed him.

  “You can be younger than six, Rob.” He winced as the monkey jumped across to his shoulder and tweaked his hair. “Ow.”

  Millie whistled, and the monkey leaped back into her arms.

  If you haven’t read them, The Adventures of Millie Radcliffe-Dix, Girl Detective are stories of an intrepid orphan, adopted by a wealthy family, who with her pet monkey Vernon battles pirates, smugglers, kidnappers, and thieves every summer. They were published by an obscure writer in the 1930s and ’40s; I have no idea why we had the full set on our shelves, but Charley was going through a phase of devouring them with the avidity he otherwise reserved for Dickens, Austen, and literary theory. I suppose I can’t blame him, given what he was being tutored in at the time. War and Peace has got to be a little dull for a six-year-old, whatever his IQ.

  “Well, put her back,” I warned. “Mum and Dad will go mad.”

  “Do I have to?” he pleaded.

  “Yeah, you have to. Don’t give me that look. It’s not my rule.”

  “I don’t want to go back,” Millie interrupted. She sat back on Charley’s bed, her curls bouncing around her face. “I was about to be taken by smugglers.”

  “It always works out by the end of the book,” Charley promised her.

  “I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “And then it starts all over again, summer after summer, with me never changing or getting a day older than eleven. Thanks awfully, but no. I think I’d rather stay here, and grow up and be an accountant or something.”

  “You’ve made a crazy person,” I said to Charley.

  He gave me a look that for him bordered on the irritated. “You can’t do that,” he explained to the girl. “It doesn’t happen. There isn’t an older version of you. I’ve read the last book. You just go back home and get commended by the police and have cake and ginger beer, same as always. Even if you did stay here, you wouldn’t grow up.”

  “Watch me,” she said.

  Vernon the monkey broke the stalemate then. He’d been sitting on Millie’s shoulder, his little beady eyes glancing around the room with interest; suddenly, without warning, he leaped through the air and onto the bookshelf. I made a grab for him, but my hand closed on empty air. All that happened was that my chair flew from under me as I got to my feet. He clambered up the shelves, then down onto the desk; fortunately, Charley had scrambled up off the floor and lunged to shut the half-open door before the monkey could get to it. Every once in a while, my brother was good in a crisis.

  “Catch it, quick!” I hissed at him. “And put it back! I don’t care how horrible it is!”

  He made an obedient attempt to snatch Vernon from the desk, and barely caught his tail. Vernon screeched, I saw a flash of teeth, and Charley jerked his hand back with a cry.

  “Ow!”

  I caught the monkey around the middle then, as if it were our old tabby cat. It hissed, and writhed, but I held on tight.

  “Quickly!” I ordered. Charley, after a second’s hesitation as he looked at the flailing limbs and bared teeth, reached out and laid his hand gently on the monkey’s back. I saw the brief, intense look of concentration flit across his face, and then I was holding nothing at all. All at once, the room seemed very quiet.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, and turned around. That was when I saw that Millie was gone too.

  “Hey,” I said. “Where is she? Did you put her back?”

  “I don’t know,” Charley said vaguely. As usual after he’d sent something back, he looked rather white; this time, he was shaking his hand and looking at it critically. “Vernon bit me.”

  “Charley…”

  “She might have gone back with Vernon,” he said. “I don’t know. They came out together; maybe they function as a metaphorical duality. My finger’s bleeding.”

  She wasn’t there anyway, so there was nothing else I could do but give it up. I sneaked Charley into the bathroom and put antiseptic on the bite on his hand, like Mum did with cuts and scratches, though looking back I suppose Vernon couldn’t have
had any diseases that weren’t written into the book. Then we went back and did our homework. I did wonder, when it started getting cold and I went to close the big window, but by then it was too late. I never saw Millie Radcliffe-Dix again after that, except on cover after cover of the books Charley left lying all over the house. I assumed she was back in those books, and Charley never summoned her again.

  IX

  It was an ordinary flat. Completely ordinary, exaggeratedly ordinary. It was neither overly large, nor the tiny shoebox that had been my first central Wellington flat. It was painted off-white, with a clock and a generic Monet print gracing the walls. It had a couch, and a dining table, and a little bench covered in photographs. It had a fireplace. For a flat overlooking a Dickensian nightmare street, it was trying far too hard.

  Millie sat down next to me on the couch, holding a cloth in one hand and a tube of antiseptic cream in the other. She was one of those people who make the couch bounce when they sit.

  “Here,” she said, handing me the cloth. “There’s no electricity here, so no ice pack. But I’ve got it nice and cold for you from the well in the pub courtyard. I’ll just put this ointment on the cut, then you can hold that to it for a while, and you’ll feel good as new. Well, that’s a lie, but you might not be too unsightly tomorrow. Don’t worry, I’m rather good at first aid.”

  I felt the coolness of her hands as she dabbed cream over my eyebrow, and then the sting.

  I had read Millie Radcliffe-Dix’s adventures, though not for a long time. “Millie was an adventurous little girl,” the narration would begin. “She had a tall, lanky body, and her corkscrew curls tumbled about her shoulders when she played with her monkey, Vernon. If Millie liked you, she was a kind and loyal friend. But if you were cruel or cowardly, then watch out! For Millie had a fierce temper, and she could not stand to see a wrong done.”

  The adventurous little girl now had to be thirty or so, if my memory served me. I could see traces of her still in the determined chin, the arched eyebrows, the direct gaze of her chocolate-brown eyes. But she was no longer tall or lanky. If anything, she was tending toward short, and comfortably plump. There was no sign of a pet monkey, and any curls were pinned tightly under control. The woman I was seeing was a force of nature: a hurricane that pats you on the back sympathetically as it blows you over. She wasn’t real—I’d seen her come out of a book, or Charley’s head, or both. And yet somehow, impossibly, she’d grown up.

  “Awfully sorry about Heathcliff,” Millie said. “He’s not really a very stable manifestation. We think he’s a postcolonial reading—or perhaps he just misses the fictional moors. Either way, he’s certainly very angry all the time. And they’re all on edge at the moment, with everything that’s been going on.”

  “That’s all right,” I said lamely. The rush of adrenaline from facing Heathcliff was starting to hit me. I was shaking, and hoped the other two hadn’t noticed. Her words caught up to me a moment later. “What’s been going on?”

  “Where did this place come from?” Charley asked from the window seat. He was barely able to tear his eyes from the scene outside. I couldn’t see anything from where I sat, but I could hear the sound of footsteps over the cobbles, and the murmur of voices rising from below. “Who made it? And who’s that helping Heathcliff pick up the lamppost?”

  “The White Witch,” Millie said, and I thought of the alarmingly tall woman in white leather. “She’s good with lampposts. I don’t know if anyone made the Street; none of us do. I wondered if you’d made it.”

  “No,” he said. “I wish I had. None of this comes from me—only you, I suppose, but that was a long time ago.”

  Millie shrugged. “Well, it’s jolly useful, and it’s ours now. What on earth are you two doing here?”

  Charley started to answer, but I interrupted.

  “Look, I’m sorry, but you can’t be Millie Radcliffe-Dix. You can’t be. She was a little girl—I saw her. And these things—the things my brother makes—don’t grow like human beings. Do they?” I turned to Charley for confirmation, but he only shrugged helplessly.

  “I—I don’t think so. I never kept one out of their books for long enough to see…”

  “I say, let’s go easy on the term ‘things,’ shall we?” Millie said it mildly, but I felt the sting. “The others don’t age, or none of them have so far, and we have some who are centuries old. But I do. I can’t explain that either. Perhaps I just wanted to. I mean to say—who wants an endless summer of adventures trapped in perpetual preadolescence?”

  “Who doesn’t?” I replied, though I didn’t really mean it. Eleven was hard enough the first time through.

  “So you did run away when I was distracted with Vernon,” Charley said. “I always thought something wasn’t right. When I put him back, something was missing. And—I think I’ve been feeling you in my head, all these years. I was too young to recognize the feeling, and after a while I got used to it. It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Vernon distracted you to let me get away.” Something like pain crossed her face. “He knew that I wasn’t going to be able to grow with him still there. So he distracted you, and I got out the window and ran.”

  “I’m sorry,” Charley said. He did look genuinely stricken. A metaphorical duality, Charley had said of Millie and Vernon back then. I think he’d made that term up—he was six—but I knew what he meant. “I could bring him out for you again, if you want. I still have your books.”

  Millie hesitated. “I’ll have to think about it,” she said. “It’s decent of you, but… I’m an accountant now. I don’t think an accountant with a monkey fits.”

  “You’re an accountant?” I said. Now that I looked at her, the smart hairstyle and suit definitely said city worker, but under the circumstances I hadn’t thought the implications of that through. “Seriously?”

  Her head whipped around to face me. “Yes, I’m an accountant! What’s so surprising about that?”

  “Well,” I said unwisely, “you live in a street that shouldn’t exist, and talk down men wielding lampposts.”

  “You also say things like ‘I say’ and ‘jolly good’ quite a lot, for an accountant,” Charley added. “Sorry, but you do.”

  “So what if I do?” Millie said. “I must say, you’re jolly lucky I do talk down men wielding lampposts, considering.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just meant—it’s not exactly normal accounting behavior.”

  “I am normal! I have a very good job downtown. I make a good living. I buy groceries and go on dates with nice men at the office and get my hair done. I am normal. I’m boring!”

  “Okay!” I raised my hands in surrender, and realized belatedly that the cloth she’d given me had soaked through the knee of my trousers. “I’m sorry. You’re clearly normal.”

  “But you do live here?” Charley asked. He seemed unfazed by Millie’s irritation. Perhaps she bites off people’s heads in the books all the time. (Metaphorically. I really hoped that had stayed metaphorical.) “I mean—full-time?”

  “I didn’t for a very long time.” Her flare of temper had cooled already. “It didn’t exist. The night I left your house, I started walking to the nearest city, and didn’t look back. I knew I couldn’t risk you all finding me in your tiny hometown, and besides, I’d never seen a real city. Can you imagine? All those adventures in farms and seasides and sweet little English country hamlets. Never cities. Doesn’t Jacqueline Blaine think that adventures happen in cities as well?”

  “I loved those stories,” Charley said, a little sadly.

  “A lot of people do,” Millie conceded. “I met a girl at one of my foster homes who just read the same one over and over again. It was like a talisman. That’s something to be rather proud of, I suppose. We can’t all be Finnegan’s Wake.”

  “Oh, don’t give him ideas,” I said, before I could stop myself. I have no clue what that thing was that came out of Charley’s reading of James Joyce, but I knew I didn’t want to meet it again.


  Charley wasn’t thinking about Joyce this time. “Foster homes?”

  “Well, it turns out that’s what happens to real children who wander about the country on their own having adventures,” Millie said. “And I was jolly lucky it was nothing worse. It wasn’t at all like in my books, when Vernon and I would just go off on our own and camp out for days on end over the summer holidays. The police picked me up on the streets after a concerned citizen called it in. Nobody could find who I was supposed to belong to, so I was placed in care. I grew up moved around from home to home. I went to school, I won a scholarship to university, I studied accounting. Money isn’t really an issue in Blaine books. I wanted to understand it. That, and have an ordinary life with a house and a mortgage, of course. Because I am in fact ordinary.”

  “No offense, but I doubt you have a mortgage on this street,” I pointed out. “I don’t think the bank would recognize the address.”

  I was a little worried she’d snap at me again, but she didn’t. She didn’t say anything at all for a while.

  “We don’t know where this street came from,” she said, at last. “Two years ago, we just suddenly felt it. Those of us pulled from books, all over the world—and I thought myself the only one of those at the time. I was working for an accounting firm in the South Island. I tried to ignore it, but I could feel it pulling me. I booked a flight over a weekend. It was one of those Wellington days when the rain and the wind pelt you so hard it’s difficult to tell which is which.”

  “Oh,” I said reflexively. “You mean March to September.”

  “I turned the corner, and here I was. A few of us were already here—one of the Darcys, and the Artful, and Miss Matty from Cranford. Poor thing, she’d been in the real world over a hundred years, most of them homeless since tea shops started needing paperwork and business acumen and things. More came later. I resigned my job, and found another here. I’ve been here ever since.”

  “Are you in charge?”

  “Why would you say that?” Her voice had a slight warning tone.