The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  “Well, they all stopped trying to kill us when you arrived,” I said. “I’d put you in charge. You talk down men with lampposts. And knife-guns.”

  “Look, will you dry up about that? Honestly. I’m not in charge here. I was just coming home from work when I saw you two idiots about to get beaten to a pulp by a Brontë hero. I knew you at once, of course,” she added, glancing at Charley. “You haven’t changed that much.”

  “Are there more summoners then?” Charley asked. “Is that what you call them? There must be more; all these people have to come from somewhere…”

  “Not in the way you think,” Millie said. “Actually, apart from me, all these people are one-offs. From what we’ve been able to gather, every once in a while, completely ordinary people seem to just read us into existence. They always have, it seems, since stories began—we have a Lancelot out there from the fifteenth century, though he’s a rarity. Perhaps everyone has mild versions of your abilities, perhaps it’s just what happens when the stars align and somebody has a pure, perfect moment of connection with a story. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, if that. The reader never realizes they’ve done it; the character never appears right in the room, as I did with you. They take longer to struggle through into the world. But you—you can bring people out whenever you want—sometimes even when you don’t want. That’s right, isn’t it? It’s from your head when you were six.”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  “That must be why you could come through the wall, of course. It’s usually only fictional characters who can get through. Everyone else just hits brick.”

  “That’s what happened with Rob, until I pulled him through.”

  I interrupted then. Things were getting out of hand. “So this is where it’s all coming from then? The new world the first Uriah Heep warned us about? The Artful Dodger, or whoever it was, on Cuba Street? And the fire-breathing Hound of the Baskervilles last night, that was meant to kill us? It’s all part of this street you’re not running too?”

  Millie looked at me with a frown. “What are you talking about? The Artful, yes. He lives two doors down, above the Old Curiosity Shop. He goes out for food quite often—I expect you did see him on Cuba Street. But we certainly don’t have a Hound of the Baskervilles, fire breathing or otherwise. Are you saying someone sent one after you?”

  “Well, it showed up on my doorstep last night,” Charley said. “I suppose someone must have sent it.”

  “It didn’t come from here,” Millie said positively. “And I don’t know anything about Uriah Heep. Did you say more than one of them?”

  “I summoned one,” Charley said. “He warned us that a new world was coming. And then another Uriah Heep showed up at Rob’s work.”

  “He didn’t come from here either.” She stood. The couch bounced again. “But I think we may both be looking for the same person. And I think we need to talk to Dorian Gray.”

  I had no chance to ask. Because at that moment, the Street moved.

  X

  Wellington is on a fault line. I’ve been here through two or three major earthquakes, and I’m used to the idea that the ground is a living thing that will arch and flex on a whim. I had never felt anything like this. The ground did indeed flex, but so did the walls, the ceiling, the sky outside. Reality rippled about us. I clutched the arm of the couch on instinct, and it warped between my fingers like modeling clay.

  As quickly as it had started, the world settled back, grumbling and creaking as it did so. I sat there, shocked.

  “It’s all right.” Millie jumped to her feet. “It often happens about this time.”

  “What does?” I demanded. “What was that?”

  “That shouldn’t be able to happen at any time.” Charley sounded as bewildered as I felt. “It was as though someone…”

  “Don’t say that too loudly, whatever you do,” Millie interrupted. She was already pulling on a lace-up boot from beside the door, one hand on the wall for balance. “Blast. Hurry up. It will be bedlam out there.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked. I found myself standing without waiting for an answer. Millie had that effect.

  “Where I said we were going,” she said. “That hasn’t changed. But I need to reassure the others first. They’ll be all out of sorts.”

  “Reassure them of what?”

  “Oh, you know,” she said. “Everything’s perfectly all right, that sort of thing.”

  “And is it?” Charley asked.

  “Of course not,” she snorted. “If it were, they wouldn’t need me to tell them.”

  It was a motley gathering, as you’d expect. I recognized Heathcliff; his knife-gun was back in his belt. The Artful Dodger was hanging on the fringes, grinning that irritating grin. All of them were clustered at the far end of the Street, a short distance from where the end of their reality was marked by another solid redbrick wall.

  “All right, everyone?” Millie called as we approached. “What was the damage that time?”

  “There’s a new house,” the Artful said. “Right there, by the far wall. Nice digs, actually, from what I can see. Not that you’ll catch me going in.”

  “It’s happening more often now, isn’t it?” a man said. I could have sworn it was the Duke of Wellington. “That’s three times in the last week.”

  “Nobody was hurt, though?” Millie checked. “We only grew; nothing disappeared?”

  An elderly woman in a gray dress and bonnet spoke up hesitantly. “The wallpaper changed in my parlor.”

  “What a frightful nuisance, Miss Matty,” Millie said sympathetically, though I saw a flash of real worry across her face. “When you’ve just bought new cushions. Still, not the end of the world. Anyone else?”

  A new voice, male this time. “Miss Radcliffe-Dix!”

  Edging their way to the front of the group were three gentlemen who seemed to move as one, clothed in an assortment of breeches and cravats. They were the ones I’d seen looking from the door; one of them had called out when Heathcliff pulled the pistol. Their faces were more different than I’d thought, but all looked proud, disdainful, and distractingly handsome.

  “These are the Mr. Darcys,” Millie said to us. “Or three of them. Darcys, Charley and Rob Sutherland. Charley, Rob, these are Darcys One, Two, and Four. Five is probably at the pool, and Three is probably at the library. They share Number 6, two doors down.”

  “Why are there five of them?” I asked.

  “Oh, trust me,” Millie said drily. “They turn up on a fairly regular basis. If there was ever a character designed for a reader to have a moment of perfect connection, it’s Mr. Darcy. Darcy One comes from the turn of the eighteenth century, but most of them are just from the last few decades. There was a spate of them in the late nineties, apparently… Everything’s quite under control, One,” she added. “I’m taking them to visit Dorian. I say, everyone, be good sports and go back to your lives, will you? The crisis is over. These chaps are perfectly harmless.”

  Millie’s language, I’d noticed, grew even more archaic when she was talking to fictional characters.

  “But how came they to be here?” Darcy One asked. “So close to this new shift? I must insist upon being told. I have not the talent which some people possess of surrendering a situation to the management of others.”

  “They have nothing to do with the shift,” Millie said firmly. “From the sounds of things, they saw the Artful shopping. If you want to be bad-tempered at someone, be bad-tempered at him.”

  The Darcys found this suggestion perfectly acceptable. They all turned away from us and toward the Artful Dodger.

  “Oh, give over,” the Artful sighed, apparently unconcerned. “You don’t like it, you pick up your own morning paper tomorrow, all right? I’ll be more careful next time.”

  “Next time means nothing to me,” Darcy One said warningly. “My good opinion once lost is lost forever.”

  Millie tactfully maneuvered us past the crowd, back the way Charle
y and I had come, toward the wall that had brought us here. It was unnerving to see it from this side, solid and impenetrable as it had looked from the alley in the Left Bank Arcade. There was no trace of anything resembling my own city, or even my own country. The sky above my head was dark blue, and the stars coming out were unfamiliar.

  “They’ll calm down now,” she said to us, with a nod back at the crowd. “Sorry about that. The Darcys are excellent sorts, really. They just like to explain their own character rather a lot.”

  “Oh God, is that ever true,” Charley sighed, with feeling.

  “Sorry about the lie too—or the sort-of lie, since you did see the Artful, after all. I just don’t want them to know too much about what you are.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What just happened? Where are we going?”

  I hoped we were going back home. I strongly suspected we weren’t.

  “I told you,” Millie said. “I’m taking you to Dorian Gray.”

  “Dorian—as in The Picture of Dorian Gray? The one whose portrait ages instead of him?”

  “It doesn’t just age,” Charley said, without much attention. He was too busy looking about him. “It’s his soul. As he grows morally corrupt, the marks of it show on the painting, but not on his face. He looks eternally young and innocent, while his portrait becomes more and more hideous. It’s ostensibly a morality tale.”

  “It’s jolly useful,” Millie said. “The condition for his being here is that I get to look at his portrait. If he’s doing anything wrong behind my back, I can spot his guilt on the painting in an instant. I know we get all sorts in this neighborhood, but we try to make our villains and antiheroes behave. Or I do, at least.”

  I didn’t dare point out that that sounded a lot like being in charge, to me.

  “And what just happened?” I asked instead. “The Street growing, or changing? What was that about?”

  “In a minute. Wait for Dorian.”

  We had stopped at the crooked house nearest the wall, and Millie was in the act of knocking, when she stopped suddenly. She turned to us, and lowered her voice. “Listen—what I told you just now goes twice for Dorian Gray. Do not let him know what you are, Charley, or what you can do. It could be very dangerous.”

  “What could he do?” I asked.

  She snorted. “He’s Dorian Gray. Whatever he wants. But, most dangerously, he could be afraid.”

  Charley nodded, as if that made perfect sense to him. “Don’t worry. I’m used to hiding things.”

  “I thought you might be,” she said.

  If the Darcys were all handsome, Dorian Gray was beautiful enough to be downright creepy. His perfect features looked carved of marble; his hair was spun gold; his eyes, when they fell on us, were so wide and blue that I felt something in me falling into them. I looked away quickly, inexplicably shaken.

  “Oh, yes,” Charley said to me quietly, as an afterthought. “Watch he doesn’t absorb your whole nature and your whole soul and your very art itself.”

  “What on earth does that mean?” I muttered.

  “I don’t really know,” Charley said, almost cheerfully. “But it might have meant something to whoever dreamed him up. Maybe just don’t look him in the eyes?”

  “Now you tell me,” I said.

  The room we’d entered was dark and cobwebbed, at the top of a twisted staircase as Victorian as an illustration in an old book. Given that, I should have been most surprised by the presence of a laptop, its screen surrounded by flickering candles. But I had seen laptops before. I trusted laptops. I didn’t trust living, breathing personifications of Victorian morality tales.

  When I risked a second look, Dorian Gray was stretching in his computer chair. He let the stretch carry him to his feet, with the grace of a young lion. I didn’t like him.

  “Another shift,” he observed to Millie, by way of greeting. I don’t need to explain how perfectly musical his voice was, do I? “Quite a big one.”

  “Still no real damage,” Millie said. “If anything, the opposite: we’ve grown. And nobody really liked Miss Matty’s wallpaper. Dorian, this is Charley, and this is Rob.”

  “The two that caused such a commotion outside,” he said. “I know. I was watching from the window.”

  “They’re rather interested in your operation here.”

  “Are they?” Dorian yawned behind his hand. “Personally, I find it extremely tedious. Anything useful always is.”

  “And what makes your operation so useful?” I asked. I was determined not to be intimidated. I was intimidated, of course, by this whole situation, but that was what determination was for. “What are you doing? And why is there a computer?”

  It was an old Mac laptop, the glow of its screen completely incongruous in the dark-wallpapered study. The only other light came from the fire in the grate, and the candles burning on the table.

  “To his reader, Dorian Gray was an Internet predator,” Millie said. “A spider in a web, master of deception and blackmail, presenting a young, attractive front to the world yet really a gross, decrepit old sinner. I think it’s a bit of a stretch, personally, but it was the early 2000s. Paranoia about the World Wide Web was high. And it comes in useful for us, because it’s given him unparalleled computer skills. I should mention that this is the one working Internet connection in the Street. For obvious reasons, we don’t get Wi-Fi here. Or cell phone coverage.”

  “Or electricity,” Dorian said. “Those cables passing through the wall originate at the nearby knitwear shop. Please try not to disturb them. If I need to reset them from the shop, I usually need to purchase some kind of hideous jumper to justify my presence there, and that is something for which you do not wish to be responsible.”

  “You don’t have to wear it,” Millie pointed out.

  “The owners will picture me wearing it,” Dorian said with a shiver. “Even to be clothed so in their imaginations is a kind of taint.”

  “We saw that cable,” Charley said. “It was part of what led us here.”

  “Dorian’s job, first and foremost, is to keep us safe,” Millie said. “It’s a difficult world to hide in these days. He keeps us away from government databases, or keeps our records ordinary in government databases, depending on the case. He tucks us away from prying eyes. He also monitors the Internet for any signs of other characters making their way toward us. When people pop into being, sometimes with odd previously metaphorical quirks, they tend to show up in police databases or on news networks. Not always, but often. We try to get in touch with them, perhaps help them get to the Street if they want to come. We’ve flown them in from all over the world.”

  “I came from the States,” Dorian volunteered languidly. “But I managed my own plane ticket, of course. It’s easy when you’re as beautiful as me. One simply has to—”

  “We’re not really interested in your sordid adventures, Dorian,” Millie said. “I just want you to show them the pattern.”

  The pattern was a spreadsheet on the computer. We clustered around it as Dorian sat down and brought up a file. I had to move twice; apparently I was crowding the great master of Microsoft Excel, and then my shadow was.

  “I have a map as well,” Dorian said. “But this gives you the highlights.” He hit a few keys, and a series of graphs overlaid the screen. “This is the concentration of fictional characters living in Wellington in any given month—the green are confirmed, the purple suspected. As you can see, it’s peaked somewhat.”

  It had. To me, any number of fictional characters in Wellington was a surprise, but the numbers did seem alarming.

  “Most of these are the Street’s inhabitants,” Dorian said. “Or a few we know of who choose to live outside our borders, but are still in the area. Right now, this city has about double the known fictional population of the rest of the world combined. That’s all very natural.”

  “There are characters living outside the Street?” I interrupted. “You mean, in central Wellington?”

&
nbsp; “There are characters everywhere, Mr. Sutherland,” Dorian said with exaggerated patience. “London. Paris. Dublin. Alaska. Copenhagen. Small towns in Italy that nobody’s ever heard of. They don’t all choose to live in the Street, even if they can reach it. In Wellington, I’ll concede, they now tend to congregate here, but there are still many who are capable of blending into the outside world and desire a little more independence.”

  “Dr. Frankenstein works in the mortuary at Wellington Hospital,” Millie offered. “I don’t think we’d allow a lot of what he gets up to.”

  I didn’t ask.

  “The strange thing are these outliers,” Dorian continued. He waved a hand at the screen. “The ones we can’t track. And what’s strange about them is, I’ve tracked most of them through police databases, and that alone. And when I say police databases, they seem to be committing real crimes. Constructs tend to be flagged for loitering or homelessness or at most petty theft. Not bank robbery—which I saw last month. You would have seen it, too, on the news. Perpetrators disappeared into thin air.”

  “I work in criminal defense,” I said. “We would have noticed something like that. I’m fairly sure I’ve never defended a fictional character.” But it had been very busy, the last year or so, hadn’t it? I knew more than one police officer who’d remarked on the crime wave.

  “Could Wellington be some kind of—I don’t know, natural fault line for pulling things out of books?” I asked. I think I was remembering our earthquake safety talks at work. “The Street must have popped up here for some reason, after all.”

  “That might not have been an entirely stupid idea,” Dorian said, “if it weren’t for one little detail.”

  “They’re fluctuating,” Charley said. He was still looking at the screen. “The numbers are rising and falling from month to month. I’m terrible at statistics, but if Wellington were just more prone to manifestations, the numbers would be increasing steadily, wouldn’t they? Unless people are moving around—”

  “They aren’t,” Dorian said. “They’re disappearing. Or some of them are. One day, I’m able to track their movements; the next, they’ll seem to disappear off the face of the earth. In some cases, they never rematerialize. In others, though, they suddenly appear again, with no word or explanation, obvious and vivid as before. Now, where do they go in the intervening weeks?”