by H. G. Parry
“Why do I feel like I’m in a Millie Radcliffe-Dix Adventure?” Charley said, with a rather weak smile.
“Well, you asked for it when you brought me out all those years ago,” Millie said. She clapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Buck up, old thing. You’re doing very well.”
Charley came out as I was opening my car door. I had hoped he would, beneath my resentment; at least, I would have been yet more resentful had he not.
“Rob, wait,” he said. He glanced quickly back at the house as he drew near, and lowered his voice beneath the hearing of anyone inside. “Don’t be angry. You’re right that keeping Uriah out is dangerous; I know it is. But we need him. I meant what I said in there: we don’t have a choice.”
“You have a choice,” I corrected him. I lowered my own voice to match his, not because I cared what Uriah or Millie heard. “You can take what information he’ll give you here, put him back, and get whatever else you need some other way. This is a mistake.”
“Which part?”
“All of it. If you don’t want to listen to me as your brother, then listen to me as a lawyer. This is not a good deal. You’re letting Uriah Heep stay out in the world. You’ve never let a character stay in the world.”
“I have,” he said. “Millie Radcliffe-Dix.”
“She was a mistake too. A literal one: you never meant her to exist.”
“Tell that to her.”
I snorted. “No thanks.”
“Exactly.” He ran a hand through his hair. “It doesn’t matter if I meant her to exist or not. She does. I don’t have any rights to her. Uriah—he’s a person. Deal aside, if he really doesn’t want to go back, I’m not sure he’s mine to put back.”
“It doesn’t matter whose he is,” I said, and knew I was deliberately missing the point. “He’s dangerous. He knows more than he’s pretending, you know. I’m certain of that.”
“Probably,” Charley agreed.
“He needs to be put back. It’s still not too late, you know.”
“It is. I promised.”
“It doesn’t matter what you promised! He’s not even real.”
Charley laughed a little. “He’s pretty real, Rob.”
“He occupies physical space. That’s not the same thing.”
“Isn’t it? Besides,” he added, before I could reply, “deal or no deal, I couldn’t put him back now. You heard him: it’s death to him. It would be as bad as what he said the other summoner was doing—worse. But I do wish it wasn’t him, out of everyone I’ve ever brought out. He hates me.”
“He’s Uriah Heep,” I reminded him. “He hates everyone.”
“That’s true. But he really, truly hates me. And they don’t usually do that.”
I thought of those blood-colored eyes in the skull-like face, and the way they had fixed on Charley. Both times he had changed his appearance, it was Charley’s form he took. I didn’t know what that meant, if indeed it meant anything.
“I won’t tell Mum and Dad what you’re up to,” I said into the silence. “Not yet. I don’t want to worry them either. But you have to promise me that you won’t break into a building on the word of Uriah Heep.”
“Not just on his word,” Charley said. “We’ll check it out first.”
“I’m serious, Charley.”
“Do you really think I’m not? I’m more serious than I’ve ever been in my life, I promise. You don’t have to come with us—I won’t even ask you to. I just didn’t want you to feel—”
“What?” I asked, because he had, as usual, stopped without finishing.
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
I knew exactly what he meant. I should have told him it was fine. I didn’t. I wasn’t sure it was fine; and if it was, I didn’t want him to think so.
“You’d better go,” I said instead. “They’re waiting for you.”
I half wondered, or half hoped, that he wouldn’t leave. But he did, with only a fleeting glance in my direction to imply he was tempted to do anything else. Millie already had Uriah in the back of her car; Charley climbed in the front. They drove away in a trail of dust and gravel, leaving me behind.
I really needed to read David Copperfield.
Millie
Miss Matty’s house had gone, and in its place was a new alley. The Street had also grown a further three feet, enough to warrant a new lamppost and a length of wall, but it was the alley that was causing the stir. The Street had always been one length of road. It was crooked and crenelated, like the jagged edge of a key, but it was one road. Now there was a gaping hole in the line of buildings, as though a tooth had been knocked out. In its place, the new alley spidered from the pavement. It looked to be reaching for something beyond.
There was already a crowd clustered about the entrance, but not so large a crowd as Millie had been expecting—only four, in fact. It seemed that most of the Street had decided to stay well away. That was troubling. More troubling yet was the fact that of the four that had ventured out, one of them was Dorian, who rarely bothered to venture anywhere at all.
The truth was, Millie liked Dorian Gray. She knew she shouldn’t. He wasn’t quite a villain, more of an antihero or a didactic exercise, but he certainly wasn’t a decent sort. She had his painting, hidden in the back of her wardrobe and scrutinized regularly, to remind her of that: the bloated, pallid face, the cruel mouth, the wrinkled hand stained with blood. He didn’t fool her. But he was interesting. More than that, he was intelligent, funny, and challenging. Many of the characters who inhabited the Street were more hindrance than help in keeping things safe. Between Heathcliff and his propensity for vengeful brooding and knife-guns, the Artful with his overdeveloped sense of mischief, and the Darcys… well, who were the Darcys… most of them were really a jolly nuisance. Dorian was helpful. He found characters lost in the world, and helped get them to the Street. He protected them from discovery by the outside world. He could defuse irate situations with a drawling observation, usually because the situations bored him. She liked talking to him.
Sometimes, though, he could be trouble. Real trouble, not the sort that could be soothed or argued away like the trouble the others gave. When she and Charley approached with Uriah Heep, she could see it glint in his eyes immediately.
“Hello, chaps,” Millie announced. Beside Dorian, Heathcliff brooded conscientiously, his diabolic face aflame. The White Witch stood beside him. They made an intimidating couple: one dark, one white as chalk, both tall, both stunningly beautiful, both able to break a person in half. Darcy Three was also present—the quiet, practical Darcy, whom Millie secretly thought of as the attractive one. (Dorian and Lady Macbeth both favored Five, but Millie thought him a little too reserved, and inclined to jump, un-Austen-like, in large bodies of water.)
“Hello,” Dorian replied lazily. He cast a glance at Charley. “Dr. Sutherland. You’ve returned, have you? I wondered where our Millie was going this morning.”
“I have,” Charley replied evenly. He seemed to pick up on the implied threat as well as Millie; but then, of course, while he had only a passing acquaintance with this Dorian, he probably knew Oscar Wilde as well as anybody.
“What’s going on here?” Millie asked. “You said on the phone that nobody was hurt.”
“We lost a house,” Dorian said. “Only Miss Matty’s, though, which was rather an eyesore. Nobody liked the new wallpaper any better than the old.”
“Miss Matty is quite well,” Darcy Three said, before Millie’s heart could seize. “She was at the Mad Hatter’s at the time, discussing their tea shop. She is much distressed, naturally.”
“I should say so,” Millie said. She recovered equilibrium quickly. “What happened to the house?”
“The house disappeared to make room for this,” the Witch said, with something approaching disdain. She waved a hand at the new alley. It looked back, shadowed and implacable, disclosing nothing.
“How?” Charley asked. “Where did it go?”
Heat
hcliff glowered at him. “It was swallowed up by cobblestones as a sinking ship is swallowed by the sea. Anyone within it would have gone too.”
“Something must be done about it,” Darcy said. “This cannot continue.”
“We are doing something about it,” Millie said. “By the way, this is Uriah Heep.”
The others turned to look at him. There was a moment’s silence as they took him in.
“Ugh,” the Witch said flatly.
This was fitting, of course, but Millie felt obliged to give them all a stern look. “He’s going to be staying with us, at least for a time. Do we have anyone that could keep an eye on him?”
“There are spare houses,” Dorian said. “Those rooms over the saddler’s, for one. Nobody wants them, because they smell of horses where there are no horses.”
“Oh, I think Uriah would like to share with someone responsible, someone able to counteract any mischief he may otherwise feel tempted to cause,” she said. “Wouldn’t you, Uriah?”
“I am happy to be placed wherever is most convenient, dear lady,” Uriah said fawningly. This time, Millie didn’t censure Heathcliff’s snort of disgust.
“We could keep him confined in our apartment,” Darcy Three said unexpectedly. He was regarding Uriah with a look of calm, measured disapproval. As always, a single strand of hair fell in his eyes. Millie, as always, longed to flick it back, which was its precise function. All the Darcys had it; even One, who was born long before film adaptations and really should have known better. “There are five of us, all surprisingly strong and healthy given the drinking habits of an average Georgian aristocrat. Somebody is usually at home, and would be more than capable of impeding any mischief on behalf of this… person.”
“I say, would you?” Millie exclaimed, with both surprise and relief. The Darcys were not known for their civic duty. “That’s frightfully decent of you. Are you sure the others wouldn’t mind?”
“I’m quite certain they will. But they owe me a favor. I’m still the only one of us who ever learned to cook.”
“There you go, then, Uriah.” Millie almost put a hand on his shoulder, but couldn’t quite bring herself to touch him. “What do you say to that?”
“An honor, I’m sure,” Uriah said. “To be accommodated by five such fine… gentlemen.”
“That’s settled then. Oh, and can you lot spread the word that we’re looking for volunteers to watch an office around the clock? Uriah is about to give us the address.”
“Not quite an address.” Uriah didn’t seem perturbed by his cool welcome. His eyes had brightened since coming through the wall, which, since they were red, gave them the appearance of glowing Christmas lights. “That’s too much to expect of such an umble personage. I know only what he sees out the window.”
“Which is?”
“Lambton Quay,” Uriah said.
Millie’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you quite sure?” She kept her voice mild in front of the others, who were listening with curiosity. “That’s the heart of the central business district. It seems rather… unlikely.”
“I don’t know what’s likely, Miss Radcliffe-Dix. I know only what I see through his eyes. And what I see are the old buildings that run up Lambton Quay. There are buses passing underneath; those trees down the center of the road catch the wind. And there’s a McDonald’s opposite. I see that distinctly.”
“Rob works down the end of that street,” Charley said. “It’s right in the heart of the city.”
“The summoner isn’t afraid of being in the heart of a city,” Uriah said. “Far from it. That street is the oldest in Wellington. Some of those foundations go back to the nineteenth century, to the first European settlers. The summoner likes old bones. He likes to pick over them. Don’t you, Master Charley?”
“Very well,” Millie said. She still had doubts, but she knew it was almost more important to be seen doing something. “Volunteers to watch an office block on Lambton Quay, please, Heathcliff, Darcy, Dorian. There’s a McDonald’s opposite, apparently. Perhaps choose someone American.”
She worked on Lambton Quay as well. Her office overlooked the street. On quiet days, she could gaze out the window, and watch the oak trees rustling in the wind.
“Huckleberry Finn would probably love to go,” Darcy Three said, with just a hint of condescension. “But you may be required to supply money for endless cheeseburgers. His financial situation is rarely stable.”
In truth, Huck Finn was probably more financially solvent than any of the Darcys, being more open to employment, but Millie let this slide. The poor fellows could never manage to perceive themselves as anything but revoltingly wealthy.
“Jolly good,” she said. “I’ll give him a spare twenty or so for the work. You can spread that around, too, if you like. See if anyone else is interested.”
Darcy Three nodded. His lock of hair flicked. “And the alley?”
Millie glanced at the space where Miss Matty’s house had once been. It stretched out a few yards before ending in an iron gate. What lay beyond she couldn’t say—perhaps nothing, save the mist that enshrouded it—but in the damp air she couldn’t suppress a shiver.
“Leave it,” she said. “Nobody is to go near it.”
Huck Finn was very interested in the errand, as was the Artful and, for some reason, the Implied Reader. By the time they had been packed off, it was nearly midday, and the sun was burning off the worst of the morning fog.
“I should probably go speak to Miss Matty,” Millie told Charley, who had been holding back trying not to be noticed. “Do you need to catch up with your parents?”
“I’d really rather not,” he said. “They’re not expecting me now. Besides, I don’t want them to know about all this, which means I’m likely to blurt it out the second I see them.”
“Will Rob keep quiet?”
“Oh, Rob wants to tell them, so they won’t get a word out of him. It’s funny how that works, isn’t it?”
“People are jolly strange,” she agreed. “In that case, let’s get lunch.”
The first time Millie had stepped through the wall and into the Street, she had found it in disorder. The buildings had been grimmer then, or seemed it. The few characters already beginning to congregate were essentially squatting, safe from the world outside for the first time in their lives, but with no food or money save what the Artful was pinching for himself. None of them had been able to carve a place in the real world as Millie had. They weren’t written for work; their essential natures, unlike hers, were not fluid enough to let them hold down a job at Burger King. They had difficulty with new skills, or new ways of thinking. Darcy could have managed a grand estate, and Heathcliff could have sought complicated revenge with the best of them, but that simply wasn’t helpful in central Wellington. Millie had never seen another book character before. She was shocked to see them so shabby and dirty. They clung to the Street like flotsam in rock pools; outside in reality, they risked being submerged without a trace.
She had two choices then. She could have walked away, or she could have stayed. She stayed, because that was really no choice at all. Her conscience tugged at her; and, if it hadn’t, her heart had opened to the Street and swallowed it whole, and now it was lodged there, fast as a hook in the mouth of a fish pulled from the harbor, and as painful. She had walked up to Darcy One, who was trying to burn paper to keep warm in the enormous stone fireplace of what would become the Darcy flat.
“It’s no good, old thing,” Millie said. “This just won’t do. We’re going to have to sort things out.”
It was her Jacqueline Blaine voice, the voice that had been out of date at the time her books were published, and that felt hollow as she used it. It was the voice of Millie Radcliffe-Dix, girl detective; she was Millicent Dix, perfectly ordinary accountant. She no longer had her animal companion, which of course in a children’s book was something like her soul. She hadn’t said “old thing” for almost twenty years. Her bravery had turned to bravado. But D
arcy listened, and so did the others, as they trickled in. And accountants, it transpired, could at least sort things out, probably better than girl detectives.
The Street to her, dearly beloved as it was, was paved with those memories. The saddler’s was where she had once broken up a fight between Heathcliff and Anna Karenina that nearly eventuated in the appropriately tragic deaths of both. (The Anna was a Victorian translation, somewhat milder than in the original Russian, or Heathcliff would not have lasted ten minutes. She left the Street for Europe three weeks later, which was a shame, as Millie had rather enjoyed her company when she wasn’t working herself into beautifully written hysteria.) The Old Curiosity Shop leaked when it rained. The Darcys’ doorway had once had a couch stuck in it for three months after an unsuccessful attempt to refurnish, until Heathcliff took matters into his own hands and tore it apart. She could read her own history in every line of the place. To Charley, it was new, and yet entirely known to him. She felt him light up with the beauty of the buildings and cobbles and pale blue sky.
They stopped at the battered old tea shop first, where Miss Matty bravely offered them tea and biscuits while the Hatter, her business partner, sat at the table and dunked his watch in the teapot.
“Don’t you worry about your house, Miss Matty,” Millie reassured her. “Anyone would be happy to put you up; you only have to say the word. Perhaps not Lady Macbeth, though. I don’t think she murders guests unless there’s a throne in it for her, but old habits die hard, and all.”
“Thank you, dear,” Miss Matty said. Her gentle face, framed by her bonnet, was regaining color. “Everyone is so kind.”
“Well,” Millie said cautiously. “Not everyone, perhaps.”
Miss Matty lowered her voice, although there was nobody else in the room. “I do hate to spread rumors, but… I don’t suppose you’ve heard the latest news about the new world, have you?”
“Not since Darcy Three met the possible Scrooge,” Millie said. “We never did track him down.”
“Oh, indeed. But this was only this morning—the dear Duke of Wellington encountered Mr. Maui at Mount Vic while he was taking his constitutional.”
