The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  “Who says anything needs to have caused it? Why can’t he just be an anomaly?”

  “He can’t be the only one,” I said. “He just can’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  I knew why not, of course: because Uriah Heep said he wasn’t. It was difficult to justify without that piece of information, and I wasn’t quite ready to give it.

  “Well,” Mum said, when no answer was forthcoming. Her voice was back to normal. “You know your family on your dad’s side. If any of them resemble Charley in any way, ordinary or extraordinary, they’re keeping it very well hidden. My parents died before you or Charley was born, but I can assure you that they looked nothing like him, and I never saw them exhibit any signs of otherworldly abilities—or unusual intellect, for that matter. He might not be the only one of his kind in the world, but I suspect he’s the only one we’ll ever know. And that’s probably a good thing. I don’t think the city can hold too many more of him, do you?”

  I managed a smile. “I doubt it.” The back door opened; I recognized the creak, and the barking of dogs. I glanced back at the shelves. “By the way, can I borrow a few of these books?”

  The sun was setting by the time we drove back to Wellington. The road hugged the long, sinuous curves of the coastline, and the waves glinted white and gold. Reflected in the water, the houses were beginning to glow with warm yellow lights.

  “Whatever you’re waiting for the opportune moment to say,” Lydia said conversationally, “now’s your moment. I’ve been up at five every morning this week—four that night Charley called. I’d prefer to get the armed confrontation out of the way before we get home so we can have dinner, watch a film, and get an early night.”

  “Fair enough.” I’d been trying not to have the kind of argument that ends in fuming, silent driving for fifty kilometers, but I could accommodate. “What on earth was that all about?”

  “What on earth was what?”

  “You know what. You were trying to get information out of my parents about Charley.”

  “Well, it doesn’t work trying to get information out of you about Charley. At least your parents don’t pretend he doesn’t exist.”

  “I don’t pretend he doesn’t exist.”

  “Rob, I was dating you for six months before I found out you even had a brother. You do so pretend he doesn’t exist. That’s why you don’t talk about him. And Charley doesn’t talk about himself around you because he isn’t sure how much you want him to exist. This I worked out a long time ago. It isn’t even disputable.”

  “He talks about himself.”

  “Not to me. Not about things I want to know.”

  I didn’t have the emotional or intellectual fortitude to decide how true any of this was, and certainly didn’t have the desire. I’d been up early this week too. “So did my parents tell you what you wanted to know?”

  “No,” she said, unabashed. “Not even when I cornered your dad outside. He gave me excellent tips about the passion fruit, though. You’re doing it all wrong.”

  “I bet I am.” I sighed. “My family’s not like yours, Lydia. Yours is big, loud, and cheerful, and I can’t keep track of all your cousins. Mine is just the four of us, plus a single set of grandparents and one unmarried aunt on my father’s side, and we’ve been weird since Charley was born.”

  “I sort of thought I was part of your family.”

  “You’re the normal part.”

  “How dare you.” She glanced at me sideways. “Don’t try to tell me this is nothing, Rob. I may not be a lawyer, but I know when people are hiding something. This is serious, isn’t it?”

  Serious. She asked the same thing about us, in exactly those terms, after we’d been dating six months. I don’t have Charley’s passion for words, but that one hadn’t felt right to me. Our relationship—whatever it was that was unfurling between us—wasn’t serious. It was important, momentous, wondrous. “Serious” sounded like something terminal. It was a word for ending, not beginning.

  “It’s serious,” I conceded. “But I promise you, it has nothing to do with you. It’s something I’m working out. I’ll put it right, and it’ll be forgotten. Please, just trust me.”

  “I do trust you. But you’re wrong. If it has to do with you, it has to do with me. That’s how this works.”

  “It’ll be over soon,” I said. “I promise.”

  I meant it—or, more precisely, I meant to make sure it was true. After dinner, after we’d watched an old film and Lydia had finally gone to bed, I sat down at the old computer out in the living room.

  Eva had sent through Eric Umble’s CV, as she’d promised. I opened it and skimmed, but nothing stood out. He’d moved from London in his last year of high school, he’d been through the School of Law, his grades were just spectacular enough to get him a job without rousing suspicion. It was a fabrication from start to finish, but there was no way of proving it—if I wanted to, I could try calling his references, but whoever summoned him would probably have covered that possibility. Anyway, I didn’t want him exposed as a fraud. I wanted to find the summoner. More than anything, I wanted to find him by normal means, before Charley and Millie did something suicidally dangerous.

  The next thing I opened was the Prince Albert University home page. I would begin with the individual pages of the academic staff; when I ran out of those, I had access to student records. Well, to be strictly accurate, my brother had access, but I’d had his passwords for as long as I could remember. What I’d told Mum was right: we’d kept any sign of Charley’s abilities out of the records. What we hadn’t kept out of the records was how advanced he was, almost from the day he was born. It seemed far too much of a coincidence to think that the two weren’t linked—perhaps that was even how the summoner had found him. Surely the records of the summoner, whoever he was, would show the same.

  It was going to be another long night. Fortunately, I had a very large mug of coffee.

  Before I started, I sent another e-mail, this one a request for an electronic copy of a birth certificate. I did it quickly, trying hard not to think about it too much. It felt uncomfortable—childish, even—trying to find out if your younger brother was adopted. But it occurred to me, for the first time, that I had not actually been there at Charley’s birth; I couldn’t even, racking the memories of my four-year-old self, swear that Mum had ever been pregnant. He didn’t look anything like us. And unlike Lydia, I am a lawyer. I also know when somebody isn’t telling the whole truth. There was something in Mum’s evasions as I spoke to her today when I had mentioned how little Charley resembled us that reminded me a little too much of my own when I spoke to Lydia. Mine were guided by Charley’s secrets, and my own guilt. I needed to know what guided hers.

  XIII

  We were sitting down to dinner the following evening when Charley called. We assumed it was telemarketers, and Lydia and I did our usual quick rock-paper-scissors to see who would have to deal with them. When she answered the phone, still shooting me a glare (she always does rock), I saw her face go to mingled relief and surprise.

  “Oh, hello, Charley… No, no, that’s fine… Very well, thank you. How are you?… Yes, he’s here. I’ll get him.” She held out the phone to me, her eyebrows raised. “It’s your brother. Are you going to be leaving again?”

  “I hope not,” I said, but my heart sank, and I knew I was.

  Lydia must have suspected too. She had not missed the fact that I had been on edge all day; I had made that impossible.

  “He said he was fine” was all she said.

  “He’s never fine,” I said. “He spent the first twenty minutes of his life dead, for God’s sake.”

  “Nobody spends the first twenty minutes of their life dead,” Lydia said firmly. “Not without serious brain damage. It’s a medical impossibility.”

  “I rest my case.” I took the phone from her, and braced myself. It might be a relief, at least, to have the waiting over.

  “I wish you’d tell Lydia what
’s going on,” Charley said, before I even spoke. “She must think I’m a complete basket case, ringing you up all the time and pulling you away.”

  “You are a complete basket case,” I said. Lydia, listening from the table, shot me another glare. I waved at her to keep eating. “What’s up? I tried to call you this morning; you didn’t answer.”

  “It’s a little strange,” Charley said. “The building in question is an office—one floor is for rent, which is where Uriah says we’ll find the summoner. We’ve watched it all day, though, and nobody’s come in or out who couldn’t be accounted for. The offices have stayed empty. The Implied Reader has been watching it since the shops closed down on Lambton Quay.”

  “Who?”

  “You know. The man with no face. But he hasn’t seen anyone in the building at all.”

  “Well, no,” I said. “He doesn’t have eyes.” Lydia’s look this time was rather more startled.

  “He can still see,” Charley said, as if I were being very dense. “He wouldn’t be much of a reader if he couldn’t see. Anyway, Millie and I are going to walk down and check it out late tonight—perhaps eleven o’clock. I thought you might like to meet us there, or outside the Street. I mean, you don’t have to.”

  I was wrong. It wasn’t a relief at all. “Wait—where are you now?”

  “At the Street. Or just outside it—it doesn’t get cell phone reception, obviously. Darcy Two had to wait outside it all day with a phone in case the person watching the house called. He didn’t mind, except that he wasted most of the batteries playing Candy Crush.”

  “You’ve been there all day?”

  “Well, yes. Where else would I be? It’s Sunday; I don’t have teaching. And this is a bit more important than getting my chapter on Conan Doyle finished—though Beth might not agree.” I heard another voice in the background. “Just a second—are you coming? Eleven o’clock?”

  “I’ll be there,” I said. I had to be, didn’t I? God knows what would happen if I wasn’t. It would probably happen anyway, to be honest, but I at least needed to be there for it.

  Wellington is not often dead. One of the things that had drawn me to it was how unrelentingly alive it was. It’s difficult to walk down the street without people waving at you, music from buskers grabbing your attention, the wind tearing at your clothes to make sure you know it’s there. At eleven at night on a Sunday, even the weather was quiet. I parked my car, and walked the near-empty streets to the Left Bank Arcade. The area around the alley was dark, and completely deserted.

  Almost deserted. A tiny little girl sat against the wall; she would have come barely past my knee standing up, and her legs, crossed neatly under her blue dress, were thin as matchsticks. A massive hardcover lay open in front of her, and she held a covered mug cupped in her hands as she read by flashlight. Her dark hair fell forward, and her small, pale face was utterly absorbed. At first, I thought she looked familiar because she looked startlingly like my brother at the same age. Then I realized, and despite everything I couldn’t help but smile.

  “Hi,” I said to her. “Matilda Wormwood, right?”

  She looked up and smiled back politely. “How do you do, Mr. Sutherland?”

  “Pretty good, thanks.” I sat down next to her on the concrete. “What’re you up to this late at night?”

  “I’m on lookout,” she said. “We’re on alert. They tug the cable inside when they want to come out; I tug back if it’s safe. If Huck Finn sees anything, he calls me on the phone, and I go inside to tell them in person. I like this time of night. It’s quiet. Millie says it’s all right if I read my book.”

  “You live on the Street?”

  “Yes.” Her face lit up. “I love it. I was homeless for years before, which was still an improvement on living with my family in my book, but this is so much better. I never knew there were so many of us. We can actually be secret here, and safe. I’ve always wanted to live in a Dickens novel, anyway.”

  “You wouldn’t rather find a family to raise you, like Millie did?”

  “I don’t grow like Millie,” she said. “Someone found me on the streets a few weeks after I came out of my book, and they tried placing me with a foster family. It was nice, at first—well, not nice, but they looked after me. They were going to send me to school. But then they started to be afraid of me. They said I didn’t talk like a four-year-old—which was true, but I didn’t know how. I moved things with my eyes sometimes, when I couldn’t help it. And I didn’t grow. They started to punish me, and talk about asking Child Services to take me away. I was scared that if they did tests to find why I didn’t age, they’d find I wasn’t real. I didn’t know what would happen then. So I ran away.” She smiled at my face. “It’s all right, truly. I can look after myself. I’d like to go to a university, though. Charley says he’ll get me into the distance-learning courses, if Dorian can get me a fake school transcript.”

  “I bet he will.” A memory struck me. “That book wouldn’t happen to be from the university library, would it?”

  She looked worried. “I know I don’t have a library card, but I can’t get one without proof of identity and address. It isn’t like in my book. I take them back after two weeks.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” I assured her. “Take the whole library. I was just wondering if you’d ever run past my brother there. Very quickly?”

  “I might have,” she said. “Usually nobody goes into the stack room. When they do, I run away very fast.”

  “And you slam the door shut…?”

  “With my eyes,” she said. “Yes.”

  “Good for you.” Well. I had been sort of right. It had indeed been a very small child in the stack room. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if she had read volume two of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire either. “Have you seen Millie and my brother?”

  Matilda tugged on the cable beside her, and very shortly afterward Millie and Charley stepped through. I hadn’t seen anyone come through the wall before. It looked eerie in the dark, as though they had melted into existence from the brick. Everything looks a little more eerie in the dark.

  “Oh, good,” Millie said. Her hair was out this time, and hung in corkscrew curls to her shoulders. She was wearing a green trench coat with voluminous pockets. Just with that, I could see the adventuress. “You’re here. Ready for some breaking and entering?”

  “Hopefully just entering,” Charley said. He must have seen my face. “Not breaking.”

  “Oh, something’s bound to break tonight,” Millie returned. “A law. A window. The foundations of reality.”

  “The day,” Charley suggested with a smile. “That will break. Eventually.”

  Me. I didn’t say it, but I thought it. I was going to break.

  It was just down the street from my work. We walked down the familiar street, past the storefronts with their expressionless mannequins and exotic soaps glistening in the lights, past the trees, which rustled overhead as birds settled for the night, past the closed doors of the coffee shop that saved my life most midmornings. Lambton Quay looked deeper and softer in the night, as though an outer shell had been removed.

  I had been intending to persuade them not to break into an office building, even one empty and ready for lease. I knew how to persuade. I had persuaded judges, juries, and clients; on a very good day, I had even persuaded Lydia. When I saw the building in question, all arguments fled from my head.

  “It can’t be here,” was what I said instead. “It can’t.”

  “Why not?” Millie asked, genuinely curious.

  “I work here,” I answered her. “I work down the road from here. This is Lambton Quay.” I couldn’t quite put into words what I meant. “The Supreme Court is just down the road. Parliament is at the far end. This is all shop-front windows and offices. The summoner can’t be here. It’s not possible. It’s not allowed.”

  “They might not be here,” Charley said. I didn’t like the anxious reassurance in his voice. It suggested he
had picked up what I was trying to hide in mine. “We’ve based this on the word of Uriah Heep. He’s hardly reliable.”

  “But you think he is here.”

  “Yes,” Charley said reluctantly. “I think so. I think Uriah truly does know where his counterpart lives. And I don’t think Uriah would lie, when it’s so much more entertaining to send us into danger.”

  I looked at the building. It was late Victorian, probably, painted soft gray and set with ornate windows. The lower level, as with all the buildings along this way, had been gutted and replaced with a modern storefront. In this case, it was a clothing shop, with mannequins in the windows clad in summer dresses. At this time of night the models looked like ghosts behind the glass panes. The floors above had been converted to offices, according to the sign advertising them for lease. It was a lovely building, in a beautiful part of the city.

  “They’re up there, apparently,” Millie said, following my eyes. “Though goodness knows how. Something else to find out.”

  “Just how do you plan to get in?” I asked. “It may be the second level you want, but the street level is a high-end shop. They’re not easy to break into.”

  “I thought about this, actually,” Charley said. “Just a second. This might not work.” In the dark, I saw him open his backpack and pull out a thin green hardcover. “Um—has anyone got a flashlight?”

  I was about to offer my phone, but Millie had one, of course. She whipped it from a pocket faster than a sharpshooter goes for a pistol in a duel.

  “Here you are,” she said. She clicked it, and gave it to him. “And I have a box of matches as well. Just in case.”

  “Thanks,” Charley said. He started to read.

  A few seconds later, there was a door in the glass plating. Its green paint was peeling, and it was overgrown with vines.