The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  “This isn’t a Millie Radcliffe-Dix Adventure,” I said. “If you’re caught, you’re not going to be tied up in a toolshed, conveniently filled with sharp implements ready to use for escape. Whatever else the summoner is, he or she is a real person. I know what real people do to each other. It’s not the sort of thing they put in children’s books.”

  “I’ve lived in the real world for quite some time, Rob,” Millie said. There was an edge in her voice. In the books, they called it “that fierce voice Vernon knew so well,” and usually her eyes would be “blazing.” They weren’t doing so as literally as Heathcliff’s, but I could confirm the word applied. “I grew up in foster homes—real ones, though those are usually jolly real in children’s books as well. I heard things from other children. I read the newspapers. Don’t think you can scare me.”

  “It’s very dark down there,” Charley said. I don’t think he was listening to us. He was just stating a fact. “And cold. Whoever it is has been down there a long time.”

  “You’re starting to worry me now,” I said. “How do you know that? You’re not psychic, you know. You just do a lot of very intense reading.”

  “I told you, I don’t know.” He blinked, and looked at me. “It’s just coming through. Like snatches of voices in the wind.”

  “Well,” Millie said. “We have a flashlight for the dark, if we think it’s safe to use it. The rest we’ll sort out as we go.”

  She drew back the bolts, and opened the door. It opened to utter darkness and a blast of cold air. Two steps leading down were visible, but nothing beyond.

  “We’d better not risk the flashlight just yet,” Millie said quietly. “Not if someone’s down there. So one step at a time, and careful how you go.”

  She started down, Charley behind her. I followed, and the darkness swallowed me up.

  I said my fear didn’t have anything to do with the basement. And it didn’t, in a literal sense. I was unnerved by underground spaces, not pathologically terrified. But the feeling of being trapped, of the familiar turning unknown and dangerous… those were all very recognizable from that day when I was six. Now they felt part of the space around me. The darkness was more than physical. I suppose Charley would say it was metaphorical.

  The stairs were treacherous; they allowed very little opportunity to take stock of my surroundings until I was on the ground. Without Millie’s flashlight, there was nothing to see. It was only when my feet left creaking wood and hit paved floor that I became aware of the whisper of the wind. And then, when I listened, I realized that it wasn’t the wind at all.

  It was a voice. A human voice was whispering in the dark. A man’s voice, too broken for accent or personality. The words had the air of a litany, or a curse.

  “… at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike and I began to cry simultaneously. Chapter One. I am Born. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life…”

  “David Copperfield,” Charley said from beside me; I couldn’t tell if he meant the name or the title. He said it very quietly, to himself rather than to us, but the cracked voice stopped.

  Millie raised her voice. “Hello, there. Are you a prisoner?”

  The silence lingered a moment longer, then the voice spoke. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

  Millie frowned. “It’s who?”

  “Not you. Him. The one who spoke.”

  “That was me,” Charley said. We were drowning in a sea of pronouns.

  I heard a long, rattling sigh, as though a breeze had rushed through the rafters. It raised the hairs on the back of my neck, and stilled my tongue.

  “I know you,” the voice said. “I can touch your mind.”

  “I think I can touch yours as well,” Charley said hesitantly. He took a step closer. “The way I can with Millie, sometimes. Did I read you out of your book?”

  “I don’t know,” the voice said. “I don’t know where I came from. I don’t know where I am. All I know is the summoner, and you, and I’ve never seen your face.”

  “Have you seen the summoner’s?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “Yes, I have. It’s a terrible face.”

  I heard a click, and then the flashlight flared and flickered over the room before finding the source of the voice. Millie was back in action.

  The room was dank, and dark. Once again, the walls were ringed with pile after pile of books. Where the light settled, a man sat on a chair, bound and blindfolded. A prisoner, as Millie had said, dressed in Victorian garb now filthy and stained. Through his scraggly red-brown beard, the hollows of his cheeks were emaciated.

  Millie, of course, recovered first. “I say. You poor thing. Hold on a tick—”

  “Don’t touch me!” the man said, and Millie stopped in the act of moving forward. “I can’t be unbound. I can’t see. I can’t escape.”

  “But you must want to be rescued, surely?”

  The man hesitated, as though encountering an entirely unfamiliar concept. “Rescued…”

  Charley spoke up then. I could hear him trying to keep his voice quiet and steady. “You’re David Copperfield, aren’t you?”

  “David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens,” he said. His words fell back into the rhythm it had been repeating when we entered. “Chapter one. I am Born. Whether I—”

  “‘Shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held be anybody else, these pages must show,’” Charley finished. “Yes. That’s right.”

  David Copperfield shook his bound head. “What does it mean?”

  “It’s the opening of a book. By Charles Dickens. It’s the fictional autobiography of a young man named David Copperfield; Dickens based it partially on his own life.”

  “Uriah Heep’s book,” I said.

  Charley didn’t answer me. “I read it when I was four, I think. I started reading things out of books at four—summoning, you all call it. I might have made you, without being aware of what I was doing. It’s the only reason I can think why we’d be able to sense each other. But that would mean you’d been here for years. Decades.”

  David Copperfield was silent for such a long time that I began to wonder if he could still hear us. His head was bowed, his dark, tousled hair falling forward around the blindfold. Then, at once, he straightened.

  “You need to leave,” he said. “He knows you’re here now. It wasn’t me; I don’t know who told him. But he’s coming for you.”

  My heart stopped.

  Charley started beside me, as though his had done something similar. “The summoner?”

  “Who is he?” Millie said quickly. “Can we find him?”

  “I don’t know who he is in your world—only who he is in ours, and that we can’t tell you. I know his voice, and his face, and the feel of him in my head. I know he’s taken possession of me, and twisted me. I know he means to destroy everything. I know he’s been in your world for such a long time, waiting. I know he’s coming, right now. Go.”

  “Come on,” I said. My heart had started beating again, painfully fast to make up for lost time. “Quick.”

  “You have to come with us,” Millie said to David Copperfield. “We can’t leave you here.”

  Silence again, for an excruciating few seconds.

  “Yes,” he said abruptly. “Yes, please, take me with you. Quickly. I—” His voice broke off in a sharp gasp that was almost a scream, and then he was gone. It was so quick, I almost missed the flare of light as he vanished.

  A moment later, the trapdoor at the top of the stairs vanished too. Another flare of light, and then, despite Millie’s flashlight, the darkness around us seemed deeper than ever.

  “Oh dear,” Millie said very quietly. “He’s here.”

  XIV

  We were trapped. There was no way out. My brain told me that, over and over again, as Millie instructed Charley and
me to stay put, as she mounted the stairs quickly toward the ceiling where the door had been moments ago, as Charley and I waited in the foul-smelling dark. The air seemed too thick to breathe.

  “I’m so sorry,” Charley said to me quietly.

  I didn’t say anything. My throat had constricted with fear. I was perfectly willing to let Charley mistake it, as usual, for anger.

  “I could put the Secret Garden door back,” Charley said as Millie drew close. “We could still get out that way.”

  “I wouldn’t risk it,” she said. “The summoner’s coming. He knows we’re here.”

  “He might be some distance away,” Charley said. “I would have to be close by to reach out and read a character of mine away like that, but in theory, if the summoner has a strong enough focus, he could do it from any distance. He’s better than me. And if he were close, he could have conjured something dangerous to stop us, not just taken something away.”

  “We may not know how close he is,” Millie said, “but we know he’ll certainly be expecting us to leave out front.”

  “Well, we can’t use any other way,” I pointed out. I think I said it sarcastically. My voice does that under stress. “We’re underground. It would open to a wall of dirt. In case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Rob…” Charley said. He had an uncanny knack for making my name both a plea and a reproach.

  “So what you’re saying is that there’s no way out at all.”

  “We’re not saying that,” Charley said. In the midst of anything, I noticed that he and Millie had become “we.” “I can read us out of this somehow. I promise. Just let me think…”

  “I say!” Millie said suddenly. Her eyebrows raised, erasing the worried knot between them. “A secret passage.”

  I frowned. “What? Where?”

  She waved her arm vaguely at the wall. “There, if Charley can make one! There’d be one there if this were a Millie Radcliffe-Dix Adventure. It doesn’t need to go far, just take us back up to street level. Can you do it?”

  “Not out of midair!” Charley protested. “I would need something to work with. All I have is The Secret Garden.”

  “Well, we’re practically in a library!” Millie said. Her flashlight swept the books around us to make the point, and I saw spines and titles in a multicolored flash. “Start looking for something!”

  “No, but—I don’t even know if I could make one at all!” Charley said. “A secret passage—that’s not a person, or an object. It’s not even a metaphorical concept. It’s a setting. It burrows through the earth. That would be changing the shape of the world.”

  “Oh, rot!” she exclaimed. “You put a door in a wall. You put people into the world. You can put a passage into the earth. I do understand it might be more difficult. But look what this summoner can do, with no more than what you have here. Just give it a go and see what happens.”

  “I think you probably should,” I conceded reluctantly. “Otherwise we’re going to be cornered here.”

  I’d never, in my whole life, asked Charley to have a go at summoning something. It seemed to decide him. His jaw set.

  “Right,” he said. “Find me something to use, and I will.”

  “There’s a good chap,” said Millie.

  We set upon the books like starving orphans. Millie was the only one who had a flashlight, but I had my phone, and Charley can read print in near dark. (Mum was always nagging him to turn a light on.) One of the first I found was a thick popular thriller that I had, to my surprise, read myself last month. I snatched it up and waved it at my brother.

  “There’s an underground cave in this. Would that do?”

  “It might,” Charley said, after a quick look. “But I haven’t read it.”

  “I have. I could find the part myself.”

  “Unless you can make the cave yourself, it doesn’t matter. I need to interpret it. I can’t use passages and phrases—well, not on this kind of notice.”

  I groaned, and put it back. “I thought you read everything.”

  “I haven’t read that.”

  “Snob.”

  “There are only so many reading hours in the day!”

  The ground trembled. I felt it ripple beneath my feet, and heard the walls around us creak. The noise was eerie in the dark.

  “That was a shift,” I said. “Like the one we felt in the Street.”

  “The summoner’s arrived,” Charley said. He said it perfectly matter-of-factly, as though an expected guest had come for dinner.

  “What?” He had stopped moving, so I stopped too. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. But the room responded to someone who can alter its shape. It wasn’t me, so it must have been him.”

  “Keep looking!” Millie hissed at us.

  I pulled out book after book, heart pounding, painfully aware of the summoner approaching and the darkness pressing in around me. My hands were shaking. I hated being closed in, I hated the dark, and I hated this place. This wasn’t my world. It wasn’t even Dickens’s. It was a dark corner of someone’s psyche. It needed therapy, not literary analysis. And it was going to kill us.

  I nearly skipped over the title of the massive hardcover at the end of the room. I think my eyes had reached the point where they just wanted to see Millie Radcliffe-Dix and the Adventure of the Secret Passage or nothing. At the last minute, I realized what it was.

  “Hey!” I called, quietly. “What about this?”

  The others turned to look.

  “The Count of Monte Cristo,” Millie read out loud.

  “There’s a secret passage in that, isn’t there?” I said. “When he gets out of prison?”

  “Well, not so much a secret passage as a tunnel,” Charley said, more cautiously. “And this is a translation from French, so the words will be a bit—”

  “Charley, I would rather have a nice, wide passage with secret rooms and treasure, too, but let’s not be particular,” Millie said. “I’ll take a tunnel.”

  Charley sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Simpler’s probably easier anyway.”

  I threw him the book, and he opened it.

  “I haven’t read this since I was about eight,” he warned us. “I hope I can find the right—”

  “You might want to hurry,” I told him.

  Charley turned the pages a little faster. “You do realize he doesn’t actually escape using either of the tunnels in the prison, don’t you? He takes the place of his dead friend and gets thrown in the sea.”

  “Charley!”

  “I know!”

  He took a deep breath, closed his eyes briefly, and then returned his gaze to the book. Some of the panic lifted, and his face became still and intent. He’s always been able to do that, even under the most trying circumstances: with a book in front of him, his mind distances itself from his body. The circumstances just don’t usually involve someone coming to kill us.

  The summoner was here now. I heard footsteps overhead, the creak of a door that must, like the Secret Garden door, have been made to let his people through from the street outside. At any point now, there would be a flare of light, and the wall at the top of the stairs would part into another door. The summoner could come down, but so could anyone out of the vast arsenal of books upstairs. And anyone else walking through the shop would notice only a haze in the air, a choking sensation at the back of the throat that urged them to get out. We would be killed, or captured, behind a veil of fiction.

  Millie was obviously thinking along similar lines. “Whoever comes down,” she said to me quietly, “don’t try to fight them off with a hardcover or anything. Just demand to talk to the summoner. He’ll want to talk to us, I’m certain.”

  I thought she was being a little optimistic, but I nodded. “All right.”

  “I mean it. I saw you try to take on Heathcliff.”

  “That was not typical for me,” I said. “I’m really far more likely to demand to talk to somebody, I promise.”

  Through it a
ll I felt, ludicrously, a little proud that Millie thought I needed holding back. Before Heathcliff, I had never been in so much as a drunken Saturday-night brawl.

  The noises at the top of the stairs stopped. I could hear voices, dull through the wall: one deep and apologetic, one high and whining, one—just for a couple of words—sharp with command. The summoner. I didn’t know for certain, but I felt a chill.

  “Well,” Millie said. Her head was held high. “At least we’ll find out who it is.”

  “Got it!” Charley said suddenly, and simultaneously there was a flare of light that seemed much brighter than usual in the darkness. David Copperfield’s empty chair jumped into sharp relief, then faded again. Millie’s flashlight beam swung to the wall.

  There, near the floor, was the opening of a tunnel. It was small—barely wide enough for my shoulders—and the edges were rough, as though shaped by a blunt chisel. Though it was set in the gray bricks of the basement wall, the inside was a different, lighter rock, scored by toolmarks and crumbling into dust. I could see a short distance, then the passage was swallowed up by darkness.

  “Oh good job!” Millie exclaimed. She dropped to her knees in front of the opening, shining her flashlight into it. “Is it clear all the way?”

  “I’m not sure,” Charley said cautiously. He shivered as he closed the book. “If it is, there’s no way it could be stable. That fictional tunnel just displaced the real earth.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean that I didn’t just pull that tunnel out. I rewrote it over the real world. Where there was solid dirt, there’s now a tunnel. Reality shaped itself around it. I felt it. And I don’t know if it will last.”

  “You mean it might just—disappear?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “And what would happen to us in the tunnel?”

  “I really don’t know. Maybe we’d just vanish. Maybe we’d be—well, left in the earth.”

  Wonderful. I’d been so hung up on the idea of getting out of the basement that I hadn’t really thought through the idea of crawling along a narrow passage in the ground. Looking at it, it seemed far smaller and darker than I had imagined. And now I was being told it might just vanish with us inside. My stomach tightened.