The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  They were closing up. Most of the chairs were stacked on tables, and I had to shout over the roar of a vacuum to ask if they could give us any pizza at this time of night. They’d turned off the ovens, but they had assorted slices left that they offered to put in a box for me. I thanked them, picked up three cans of soft drink from the freezer, and leaned against the counter to wait for my order.

  I had come here as a first-year law student one night during exams week. I had been hunched over my desk, notes swimming in front of my eyes and my nerves about ready to snap, when my neighbor from two rooms down had come banging on the door.

  “We’re going into town to eat pizza and gelato,” he’d said.

  “Who is?”

  “All of us. The floor. Maybe the building.”

  “I have an exam in the morning.”

  “So do half of us. The rest have one in the afternoon. Some of us have both. We’re calling it an experimental trial: pizza and gelato as a last-minute study tool.”

  “Sign me up,” I said at once, because I was eighteen and an idiot.

  We had ended up here, bankrupting ourselves on pizza that was bubbly and hot and gelato that was creamy and cold, and making far too much noise about it. Afterward, we had gone to the waterfront. It was deserted, and the lights reflecting on the water had been dazzling in the expanse. We had stood on the edge of the harbor, tried to outyell the wind, and were nearly blown into the sea in the process. I sat the exam the next day on about half an hour of sleep, came home so tired that I crashed on my bed and slept through to the next day, and somehow received an A, though I was never brave enough to repeat the experiment.

  I tried to hold on to that memory, but the waterfront had already shifted in my mind, and now this place was shifting too. They were part of tonight now. They had become something unfamiliar and strange, as surely and as disconcertingly as the office block on Lambton Quay had transformed into a Dickensian nightmare around me. And I wasn’t all right.

  Outside the window, the streets looked bright and cold. The flare of lights from a passing car caught the glass and seemed to split the world in two.

  I was walking the food back to the table when I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck and arms. The lights overhead flickered. A faint mist or distortion was settling over the tables—the same mist, I realized, that had descended over the abandoned office, moments before Charley and Millie had vanished.

  Millie had gone outside to find a payphone: the water had drowned both our phones coming up from the harbor. Charley sat alone at the booth, absently turning the pages of the summoner’s book. Already, there was a faint transparence about him.

  “Charley,” I said. My voice was tight with panic.

  Charley blinked, and looked up. His mind took a moment to follow him out of the book; when he registered what I was looking at, his face cleared. “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.”

  He snapped the book shut, and closed his eyes. The mist around cleared as if in a rush of air. I could breathe again.

  “Is that how the summoner was using your book?” Millie asked, with interest. She must have come back in while I was distracted.

  “Mm.” Charley made a face, and rested his forehead in his hand until the dizziness let him look up again. “I think so—did you get through? Is someone following the summoner?”

  “No luck,” Millie said. “I was just on the phone with the Artful. He says nobody came in or out the entire time he was sitting there eating cheeseburgers. We’ve lost the summoner again.”

  He stared at her. “We can’t have.”

  “We have. However he’s been entering and leaving the office, it hasn’t been through the front door. And he isn’t likely to come back, now that he knows we’ve found that particular bolt-hole.”

  “But… that means we’re no closer than we were before! We still have nothing.”

  “We were a sight too close down there, if you ask me,” Millie said. “And we don’t exactly have nothing. We have that book.”

  That book. It lay on the greasy table, where Charley had pushed it away. There was a coffee ring on the green cover, and the edges were tattered. It was only my imagination that the world receded away from it, but that didn’t reassure me. Imagination wasn’t keeping to its proper place tonight. We all looked at it as though we expected it to bite.

  “The section on Oliver Twist was dog-eared, with notes in the margins,” Charley said into the silence. “I was just reading it, and the observations the summoner’s written down. They’re quite brilliant.”

  “Brilliant enough to create a London hovel in the middle of central Wellington?” Millie asked.

  “Well,” Charley said. “That’s what I was just wondering.”

  I found my voice by putting it back on a familiar track. “You really need to be more careful about what you wonder in public. A few more seconds, and that London hovel would have been out in the open.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I would have noticed before that, I promise. It’s just that I was still a bit light-headed from the tunnel, and my concentration slipped. I need to practice secret passages, I think, next time we break into a building.”

  “Or not be up all night practicing doors the night before,” Millie suggested.

  “Maybe.” He yawned. “But the door went really well, didn’t it?”

  “It was a beautiful door,” Millie said, with a crooked grin. “And the tunnel was a work of art. Well done.”

  “Thank you.” Charley smiled back. “Next time, I’ll try to make it lead somewhere more dry. Like a theoretical textbook.”

  “Or you could just avoid summoning doors and secret passages at all,” I interjected. “They don’t seem to be a good idea.”

  “They seemed a jolly good idea to me,” Millie retorted. “We got out of there, didn’t we? With the book.”

  “It was good then,” I had to admit. “But I don’t think we should make a habit of this. The breaking and entering, or the summoning of passageways. For one thing, you look terrible.”

  “I don’t feel terrible,” Charley said. I believed him, unfortunately. He didn’t even really look terrible. He looked exhausted, and freezing cold, but his face was glowing. For once, whatever he said, he didn’t even look particularly sorry. “Or at least, if I do, it’s because I need to do more rather than less. It’s like when you were training to run a marathon, remember? Two or three years ago? When you push too far, you do look terrible. You might even collapse, and everything hurts the next day. But in the end, you can run a marathon.”

  “I suppose,” I conceded. That had been a failed New Year’s resolution—I’d worked up to one half marathon, then quit. “But it’s not dangerous if people find out you can run a few kilometers. It’s not a secret.”

  “Summoning won’t be a secret if this summoner keeps going much longer unimpeded,” Millie said. “He’s already caused a crime wave, sent the Hound of the Baskervilles to Highbury, and turned a central-city office into Dickensian England. Sooner or later, he’s bound to get noticed—and he doesn’t seem to care.”

  I didn’t answer, because it was true. But I hated this. I didn’t even know, entirely, what it was that I hated: the danger that I was still shaken from, the sudden strangeness of the city I thought I knew, the sensation that Charley was tumbling deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole that I couldn’t follow him down. The worst part was that the other two were enjoying it. My brother, who used to be afraid to jump into the deep end of a swimming pool, was suddenly in his element. And I didn’t know how to get him out of it before he drowned.

  “Here,” I said, pushing the pizza between the two of them roughly. “Eat quickly. They’re closing any minute.”

  “Thanks, Rob,” Millie said. “Jolly decent of you. Can I see that book, Charley?”

  “Go ahead.” He pushed it across the table, and she slid into the booth while scooping up a slice of pizza.

  “Dickens again,” she remarked as she opened it up. “I know you’re a Vic
torian specialist, but he seems to be a theme, doesn’t he?”

  “There were plenty of books there that weren’t Dickens,” Charley reminded her. “Thousands of them. That’s more impressive than you’ve probably considered, you know. If they really are using that many for summoning, they would have to not just read them, but understand them. I bring things out from what I’m reading at the time: it’s not planned. To bring people and worlds from any book, at will, and put them back, they would need to know them almost by heart.”

  “You always seem to know books by heart,” I pointed out. I sat down in the spare chair. My clothes squelched unpleasantly around me.

  “Some. But those weren’t just some. They filled the entire building. I think I’d need to read for a hundred years to have that kind of knowledge.”

  Charley had been reading for about twenty-five years, at various levels. The thought of him with four times as much reading under his hat was disconcerting, to say the least.

  “But out of all those books,” Millie said, “it always seems to be Dickens they come back to—or, at least, something Victorian. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Uriah Heep, David Copperfield. The criminals, too, the ones Dorian’s identified, seem to be Fagins and Magwitches and Scrooges. Is that directed at you? Or are we looking for another Dickens scholar?”

  “There aren’t any other Dickens scholars in the city,” Charley said. “At least, nobody else at the university specializes in the nineteenth century.”

  “What about David Copperfield, down there in the dark?” I asked. “What was that directed toward?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Charley said. He sobered at the memory. “David Copperfield is very important to Dickensian criticism, of course. Or his novel is. Like I told him, it’s semiautobiographical. A good deal of what happens in that book is taken from Dickens’s own life; at times, Dickens and David Copperfield blur so that it’s difficult to tell whose voice is really narrating. Like the blacking factory.”

  “Are you going to make us ask?”

  “It’s just an example. Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory when he was twelve, when his father was in debtors’ prison. He never recovered from the experience; he was angry about child labor and social injustice for the rest of his life. Something similar happens to David—except that David is ten. The words Dickens used to describe his own experience to a friend are almost identical to those he gives David in the book. ‘I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf.’”

  “That doesn’t sound very angry,” I said when Charley paused his quotation for breath. “It sounds betrayed.”

  “It’s that as well,” he agreed. “But it doesn’t explain what David Copperfield was doing blindfolded and captive in a basement that shouldn’t exist.”

  “If he was an old reading of yours, from when you were four or so,” Millie said, “then he probably knows things about you, the way I do. Perhaps the summoner was questioning him. That might have even been how he found out about you in the first place.”

  “If so,” I said, “he didn’t seem to want him anymore. He read him away right in front of us. Could he do that, to a reading not his own?”

  “I would have said not,” Charley said. “But then, I didn’t know I could alter the readings of someone else, until I did it to Henry. I don’t know where the limits of power are anymore.”

  I nodded slowly. “And your book? Where does that fit into things? I assume he’s using it because it was written by you, and he knows what you are.”

  “I assume he knows what I am too. I assume that’s why all of this is happening here, now, of all the cities in the world. But I can’t think what difference that would make to the book.”

  “What’s it about, anyway?” I asked.

  He looked at me, surprised. “I sent you all copies.”

  “I didn’t read it, Charley. Mum and Dad did—well, Dad tried. He got lost when you started talking about hermeneutic traditions versus the deconstructive approach.”

  “I told him not to worry about that part. He said he loved the book. And Mum said it was powerful.”

  “Well, maybe he loved not understanding it. What’s it about? In ordinary English.”

  Charley looked a little crestfallen, but he shrugged. “It’s about the darker side of London as Dickens portrays it. You know, the world of prisons and pickpockets and thieves. It talks about Dickens’s construction of the criminal underworld. There’s more to it than that, but—honestly, it’s not the only or even the best piece of Dickensian criticism on that subject. I was a teenager. There are other books for the summoner to use.”

  “But none that were written by another summoner,” Millie said. She had been looking through the book as we were talking. Suddenly, she froze. “Charley, have a look at this.”

  On the page was a black-and-white illustration, probably a replica of one from an old Victorian edition of Dickens. It was delicately shaded, depicting a cobbled path flanked with crooked buildings. Fog writhed from the pavement, and streetlights glowed. It was the Street. It was unmistakable. I recognized Dorian’s house looming in front, and Millie’s farther down the road. There was the saddler’s, and the pawnshop, and the pub. It could have been drawn from life. Or the other way around.

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s very weird.”

  “That’s from an edition of Bleak House, I think,” Charley said. He rubbed his brow. “It’s not really important to the analysis—OUP just wanted an illustration or two, and that one had the fog—”

  “They’ve scribbled a date next to it,” Millie said. “Two years ago.”

  “It’s not quite the Street, though, is it?” Charley said. “The Old Curiosity Shop isn’t there, or the bookstore—”

  “No,” Millie agreed. “It’s the basis for an interpretation. The text fills in the rest. I suppose a little like the building we were just in.”

  “The summoner made the Street,” Charley said.

  “I think he did,” Millie said. She sounded excited but, for the first time, a little shaken. “I think that’s what these notes are about. He was trying to summon a setting.”

  “So they read out a Dickensian street,” he said. “Not a street from any individual book, but a quintessential Dickensian street.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But why?” I asked, drawn in despite myself. “They haven’t made any use of it. If they did bring out the Street, they haven’t been back to it since. Have they?”

  Millie shook her head. “It was empty when we found it.”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t what the summoner wanted,” Charley said. “Perhaps they didn’t even know they’d succeeded in making it. It isn’t exactly in the real world. It’s stuck halfway.”

  “Like the Oliver Twist house again,” I suggested.

  “Sort of,” he agreed. “Although that was further through. It was taking up space, of a sort; it was melded to the curves and lines of the building that housed it.”

  “But perhaps,” Millie said, “it’s still not quite far enough.”

  Her face had lit. It unnerved me.

  “What are you thinking?” Charley asked.

  “I’m thinking about what you just said about the Street.” She pulled the book toward her. “If this date in the margins means what we think it means, then the summoner brought it through two years ago, and abandoned it. Let’s suppose, just for a moment, that they abandoned it because it didn’t work. When you read anything out, you bring it into the real world, don’t you? The Street never quite came into the real world. It’s stuck halfway.”

  “And so they left it,” Charley said slowly. “They left it for you to find.”
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  “Yes. We were drawn to it—it left a great wound in reality, and we came to infect it. But it was never meant for us. It was a failed experiment.”

  He considered this carefully. “And the house we were in a moment ago? Oliver Twist?”

  “As we just said. A little further through. Still not far enough.”

  “Far enough for what?” Charley asked, then caught his breath. “Oh God.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “What?”

  “The coming of the new world,” he said. “The whispers Dorian and the others have been hearing. Could they—what if it’s not meant metaphorically? What if the promise of a new world is quite literal?”

  “Things read out of books usually are quite literal,” Millie said. “Heathcliff’s eyes are made of fire. The Implied Reader is a person that lives about the saddlery. Uriah Heep can change his shape.”

  “Dickens’s criminal underworld,” Charley said. He sounded dazed. “That’s what they’re trying to summon. Not a street. Not a building. They want a Dickensian underworld.”

  “I think that’s what the Street’s been responding to,” Millie said. “That’s why it’s been shifting, and growing. The summoner has been trying to bring out the rest of the city. Every time he’s come close, our street has been reaching out for it.”

  “Just a moment,” I interrupted. My head was spinning. “What do you mean by a new world? What happens to the one already here?”

  “I rather think it would be supplanted by the one that comes,” Millie said. “The way Charley’s tunnel displaced the real earth, and his door displaced the real wall.”

  I thought of the Lambton Quay shops dissolving around me as Charley had pulled me through the doors.

  “This is hypothesis,” Charley said to me quickly. “We can’t know for certain what the summoner is trying to do.”

  “I think we can make a jolly good guess at it,” Millie said. She had no interest in sparing my feelings. “I think he wants his own reality. And I think Charley’s book is his means of getting it.”