by H. G. Parry
Anyway, consider me caught. I probably won’t have time to work on it much this week, but I’ll pull a couple of all-nighters and get it to you by Wednesday of next.
Best,
Charles
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Hallo old chap,
Hope all is well after last night. I say, while you’re there, do you mind seeing if anyone’s taken a copy of your book out of the library? Since we have the summoner’s copy, they might be looking to replace it. I’m bunking off at midday to go back to the Street—Lambton Quay is quiet, and the Artful is still watching the old office building just in case. E-mail Dorian if you have any news.
If not, see you tonight,
Millie
Sent from my iPhone
Millie
The Street was on high alert—or as high as it could manage. When Millie came back from the outside world, Matilda was sitting cross-legged against the wall with a mug of hot chocolate and a copy of To the Lighthouse; inside, having been duly warned of someone coming via the cord, Heathcliff and the White Witch burst from the house opposite Dorian’s.
“Oh.” Heathcliff lowered the lamppost, disappointed. “It’s you.”
“Sorry, old thing,” Millie said. “But you did very well. Anything to report?”
“Not a whisper,” the White Witch said. She twirled her gold wand lazily. “Are you certain you don’t want me to test that this thing still works? It’s been a while. Do we really need so many Darcys?”
“I think we could always use a spare Darcy or two,” Millie said. “If Uriah Heep causes too much trouble, though, I might consider him. Is he being watched?”
“He’s in the Darcys’ attic, I believe,” Heathcliff said grimly. “And should count himself fortunate not to be under my roof instead. My author’s notion of hospitality was not so civilized as theirs.”
The Darcys’ roof was, as always, very civilized indeed. The five of them were united at least in their attempts to make their home as much like Pemberley as a Victorian London flat could be, which was not very. It was, however, clean, light, and airy, with fires burning in every room, and books and tea tables and armchairs tucked around every corner. Darcys Three and Four were at home when Millie called—the latter was nearly always so. The poor thing was the victim of one of many readers convinced Darcy’s haughtiness was the product of extreme shyness, and lived much of his life holed up in the study gripped with paranoia that the others were going to organize a dance.
“Thanks for putting up Uriah Heep,” Millie said to the two of them. “I know you don’t like house guests.”
“For a house guest, he really is quite accommodating,” Four assured her, looking as usual at a spot on the floor near her feet. “He neither expects civility, nor deserves it. Unfortunately, I have not the talent which some people possess of conversing easily with those characters whose books I have not read. I cannot catch their tone of narration, or appear interested in their plot developments, as I have seen others do.”
“Never mind, old thing,” she said sympathetically. “At least you’re jolly decorative. May I talk to Heep alone?”
Uriah Heep was hunched over a desk in the corner of the attic, writing furiously. What he was writing probably wasn’t terribly important—it was just what Uriah Heep tended to be found doing. Sometimes, characters had difficulty knowing how to fill their time at first, if their authors or their readers hadn’t given sufficient thought to what they got up to off page. In any case, his red eyes gleamed with pleasure when Millie entered, although he was no help at all to her inquiries.
“No, Miss Radcliffe-Dix,” Uriah said, his eyes wide. “I’m afraid I still see nothing from my counterpart. I haven’t since last night, when you caused all that commotion. Perhaps he’s been put away? Speaking of which, where is Master Charley?”
“Never you mind,” she said. “And you keep Charley’s abilities to yourself, please, if you don’t want to be kept under far tighter guard than you are. Thanks for the information.”
“Of course,” he added as she turned to leave the room, “I might be able to see more if I were given more freedom myself.”
“You can go anywhere you like,” she said. “As long as you’re accompanied by one of the Darcys. But you must see we have to be careful. It doesn’t matter if we trust you or not—there’s still a danger that the summoner can use Eric to see through you.”
“Surely he can create someone to see through anyone he chooses, Miss Radcliffe-Dix,” he said softly. “Even you.”
She’d thought of it, of course, but her chest constricted to hear it in Uriah’s voice.
Darcy Three was waiting for her outside, flicking idly through a magazine. He straightened, of course, at her approach. All five Darcys were unfailingly proper, if not exactly polite.
“I take it your visit was unsuccessful?” he said.
“Rather,” she sighed. “Mr. Darcy, can I ask you a bit of a personal question?”
“We love to be asked personal questions,” he said, smiling. She sometimes forgot, talking to the others, that Darcy did actually know how to smile in his novel. “It really is more or less our textual function. I may decline to answer, however.”
“You can all see through each other’s eyes, at times. How far does it go?”
“I wouldn’t quite call it seeing. It’s more a form of sharing. We blend into one another momentarily.”
“Right now, for instance…?”
He closed his eyes obligingly. “Five is quite clear at the moment. I can see him at a coffee shop, with an attractive young lady who has noted his resemblance to Mr. Colin Firth. He will doubtless be rude to her, and thus obtain her phone number. One is somewhere warm, white, and quiet, which I happen to know is the laundromat because it was his turn to take the cravats to be washed. Two is actually just at the pub across the street, writing his memoirs. I can’t read the page, but I can see the sweep of the pen, and catch snatches of his thoughts.”
“Thanks awfully.”
“Not at all.” He blinked rapidly, coming back to himself. “I assume you ask because of Mr. Heep?”
“Not just him,” she said. She couldn’t say any more, but plans were solidifying in her mind. “Is he lying, though, about what he can get from the other Uriah Heep? It doesn’t seem likely that he’s been put away.”
“He may well be lying,” Darcy Three said. “He certainly looks capable of deception, though I could not begin to guess at his motive. It may be that the other Heep is preventing him from further glimpses. We all do that to each other, at times, if we notice the touch of each other’s mind. In fact…” He closed his eyes again briefly. “Five is doing so to me at this very moment. Perhaps the encounter is going better than I assumed.”
“That reminds me,” Millie said. “Where’s Dorian?”
Dorian was in his upstairs office, lounging in his dressing gown in front of his laptop. The skull-topped crystal decanter across the desk was looking suspiciously low, as were the burning candles.
“You’re home early,” he observed, without looking up.
“You’re awake early,” Millie returned. “Or late. You’re awake while the sun is in the sky, at any rate. Is there a crisis?”
“I wouldn’t be awake if there was. The only thing more tedious than someone else’s crises are one’s own. Did you bunk off work?”
“I was worried about this place.” She leaned against the doorway, unwilling to turn her back to the window overlooking the Street. “After what we did last night. If the summoner wasn’t looking at us before, he will be now.”
“I imagine he’ll be looking mostly for your summoner,” Dorian said. “You do realize what you’ve done, don’t you? Whatever the summoner’s plans were, we weren’t a threat to them before. We are now. He’ll be coming for us. And it isn’t as though we’re hidden. Any fictional person is drawn to the Street like a magnet.”
“The
summoners are too,” Millie agreed. “At least, Charley was. But there’s been no trouble so far?”
“Not a whisper from the outside world. Uriah Heep seems his usual repulsive self. Heathcliff and the Darcys are squabbling over cravats or something again, which might need your intervention. Best not make any of them keep watch together; Austens and Brontës are fundamentally opposed.” He yawned, stretched, and rose to his feet. “You’re right; this is far too early for me to be awake. Would you like a drink?”
“Thanks awfully, but I’d like a working liver more. We don’t all have convenient portraits to take our substance abuses, you know.”
“There’s nothing convenient about having one’s eternal soul stashed in your wardrobe.” He crossed to the crystal decanter, and poured a glass. The green liquid bubbled in a way that she didn’t think even absinthe was supposed to. “I want it back, Millie.”
It took her a moment to register a change in topic. “What?”
“My portrait. You’ve given Jadis her wand back now.”
“She needs it to protect the Street. I’m not happy about it—Mr. Tumnus certainly isn’t happy about it—but there’s no alternative. You don’t need your portrait to protect the Street.”
“You need me to protect the Street. Please don’t mistake my apathy for bravery, Millie, and certainly don’t mistake my service for loyalty. I’m here because the Street offers me physical protection from the outside world—or did. Risking my life for it would be rather counterproductive.”
“Nobody’s asking you to risk your life for it. Just to keep it secret from the outside world. We’ll deal with the summoner.”
“‘We’?”
“I will.” She knew better than to be drawn into another discussion about Charley.
Dorian sighed. “It isn’t only this new summoner, you know,” he said. “In fact, the summoner might have a point, if what you surmise about their goals is correct. The Street can’t go on like this forever.”
“It hasn’t even gone on five years yet,” Millie said. “I hope we still have a few anniversaries to celebrate.”
“Precisely my point. Millie, do try to stop being so bloody optimistic and consider our position. The world is growing and changing too fast; we won’t be able to hide in it much longer. As you say, it’s my job, and I know how impossible it is. You couldn’t possibly know how many threads of the World Wide Web I tweak every night to make sure that nobody discovers us. Sooner or later, somebody is going to materialize on camera. A body is going to be discovered in an alley, autopsied, and found to be inhuman. Somebody is going to find the Street, and we will be under siege.”
“You can’t know that.”
“It’s written into me to know it. Oscar Wilde knew it. Nothing stays hidden. Secrets are always found out, and the world is unforgiving.”
“As I recall,” Millie said, “in your book, your secret isn’t revealed until you stab your painting in the heart.”
He shrugged. “That’s how all secrets are revealed, in the end. Either someone else betrays us, or we betray ourselves.”
“Why do I end up with Wilde’s most depressing creation? Why couldn’t someone have had a deep and sincere reaction to The Importance of Being Earnest?”
“I’m right. You know I am.”
“Suppose you are. I don’t see the alternative.”
“Perhaps this summoner does. The Street doesn’t just give us a place to hide, you know. It gives us a chance to gather, in force, for the first time. We’ve always been alone, and vulnerable. Well, we’re not alone anymore. We have the chance of a new world. A world of our own—not a hidden world, but a world carved out of the world of flesh and blood, for us to defend, if we can. For the record, I don’t know if we can. I don’t know how strong this summoner is. But if we can, it might be no bad thing to strike first.”
“Against innocent people?”
“There are no innocent people,” Dorian said. “I know the darkness in their hearts. I’m a creature of the Gothic imagination; more than that, I’m a creature of the Internet. I don’t hold it against them. I’m no better than them. But believe me, Millie, there is no happy ending to real life.”
“If you feel that way, then leave.” She wasn’t really worried that he would, given the dangers of the world outside, but something tightened in her chest. It wasn’t just that she would really miss him, or even that he was absolutely right about how much they relied upon him. The thought of Dorian on any side but their own was potentially very troubling. “When you do, I’ll gladly give you your portrait to take with you. But until then, I’m not having you here at large with your soul in your possession. I know you too well, Dorian. Our White Witch actually isn’t too bad, given that she’s an allegory for the devil. She’s mostly style and malice; she’s probably from the mind of a rebellious teenage girl who didn’t really understand what evil was, or wasn’t interested. You’re trouble.”
“I’m flattered.” Dorian paused. “I could threaten to tell them all I know about Dr. Sutherland. Your summoner. You know I’m not above blackmail.”
Millie laughed. “You may as well just leave, in that case. I’d make you leave after that anyway, so it would be a sight less bother. And you don’t want to leave.”
Dorian smiled his lazy, soulless smile, guaranteed to thrill the hearts of all within a five-mile radius, and raised his glass. “Perhaps not quite yet. There are developments I’d like to await, I think. But—”
He broke off. The cord extending from his laptop was twitching: once, twice, three times. In the Street, Millie saw Matilda hurry through the wall, clutching her book. Heathcliff and the Witch emerged; some of the others stepped forward as well, alerted by the flurry of movement.
“Are we expecting someone?” Dorian asked slowly.
“Charley was coming,” Millie said. “But not until later.”
It wasn’t Charley. The figure who staggered through the wall as Millie made it down was a tiny, wizened old man in a nightshirt and nightcap. He was clearly one of them: the air around him brought its own supernatural chill. Millie, standing near him, tasted frost and felt her nose tingle. His face was lean, set in crags more used to frowning than smiling. Now, though, it was stretched tight with terror.
“Who are you?” Millie asked him. “You’re safe here, you know, whoever you are.”
The man bent and caught his breath, struggling to speak. His limbs were fragile as old twigs.
Darcy Three spoke up first. He was standing by his own door, not far down; the magazine from earlier was still in his hands. “I know him,” he said. “He’s the Scrooge who told me about the new world. Do you remember, you asked me from where I had heard the rumors? I couldn’t find him again.”
“Is that true?” Millie asked the old man. “Are you Ebenezer Scrooge, of A Christmas Carol?”
The man nodded shortly.
“Did you come from the summoner?” Millie asked him.
“He read most of us away last night.” The Scottish brogue was punctuated by gasps. “When you found him. He missed me. I was in the office, fiddling the accounts, and he forgot me. I escaped out the window—hid behind the dustbins. Once he remembers—or he feels me in his head—I’ll be gone. I wanted to warn you…”
“We know about the new world,” Millie said quickly. “We have the book. Is there anything else you can tell us? Who is he?”
“I can’t. We can’t speak his name. None of us can—not his real name. He reads that into us, like a spell. We don’t even see him the way you would see him.”
“He can do that to you?” She was almost sure that Charley couldn’t—though it wasn’t something that he would ever have tried. “He can make you see him as someone other than who he is?”
“I don’t think so. I think—I think we see him as how he truly is. How he began.”
Millie frowned. “How would we see him then? Who is he now?”
“We don’t know who he is,” Scrooge said. “He’s a ghost to u
s. But I can tell you this: He knows you’re here. And he knows what Charles Sutherland is.”
Heathcliff frowned. “What do you mean?”
Scrooge cried out suddenly, a short sharp cry that brought him to his knees. Millie, reaching out to catch his shoulder, found him ice-cold beneath it. “No… Spirit, hear me! I am not the man I was…”
“He’s fading,” the White Witch said. “Look.”
He was. His edges shimmered with transparency; his voice, too, faded in and out. “Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me… I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year…”
“Millie, let him go.” It was Heathcliff’s voice, for once sharp with urgency. “Quickly.”
Millie crouched down, to keep eye level with Scrooge. “Mr. Scrooge. Listen to me. Can you tell us where we might find him?”
Scrooge, with great effort of will, shook his head. “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I—”
“Millie!”
She tightened her grip on the bony shoulder. It was like trying to hold on to a fog. “Then listen to me. If the summoner reads you out again, will you give him a message from us? Tell him that we have something of his, and we want to negotiate. Tell him to stop hiding, and talk to us. Can you hear me?”
She thought Scrooge’s eyes met hers, but it was difficult to tell.
“Mr. Scrooge?
“For God’s sake!” Millie’s hand was wrenched from Scrooge’s shoulder by a grip like iron. The tips of her fingers passed through the miser rather than from him; he dissolved like ink in water, and was gone.
They looked in silence at the empty space left behind.
“You could have gone with him,” Heathcliff said, at last, to her. He released her, gruff with embarrassment. “We are few enough already. We cannot afford to lose you.”
