The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  “Thank you,” Millie heard herself reply. “Poor soul. Jadis, Heathcliff—I wonder if you might make sure you’re both around for the rest of the afternoon. Lancelot and the Scarlet Pimpernel volunteered to take a shift this evening, but…”

  “I wish one of us were a Wentworth, or a Colonel Brandon,” Darcy Three said, with a touch of bitterness. “Instead of so many Darcys. A war hero would be a lot more useful than a gentleman with ten thousand a year.”

  “I notice you don’t wish you were a Wentworth,” the White Witch said dryly.

  Millie had noticed the same, but she still found the sentiment touching. Possibly because of the single lock of hair curling over his eyes. “You can all take your turn all the same,” she said. “I think we’d better tighten things up around here. Just to be safe.”

  “That man was destroyed inside our very walls,” the Duke of Wellington said. “We do have a plan, do we not?”

  “The summoner can only destroy his own readings,” Millie said. She thought it was true. Charley had only ever altered a reading not his own, and that had been Henry, not a human character. “He can’t hurt us. And yes. We have a plan. You heard me: he’ll come to talk to us.”

  “What do we have of his that he wants?”

  “I’d rather not say,” Millie said. “But trust me. It will bring him to us. All we have to do is wait.”

  Dorian was watching silently from his doorway. When she turned, she saw him, glass of absinthe still untouched in his hand. His blue eyes were not so soulless as usual.

  “I do want that portrait back,” he said.

  “The trouble is, all we have is a book,” Millie said to Charley later that evening. “It’s a sight more than we had last night, but still… do you think the summoner will come for this book, after all? It’s not impossible to source another.”

  “The university library copy of that book’s been out for two weeks,” Charley said. He had come straight from the university; his hair was still windblown from the death trap. “I checked today, as you asked. Nobody’s requested it. The public library doesn’t have a copy. The summoner could have his own extra copy, of course. But even if he does, I think he’ll want this particular copy back. Especially if he gets your invitation.”

  Despite his best efforts, his eyes kept wandering, not because he didn’t feel her urgency, but because Millie had made the mistake of taking him into the Street’s bookshop. The walls teemed with books: not the sprawling, disorganized clutter of Charley’s house, but crisp, cool, ordered. Many were new volumes, and their colors were bright against the dark Victorian wood. The faded paint over the door declared the shop to belong to “Mr. Brownlow,” from Oliver Twist, but it was in fact occupied by a tall, brown-skinned woman. She was up on a ladder when they entered, putting a volume on the highest shelf.

  “Scheherazade,” Millie had introduced her to Charley. “From the Thousand and One Nights, of course. She understands English, but doesn’t speak very much—she came into the world with only Arabic.”

  “I had that happen when I was reading the Odyssey in Ancient Greek,” Charley said. “English translations came out speaking English, but when the words were in Greek, Odysseus showed up speaking Greek as well. It was embarrassing. I thought I was fairly fluent, but you realize your limitations in a dead language when you’re trying to explain to a legendary hero how the coffee maker works.”

  Now, Scheherazade was safely out of earshot at the far end of the shop, continuing her shelving. Half the reason Millie had brought them there was that the woman cared very little about much except collecting and sharing stories, so their conversation could take place in private. The rest of the Street was terrified enough already. She had underestimated the extent to which Charley shared this trait.

  “You say the library copy of your book’s out?” Millie said. “Who has it?”

  He hesitated before he spoke. “Well. Troy Heywood, according to the library. I asked them; like I said, I need to track down books I’ve written notes in all the time, so they’re used to telling me who has them out. He’s a postgrad. I’m co-supervising his PhD, actually… he’s very bright.”

  “Bright enough to read out a Dickensian street?”

  She had his full attention now. “He’d need to be more than bright for that—and I’d need to have firmer grounds than his intelligence to suspect it. It’s not exactly suspicious that he has the book in question out from the library, you know. He’s writing a thesis on Dickens and Foucault. He probably has a lot of Dickens criticism out of the library. That’s what the library is for. And the Dickens criticism, for that matter.”

  “You said there weren’t any other Dickens scholars in the area.”

  “He’s a student.”

  “You were a student when you wrote most of that book. You’re probably not much older than him now, for that matter. Don’t be a snob.” Millie sat forward. “Listen to me. Whoever the summoner is, they know you. They know your book; that might be how they tracked you down. But they also know where you live. It can’t be a coincidence that they’re in the same city as you; since you didn’t move to be close to them, they must have moved to be close to you. They know where your brother works: they sent Uriah Heep to watch him. For all you know, there’s someone watching you at your own work.”

  “I think I’d know. Rob recognized Eric.”

  “That was pure chance. He happened to have already seen another version of Uriah Heep that wasn’t too dissimilar. They’d be more careful with who they sent to watch you. Certainly they know where you work. It’s public knowledge. They also know where you live. They sent Henry to your house. They’ve almost certainly made themselves personally acquainted with you. They might not have done so from the university, but you don’t strike me as having a large circle of acquaintances outside work.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “Only in the sense that I really have no circle of acquaintances outside work. None nonfictional or unrelated to me, anyway. I’m busy. There are a lot of books to read.”

  Millie snorted. “That’s rather what I thought. Has your postgraduate student been to your house?”

  “Once or twice. Most of the English faculty have. But—”

  “So if he wanted to set the Hound of the Baskervilles on you, he’d know where you lived?”

  “We probably all want to do that to our thesis supervisors, at some point… Look, I understand your argument. I know that we need to find the summoner. But we can’t just jump to accusing people on circumstantial evidence. I can think of a myriad of reasons why he or anyone else in the department would be reading critical books on Dickensian London—my own book included. Troy didn’t check it out this morning. He’s had it for a while—before we stole the summoner’s book last night.”

  “When exactly was he last at your house?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. I suppose it would have been—” He stopped. Millie waited, and behind his eyes saw a thread come together against his will. “He was there right before the Hound of the Baskervilles,” he said at last. “He left just before, when Rob came. But that doesn’t mean anything. There were a handful of people there—all of us on the History of the Modern Novel.”

  “I’ll ask Dorian to look into all of them, just to be safe, of course. But the others aren’t nineteenth-century scholars—if I remember the school website. They wouldn’t have any reason to prefer Victorian characters over others. This fellow would. How long have you supervised him?”

  “About two years. A little more. He was one of the first students I took on when I came over. I know what you’re about to suggest. The Street’s two years old.”

  “Is there any chance,” Millie said, “that he came to the university because of you?”

  “Well… maybe. It’s not unusual to go to a university for your PhD because there’s someone there who’s able to supervise it.”

  “You know that isn’t what I mean. Is it at all possible
that he read your book, recognized what you were, and applied to work with you just to be by your side?”

  “Maybe,” Charley said reluctantly. “But if he can recognize what I am from my work, then surely I should be able to recognize him, if he were a summoner. And I don’t.”

  “Perhaps he’s hiding better than you ever have. He has, if we’re right, rather more to hide. I think we should look at him more closely.”

  “Look at him how?”

  “Well, Dorian can search his computer, for a start. Otherwise…” Millie grinned. “You haven’t seen the Invisible Man yet, have you?”

  “I think that would probably be something of a paradox.” Meaning caught up to him a second later. “You mean H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man?”

  “Well, I didn’t mean Ralph Ellison’s. That one’s in Harlem.”

  “Isn’t he a dangerous psychopath? The Wells version, I mean. Griffin.”

  “A little. He’s mellowed rather since 1897. And he’s very good at looking at people. It’s easier when they can’t see you back.”

  Charley stared at her. “You can’t. You can’t set the Invisible Man on my students!”

  “I can. No harm will come to him, I promise. We’ve done it before, when we’ve needed people watched. He’ll just stay by the house, invisible, and keep an eye on him. If your student has nothing to hide…”

  “I think everyone has something to hide. And definitely everyone has the right not to be followed by an invisible mad scientist!”

  Millie cast a warning glance at Scheherazade, who was busy not deaf, and Charley caught himself.

  “You saw David Copperfield tied up in the basement,” Millie said. “You saw the world that the summoner had built to keep his creations locked up. Scrooge was read away in front of us this afternoon. They have rights as well, fictional or not.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. You know I don’t mean to suggest they don’t. I just don’t think it’s Troy.”

  “Truly? Or do you just not want it to be?”

  “The former. The latter. Both.” He sighed. It was no wonder Rob found it easy to bully him. He was too schooled in seeing other points of view to hold to his own. “If you truly trust the Invisible Man to watch him safely, then I understand it’s the best course of action. I just don’t want to start suspecting everybody I work with of being a criminal mastermind. I like the people I work with—most of them.”

  “I’m sure most of them like you. You just have to be open to the possibility that one of them might be trying to kill you.” She paused. “Did anyone else at work seem to be paying you undue attention today?”

  “How many more invisible people do you have?” He considered the question. “Well… if they did, I couldn’t blame them. I suspect I was all over the place today. I know I talked too fast through two lectures, which probably drove half my students to Facebook. There was a meeting this afternoon, and I was there, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing we discussed.”

  “You did read the world into a lot of different shapes over the weekend.”

  “No—well, yes, but it’s not just that. I’ve been worried about this place, but it’s not that either. It’s more… do you ever get the feeling, after you’ve been on the Street, that the world outside is so hard and unyielding by comparison you can’t get comfortable? You try to push into it, and it just pushes back at you. It’s like trying to sleep on a bench.”

  “When did you ever try to sleep on a bench, Sutherland?”

  “At an airport. Half a bench, really. I’d been flying for twenty-four hours, and I can’t sleep on planes. But I’m sorry, I forgot—you probably slept on plenty of benches after you left us.”

  “A sight too many,” she said frankly. “But it was all good fun back then. I hadn’t grown into this world enough to know any different. Charley—did you mean it, when you said you thought you could learn to do more summoning than you did last night?”

  “Of course,” he said, without his usual hesitation. “What do you want?”

  “Cross your heart? Because you were rather tired last night. You look rather tired still, if truth be told.”

  “I didn’t say I could do it easily. Pushing the boundaries of reality shouldn’t be easy, or there’s something wrong. I can still do it.”

  She nodded. “Good man. Until Scrooge came today, I was going to ask you if you could read out anyone else like Uriah—people who had counterparts with the summoner, who might be able to tell us what’s going on in their heads. It looks like the summoner’s put a stop to that, but we could still try. It’s the other half of why I brought us here—these books would be as good a place to start as any. If they want to stay out after you’ve read them, that’s all well and good. Plenty of houses on the Street.”

  “I’ll try,” he said. “I also think we need to do more than that. Even if we find the summoner, we need to meet him from a stronger position. You’re hoping he’ll negotiate because you have me and his book, but he’s better than I am. We need to know a good deal more about summoning than we know now. I need to know a good deal more. And that means reading, experimenting, and going deeper.”

  “How deep?”

  “As deep and as far as it goes. The other summoner can make an entire Street. We need to understand how.”

  “I suppose we do,” Millie said cautiously. “If you’re up to it.”

  “I’ll be up to it.”

  “If you do, though, we need to keep it very quiet from the rest of the Street. I don’t know how they’ll react.”

  “Even Dorian? You said he knows what I am.”

  She thought of the look on Dorian’s face before he had withdrawn into his house. It hurt her heart, but she nodded. “Yes. Even Dorian.”

  “All right. It’s not as though I’m not used to it.” He smiled, at once shy and brimming with excitement. “I want to try something new with the Secret Garden door, actually. You know we were wondering how the summoner escaped the office without being seen by the lookout? The tunnel leading to the sea made me think of it. In the book, the door doesn’t just go to the other side of the wall. That was a shallow reading on my part. It goes to a secret place, locked off from the rest of the world. It’s a portal. It occurred to me to wonder if the summoner might know how to use portals too. And I wondered where else ours might be able to go.”

  “I say.” She wasn’t sure whether to be amused, fascinated, or nervous. “You’re the literary equivalent of the scientists who split the atom.”

  “Books don’t hurt people.”

  “What comes out of them jolly well does.”

  “Does that mean you think it shouldn’t be attempted?”

  “No,” she said. “No, it doesn’t mean that.” And she knew that they were reaching deeper into something strange, glittering, and infinitely dangerous.

  That night, Millie stood in the real world, at the end of the alleyway. The sky was soft and dark, only intermittently pierced by the early stars. She stood there for a long time.

  At length, a shadow passed over the streetlights. A large, ungainly bird flapped across the road: a kererū, a wood pigeon. Its white chest was visible from the distance and its dark green wings fought the high wind. Millie waved at it.

  The wood pigeon circled once more, then landed on the rubbish skip beside her in a clatter of claws. It tilted its head at her, and its black eyes gleamed.

  “Hello,” Millie said. “I say, I’m glad I found you. May we talk a moment?”

  The wood pigeon indicated with a wave of a claw that it had no objections.

  “We’ve found out what’s behind the disturbances,” Millie said. “A summoner means to create a new world from the covers of a book. To rewrite reality. He wants to bring Victorian England here.”

  In a burst of feathers, a slim, scantily clad Māori man was sitting on the edge of the skip where the bird had been. His face was shrewd and clever. It was impossible to tell from it whether Millie’s news was news to him or not.r />
  “It wouldn’t be the first time Victorian England came to this country,” Maui said.

  “No.” She knew he wasn’t only talking about the Street. She wondered, once again, just how long Maui had been in the world. “But it might be the last. I know you don’t like the Street being here very much, but it did at least bring our own land with it. We live side by side with you, whether inside the Street or out. The new world would rewrite everything.”

  “I heard the first time,” he said. “It all sounds a bit postcolonial, doesn’t it?”

  “You warned the Duke of Wellington that the new world was coming here. It must have worried you.”

  “Maybe I just wanted you lot to find out what it meant. Spare me the trouble.”

  “Well, we did.”

  “Maybe I knew already.” He tilted his head. His eyes were as bright as they had been as a bird; or, perhaps, they had been as bright as a human’s eyes when he was a bird. “What have you come to ask from me? You want me to help you investigate this?”

  “No. Well, yes, if there’s anything you can do, but no. I want to know if you’ll stand with us, if the worst happens, and it comes to a fight between the summoner and the Street.”

  Maui laughed. “And why would I help you?”

  “You wouldn’t. I know full well we’re nothing much to you. But I hoped—you’re not just a storybook character. You’re a culture hero, and this is your land. I hoped you might want to protect it.”

  He considered for a long time. “When it’s time to fight,” he said at last, “I’ll decide if it’s my fight. If it is, you’ll know. That’s the best I can promise and mean it. I am a trickster, after all.”

  It was the best she could hope for, the best but one, and that was for the time never to come at all.

  Lydia

  Lydia knew Eric as soon as she saw him. It wasn’t just that he was the only person likely to be in Rob’s office when Rob wasn’t there. She had spent the morning thinking about his voice on the phone, and his appearance matched his voice exactly. He was thin and pale—like, she couldn’t help thinking, one of the wriggling white huhu grubs she and Rob had unearthed when they turned over an old log in the garden. He squinted at the laptop inches from his nose.