The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  I lay awake all that night, staring up at the ceiling. Searching the university database for the summoner had done me no good; really, I had known it wouldn’t, much as I had known Charley’s birth certificate would only prove he was ours. If I was going to find the summoner through any rational means, the answer lay closer to home. And if I still wanted to, I was running out of time. I needed help of some kind.

  When the night began to thin around me, I sat up and pulled my laptop from the dresser to my knee. I thought it would be difficult to find who I was after. In fact, I found him within three minutes on the hospital’s main website. I suppose, for all their concern about secrecy, nobody would think to look for literary characters. The only reason they might choose not to use their real names would be because nobody would believe them.

  Still. Victor Prometheus Godwin. That wasn’t even trying.

  The next day, I called the hospital from my office, and with a combination of bluster and legal fudgery managed to get patched down to the mortuary. When I heard the cultured voice, I knew I had the right man.

  “This is Godwin.”

  “This is Robert Sutherland,” I said. “I’m—”

  “I know who you are.” He didn’t sound surprised, but perhaps he sounded a little cautious. “You’re Charles Sutherland’s brother.”

  “And you’re Victor Frankenstein. I want to talk to you. In private.”

  There was silence. “I have an hour for lunch at one,” he said. “You can meet me at the Bolton Street cemetery.”

  Many thoughts raced through my mind before I found my voice again, the loudest being that this was a terrible idea, leave it alone, for God’s sake.

  “Fine,” I said. “Which grave?”

  It was one of those crisp, clear Wellington days, when trees and buildings are sharp-edged in the sunlight and the sky looks as though it would chime like crystal if flicked with a fingernail. The graveyard in question was just around the corner from Parliament, and was a piece of history rather than a working burial ground. The graves there went back to the early settlement, and over the years had grown into more of a public park. I had always liked it. It wound up the hills to the Botanic Gardens, the worn headstones peaceful in the shade of towering pine trees. People meandered through, talking on their phones or listening to music. I heard a tui piping in the distance. There was nothing in the least Gothic about any of it, except the person I was going to meet.

  I followed the visitors’ map to the grave the mortuary attendant had named, off the path and over the curve of the hill overlooking the old Thorndon houses. Down there, the sunlight was softer, and the grass gave off a faint warmth and sweetness. The wind rustled the branches of the trees overhead, but didn’t make it to the ground.

  Frankenstein was sitting on a headstone, eating fish and chips from a paper bag. His long, thin legs were stretched out in front of him, and he was waiting for me.

  I haven’t in fact read Frankenstein, but I’ve done everything but. I grew up watching old horror movies with Dad. I knew Dr. Frankenstein from those, as a wide-eyed black-and-white madman surrounded by crackling electricity. I met him again in one of the comic books I always got for Christmas, captured in hand-drawn lines and pastel colors. Because I’d read the introduction of Charley’s copy of Frankenstein, I knew that his book was written by Mary Shelley, who at the time was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, eighteen years old and traveling with her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Lord Byron in Geneva. Childishly, I’d never wanted to meet the Frankenstein between the pages of that book. He belonged to Charley, who managed to colonize most of the literary landscape of our house before I could reach it. My Frankenstein was the one of popular imagination, the one who cried, “It’s alive!” while lightning clashed, and I liked him.

  This Frankenstein was neither mine, nor exactly Mary Shelley’s. He belonged to some unknown reader, who had apparently bestowed upon him a penchant for black coats, and pale skin that, in the harsh New Zealand sun, was starting to freckle. But his eyes I recognized. They were pale gray, as they had been on the silver screen, and they glittered as he looked at me.

  “Dr. Frankenstein?” I said as I approached. I tried to keep my tone as businesslike as possible, as though he were an expert witness, or a client I was trying to clear of selling dodgy televisions. “I’m—”

  “You’re Dr. Sutherland’s brother,” Frankenstein said. He had a quiet, well-spoken manner; the accent was difficult to place, except as vaguely English and vaguely exotic. Swiss written by an Englishwoman read by goodness knows whom. “I know. You don’t look very much like him.”

  “You’re not the first to notice it. You two have met, then?”

  “No. I don’t go to the Street much. But I’ve heard the stories. Right now, he’s the only thing standing in the way of the new world—or so they say. There are many people out there who’d wish him harm for that, and many who think he’s going to save them.”

  “What do you know about the new world?”

  “I know it’s supposed to be coming. There have been whispers of it for over a year, and they’ve been getting louder.”

  “From the summoner’s creations, do you mean? That’s where Millie said they’d sprung from. Mr. Darcy met a Scrooge on the road one night, or something. But it doesn’t make sense. It seems to imply that the summoner wants people to know he’s here, and what he’s planning. Why would he?”

  Frankenstein raised an eyebrow. “I really have not the qualifications nor the interest to answer questions about the summoner, Sutherland. You should talk to the Street. Millie, I believe, is very keen to know his mind.”

  I knew this all too well. But unfortunately, the Street and I were no longer on speaking terms. “If you had to speculate.”

  “If I had to.” He considered. “It’s possible that you’re correct, and as the new world draws closer, the summoner wants us to prepare for it. There is another possibility, however.”

  “Which is?”

  “The summoner’s characters are trying to warn us. As much as they can, within the limitations the summoner has imposed upon them, those poor, flat creatures of ink are trying to tell us to protect ourselves. And perhaps to save them.”

  I thought of Eric and his comments about my brother. I had thought at the time that he had realized I knew who he was and was taunting me—but if so, it was curious that the summoner kept him near me. I wondered, for the first time, if I had misjudged him. Perhaps Eric did, indeed, know or guess that I had recognized him, and what I had taken to be taunts were really all the warnings he could give me.

  “Which do you think it is?”

  Frankenstein shrugged. A veil had fallen over his silvery eyes. “Personally, I try not to listen to rumors. I’m too busy.”

  I didn’t want to know what he might be busy doing.

  “How did you know to look for me, may I ask?” he said, more prosaically. “I appreciate that once you did, I may not have been difficult to find.”

  “Millie mentioned you,” I said. “Offhandedly. You stuck in my mind.”

  “I’m flattered. To what do I owe this honor then?”

  I pulled my mind back to the present with an effort that seemed physical rather than mental. “I’ve come to you as a lawyer coming to a hospital worker,” I said, in what was a desperate grab at normality under the circumstances. “I want information from the hospital, and I think you can help me.”

  “Once again,” he said, “I would think that the Street could best help you with that. Dorian Gray is known to be a veritable fountain of information.”

  “I don’t trust Dorian Gray,” I said. “And I don’t want any dealings with the Street at the moment. I can pay you for your time.”

  “I take it then you want information I shouldn’t be giving you,” Frankenstein said. “And the money you speak of would be not so much a payment as a bribe. Does the desire for knowledge often overcome your ethics, Sutherland?”

  “No,” I said, firmly. �
�Never. I’m not one of those lawyers. But this is about my brother.”

  “And we do extraordinary things for the people we love, do we not?” Frankenstein said. His wild eyes shone. “We pit ourselves against death itself in their names. We sell our very souls.”

  “Well, I wasn’t exactly considering that.” I kept my voice deliberately dry, and folded my arms so he couldn’t see me shiver. “I was thinking maybe a hundred dollars.”

  Frankenstein laughed unexpectedly. “And what would you be gaining from this Faustian deal?”

  “Well, first of all,” I said. “I want Charley’s medical records. He hardly ever goes to the doctor, so they’re probably still back in England, but you should be able to access them through the hospital. Specifically, I want anything from his birth and early infancy. I know records from then exist. He was a bit of a special case.”

  “He could request a copy of those himself, I assume.”

  “I know. I’d rather do it this way, for now.” I didn’t want to say that we weren’t speaking. It sounded childish; besides, it was none of his business. “When I find out what they say, I might have more medical data for you to find.”

  “I see. And what do you expect them to say?”

  I thought about telling him it was none of his business, but I relented. It probably wasn’t wise to push literature’s original mad scientist too far. He’d see them for himself soon enough anyway. “They’ll say that he was a stillbirth, who revived unexpectedly and spontaneously after twenty minutes with no heartbeat or respiration. I want to see what else they say, and then I want to see if I can find anyone else who matches it.”

  Two things stood out about Charley that could be tracked on paper. One was that he was highly precocious, especially at literature and language. That had been my first line of inquiry, but it didn’t seem to being getting me anywhere. The other thing was that he had been pronounced dead at birth. And, as Lydia had said, nobody spends the first twenty minutes of their life dead without consequences. At the very least, I’d soon know if I was wrong. Children born dead who grow up to demonstrate brilliant language abilities have to be few and far between.

  I don’t think Dr. Frankenstein heard the last part of what I had said. His eyebrows had shot up at the first sentence, and stayed there as his eyes grew thoughtful.

  “If you were in a certain kind of book,” he said at last, “I’d say you were talking about a changeling.”

  I frowned. “You mean a child swapped out by fairies?”

  “Exactly. A child who mysteriously awakens from death, grows up to look nothing like his family, displays a highly precocious intellect, and wields magic powers… Well, that would certainly have raised eyebrows a few hundred years ago, shall I say.”

  I had thought something similar, in a more literal sense. It was why I had looked for his birth certificate first—to ensure he really did belong to us. But he did. Whatever else he was, he was ours.

  “I thought you were a scientist.”

  “I began as an alchemist. A follower of the ancient philosophers, who sought to transmute base metal to gold and bestow everlasting life. And I am one yet, in many ways. I consider myself a student of natural philosophy. I don’t believe in changelings. I do believe there’s something peculiar about your brother’s origins, and that gives him the power to bestow life. Life from thought and language. That interests me.”

  “Leave him alone,” I warned, with a sting of alarm. The last thing I needed was to set Dr. Frankenstein after my brother. “He’s not your concern.”

  “At this point, I’m more interested in seeing his medical records than him, I assure you,” Frankenstein said. “Besides, there are so many interested parties around him that I would be fortunate to catch a glimpse. What you need to understand about protagonists, Sutherland, is that we’re all busy with our own plots. We can’t help it; we’re not used to sharing our stories. And right now, most stories are all about your brother, the other summoner, and the new world.”

  “And what about you?” I asked. “What’s your story? What’s your interest in the new world?”

  “I’m Dr. Frankenstein,” he said. “My story is about life and death, of course. Where do we come from? Where do we go? How do we keep ourselves from leaving? I don’t care about the new world. I care about penetrating the mystery of what gives us life. That’s my interest in Dr. Charles Sutherland, and the other summoner. You’ve increased it rather, today.”

  “So that’s why you’re here,” I said, with a nod to the graves. “And it’s why you work at the mortuary. You’re still trying to revive the dead.”

  “Your dead?” Frankenstein said. “Forgive me, but any interest in your moldering physical forms is purely nostalgic, I assure you. I work at the mortuary because it’s a job well suited to my skill set; I come here for lunch because—well, let us say it satisfies my Gothic elements. And it reminds me of simpler times, times I may not have actually lived, when life and death were human and more easily researched. It’s not human life and death I’m concerned with anymore. It’s ours. This life I and those like me have been so mysteriously given from fiction. I want to know how that is created, and how it grows. Where we come from, and how we can stay here.”

  “You come from books, don’t you?”

  “A book is words on a page,” Frankenstein said. There was a touch of scorn in his voice. “You tell me, how does one come from that? I don’t dispute your theory. But like most, you haven’t bothered to interrogate its basic principles.”

  “I’m sure you have. Have you found any answers?”

  “None,” he said. “But I hope to, though I know that such an answer may destroy me.”

  “Well, good luck with that.” The wind must have picked up; I was suddenly cold. “Personally, I don’t want any answers that may destroy me.”

  “In that case,” Frankenstein said, “be very careful about the answers you chase right now. Do not drink of the intoxicating draft; dash it from your lips before you taste its true bitterness. Questions are dangerous, and their answers are more dangerous yet. But you won’t stop. Nor will I. Nor will your brother, I suspect, though he and I have never met. It’s in our natures to chase the secrets of the universe.”

  “I don’t chase the secrets of the universe. I don’t chase any secrets.”

  “You told me you were a lawyer. Don’t you deal with secrets every day? Did you really take up your chosen profession to not look at them? Or do you go after the facts at all cost?”

  “Lately, it seems I’m going after stories.”

  “Well,” he said softly. “I rest my case. Those are the most dangerous of all.”

  I hate dealing with literary characters. I really do. “Can you get the records for me?”

  “I can.” He ate another chip, and wiped the salt from his fingers. “And you needn’t trouble yourself about payment. As I said, I want to see them too.”

  “Good.” I paused. “While you’re at it, there’s another set of medical records I’d like.”

  “And whose might that be?”

  “Susan Sutherland. Her maiden name was Walters. She’s our mother.”

  One dark eyebrow shot up. “You suspect a genetic link?”

  “I think something might show up. I don’t think she has anything to do with this. But it couldn’t hurt to look. I know Dad’s side of the family. I don’t know hers.”

  And she had been hiding something. However hard I tried, I couldn’t twist that into something I had imagined. She really had been startled by my question. It was Mum who had made me suspicious of Charley’s birth in the first place when I asked her about our family history. I had thought she might be reacting to the idea that Charley wasn’t a member of our family at all—that was how it still read to me, in my head. But it wasn’t what I had asked. I had asked if anyone else in our family had been a summoner. I had said that his ability must come from somewhere. I had never seen Mum read anything out of a book, of course. But she was the one
whose family history was a blank. She was the one from whom Charley had inherited his love of books, and reading, and Dickens.

  It couldn’t hurt to look.

  “It always hurts to look,” Frankenstein said. It startled me, until I realized I had used the phrase earlier. “Sometimes it even blinds. But I’ll see what I can do.”

  I left him sitting on the headstone, the trees rustling and creaking above him against the cloudless sky.

  The following day was our father’s birthday. I phoned him to wish him the best—late in the day, because it was the first chance work had given me to so much as breathe—and he told me Charley had already called. To be accurate, he had phoned at six in the morning, and though Charley had been purposefully vague about it, Dad suspected he hadn’t been to bed. It was still better than the hours he rang when he was in England.

  “I’m sure he’s fine, Dad,” I said, although he hadn’t really suggested otherwise. I could hear the question lurking around the edges. “I mean, he’s Charley. You know how he is. He gets obsessed.”

  “Oh, I know,” he said. “And I know you’re both old enough to take care of yourselves. Still. It’s good you’re in the same city, to look out for each other.”

  And of course, I felt a guilty lurch, because I wasn’t looking out for my brother. At most, I was looking into him, the way I would a murder suspect. I hadn’t even seen him. As far as I was concerned, it was as if he’d disappeared from the face of the earth.

  Millie

  Are you sure?” Millie asked. “Not a whisper?”

  The person to whom this question was addressed was a fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and to whom Charley had already apologized profusely for his current state.