by H. G. Parry
She made herself punch him lightly on the arm. “Good show, Dr. Sutherland.”
He shook his head, and came back to himself. “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I did that. I knew we needed to keep it secret—I’ve been doing it my entire life. I just didn’t care anymore. I was so angry at him.”
“The time for secrets in the Street is over, I think,” she said. “We needed to make a stand. We made it. There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
“I’ve never talked to anybody like that in my life.”
“Clearly you’ve hidden depths.”
“I think I’m just tired, actually. Come to think of it, I snapped at Brian by the photocopier today as well.”
She snorted, then hesitated. “Was that really Charles Dickens?”
“I think it was the Dickens of David Copperfield,” Charley said. “Have you heard of an implied author?”
“Like the Implied Reader?”
“Exactly. The implied author is the character a reader may attribute to an author based on the way a book is written. It might have nothing in common with the author as a real, historical person, or it might be very close—that’s completely irrelevant. What matters is what’s on the page.”
“So that was the Dickens that we imagine when reading David Copperfield?”
“I think so. I just… did an autobiographical reading.”
“And we had Dickens on our street.” She wasn’t sure why she was so unnerved. She’d thought herself fairly hardened to the way Charley’s abilities worked. “Well, it certainly scared Eric.”
“It did,” he agreed. “I thought it might.”
“What could it do to him?”
“I don’t think he could do anything, really. I think an implied author is no different from a character in a book—it’s just a collection of words and interpretations on legs. It’s the idea of it that frightened Eric. It was the author who brought him to life—not even the historical man, whom I could have brought from a biography, but the author of his book. Nobody likes to be reminded of their own fictionality.”
It was true. She knew it was true.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” he added. “I was angry and scared, so I lashed out. I knew it would scare him. And he was right. It wasn’t fair of me to threaten him. He has no power in any of this.”
“Oh, rot,” Millie said dismissively, back on firmer ground. “He deserved it. If there’s one thing I took away from David Copperfield, it’s that Uriah Heep deserves a lot more than he ever gets.”
“He can’t help it. He’s designed to. Dickens wrote him that way. You must have noticed the reaction our Uriah Heep always receives, even from people who’d usually be kinder—nobody can stand him. He makes their skin crawl, even when he’s doing nothing at all. That’s probably another reason Eric was so scared of Dickens. He’s the man who wrote him to be hated. Uriah Heep is a scapegoat, so that David can achieve what Uriah wants to achieve without being dangerous himself. That’s how happy endings work. For there to be a restoration of order, there has to be a sacrifice.”
Millie didn’t really care about Uriah Heep, in or out of David Copperfield. This was perhaps evidence of Charley’s theory in itself. “The way the Street responded. The rain, and the tremors. Was it responding to Dickens?”
“No,” Charley said. She realized that he wasn’t as calm as she had thought. He was trembling with barely suppressed excitement, like a divining rod in the presence of water. “It was responding to me. I had it. Just for a moment, I had it. I could feel the shape of the reading, the way I’ve been trying to do all week. I held it in my mind, perfect and complete. It has to do with anger.”
Millie remembered the ripple across the world, and a shiver went through her. She was soaked through, of course. “Whose anger? Yours?”
“No—well, I don’t think so. Not exactly. Dickens’s, I think. Perhaps even the summoner’s. Whatever it is, I tapped it for a second, when I lost my temper at Eric.”
“You made it rain,” she said, and felt very cold.
“Yes! I didn’t intend that. That was just pathetic fallacy. But… Millie, if I could get there again, I could do anything with this place. I really could. I could stop the shifts, properly, not just for that one second I managed earlier. I could shift it myself. I could alter it, reinterpret it, maybe even read it all the way out into reality.”
“Could you read it away? Back into your book?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Yes. If I could ever understand it completely. I could. I was so close just now…”
“And what would happen to us?” This, Millie realized, was what was bothering her. It was the same thing that was frightening everyone else on the Street. The appearance of Dickens, and the change in the Street, had been too much. It seemed to touch on things that were unknowable and unspeakable. In all their efforts to make Charley’s abilities more powerful, it had somehow never sunk in that he was gaining the power to shift her reality at its core. “If you were to read away the Street with us still inside it?”
“I don’t know. I—I suppose you would disappear.” The glow on his face faded as his words caught up to him. “The way the characters in the tunnel disappeared by the harbor. You’d be read out of existence. I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t mean that.”
His sudden uncertainty made her feel guilty. “Of course you wouldn’t. I know that. But you’ve read people back before, you know, who didn’t want to go. You read back Uriah Heep the first time you met him.”
“I know I did,” Charley said. “And it was wrong. I knew that, even then. I would never do it now. I just meant… if the war the summoner promised comes to anything…” He shook his head. “It might be something worth knowing. Possibly. I’m sorry. I’m not thinking straight these days. I’m sorry I couldn’t save the house before too.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “Mr. Darcy escaped. You saved him. I don’t care about the house.”
“I care,” he said. “I want to save all of it.”
Henry took the opportunity to shake himself suddenly, and pelted them both with droplets of rain.
“Henry!” Charley complained.
Millie laughed, and snatched at the sudden release of tension. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go back to my place and get warm and dry. We still have cake to finish too.”
Charley sneezed, and made a face. “Oh, wonderful. I’m going to catch cold from a pathetic fallacy. I’d love to come in. But is that a good idea, after what I’ve just done? The people here would rather I go home, wouldn’t they?”
“I think,” she said, quite seriously, “that going home wouldn’t be a good idea right now. I think most of the people here would be very nervous if you left; a few want you gone. They’ll all be watching out their windows to see just where you do go. I think it’s best to tell them that you’re not going anywhere.”
He nodded slowly. “This street’s complicated, isn’t it?”
“Thousands of years of the written word, filtered through countless readerships,” she said. “How can it not be?”
When they reached Millie’s apartment, a window was open, and rain had blown through onto the table. A few minutes after that, they realized that the summoner’s copy of Dickens’s Criminal Underworld had gone.
XVII
On Friday after lunch, Eric came into my office. I had found an excuse for him to spend the morning in the archives, just to give me breathing space.
“I have the files you wanted, Mr. Sutherland,” Eric said. “I know you said I could take all day if I needed, but I really couldn’t bring myself to waste so much of your valuable time.”
“Fine, thanks, Eric.” It might have been my imagination, but the dark circles under his eyes looked deeper than usual, and his hair was a little less smooth. “Just put them over there.”
“Of course, Mr. Sutherland,” he said. “Is there anything else?”
Perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut. It was his last day as my personal assistant;
as of next week, the interns would be rotated around the firm, and I would probably be able to stay out of his way. I doubted he would be back in November with the other two. But something Frankenstein had said had been niggling at me. They were trying to warn us, he said. The creatures the other summoner had made—the creatures like Eric, the ones sent to do his bidding. If he was right, then Eric’s method of trying to warn me was very peculiar. So far, he had done nothing but offer oblique taunts that may or may not hold meaning. But they were strange, the things my brother brought out of books, and the ones the summoner made were stranger still. And as long as we kept up this pretense that neither of us knew who the other was, I would never get anything more.
“Last weekend, I saw where you live, Eric,” I said as casually as I could. My heart was pounding. “Or rather, the place where the summoner keeps you. You can’t like being there.”
He stiffened, then straightened slowly. With a twitch, he pulled his glasses from his face, and his red eyes gleamed. “I’m not, anymore. We’ve shifted now, thanks to you and your friends, Mr. Sutherland.”
So I was right. He did know I knew. And both our masks were off now. “And where you are now is better?”
“Oh, much better, Mr. Sutherland,” Eric said. “The new place has rats as well as spiders. And the damp is ever so much more penetrating.”
“You could actually mean that seriously and I would believe you,” I couldn’t resist returning. What was it about Uriah Heep that made it so difficult to speak to him civilly? “But assuming you’re being sarcastic, and you’re half as miserable as I would be—why would you stay? I could help you, you know.”
“You couldn’t.” The obsequiousness had dropped from his voice. For once, he sounded almost human.
“Why not?”
“Because he would know. Believe me, Mr. Sutherland, your movements are being watched very closely.”
“Not that closely,” I said. “The summoner doesn’t know I’ve recognized you, does he? You knew I had—you’ve known from the beginning—but you never told him. You never told him about the other Uriah Heep either, even though you must have felt him in the world. Your summoner thinks I believe you’re a regular intern, and that you’ve done nothing to make me think otherwise. If you had, he’d have pulled you out of here.”
“That’s true,” Eric said. “If he knew we were having this talk, he would read me away right now, this minute. He can do that, you know. I’ve been beside people when they’ve disappeared, with the summoner ten miles away. The only thing that’s saved me this far is that he has no idea I’m capable of deceiving him. He thinks I’m here doing what I’m supposed to.”
“What are you supposed to be doing here? What does the summoner want with me? If you tell me, I might be able to stop him.”
“He can’t be stopped,” Eric said. “He’s too powerful.”
“You don’t know my brother.” I forgot, for a moment, that I’d told Charley to stay out of this. “He’s pretty powerful too, you know.”
“I know exactly what he is,” Eric said. “And it won’t be enough. My master means to see to that.”
“How?”
Eric didn’t answer. Perhaps he couldn’t.
“I don’t care what your summoner does to the Street,” I said. “That’s between you and them. But you tell your summoner that if any of you lay a finger on my brother, then it won’t be him you need to worry about. It’ll be me. Understood?”
“Perfectly, Mr. Sutherland,” Eric said. “Interestingly, Dr. Sutherland said something similar to me, last night. Only about you, of course.” He bowed, his thin arms and legs like a spider’s, and headed for the door. “Let me know if you need anything else, Mr. Sutherland.”
After the door closed behind him, I sat in my chair without moving. I felt hot and cold at once. Last night. Eric had seen Charley last night. And he had threatened him. Eric had told me so; it had indeed been a warning, in the only way he could give it. Whatever that breath held, it was about to be released.
By sheer good fortune, Frankenstein picked up the phone on the first ring when I called. Presumably I’d caught him on a lunch break. Or a graveyard break, or whatever.
“Tell me you’ve found something,” I said. “Now.”
He seemed unsurprised by the force of my command. I think the creations of the Romantics expect emotional registers to be high.
“I have the records you requested,” Frankenstein said. “I received them only this morning. I was about to send them to you. I’ve just been looking over them myself.”
I was past caring about any threat Frankenstein might pose. He was, after all, far from the most dangerous Gothic hero I had met that fortnight. “And? Does anything stand out?”
“Such as?”
“Anything unusual. Anything I could use to find the summoner.”
“Apart from the fact that your brother did indeed come back from the dead? Your mother did not, by the way. If you were expecting that to be a family trait, you are bound for disappointment.” He paused. “I found one thing interesting. His eyes changed color.”
I blinked. “They what?”
“What color were your brother’s eyes, in infancy? Dark or light?”
“Dark.” I didn’t need to think about it. “They’ve always been dark. Black, in some lights.”
“When he was born, they were light. Or should I say, before he came to life. It was noted by the midwife, though nobody took it very seriously. I can only imagine she insisted it was put in the folder. She claimed that he was born with light blue eyes. When he came to life, when they came to weigh him and record his details, they had darkened.”
“That happens with children’s eyes, doesn’t it? They darken?”
“As they grow older. Not in the space of twenty minutes, ordinarily.”
“So what might it mean? Why would the midwife want it noted?”
“Perhaps she thought he was a changeling as well.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t believe in changelings. But it might be useful in giving some hint to the exact nature of what he is.” He broke off suddenly, and when he spoke again his tone had changed. “If you want to know. Let me try to warn you again. Knowledge is dangerous. You might not want to investigate your brother any further.”
“I’m not investigating Charley.” A chill had shot down my back; I was determined to ignore it. “I’m trying to find the summoner before Charley gets himself killed. And I think I’m running out of time. Can you send those files through already?”
I hung up without waiting for a reply. I was shaking.
The e-mail came through with a chime like a death knell. My brother’s file didn’t take long to look through. Summoning aside, my brother was a healthy twenty-six-year-old; like a lot of men his age, myself included, he avoided going to doctors until he was basically on his deathbed. In the three years since he’d returned to New Zealand, he hadn’t been at all; in England, only a handful of times, mostly in his midteens. I scrolled past these quickly, looking for the very first entry. Somehow, I thought this was probably what the summoner had been looking for.
It was the same story I had always been told: stillborn, resuscitated unexpectedly after twenty minutes, no noticeable cognitive impairment. The midwife’s comments about his eyes were there, as Frankenstein had said. I didn’t know what to make of them, except that my brother had always been peculiar.
Almost on a whim, I opened my mother’s.
Frankenstein was right. My mother’s birth was perfectly ordinary. There was another early note, though, that was less usual. Frankenstein hadn’t paid it any mind. It wasn’t the kind of thing he was looking for: no miracles, no transformations, no returns from death. It wasn’t what I had been looking for either, this time. But I had seen it before, far too often in my line of work. It was the code doctors used to flag suspicious injuries in children. The kind that indicates potential abuse.
Susan Walters had been four years old. S
he was brought to the local emergency doctor by her mother, bleeding profusely from a series of cuts across her back. Her mother—the grandmother I had never met—was unable to satisfactorily explain them, except to say that Susan had been playing in the paddock outside and perhaps a wild animal of some kind attacked her. The doctors were presumably skeptical. This wasn’t the plains of Africa. There was nothing further noted on the file.
Some kind of wild animal attack, in a place without dangerous animals.
Charley had been four the first time he read out the Cat in the Hat.
No wonder my questions had shaken Mum. She was indeed hiding something. She had been hiding something, it seemed, for all our lives, and most of hers. She was a summoner.
Dad answered the phone on the third ring. He sounded pleased, yet surprised, when I announced myself: they didn’t usually hear from me during the day. “Hello, Rob. What’s going on?”
I didn’t answer—it was too big a question. “Is Mum there?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“She’s been at the animal shelter all morning—it’s her week to volunteer. She should be back for lunch soon. What on earth is all this about?”
“I don’t know yet. Look, when Mum gets back, can you ask her to give me a call? Please?”
“Of course,” he said slowly. “Of course I will. Is everything all right?”
I didn’t know that yet either. “Fine,” I managed. “I’ll talk to you later, all right?”
I had to call Charley. It didn’t matter what had passed between us. I had to call him right now. And if he didn’t answer, I was going to get in my car and find him. This had gone on long enough. He was my brother, for God’s sake. And he was in trouble. Probably more trouble than he knew; definitely more than he could deal with. He needed me.
As it happened, I didn’t need to call. Before I had steeled myself to pick up the phone, it vibrated noisily on my desk. It was Beth White. Charley had collapsed in the middle of a lecture on literature and the British Empire, and she was wondering if I could give him a ride home.
