The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  “What happened?” she asked, in a rather different tone than before. She put the back of her hand to his forehead, then took his wrist between her fingers. Lydia had done some first aid training, I remembered, when she got her hotel job. She wanted to be able to help in case of emergencies. This was, I had to admit, starting to look like an emergency.

  “Is he all right?” I asked, and received exactly the look I deserved.

  “His pulse is going mad,” she said. “And he’s like ice. Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  “Well. It’s sort of—you know the family stuff I keep—?”

  “Rob,” she said. “You need to forget this stupid family matter business, and you need to get him to a hospital.”

  Millie

  It might have been all right, had Heathcliff not died. Despite how badly injured he was, Millie hadn’t been expecting it. Perhaps she’d thought, despite all she’d ever said, that none of them were alive enough to die.

  They didn’t have any surgeons among them. They tried to call Frankenstein, but he wasn’t picking up. And they felt they couldn’t risk taking Heathcliff to the hospital, not with his eyes of dark flame. Millie would have taken him anyway, at the last, but the last came so quickly that it was over before she recognized it. Besides, Heathcliff himself wouldn’t allow it. He was filled with glorious, Brontë-like exultation as he lay on the floor in the public house.

  “Last night I was on the threshold of hell,” he said. “Today, I am within sight of my heaven. I have my eyes on it: hardly three feet to sever me!”

  “That’s all very well,” Millie said, rather helplessly. She recognized the words, but she didn’t know Wuthering Heights well enough to speak in its language to him. As his strength failed, he seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into its pages. “But I do think we should find you a doctor, at least.”

  “Perhaps Master Charley can read one from a book,” Uriah Heep said blithely, from the corner of the room. Millie gave him a hard, cold look, and he blinked back without a trace of guile. His suggestion wasn’t even a bad one, she had to admit, in practice. But it made the others stir uneasily. The entire Street was watching at this point, those who could not fit in the shop peering through windows or just standing outside the open door trying to see over people’s heads. Somehow, Uriah had ended up in prime viewing position. The Darcys should have been watching him, of course, but she could hardly blame them for having other things on their minds.

  Heathcliff tossed his head in what might have been a negative, or just an attempt to shake off pain. His brow had furrowed. “But you may as well bid a man struggling in the water rest within an arm’s length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I’ll rest. I’m too happy; and yet I’m not happy enough. My soul’s bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself.”

  “All right,” Millie said soothingly. “Absolutely. You just stay quiet. You were jolly brave, you know. We all owe you our lives.”

  “The Sutherlands certainly do,” Uriah said. This time, the look he gave Millie was not quite so placid.

  The Duke of Wellington gave his very best attempt at battlefield surgery, bravely assisted by Miss Matty, who knew little about medicine but a good deal about stitching. When Wellington cut back Heathcliff’s shirt, the wounds on his body were so unexpectedly deep and bloody that Millie’s throat caught and her stomach heaved. Gasps went up from those around her, and she steeled her face into calm.

  “It’s not so bad,” she said out loud.

  She didn’t believe it. Of course it was bad. All the same, she did not expect to lose him. Miss Matty was only just beginning to stitch, her hands trembling, when a gust of rain-specked wind blew through the open window. Heathcliff gave one gasp. His eyes opened wide, and his teeth bared a keen, fierce smile. Then he stopped breathing. His breath had been coming ragged and harsh before that; if it hadn’t been for the sudden quiet, Millie would have thought him still alive.

  “He’s gone,” Wellington said. Miss Matty gave a little cry of distress.

  “Oh, the poor man,” she said.

  He couldn’t be. Millie stared at his face, still so triumphant and so vital, and thought she couldn’t believe it. It was only when her vision blurred that she realized tears had sprung to her eyes, and she knew it was true. One of them had been killed. And it was Heathcliff. In his book, of course, he had died, his soul lured from his body by the ghost of his dead love to roam the moors. But that was a different Heathcliff; Brontë’s Heathcliff. This one had died to save them.

  “He always hated it here,” Darcy Three said, into the silence. “Not on the Street, precisely, but out of his book. The world he came from was too alluring.”

  There was a butterfly drifting about his shoulder. The only one that had come back from the outside: it had followed Darcy Three to a café on Cuba Street, where he had eaten his breakfast in relative peace and had a cup of coffee before returning. Their plan, it seemed, hadn’t been very successful. And now Charley was gone, and they had no more ideas.

  “This is really about to happen, isn’t it?” Miss Matty said from beside her. Her quiet voice seemed to speak for all of them. “The new world.”

  “Not if we stop it,” Millie said. She turned to face the others, and spoke so they could all hear her, even those outside on the cobbles. “No.”

  “But if we try to stop it,” Darcy One said, “the summoner may try to kill us.”

  “It’s no longer a ‘may,’” she said. “Heathcliff is already dead. Yes, they will try to kill us unless we submit. Which strikes me as precisely why we should refuse to do so. I don’t intend to be frightened into submission.”

  “Hear, hear,” the Duke of Wellington said firmly. “And they won’t kill us without a good fight. We still have Charles Sutherland.”

  “It’s all right for you,” the Artful retorted. He was standing by the door, arms folded and cap jaunty. “It weren’t your author Dr. Sutherland pulled from a book last night, were it? If he can do that, he can do anything. How can we trust him to do the right thing by us?”

  “And you trust the other summoner?” Millie said. “The one who pulled a monster from a book and sent it to our doorstep?”

  “How did that happen?” Darcy One said. The Darcys were sounding uncharacteristically helpless today. “It didn’t come through the wall. It came from here. Is the summoner here?”

  “No,” Millie said firmly. “He couldn’t be. But someone must have helped him. The same person who stole Charley’s book from my kitchen table last night. The same person who—”

  And then she knew. The shock of discovery stopped her breath; the corresponding flare of anger dried what was left of her tears.

  “Dodger?” she asked slowly. “Where’s your butterfly?”

  He frowned. “My what?”

  “When you left the Street this morning, a butterfly should have followed you. Where is it?”

  “I dunno know what you mean,” he said. “Who says I left the Street this morning?”

  “You always do. Every day. It’s your job to pick up the supplies; I expected it. But a butterfly should have followed you there today. Why didn’t it follow you back?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” A number of things were catching a different light in her head now, and she could see them clearly for the first time. “You took the book to the summoner. You helped him bring that monster here.”

  “Dunno what you mean,” the Artful said again. The universal plea of the guilty. It was convenient, sometimes, to deal with people so bound to literary conventions.

  “The Jabberwock couldn’t have come here itself. It didn’t come through the wall. It materialized in the middle of the Street. I’m not sure how. At a guess, I’d say it was some arrangement similar to the Oliver Twist house in Lambton Quay. But it had to be brought by someone who passes from this world into the other on a regular basis. There are only a few of us who do that: me, the Darcys, Dorian Gr
ay. And you.”

  “Talk to Dorian then. He don’t want Dr. Sutherland here neither.”

  His voice was more convincing this time, but she knew. In the presence of death and her own certainty, she felt stronger than she had in a long time. The missing piece of her, locked in her book, was calling to her. She was Millie Radcliffe-Dix, girl detective. She knew she was right.

  “No, he doesn’t. And I have to admit, I thought that if it wasn’t Uriah Heep, it might be Dorian Gray. But Dorian was in the doorway of his house the whole time Eric was here, and there was no way he could have got past me to steal the book. You did that, didn’t you? You did that after you came to tell us that Eric was coming through the wall. The Street shifted as you were standing there; we all ran out. You took the book then, and gave it back to the summoner this morning when you went out. And somehow they gave you a monster to unleash.”

  “Good God,” Darcy One said.

  “You haven’t got any proof,” the Artful said.

  “No,” she said. “But there’s a telling lack of proof. You were followed this morning, when you left. By a butterfly, one from Aesop’s Fables. It never returned. If we count them outside, I’m certain we’ll find one missing. The summoner realized what it was, didn’t he? Did he read it back, or just kill it?”

  The Artful looked around, then shrugged. She could see the moment his story changed. Suddenly his face looked a good deal less young.

  “It was your fault, really.” He didn’t sound at all repentant, but he may have sounded slightly defensive. “You said you could keep the summoner’s creations out. You never thought that some might have been here from the start.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  He gave his cocky, infuriating smirk spasmodically, like a twitch. She remembered the first time she had seen it, the day she came to the Street. He had been one of the first here, just after Darcy One and Heathcliff. She thought, at the time, how well he had matched this place.

  “He likes Victorian criminals,” Millie said slowly. “We asked you if you had heard or seen anything from another Artful Dodger, one the summoner might have read out. But we were talking to that Artful Dodger, weren’t we? You were read out by the summoner.”

  “He felt the Street grow too,” he said. “He was probably the first to see it. After a bit, he saw you lot starting to trickle in to infest it. He sent me to watch you. Did a better job on me than on most of those poor saps with no free will—I’m the same as one of you lot, except that I’m bound to him. He weren’t overworried about you, but he wanted to make sure you didn’t turn into a problem. Which you did, the minute you let Dr. Sutherland through your doors.”

  Despite herself, Millie couldn’t resist a quick glance at Dorian. He gave her a very small smile back.

  “I did warn you that you had made us a target,” he said.

  “Did you know about the Artful?” she demanded.

  “I suspected. I knew he had come into the world much earlier than he claimed. I suspected who had brought him in the night you found the hideaway on Lambton Quay. I thought I would wait to see what happened.”

  “I trusted you.”

  “No you didn’t,” he said. “You aren’t a fool. You just trusted that you were cleverer than me. You may be, yet, but we have a lot of story left in us. Or perhaps only one of us does.”

  “Oh shut up. Just shut up, Dorian.” She turned back to the Artful. “You were the one on lookout, that night at Lambton Quay. You were the one who called the summoner back, after we’d entered—as soon as Huck Finn had left, and you took over. That was how he knew we were there. And that’s how he was able to leave afterward, without us seeing where he went. You did see him leave. He didn’t have any particularly secret means of exit. He read the rooms away from memory, and walked out the front door. You just lied about it.”

  “I’m the Artful Dodger,” he said. “You couldn’t have thought I was honest.”

  “No,” she conceded. “But I thought you were on our side.”

  He glanced away. “Now you know I’m not.”

  “Who is he?”

  “You heard Scrooge, that day. We don’t know who he is in your world, or what he looks like. We know who he really is, but we can’t say. Not even me.” He paused. “But I’ll tell you this. He’s one of us.”

  Lady Macbeth spoke up from one of the barstools, her black eyes sharp. “How now? What mean’st this?”

  “I mean he’s our kind.” He turned to her. “A character. He was read out of a book, a long time ago. That’s why he hates them so much—the people out there. He’s as afraid of them as we are.”

  “Thy master art a summoner and a creature of fiction in one?”

  “That’s right. I don’t know how, but he is. He’s on our side.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s on our side!” Millie retorted, over the murmurs of surprise from the rest of the room. She was shaken herself, but there was no time to wonder at new impossibilities. There was no time for a lot of things. “Where is he now? You can say that, can’t you?”

  “You think he’d tell me? His world can go with him in the pocket of a coat. I have no idea where he is now. But he knows where I am. He found me yesterday. He told me about the book you stole, and he told me to get the book back while you were distracted and bring it to him. Which I did last night, and this morning. He said he needed it for the new world.”

  “But that wasn’t all he needed, was it?” Millie asked flatly.

  The Artful shrugged again. “He gave me Through the Looking-Glass this morning. Asked me to bring it in. He said the Jabberwock was trapped halfway between the words and the world. If I opened it, that would let it out. So I put it in the middle of the Street, and I scarpered. And you’re right, by the way. He saw your spy at once. He said he knows Dr. Sutherland’s work when he sees it. He crushed it with the book I gave him. One blow.”

  Millie shook her head. She should have seen it earlier. Of course she should have. She was Millie Radcliffe-Dix. But Millie Radcliffe-Dix, she remembered, didn’t solve cases until the book was almost over.

  “Why? Why would you listen to him? You could have come to me.”

  “You?” the Artful retorted. “You think you can protect me? You saw what he did to Scrooge, right here in the Street. He could do that to me, easy as winking. The Street’s not yours, Millie. It’s his. Once the new world comes through, he’s not going to let you keep it.”

  “Then we fight for it,” she said.

  “With what? Dr. Sutherland? He did all right with the Jabberwock, I’ll give him that, but that was a game, and it nearly finished him. He won’t stand a chance in a real war. The more he tries, the worse it will be for all of youse.”

  Millie looked out at the Street. She saw the shattered buildings, the still-smoking houses, the claw marks scored on the road. The red smear on the cobbles, just outside, where Heathcliff had lain before they’d dragged him away to die.

  “I swear, Dodger,” she said. “I’ll—”

  “What?” the Artful said. “Hurt me? Kill me? See me in the dock for my crimes? Plenty have tried that, and I’m still here. My summoner could look at me, and I’d be gone. There’s nothing you can threaten me with that worries me like that.”

  “You do realize that your summoner could do that just as easily once the new world comes? He doesn’t seem to have a good deal of respect for our kind.”

  “I told you, he’s one of us. He’s on our side, in his way: us against the outside world. I’m not like those half-formed things he uses to do his bidding and puts away again—nor are you lot. You heard that Eric, when he came—he was right about that. We’re fully written characters. There’d be a place for us in the new world. Besides, how can you say that your summoner won’t do exactly the same thing to you? To any of you?”

  “Of course he won’t. Don’t be ridiculous. Dr. Sutherland doesn’t put people away against their will.”

  “That’s not what Uriah Heep says. And h
e speaks from experience, don’t he?”

  “That was different! He didn’t know about this place then. He didn’t know about any of us.”

  “So what’s changed now that he does? What’s he after? I know what my summoner wants: a new world, where we don’t have to hide anymore. I don’t know what yours wants.”

  “None of us do,” Dorian Gray spoke up.

  All eyes went to him, Millie included. He was perched on one of the piles of fallen rubble, as lithe and graceful as a cat. His curls were battle tousled about his perfect face. He looked magnificent. He was at his most dangerous.

  “He wants to keep us safe, and hidden,” Millie returned. “As we’ve always been. He wants to stop the summoner from revealing us to the world, and threatening our lives in the process. What do you want, Dorian?”

  “I want to be safe and hidden,” he said. “But I don’t think Dr. Sutherland can accomplish the task. Even if he successfully defeats the other summoner and protects our secret, it’s only a matter of time before somebody else finds us. The old world is no longer feasible. We need a new one.”

  “Well, here it is,” Millie said. She waved her hand to take in the broken public house, Heathcliff’s body still warm on the floor. “Welcome to it.”

  “This isn’t the new world,” Dorian said. “This is the old one burning down. Heathcliff chose to burn with it. Very well, that’s his narrative. That’s good, that’s aesthetically sound, I admire him for it. But I have no intention of burning. And I’m tired of hiding here, trapped like the Artful’s monster friend between the pages of a book, neither in one world or another. I’m tired of watching your summoner, wondering what he’ll do; I’m tired of watching you struggle to keep everything the same; I’m tired of lurking in the shadows of the World Wide Web. I’m tired of the Street. I want the world. And it’s coming.”

  Millie looked at the faces around her. They weren’t all hostile, or angry, or in agreement. Many of them, she suspected, didn’t know what they felt. But she could see echoed in them the expression that had been on the face of the picture of Dorian Gray for a long time now. They were all afraid. Everything had changed, when for so many of them nothing had changed for a hundred years. They didn’t know what to do. The other summoner, with his whispers of the new world, was promising permanent safety with him even as he also promised death for standing against him. And she couldn’t promise anything in return except the fragile safety of the last two years: the safety that came from secrecy, and could never be maintained if the summoner were to win. That and, perhaps, the dangerous prospect of doing what they ought to do in spite of fear.