by H. G. Parry
“And it’s my job to stop him?” I returned, as if I were fifteen years old. “He’s an adult, you know.”
“And that’s exactly what adults do,” Dad said dryly, unable to help himself as usual. “Go through walls into fictional streets.”
“You should have told us,” Mum said. Her eyes were now bright with tears. “We needed to know.”
Because I wasn’t in fact fifteen, I bit back my defensive instincts. My own eyes were suspiciously hot, and my throat ached. “You’re right. I should have told you. But there are things you should have told me too.”
“Such as?”
I felt exactly as I had on Sunday night, when I gathered myself to plunge through the harbor waters above my head. “The night Charley was born. Who was there when he came back from the dead?”
Dad frowned, pulled out of his role as conciliator. “What do you mean? What’s this about?”
“Just—tell me who was in the room with him. Please. Were you?”
“Well—no. I’d stepped out to talk with the doctor. Your mother was there, of course. He woke up in her arms. Probably the midwife was with her. Why? How could that possibly matter now?”
I turned to Mum. “Was the midwife with you?”
There was a pause, which may have been down to surprise. If I were wrong, it would be an unexpected change in subject.
When she spoke, I knew it wasn’t.
“No.” She sounded, suddenly, calm. It was as though she’d been waiting to give that answer for a long time. “Nobody was with me. Your father and the doctor were talking in the corridor. The midwife had stepped out to get a blanket. I was alone in the room with him.”
She seemed to be waiting for the next question. I asked it. “What did you do? What is he?”
“Rob—”
“What are you talking about?” Dad interrupted. He was looking from Mum to me; he might have been asking either of us. “What does it matter who was with him? What does that day matter at all right now?”
I kept my eyes on Mum. Her face was very still. “What did you do that day?”
“If you’re asking that question, Rob,” she said quietly, “then I suspect you already know.”
“He’s not really my brother.” I said it as bluntly as I could, but I still felt the words torn from me. “Is he?”
“He is your brother,” she said. “In every way that matters. But he wasn’t the child that was born dead on that day. No.”
Dad stared at her. “What do you—? He had to have been. You were alone in the room with him at that moment, but not for very long. There’s no way you could have—”
“Replaced him,” she finished. “I did. It’s exactly what I did.”
“How? You couldn’t—you can’t just pull a newborn out of midair!”
“Charley could,” I said. “Given a few minutes alone with a book. And so could you—I think. Please tell me I’m wrong.”
She shook her head, and my world came crashing down. “You’re not wrong.”
(“In another book,” Frankenstein had said, “I’d say you were talking about a changeling.”)
Something was roaring in my ears. It took a while for me to realize my mother was asking me a question, and when it did, it came from a long way away.
“How did you know?”
I had to swallow twice before I could speak. “About you, or Charley?”
“Either. Both.”
“I knew what you were when I saw your medical records. You summoned something when you were four, didn’t you? It attacked you. And Charley—little bits of things. I saw his medical records. Physical details didn’t match from before and after the midwife returned to the room. You wouldn’t let them take him to be examined in any detail. I may not be a literary specialist, but I am a criminal defense lawyer. I know how to recognize something going on.”
“I didn’t want the doctors to look at him too closely,” she said. “Not then. I wasn’t sure enough what he was.”
“I told you it would be best to let them take him to the hospital for the night,” Dad said slowly. He looked dazed. “You said you couldn’t bear it.”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “If they’d found anything strange—I hadn’t looked at him myself yet. I didn’t even know if he had a heartbeat. I still don’t trust what hospitals might find—I’m terrified that he’s in there. I’m reasonably confident that nothing about him stands out that a routine medical check would flag. But if they look too closely—if they start taking blood work and X-rays and scans—”
“What?” Dad demanded. “What might they find?”
Mum turned to him. “Did you really never suspect anything was strange? In all these years?”
Dad threw up his hands. “He was a strange child! Even without the magic, that was commonly accepted. He read Dickens at three. I didn’t suspect he wasn’t human, no. Perhaps that was naive…”
“Still. You must have seen things you couldn’t explain.”
“I saw there was nothing of me in him,” Dad said bluntly. “Of course I did. I’m not an idiot. But I didn’t let myself suspect anything at all. The natural explanation was that I was not his father, and that’s not something I would ever believe of you. You hadn’t conceived him with anyone else.”
An involuntary smile escaped. “‘Conceived.’ That’s exactly the right word. And no. Not with anyone else. I didn’t have some sordid affair with another man. I know other people must have accused me of it, at times. They just… I suppose nobody could have suspected where he really came from.”
“Which is a book,” Dad said. “Rob’s right, isn’t he? You read him out of a book. The way Charley does.”
“Not quite the way he does,” Mum said. “At least, not for a very long time. But yes. I did that.” She fell quiet.
“It happened when I was four,” she said at last. “Just like Charley. I didn’t have the gift for reading that he had, of course, but I was learning. I was sitting out in the paddock on a Saturday morning, at the back of the house, while my mother worked in the garden. It was one of the first times I’d ever read entirely on my own. I remember the excitement of the words making sense.”
“What came out?” I asked.
She smiled a little. “A lion. A roaring, whiskery lion in the meadow.”
“The picture book from the shelf?”
“That exact one. I wasn’t old enough to control it, or interpret it. It was just fear, and excitement, and the joy of being scared. It lunged to get away; its claws glanced me as it went. I don’t think I even felt the pain at first. I was just filled with the wonder and the terror of it. My mother, on the other hand…”
“I can imagine.”
“She had no idea what I’d done—neither had I—but she was beside herself. The lion had escaped over the fields—there was nothing she could do about it. She packed me in the car and hauled me down to emergency, where they gave me a handful of stitches and a tetanus shot. I don’t know how my mother explained it.”
“They thought you were being abused,” I said. “At the hospital.”
“I wasn’t then. The abuse came later, if you could call it that. They were trying to protect me. I understood that when Charley was born, but at the time I hated them. I was already hurt, so they didn’t beat me. They only yelled at me, repeatedly, and then when I was crying so hard I couldn’t hear them anymore, they took every book out of my room and locked me in there for a month. They brought me food, and water, and changed the bandages. They didn’t neglect me. After a while, when I showed no signs of calling up any more lions, they let me out. But I never saw or heard a story for the next three years. They schooled me at home, and they made sure I came nowhere near the written word until the magic, or whatever they thought it was, had been entirely driven out of me. They told me, again and again, that nobody could ever know what I had done, or I would be taken away and experimented on. It was the 1960s: I suppose they believed it. Perhaps they were even right. At any rate, as fa
r as I was concerned, they needn’t have bothered.”
I couldn’t form the question, but she took my silence as an invitation.
“I had felt what happened to my lion. My beautiful lion, the creature of imagination, whom I loved. A few days later and a few miles away, a farmer shot him. It caused a stir, as you can imagine. It was assumed someone had been keeping one illegally as a pet, but nobody knew who or how. My parents told me when it hit the papers, but I had already felt him die. I was terrified of what had happened to him, of what had happened to me, of what might happen still if I was ever to be discovered. By the time I was eight, I could read again, but I had no intention of ever summoning. I didn’t even think I could. That part of me had been squashed flat. Until that night, when our child died.”
Their child. My real little brother, the one who’d had blue eyes like me.
“I didn’t think we could survive that,” she said. “It felt like the tear in my heart the day the lion died, only worse—much worse. I can’t describe it. There are some things too big for words.”
“God,” my father said slowly. “He’s still dead. I thought all this time… but he’s still dead.”
Mum was still speaking to me. She didn’t even look at Dad. “It was just before midnight. The doctor and your father had left the room; the midwife left me alone to get another blanket. She shouldn’t have done that, poor woman, but she was crying too. She was so young—we all were. I sat there with my dead child in my arms. He was so beautiful. I just—I kept thinking of you, and how we would have to tell you that you wouldn’t have a brother after all.”
“Is that an excuse?” I snapped, before I could stop myself. “A child isn’t a new toy. You can’t just swap one out for a new one.”
“Do you think I want an excuse?” Paradoxically, I much preferred the flash of anger to the raw grief it replaced. I had never seen my mother cry before. It tightened my stomach. “Nobody was swapped out. I loved that child as much as I love you and Charley. I still grieve for him, every day, and I’ve never been able to tell anyone why there’s a part of me that died twenty-six years ago. But I’ll never regret bringing Charley into the world, however it happened. You can blame me for not telling you all—you have every right to. I’m so sorry for that. I’m not sorry for a single moment of your brother’s life.”
“None of us are,” Dad said, but as if on reflex. His own eyes were glittering. “But—bloody hell, Susan.”
She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “I know. I must have been mad. I just wanted—I don’t know what I wanted. I just know that the book I needed was right there, on my shelf. I opened it, and I started to read the first paragraph. It wasn’t really a reading, not the way Charley does it. I didn’t interpret, or frame, or analyze. I just poured everything—my love, my grief, all the hopes I’d had for the child that was dead—into that book. And then there was a new child on the bed in front of me. It didn’t even sink in, what I was really doing, until the clock struck twelve and the baby—”
“—‘began to cry, simultaneously,’” I finished. One of the most famous opening paragraphs in history. I’d read it only a few nights ago. My stomach tightened further. “David Copperfield.”
“You knew that too?”
“That was how I knew. I’ve been reading it lately—your copy, the one I borrowed from your house on the weekend. It wasn’t the words, though. It was the frontispiece. It has a picture of Dickens in his twenties.”
“The Daniel Maclise one,” she said. “Yes. I know. I saw it at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It’s starting to look like him, isn’t it? Or rather he’s starting to look like it. Not precisely, but enough.”
“I didn’t notice at the time. But then I saw the medical records, and it fell into my head. Like Dad said. He’s never really looked like us. He had to come from somewhere.”
“I don’t really know where he comes from,” she said. “Me, originally, but I’ve had control over how he grows. I don’t know what he is now. A little bit of David Copperfield, maybe, a little bit of Dickens, but so much that seems to come entirely from himself. Or perhaps it’s from all of us. Perhaps we’ve all made him up over the years, without realizing it. I can’t explain him. As I said, he was a miracle. I never thought he’d grow up—how could he grow up?—but he did.”
“I know,” I said. “I was there.”
I was there the day after he was born. I’d seen him in his crib, all enormous dark eyes. I was there as he started to talk in complete sentences while the others in his playgroup were still learning to recognize their own names. I was there when he came to high school and sat quietly at the back of my classroom getting everything right and learning not to be noticed. The weird kid, whom everyone regarded with fascination and unease.
Was that why he had been such a prodigy? Had he been born with our mother’s knowledge and abilities, just waiting to develop as soon as his brain was ready for them? Did he really never need to learn, but only to remember?
“I couldn’t tell you,” Mum said—to Dad, I think, this time. “It was before Charley’s abilities had manifested—I had no idea they would manifest. I had no idea how you’d react to the idea of things coming out of books. I thought—if you had made me put him back—”
“What about our first child?” Dad said. The words came out too calm, as though they were being strangled. “What did you do with the—what did you do with him?”
“I wrapped him and put him in the clothes chest, under the bed,” she said. “Then I called out. When you all came in, I was holding a child that was alive, and crying. Of course you had no reason to suspect it wasn’t the same one. The following night, I buried him under the oak tree outside.”
At that, of all things, bile rose in my throat. I knew that tree. Charley and I had played under it, a hundred times, in the early years before I grew out of games and he started to be tutored so intensely. We’d never thought there was anything dark or haunted about it. There hadn’t been.
Dad shook his head. He looked about as sick as I felt. “I can’t handle this.” He picked up his coat from the back of the couch.
“Joe—” Mum started to say.
He held up a hand. “I’m not leaving. I’m going to go see how Charley’s doing. But I can’t be in here with you at the moment.”
“Don’t blame him,” Mum said. She blinked, just once, and tears spilled down her face. “Be as angry at me as you want. But please, don’t blame Charley for being what he is.”
“I’d never do that,” Dad said. “It’s not his fault. I just don’t know how to think about him right now. And I have no idea how to think about you.”
As Dad left, I drew a deep breath and leaned back against the wall, fighting dizziness. Perhaps this was how Charley felt when he put something back. The world opening, and changing, and things forced into place that didn’t want to fit.
My brother wasn’t real. He wasn’t my brother. And he wasn’t real.
“Rob?” My mother was watching me, anxious, drawing herself together. “Are you all right?”
“Does he know?” I managed. “Charley?”
“I don’t think so—though I never quite know what Charley knows. He knows about what I did as a child, or he did once—I told him when he was small. He might have forgotten. I certainly never told him where he came from.”
“Don’t tell him.” I could hardly tell what was real anymore, but that seemed important, so I grabbed at it. “It would destroy him. He can’t know.”
“I don’t want him to,” she said. “I wanted him to feel he belonged with us, and to this world. But there are a lot of things I wanted for both of you that are impossible. And your father is absolutely right that your brother is much tougher than he looks.”
I wasn’t listening. Another thought had just struck me. “You said that he needed to stop wanting to read things out into the world,” I said. “Back at your house last weekend. I thought you just knew him. But you knew, didn’t you?”
/>
“Do you know when I stopped wanting to?” she said. “The day you were born. I hadn’t read anything out for years, but on that day I decided I never wanted to again. It just wasn’t as important as keeping you safe.”
I don’t know what I would have replied. At that moment, Dad came back in.
“I think you two should probably come.” His voice was calm again now, the kind of calm that implies a storm beneath the surface. “Charles Dickens has arrived to pay a visit.”
XXII
It wasn’t the Charles Dickens of popular imagination, with his wise, bushy-browed face and wiry beard; nor was it the younger Dickens in our family’s books, with his delicate chin and tumbling curls. This was a middle-aged Dickens, no more than forty. His hair had thinned into an extravagant comb-over; his mouth was wide and expressive; his dark eyes twinkled with intelligence and humor. Presumably, this was the Dickens who had written David Copperfield. He stood beside Charley’s bed, entirely unfazed, even as Dad drew the curtains around us all to hide us from view.
“This kind of thing,” Mum said, very calmly, “is exactly why I didn’t want Charley to have his tonsils out when he was fourteen.”
“I understand that now,” Dad said.
Dickens didn’t give them more than a passing glance. His dark eyes focused directly on me. In that movement, I saw Charley in him.
“I’ve come from your brother,” he said.
“But—” I cast an uncertain glance at my parents. “He’s not awake, is he?”
It was a stupid question: I could see him there, in the bed, as still and unresponsive as before. Fortunately, other than the shadowy unconscious figures on the other side of the curtain, the room was empty. No nurses or doctors had seen Dickens’s arrival, or we would probably have heard about it. I wondered about security cameras, but consigned it to the list of future worries.
“He is not awake,” Dickens confirmed—patiently, under the circumstances. “His body is still unconscious. His mind is awake, and fighting to get out. I, perhaps, am the part of his mind that made it. He fears you are in terrible danger.”
