The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  “He is real,” I said. “He’s not like you.”

  “He’s exactly like me, and I suspect you know it,” Beth said. “Charles—”

  “Stop it!”

  “You are not Susan’s child,” Beth-Moriarty said. “You are her creation.”

  There was a silence then, so heavy that I began to understand metaphors about cutting silence with a knife. If I’d had a knife, I’d have taken it to this one.

  “I don’t understand,” Charley said finally. It came to me, inconsequentially, that I hadn’t heard him say that since he was about four.

  “I think you do,” Beth-Moriarty said. “I think this is the last piece snapping into place for you. You know the feeling of the last piece snapping into place well, don’t you? The feeling of seeing the whole world, and knowing that it makes sense. I think you’re seeing yourself for the first time, right now. You’ve always known you never quite made sense.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I didn’t suspect it myself for quite some time,” she said. “Your mother told you she read something out of a book once, a long time ago. When she was a child. She was punished, like Beth, and unlike Beth she stopped. I started to wonder, then, if you were not a good deal more like me than I had imagined. I reread your diaries then with a different purpose, and it began to make sense. I requested your medical records, and discovered the peculiar story behind your birth. I knew I had been right.”

  “You met her at Charley’s place,” I said. “She said you did.”

  “I did,” Beth-Moriarty said. “And it was interesting. Nothing more. She doesn’t truly come into this story. She’s a mere human being, a flesh-and-blood summoner, as Beth was. Perhaps she could have been powerful in her way, but she turned her back on it. After she grew up, she came into her power once, and once only: the day her second child was born dead. She brought you to life that day. It took me a while longer to work out what she had brought you to life from. You’re almost unrecognizable. You grew with Susan’s gifts, and her knowledge, and you made them your own. But not all your gifts are from her. Some of them belonged to Charles Dickens. Do you really need me to tell you to whom he gave them?”

  “Leave him alone,” I said.

  “He’s been alone his entire life, Robert. He’s been a creature of words in a land of flesh and blood. You know, don’t you, Charles?”

  She reached into her own coat. Not the pocket, it would never have fit, but the lining. From it, she drew an enormous thick hardcover. As Charley had done a moment ago, she laid it on the table faceup, almost reverently.

  David Copperfield.

  Charley made a tiny, convulsive noise, then swallowed.

  “This is why the Street lets you through,” she said. “It’s why the city welcomes you—it wouldn’t welcome your mother. Do you remember the first time you read Dickens? I do. You wrote about it. You said it was like finding yourself.”

  “Yes,” he whispered. He was frighteningly still. The stillness that means he is very, very frightened. “Yes, I remember.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I insisted. “It doesn’t change anything.”

  Charley looked at me. The moment his eyes fell on me, I knew I had betrayed him.

  “You knew,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Not for long.” It sounded weak to me. “I suspected. Mum told me for certain right before this city spilled out. When you were in the hospital. So what? It doesn’t matter.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  He was right. I didn’t. Of course it mattered. And I know he was reading it on my face.

  Charley drew a deep breath and, to my relief, finally looked away. “Oh God,” he said, almost conversationally.

  “If you’re going to be sick,” Beth-Moriarty said calmly, “please do so in the fire grate.”

  “I’m not.”

  He was, though; or at least, if he wasn’t, it was out of sheer stubborn willpower. I recognized the signs. It had been my job to recognize them, a couple of decades ago, on long car trips.

  “Just as you please. Some of that nausea is from overwork, of course. It isn’t so much the summoning itself, though that does require a degree of pacing oneself. It’s the emotional energy. You need to put less of yourself into fictional creations. Keep it simple, and intellectual. For an intelligent man, you have a remarkable lack of ability to puzzle out the simplest life skills. I’ve been watching you wear yourself out all week.”

  “That was why you sent the Jabberwock when you did, wasn’t it?” I said. “He’d just collapsed. You knew he was at a low point.”

  “It seemed the right time to act,” Beth-Moriarty said. “I had the knowledge, I had the book you stole from me, I had the diaries. I needed him out of the way for the time being; I thought he was weak enough that I could achieve that. I admit, it worked a little too well. I had no intention of killing him.”

  “So you said. Why not? I can’t think it would trouble your conscience.”

  “You don’t seem to understand.” She looked at Charley. “Charles, I am the world’s greatest criminal; you are my nemesis, as Holmes was to Conan Doyle’s Moriarty. Moriarty doesn’t exist without Sherlock Holmes. He’s a mirror, a shadow, the underside of a very bright coin. I need you to define myself against, and vice versa. That is how literary villainy works. You are my equal, my opposite, and we are the same. We were destined to be enemies.”

  “You weren’t destined to be anything,” I said. “Real life doesn’t work that way.”

  “But we are not real people,” she said. “And this is no longer the real world. This is my world.”

  “And it’s mine,” Charley said. It was the first time he had spoken for a while. “Whatever else I am, I’m the person who wrote this world. You didn’t take it from Dickens, not directly. You took it from me. My interpretation, my writing, my book. It’s mine.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s yours as much as mine. A collaboration. And we find ourselves at the point now where we must grapple with each other for control over it, or take control of it together. Our stories, as I read them, say we must do the former. We are enemies, and must fight as enemies. If we follow my story, that of Moriarty, we will probably destroy each other.”

  “I thought Holmes defeats Moriarty and comes back,” I said.

  “Not in the first story,” Charley said, without looking at me. “Conan Doyle was forced to bring Holmes back later; he was too well loved to be allowed to stay dead. But he died. It was how the story was intended to be read. He and Moriarty fall over the edge of the Reichenbach, and they die.”

  Beth-Moriarty nodded. “But we need not die. This may not be the real world, but neither is it David Copperfield nor The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. We are authors as well as characters. We write our own stories now.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Charley asked.

  “This is our world,” Beth-Moriarty said. “Your writing, my reading. We’ve made it together. Our control of it will be stronger together. You know we’ve worked well together in the past, Charles.”

  “That was before I knew you were Professor Moriarty.”

  “And it was before you knew you were David Copperfield.”

  “I’m not David Copperfield,” he insisted. “I’m not. Maybe I began as him, but I’m not him.”

  “‘Chapter One. I am Born. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’”

  Charley shivered, just once. He was as pale as he’d been in the car on the way to the hospital.

  “Do you remember what you wrote about those lines, once? You called them the most perfect opening lines in the history of literature. Because they are all our opening lines. They are how our stories all begin. It was how you began.”

  “Stop it.”

  “But you’re quite right. You needn’t be bound to his story, just as I needn’t die at the Reichenbach Falls. We’re in our own s
tory now. And it can be greater than anything dreamed of by Dickens or Conan Doyle. They were only writers, after all. We are the stories.”

  “Charley—” I started to say, and he turned.

  In all my life, I had never seen Charley truly angry with me. I have now. I felt something in me curl up and die.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Did you want to know?” I said. “I didn’t want to know.”

  “It doesn’t matter what either of us wanted, Rob! I needed to know. I need to know everything. I don’t need you to protect me.”

  “He needed you not to know everything,” Beth-Moriarty said. “He needed you to be protected. He’s needed you to be less than you are for your entire life, Charles, because you’re more than him. You know that. You know you don’t belong with him, and those like him. You are better than them. You are words, and thought, and memory.”

  “Stop telling me what I am!”

  “You know what you are. And you know what Robert Sutherland is. Do you remember the day he abandoned you, when you were twelve years old?”

  “Why does everyone keep talking about that day?” I snapped. “We were both young. He didn’t get hurt, not really. I never did it again.”

  “You never had to,” Beth-Moriarty said. “Nobody ever touched him again. He came into his power on that day. You did, Charles. You unleashed Sherlock Holmes upon your tormentors. You were alone, and strong, and indomitable. Then you went away and cried because your own brother hated you and you didn’t fit. You had no need to. He was never your brother. You were never supposed to fit there. You were supposed to be here.”

  “You’re just saying that because you need him to be here,” I said. The realization wafted by me unexpectedly, and I grabbed it. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? That’s why that… thing… is here.”

  “Don’t call me a thing,” diary Charley said. “I’m not a thing.”

  I felt a stab of guilt, but I couldn’t stop to talk to him. “You can’t manage the city alone after all. It’s too big for you—and you want it to grow bigger still. You’ve brought Charley from a diary to help—from the point where he’s angry enough and scared enough to do it—but he’s not powerful enough. You need the real Charley’s help to stabilize it. Your copy can’t manage it.”

  “I can!” diary Charley insisted. “I can so manage it. I just need more time.”

  “No, he can’t,” Beth-Moriarty said calmly. “I read him to be a summoner, but he hasn’t been very successful. He’s a limited interpretation of a child’s diary, after all, and of course he’s a child. Even were he a more detailed reading, he would be years away from the author of Dickens’s Criminal Underworld. Rather like collaborating on a science project with a twelve-year-old Einstein: one could set him some basic background sums, but he’s hardly going to crack relativity. So yes, Charles.” She turned to him. “I don’t need your help. But I do not deny I want it. Nor do I deny that if you do not either join me or stand aside, I will rain destruction down upon you and everyone you hold dear. But that is not the point. The point is what you will do. What you could be, for the first time in your life.”

  She was talking to Charley, but I answered. “Which is?”

  “Whole,” she said.

  The word hit me like a blow to the stomach. Because she was right. He’d said it himself, back in the pizza place after we’d escaped Beth’s house, and I hadn’t wanted to listen. The Street was a part of him he’d been missing his entire life. It was part of what frustrated me so much about him when we were growing up: that he never seemed to fit in the real world. He belonged here. I could see the resemblance between him and Beth-Moriarty, as the two of them stood there, and it was the resemblance that strangers had never been able to see between him and me.

  Charley blinked suddenly, as if waking from a dream. “Wait—are you both actually waiting for me to answer?”

  “I think we both are,” Beth-Moriarty said.

  He started to laugh, then broke off as though it hurt. “You really don’t know me at all, do you? Either of you.”

  “Do you know yourself?” Beth-Moriarty said. “Really?”

  “No,” Charley said. “No, I don’t. But I know you. You’re Professor Moriarty. I know who you are, and how your story goes. I know how Holmes replies when you make a similar offer to him. Do you really think any self-respecting Victorian scholar would do differently from Sherlock Holmes?”

  Beth-Moriarty smiled tightly. “You stand fast?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I have no need to threaten you explicitly. As you say, you know the offer I made to Sherlock Holmes once, on paper. Here is one thing, though, with which I did not threaten Sherlock Holmes. I will kill Robert Sutherland in front of you, right here, right now, and I will paint the walls with his blood.”

  “Do you really think,” Charley said, quite seriously, “that I would ever, ever let you do that?”

  At that moment, there was a sound: a single gunshot, short and sharp. Beth-Moriarty’s head whipped toward the window, as did mine. Footsteps and shouts were coming from the courtyard outside.

  Charley didn’t turn to look with us; he didn’t need to. His eyes widened.

  “Millie…” he whispered.

  Millie

  The occupants of the Street had gathered in the public house as the world shifted. Outside, the cobbles spasmed; buildings creaked, and the sky grew dark. They clustered together for safety. Predictably, this meant they argued.

  “The new city is coming for us,” Darcy One said. “That’s why it appears to be traveling in a straight line down Courtenay Place. It’s reaching for us. And the Street is reaching back. The road has extended a quarter mile since that great shift. It’s no longer safe.”

  “It’s no longer safe anywhere!” Millie protested. “Do be sensible, Mr. Darcy. The new city is spreading over everything. If we leave this street, we’ll lose it, and any tactical advantage it might give us.”

  “They’ll take it from us if we stay,” Darcy One said. “Mr. Gray was right about that, at least.”

  The Witch laughed. “Then we take their new world from them first! Dorian was right about one other thing, fool though he is. This is a war of magic. We have strength of our own. Whatever the rest of you may be, I am a queen. My enemies will crumble before me.”

  “Your wand had no such effect against the Jabberwock,” Darcy Two pointed out.

  She tossed her head. “That strength came from its author. It was written to be practically invulnerable. I doubt the summoner has many more such weapons in his arsenal.”

  “He can have the same one back again and again, if he wants to,” Matilda said sensibly. “We need Dr. Sutherland to come back.”

  “I’ll duck outside and phone Rob,” Mr. Sutherland said to Millie, in an undertone. He had been looking increasingly overwhelmed; she suspected he was glad of the excuse. “If Mr. Holmes doesn’t mind getting me through the wall.”

  She nodded her thanks, and turned back to the others.

  “There’s little use in our defending the Street,” Darcy One was saying. “The purpose of the Street was to give us a place to hide. A place of refuge, and secrecy. That is lost to us forever. The summoner has made sure that everybody knows we exist, and his actions have put us at war with the world. Before long, the people out there will find the Street, and they’ll find us. The only prudent course of action is to withdraw and hide.”

  “Or,” Millie countered, “to fight back.”

  “Fight back for what reason? This war isn’t between the Street and the new world anymore. It’s between the real world and the summoner. We have nothing to gain by fighting in it.”

  “It isn’t a war yet,” Millie said. “And perhaps we can prevent it from becoming one. The summoner’s attentions are still focused on creating the new world. If we strike now, before the world is solid, we might have a chance. Charley might still be able to read the new world away. We might still stay secr
et. And even if we can’t, we can jolly well save some lives. If the new world is anything like the Street, we’re the only ones who can. The army, the air force—none of them will be able to cross the boundaries of reality. We can.”

  “We would have no chance,” Darcy One said flatly. “They would kill us at once.”

  “The we die with honor!” the Scarlet Pimpernel declared.

  “Aye,” Lancelot agreed. “For once shamed may never be recovered.”

  “What does Mr. Dickens think?” Darcy Three spoke up. He had been quieter since his escape from unreality the night before. This was not surprising, given that day had included a Jabberwock attack and a new world arriving, but even that morning Millie had caught a faraway look on his face. Mr. Darcy did many things; he didn’t characteristically dream.

  Dickens considered the question carefully; one could, uncharitably, say self-importantly. For once, the pub quieted to listen. “I think,” he said slowly, “that it is worth sacrifice to rid the world of a shadow. This threatens reality, and not only us. Those people out there are our readers. I think to die in their defense would be a far, far better thing than we have ever done.”

  “That’s from A Tale of Two Cities,” said Matilda.

  “Yes,” Dickens agreed. “It doesn’t mean it isn’t for us too.”

  The discussion was ongoing when Mr. Sutherland and Holmes slipped back in. Millie, seeing the looks on their faces, went to join them and Mrs. Sutherland in the corner.

  “I can’t get hold of either of them,” Mr. Sutherland said, before she could ask. “I tried Charley’s phone, when I couldn’t get Rob. To be fair, Charley hardly ever answers, even when he’s not in a coma. But Rob lives on his phone. And it’s not just not picking up. It’s coming up unavailable.”

  “Did you try the hospital?” Mrs. Sutherland said anxiously. “Perhaps the signal’s down.”

  “Thought of that. I got the hospital straightaway. They’re in chaos there, but they said Charley was still officially checked in.”

  Millie knew then. It made sense, but it wasn’t just that. She knew. She thought of Darcy Three, and the connection he had explained with the other Darcys. She and Charley were creator and creation, not different incarnations of the same character, but they shared a similar connection. Experimentally, she closed her eyes, and reached out for the part of her mind that sometimes felt what Charley was feeling. It wasn’t, as Darcy had said, strictly an image she received, but something came to her nonetheless. Darkness, and fear. Clouded skies, and uneven pavement underfoot. The Street, but not the Street. It turned her stomach.