The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  She opened her eyes and saw Holmes looking at her.

  “He’s gone in, hasn’t he?” she said. “Into the new world.”

  Holmes nodded. “I believe so. In fact, given the evidence, I would strongly suspect they both have.”

  Millie found it difficult to swear—it went against all her Jacqueline Blaine vocabulary. But she felt she could have managed at that moment.

  “Why would he do that?” she demanded, exasperated.

  “What do you mean?” the Scarlet Pimpernel called from the counter. He had unfortunately sharp hearing. “Who’s gone?”

  “There is no other place where he can go,” Dickens answered Millie. He had obviously overheard too. “I am an author, Miss Radcliffe-Dix. I understand his story. The only way it can be brought to conclusion is for the two of them to meet.”

  Dickens had misunderstood her question. Millie knew perfectly well that Charley had to go. She had been asking why he had not taken her with him. It was her fight as well. They were one and the same, him and the Street and herself and the summoner. They were part of the same world, and they had been made part of the same war.

  She might have been willing to follow him right then. But it was the Artful Dodger who, in the end, pushed her to make the final step. He came at that moment, hurtling himself through the door with such force that he almost knocked over the Duke of Wellington. Darcy Five caught him securely as Millie hurried over to them.

  “What happened?”

  “What do we care for what happened?” the Witch demanded. Her wand was already pointed at the urchin’s head. “Hold still, traitor!”

  “No, wait,” Millie ordered. Up close she could see that he looked ashen and trembling. For him to come running back to the street he’d half destroyed, something terrible must have been close behind him. “Dodger, what is it? Where are the others?”

  “He took them,” the Artful said. His voice was smaller and younger than she’d ever heard it. “My master. The summoner. He just read them away.”

  “Into their books?”

  He shook his head. “He put them in a room. He told them to wait there a moment. Then he locked the door from the outside, and he read the room away. I don’t know where they are. They’re just… gone.”

  Millie’s breath caught. She thought of the tunnel under the sea, that night less than a week ago, and the hand reaching from its depths. “Dorian?” she heard herself ask. “Did he escape?”

  The Artful shook his head. “He went in last. He looked at the summoner, and then he closed the door behind himself. It was as though he was daring him to do it.”

  “But they were going to join him,” Darcy Five said, as if the Artful needed to be reminded. He’d been with them. “Or her, if Mr. Holmes is correct. Dorian and the others were going to help the summoner.”

  “He didn’t need them,” the Artful said. “He doesn’t need any of you. I thought he did, I swear. I thought he wanted—I knew he had people of his own, people who weren’t real people, just as blank as he could make them. But I thought those were just the tools he was using to bring the new world about. I thought there’d be a place for other characters there. I thought—”

  “You thought there’d be a place for you there,” Millie finished.

  The Artful sniffed. “I thought I was different. He made me to be like you lot, to fool you, and I thought you were different. But you aren’t, not to him. We’re all just tools. And you lot—Dorian’s lot—are just tools with minds of your own, ones he can’t use. The new world isn’t for us. It’s not for anybody but him.”

  Millie stood still for a moment. The Street stood still, too, around her.

  Like tools, Rob had said. Or portable devices. Taken out and put back as needed. But it was worse than that this time. Beth—or whoever she was—could bring her own interpretations out again and again—maybe not quite the same, but continuous, nevertheless. She could never bring back Dorian and the others, not as they were. They were gone. It didn’t matter where; that was a question that might never be answered. They would never be here again.

  The part of her that belonged to words, to adventures and smugglers’ caves and eternal summer, was very strong now. Out the window, the butterfly spies—the ones from Aesop’s Fables—were fluttering about the rubble. They were blue with white tips on their wings. In the streetlight, it looked unexpectedly beautiful.

  “Everyone who wants to leave,” she said, and marveled at the calm in her own voice, “can leave now. If you head out of town, as fast and as far as you can, you might escape all this. I promise, I understand. But those who want to follow me, I’m going into the city.”

  “It might be a trap,” Darcy One warned. “To lure us in.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, we are at war.”

  Scheherazade rarely spoke at these kind of gatherings, though her dark eyes followed every word. She did so now, in her lilting English. “I think,” she said, “it’s time for a story of our own.”

  “What about Dr. Sutherland?” Matilda asked.

  “We’ll meet him there,” Millie said.

  Susan Sutherland stepped forward. Her chin had the determined tilt that Charley’s had at times. “And in the meantime,” she said, “you have me. I don’t know what I can do now, but I was born a summoner. I’ll do what I can.”

  The roar of a motorcycle engine greeted her words. Turning, Millie was just in time to see the silver Harley pull up outside the open door, the Witch astride it. Her hair gleamed black in the lamplight, and her skin was pale as ice.

  “If anybody intends to come with me into battle,” she said haughtily, “I might even deign to let them ride on the back. But they had better earn such a privilege.”

  Heathcliff’s knife-gun was strapped to his belt. Millie took it in his name. Other than that, they had few weapons. The Scarlet Pimpernel and Lancelot had their swords, and it turned out the Artful had been stashing a good few knives and shotguns in the Old Curiosity Shop that Millie would have certainly made him dispose of if she had known about them. The Witch had her wand; Matilda had her powers. Many of them would be without weaponry at all. But somehow, one by one, they all agreed to follow her.

  Cuba Street was deserted in the evening. The sounds of sirens wailing and shouts drifted down the redbrick footpath. As Millie strode out of the alleyway at the head of her army, though, a green-and-white kererū drifted in on the breeze. It carried the last of the sunlight on its wings.

  “Stop,” Millie said. They waited as Maui lit on the ground, shook off his feathers, and stood. The jawbone clutched in his fist gleamed white.

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” he said.

  “We had to decide if it was our fight too,” she said. “Have you come to stand by us?”

  “It’s my land,” he said. “But I might let you stand by me.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I think there’s room for all sorts of stories in this.”

  There were policemen at the barricades when they went to meet the city. They saw them, and tried to stop them. But the dark fog reached out to welcome them, and they entered its embrace. The time for secrecy was over.

  At the gates of the crumbling house at the heart of the city, Millie stood at the head of her army as Maui flew in pigeon form overhead. They looked back at her: gentlemen and knights, witches and urchins, Victorian spinsters and powerful children. The keeper of a thousand and one stories. Charles Dickens. Sherlock Holmes. And the parents of Robert and Charles Sutherland, whose children were in there and, not incidentally, one of whom was a summoner. Those two looked rather lost and bedraggled, the only real people in a world of fiction.

  “Are you ready for this?” she asked them, in an undertone.

  “I don’t think we could be,” Joseph said, but dryly. “Only a few hours ago I was gardening. We haven’t even had dinner.”

  “I’m ready,” Susan said. “But I don’t know what I can do.”

  “You’re
a summoner,” Millie said. “Something will come to you.”

  “I said that before we came in. But now that we’re here… I haven’t read anything out of a book in twenty-six years.”

  “You hadn’t for some years before that,” Millie reminded her. “And you created Charles Sutherland.”

  Surprise flickered across her face, but below the surface. There was too much else going on. “You know about that?”

  “Dorian told me. It was his job to know things.”

  “I never knew how I did it, though. It was just an uncontrolled rush of grief, and decades of suppressed magic came out at once.”

  “You have decades of suppressed magic locked up in you again,” Millie said. “And your sons are in danger. I rather suspect you’ll feel a rush of something.”

  Maui lit on the gate above her head. “The place is locked up,” he said. “There might be a way in the back. Where’s your summoner?”

  “He’s in there,” Millie said, without needing to check. The connection between them was very strong at that moment.

  “He is,” Susan agreed. “I can feel him there too. I can do that, sometimes, with him. I’ve always wondered if that was real magic, or just my imagination.”

  “It’s both,” Millie said. She closed her eyes, and concentrated, the way she had seen Darcy Three do on request. She saw a dark room, and the face of a woman. A light glowed; when she opened her eyes and looked up, she saw that same light burning in the window.

  “There are few ways we could get in without their seeing us,” Maui said. “We could take them by surprise.”

  “There’s no time,” Millie said. She could feel that too.

  “In that case,” Maui said, “just break the gate down.”

  Millie didn’t wait any longer. She aimed Heathcliff’s knife-gun at the lock on the gate, and fired.

  The shot would draw the attention of anyone inside; they would be thrown into open assault. But that, to be honest, was all she reasonably expected from the entire venture. There was very little any of them could do to Beth. Charley would have to do it. Their attack, if it did anything, would have to be to buy him time and space to act. Making noise and trouble was a battle plan in itself under those circumstances—though she hoped other plans would unfold in due course. The Duke of Wellington was with them, for goodness’ sake. And Charles Dickens, though he had no experience in war, had a good deal of experience in plotting.

  Against odds, the shot hit the lock, and when she rattled the gate, it began to give. It seemed that only the long wooden planks nailed across it were left to hold it closed, and they were rotting. The whole city was rotting, as far as she could tell. This was nobody’s new world.

  “Come on, chaps,” she called. Her voice was fierce and jaunty; that of the girl adventuress despised by critics and loved by children who should have been doing their math homework. “Let’s get this down. When we do, fan out into the courtyard, and hold your ground. Make them come out to us.”

  “Watch the windows,” Wellington advised. “Good position for riflemen to fire from a distance.”

  “Those with weapons share with those that don’t,” Millie added, “and if you have any bizarrely literal metaphorical traits that might come in handy, this would be an excellent time to use them.”

  The doors to the house opened as the gates came crumbling down.

  XXVIII

  The noise outside was getting louder. It sounded as though an army had arrived; knowing Millie, it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit if one had.

  Beth-Moriarty was still looking out the window, her gray eyes hardening. I, stupidly, was still doing the same, although from where I stood I could see nothing but the sky and rows of chimneys.

  “Should I kill him now?” diary Charley’s voice came. He didn’t care about Millie. He wasn’t built to. He only wanted to please, and to destroy. “You said that—”

  Beth-Moriarty never looked his way. “Go ahead,” she said. I didn’t realize, until he attacked, that they meant me.

  I felt the floor rock under me, and then a burst of searing heat. My muscles reacted, the way reflex kicks in when your hand gets too near a hot stove. I flinched away. The chair behind me went up in flames.

  I didn’t have time to say anything, or even to feel. But I looked to diary Charley, instinctively, and I remember the shock of the expression on his face. I had seen naked hatred like that only once before, and that was on the face of Uriah Heep.

  The next burst rippled the entire room. It was more luck than skill that I fell to the ground as a second ball of fire flew. I felt the heat over my head, and on the back of my neck.

  “Stop it!” I heard Charley’s voice snap; the real Charley, who was actually no more real than anyone here. The room twisted dizzily around me; then, at once, the fire retreated. I heard a terrible scream, a cry of agony and loss that went to my heart like a knife. When I looked up, diary Charley was enveloped in flame. Fire rose almost to the ceiling. His tiny form was lost in a mass of hungry orange light.

  I could only stare, horrified. Charley, for once in his life, moved quickly; or perhaps, not unusually, he thought quickly. All at once, there was a door set in the floor. I recognized it: the green-painted wood, entwined with ivy that looked even more peculiar growing from the floorboards. The Secret Garden door.

  Charley lunged forward, grabbed the paperback from the table, and wrenched the door open.

  “Quick!” he said to me. “Jump!”

  I understood what Charley had meant, that day last weekend when he’d said that if he stopped to think about breaking and entering, he wouldn’t act. I couldn’t stop to think about this. As Beth moved forward, I sat down, swung my legs over the new opening in the floor, and jumped.

  I know, because I measured during a fit of early-home-ownership DIY, that the height from the floor to the ceiling of my house is eight feet. The ceilings of old Victorian mansions are much higher. Until that point, I’d forgotten the bruises from the Jabberwock earlier today; as I hit the ground, the wooden floor reminded me, forcibly. My vision flared white. The air shot from my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. My chest burned, and I fought to subdue panic as I gasped. I knew, from my experience playing high school rugby, that I would draw breath again soon, but I hadn’t had the world’s greatest criminal mind trying to kill me on that particular rugby field. For a moment, everything just hurt.

  You can’t do this, something in my head whispered treacherously. It’s too hard.

  Then my chest spasmed, air flooded back, and I sat up, still gasping. Everything still hurt, but it was no longer the only thing on my mind.

  “Charley!” I snapped, almost before I could.

  He was still dazed, but his face cleared at the sound of his name. He caught his breath sharply, and looked up at the door in the ceiling. I could see it as a rectangular hole, through which the orange glow of flames was burning. Almost at once, it vanished.

  The room was very dim, and quiet but for the sound of our ragged breathing. From the other side of the wall, I could hear shouts and footsteps. The ceiling was streaked with ash.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Charley.

  He nodded, and winced. “Ow. Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Just—you know, fell through a floor.”

  “Know the feeling.” Beth-Moriarty could follow, of course, at any time. I had no idea why she hadn’t. Maybe she thought we’d both broken our necks. Maybe, judging from the noise outside, she was distracted by other things.

  Things like fire raging, and the child she was using to keep this world together transformed into a pillar of flame.

  “Is… Did you kill him?” I asked Charley. I didn’t need to clarify whom I meant, and he didn’t pretend to ask.

  “I think so,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. I thought he’d stop me. I just wanted…” He shook his head. “No. I was going to say that I just wanted to stop him from killing you. That’s not true. I wanted him to go away. I wanted to burn him up, the way I always mean
t to burn that diary entry. But I didn’t mean it to be like that.”

  I felt a shiver. “What did you do?”

  “He read the fire that burns up Satis House, the fire that destroys Miss Havisham. He flung it at you. I just read him as the Miss Havisham of this house. The parallel works: it’s his house. He’s the one living in a frozen moment, trapped in a memory of a betrayal, who creates weapons to wreak vengeance. And so he burned, just as Miss Havisham did in the novel. Though I suppose in this case he’s also Estella. The weapon without a heart. The—” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t mean it to be like that.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Good job with the door,” I said finally, in that effusive way I have.

  “It’s easier in here.” Understandably, he sounded distracted. “This reality’s more malleable.”

  “Couldn’t you have made the floor softer?”

  “I think I did,” he said. “Or we probably would have both broken every bone in our bodies.”

  “Softer still next time, okay? Let’s not break any.” My ankle was throbbing fiercely. If it wasn’t broken, I at least wasn’t going to be running any half marathons anytime soon.

  As we got to our feet, Charley’s eyes widened suddenly at something over my shoulder. “Oh…”

  I turned, my heart quickening. At first, I saw only what I expected to see: a rotten, moth-eaten sitting room, with floral sofas and cobwebs. A broken chandelier hung from the ceiling, and a pile of old clothes moldered on the floor.

  I looked again. It wasn’t a pile of clothes. It was a man, his eyes wrapped in a blindfold, curled up only a few feet away. I’d never seen a dead person before, but I’d seen enough crime-scene photos at work to recognize that this one was indeed dead. His throat had been cut. I remembered the dark, sticky feel of the floor beneath me, and recognized the iron tang of blood in the air.