The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  “She’s looking at you now.”

  “I know.” He winced, and his hands tightened on the window ledge. “Okay. That hurts. Never mind. I just need to—”

  “Look, calm down,” I said, because I could see him starting to panic. “What’s happening? She’s not flickering anymore.”

  “No. I’ve lost it. It’s not working.”

  “Is it because you’re not close enough?”

  “I don’t—no. No, it was working before. She was changing. I could feel it working.”

  “So why won’t it work now?”

  “I don’t know!” His voice raised. “I really don’t! I don’t know how I ever made it work in the first place.”

  The city was definitely growing darker. Outside, the buildings creaked and grumbled as if a step away from prizing themselves free and walking toward us. Something stirred beneath the ground.

  The darkness at the heart of the Dickensian world. It was just an expression. No, it was an idea, set down in words. And here, that was everything.

  “If you can’t take her,” I said, “can you take the world back from her, somehow? Reread it into something a little more safe?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You love Dickens. You don’t read it like this. I’ve met your Dickens—I know you don’t. So what part of your book has Beth ignored? What offsets the darkness?”

  “What?” he said distractedly. He shivered, and made an extreme effort to collect himself. “Um… I don’t know. I can’t…”

  “Think!”

  “I can’t! I don’t know why, I—it’s just not there. The city won’t listen to me anymore.”

  I looked out at Beth-Moriarty, at her eyes fixed on the window. A horrible conviction settled over me.

  “I think she’s reimagining you,” I said. “Just a little, maybe, but…”

  “I think she is too,” he said. “I can feel it. She’s trying to make me into David Copperfield, just as I’m trying to make her into Moriarty. David Copperfield didn’t write Charles Sutherland’s book, and he can’t summon. He’s not a threat to her.”

  “Okay. So don’t be him. Stop focusing on Moriarty for a moment, or Dickens. You need to focus on who you are.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I have no idea who I am. Not anymore.”

  I knew what he meant. I had no idea who he was either. I’d seen him in too many different forms, in too many different lights. I was one to criticize him for never living more than half in the real world. It seemed to me in that moment that Charley had always been more than half a dream figure to me.

  “You’re a reader,” I said. It was all I could think to say. “A summoner. Hold on to that.”

  “I’m trying,” he said. “I don’t think that’s enough. I can’t keep that and lose everything else, it doesn’t work like—” He broke off with a gasp, and doubled over. Suddenly, horribly, he flickered and distorted as the Jabberwock had done in the Street. It only lasted a second, then he was back, straightening, his face white with pain and effort. But it was obvious what was happening.

  “She’s reading you right back into your—into David Copperfield, isn’t she?” I said. “The book, not just the character.”

  He nodded tightly.

  “Okay,” I repeated. I tried to sound as calm as I could. “You really need to fight back, or you’re going to be reinterpreted out of existence.”

  “I am fighting back,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I really am. I’m trying to hold on to who I am, but it’s not like finding an interpretation of a character in a story. I can’t—don’t!”

  He’d flickered again, and I’d lunged forward to grab him instinctively before he stumbled. He wrenched himself backward out of my reach, his image solidifying briefly as he did so.

  “Don’t touch me. I don’t know what would happen to you if I go when you’re in contact with me.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” I said firmly. “I’m not going into a book. I can’t. I’m real.”

  “I pulled you through the crack in the wall to the Street. I pulled you into a cloud to bring you here. I don’t know where the boundaries are anymore.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen because you’re not going anywhere,” I said. “Come on. You said that we’re all stories.”

  “When?”

  “In your book. This book. The one we’re practically living in. It’s in the conclusion.”

  “You said you hadn’t read it.”

  “I might have been lying about that.”

  He looked at me in disbelief, then laughed a little. The laugh was strained, but it was genuine. “You’re horrible.”

  “That’s right. But you still said it. You must have believed it. So what does it matter if you started out as a story too?”

  “I was eighteen, up all night and very highly caffeinated when I wrote that conclusion. It’s more emotion than criticism. Besides—my story’s a lie. I don’t know what’s true anymore. It’s not that I’m upset about it; it’s just a fact. An intellectual problem. I don’t understand. You have to understand a story to interpret it. I don’t know who I am.”

  “That’s rubbish,” I said to him firmly. “You’re Dr. Charles Sutherland.”

  “And how am I supposed to believe that, when the reason I need so urgently to believe it is that I’m not? If I were Dr. Charles Sutherland, I’d be real. No reader in the world could make me otherwise. Beth can only read me into what I actually—” He flickered again. It lasted longer this time, and his sharp intake of breath dissolved into a cry of agony.

  “Charley?”

  His image phased wildly in and out of focus, then settled. “I’m here, I’m still here,” he said, but faintly. His face was streaked with tears. “God, that hurts.”

  “I know.” I didn’t, obviously, but I could imagine. As Dad said, Charley is a lot tougher than he looks. If he says something hurts, it really does. “But—look, that’s because it’s wrong, isn’t it? It’s because you’re not hers to read.”

  “It’s because I don’t want to be sent away.” Of course, he had to be right and I had to be wrong, even now. Even about this. “Not like this. I know how Uriah felt now; I’m so sorry I did this to him; I didn’t realize. I don’t care if there’s a book to go into or not. I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here.”

  The ripple came again, and took him. This time, he didn’t manage to hold it back for more than a few seconds. He screamed.

  For just a moment, a fraction of a second, the wavering form that had been Charley shrunk to nothing. Through the fractured light, I glimpsed a tiny, swaddled bundle. I thought I had felt sick before; now, I felt bile rise in my throat.

  Because obviously, Beth wasn’t trying to read him into the strong, capable Dickens David Copperfield who had materialized in Charley’s hospital room. That wasn’t what he had been read from. She was trying to read him back to the beginning, to the infant who had been born, as he had been informed and believed, on a Friday, and had cried as the clock struck twelve. He was going to be undone to the very first moment of his birth, and then he was going to disappear back into a book or nothingness or whatever there was for fictional characters outside this world. He was right, it didn’t matter. He would be gone.

  And then he was back, sunk to the ground, shuddering, his jaw set in determination. He was faint around the edges, and his skin had the translucency of ice, but he was still there.

  There had to be something I could do. I’d come to protect him. It couldn’t be true that now, at the crisis, all I could do was watch.

  Outside, a scream came as someone was hit—by bullets, by fire, by magic. It was one of ours. Moriarty’s people wouldn’t scream. They would die without a sound, and they would kill without a sound. And they would kill everyone. It didn’t matter how brave Millie was, or how clever. When Moriarty was finished with Charley, she would destroy them all with a thought.

  I heard a roar.

  I turned to the window in tim
e to see the sky shatter with light: the white light that brought a character into the world, or took it away again. This time, it brought a dragon. It filled the sky, furious and terrible. Red, knobbly skin, smoky black wings, fierce orange eyes that blazed fire. It opened its jaws, and the roar came forth again. The entire city quivered.

  There were a lot of places a dragon could have come from. They’re the oldest stories; possibly they’re older than story. Beowulf had a dragon, Norse sagas had dragons; they were part of Chinese legend and medieval folktales. But I knew this dragon. It didn’t come from legend, and it didn’t come from Beth.

  “That’s A Lion in the Meadow,” I said slowly. “That’s Mum.”

  I don’t think Charley heard me. He was locked in his head, somewhere beyond words. But he had heard the roar. Slowly, with great effort, he turned his head toward it.

  “Look,” I said to him gently, the way I might have in those few months before he could talk, when he was still mine to teach everything I knew. “Do you see it? It’s the dragon from the picture book, the one she used to read us. She’s come for us.”

  Something worked behind his eyes, in the muscles of his jaw. His mouth opened twice before he spoke. “I see it,” he said.

  Beth must have taken her eyes from Charley for just a second. The Jabberwock had sprung to meet the dragon. It spilled into the world: leathery, sinuous, impossible. This time, it had wings that propelled it into the sky. The two great monsters collided above the Dickensian nightmare city.

  Underneath them, in the midst of the battle, I saw my parents. Dad stood close to Mum, Matilda held protectively in his arms as I could still remember being held. Mum stood beneath her dragon. She wouldn’t have needed a book to summon it. The book had been the source of her first creation when she was a child. She had read it to us a thousand times.

  “Okay,” I said. A calm had settled over me, real instead of pretended. I crouched down beside Charley. “You need to know who you are? You’re Dr. Charles Sutherland. You’re a supremely annoying word genius who went to Oxford at thirteen and wrote the world we’re standing in. You can quote Dickens and Conan Doyle verbatim, but can never remember where you left your phone. You’re stubborn, you’re kind, you’re brave, and you’re too smart for your own good. You apologize too often, forget to buy milk, and have terrible taste in friends, because seriously, Moriarty. You’re my brother.”

  “I’m not your brother.” His voice was strained, but it was back. “Beth was right about that. I—David Copperfield’s brother died as a baby. They had the same eyes. I’ve never been your brother. We’re not even related.”

  “For God’s sake, Charley, I’ve known you since you were a day old. I grew up with you. How much more related do you want to be? If you’re not my brother, then tough, because I am sure as hell yours.”

  I saw a shiver go through his body, and he looked up. His eyes caught mine, the way they had when I first saw him, the day after he came into the world. And they were nothing like my eyes, and they were Dickens’s eyes and probably David Copperfield’s, too, but they were also his.

  He believes what you tell him, Eric had said. He saw himself as I saw him.

  “I know you,” I said. “I remember you. And you are not going anywhere.”

  Another cry from outside the window. This one was barely audible over the gunfire. The dragon and the Jabberwock fought in the sky.

  I stood and offered Charley my hand.

  He flickered once more as he took his place by the window, but he barely noticed. His attention was once more directly at his archnemesis. This time he didn’t say anything, even to himself. He looked at her.

  And she felt it. I saw her teeth bare in a flash of white. It only took moments this time before her image began to twitch, then change.

  “You’ve got it,” I said—quietly, this time, so as not to distract him. Hope rose in my chest. It wasn’t only Beth. The characters around her were beginning to falter without her explicit orders to guide them. The city itself was darkening, and there were ominous creaks and groans from the house around us. The whole world was straining at the seams.

  Beth broke Charley’s gaze, motioned to two characters to follow, and turned back to the house.

  “What—where is she? Where’s she going?” I asked. “Is that it?”

  “She’s coming upstairs,” Charley said. He was no longer fading, but there was a transparency to him. Light seemed to be coming from somewhere behind him, and shining through him. He was tiring. “She’s coming to face me properly.”

  I could hear footsteps coming up the stairs. I remembered being in Charley’s flat, only a week or so ago, waiting for the Hound of the Baskervilles to come break down the door.

  “Don’t give up,” I said. There had to be more I could do than this. There had to be. “You never give up. There, that’s something else about you. You’re a complete pain, but I’ve never once seen you give up.”

  “You can stop telling me things about myself now,” he said. “I’ve got that. Besides, I think you’re just finding new ways to tell me I’m a pain.”

  “How about the fact that you used to be terrified of spiders until you read Charlotte’s Web when you were five?”

  “Stop it!” he said, but he’d smiled. The light around him solidified. “I thought we agreed never to talk about that.”

  The door opened, and Beth-Moriarty came in. Two characters flanked her. I think I recognized a Fagin, all red hair and knobbly eyebrows, and the other may have been Bill Sikes. Beth-Moriarty’s perfect gray hair looked a little less perfect that it had been. That wasn’t all. I thought, with a start, that she looked taller and thinner, her forehead higher and her eyes a little more deep set. Her head oscillated slowly from side to side as she glared at us.

  “Copperfield,” she said. Her voice, too, sounded lower, with a gravelly hiss it had not possessed before.

  “Moriarty,” Charley said.

  “You won’t beat me,” she said. “I am better than you. That is indisputable fact.”

  “We’re not fact,” Charley said. “We’re fiction.”

  Beth-Moriarty smiled. For a moment, the two of them looked at each other. There was no reading being done, I don’t think. They simply looked, and saw each other.

  And then the Fagin standing at Beth-Moriarty’s side drew out a knife and stabbed her through the heart.

  It was so quick, and so unexpected, I didn’t realize at first what had happened. I’m not sure anyone did. Moriarty screamed, a high, shrill sound of more anger than pain. The city convulsed. The floor rocked under my feet; the walls around us bulged and flew apart; the sky was suddenly the color of blood. Outside, I could hear the cries of the combatants as the ground split into jagged lines.

  Fagin stepped forward. His features blurred and melted, his red hair sprouted, and once again, I found myself looking at the face of Uriah Heep.

  XXIX

  Master Charley,” Uriah said. Beth-Moriarty was on the floor, gasping and choking. The knife in Uriah’s hands glistened red with blood. “Or is it Master David? Do tell me which you prefer, won’t you, sir?”

  “Uriah,” Charley said, deliberately calm. “What are you doing?”

  “What am I doing?” he repeated. His limbs twitched. “What does it look like I’m doing? What am I always doing? Rising above my station. I’m Uriah Heep, Master Charley. A threat to the social order, and the truth at the heart of it. It’s what I do.”

  “I thought you were with Dorian,” I said.

  “He thought so too,” Uriah said. “Dorian Gray. Such a witty, aristocratic person. So beautiful and clever. Do you know what Moriarty did to him, Master Charley? Him, and those who followed him? She welcomed them into her city, and then she melted their bodies into words. All of them. I hid in the form of one of her soldiers. I heard them scream as they were torn from the world.”

  I felt rather than saw Charley shiver.

  “You told them to come to her,” I said. “Dorian,
and the Artful Dodger, and the rest. All of them.”

  “Oh, I would never presume so far, Master Robert. They would never have believed me, if I had told them that the other summoner would lead them to greatness. They didn’t realize I was telling them. I didn’t, not in words. I just whispered, and they believed what they wanted to believe.”

  “Why? What did you want?”

  “I wanted them to come here,” Uriah said. “It would be too conspicuous for me to come on my own. I wanted her to deal with them. And then I wanted to deal with her. With both of you. I wanted the city for myself.”

  “You can’t control it,” Charley said. “You have no power over it. You need to stop this.”

  “That’s what they all say,” Uriah said. He smiled: not his horrible, obsequious smile, but the one with fury behind it. “‘Stop it, Uriah. Keep to your place. Be umble.’ That’s what this city is, you know. You should know, you wrote about it. The darkness. The rage and pain of thousands like me, kept in our places until we die there. My place? This is my place. It’s always been my place. Not hers. Not Dorian Gray’s. Not yours, Dr. Sutherland, David Copperfield, Dickens’s favorite child. Mine. Control it? I don’t need to control it. It’s part of me. Let it spread until it devours the whole world. It’s mine.”

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs, a flurry of them, brisk and quick. I turned my head for a moment, toward the open door. In that one moment, Uriah grabbed me by the wrist, spun me around, and pressed his blade to the soft part of my throat.

  There are a lot of things for which I’m truly ashamed during this whole affair—deeply ashamed, where I doubt I’ll ever be able to dig them out. Letting myself be grabbed by Uriah Heep at that moment, by contrast, was nothing. Moriarty, after all, had been caught off guard by him only moments before. He was strong, supernaturally so; I was battered and off balance after my fall through the floor. I was prepared to protect Charley, not myself. But, illogically, what shot through me as the knife-edge bit my skin like a midge was pure humiliation. How could I? What an idiot.

  Then I saw Charley’s eyes wide and his face still, and a chill of real fear touched me.