The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  Could Henry get me there? He was fictional, just like Millie and the others. He could pass through. And he could take me, too, if I kept a hold of him. The trouble was, he was all the way back at Charley’s house. By the time I got there and back with him, I would be too late. Even if I got in my car right now—

  My car. Suddenly, I knew. Excalibur. The sword that Charley had pulled from Le Mort Darthur, all that time ago, to save me from Uriah Heep. It was in my car. I’d put it there just this afternoon—only hours ago, though it felt like longer—when I’d gone to pick him up from the university.

  It would pass through. It was from a book, it had to. Whether it was alive or not shouldn’t matter; it was whether or not it was real. And if I were holding it…

  I didn’t know for certain. I never knew any of this stuff for certain. But my car was right there; it would take seconds to test it. And it made sense. Charley is always very big on things making sense.

  I didn’t stop to think. I got up off the back of the ambulance. I forgot how sore my ankle was and how weak and shaky I’d felt only moments before, forgot that Millie was standing right next to me, forgot everything except where I’d left my car keys (my jacket pocket) and where I’d put Excalibur.

  “Rob, what are you—?” Millie asked. I ignored her. I ignored my parents as well.

  The sword was still in the trunk of the car. I had laid it diagonally across the old blanket I kept there, and it gleamed in the emergency lights. I picked it up and curled my hand around the pommel. It fit there like it had been created for me. In some ways, of course, it had.

  “Rob?” I don’t think Millie knew what Excalibur was, but from the tone of her voice, she could work out what I intended to do with it. “Rob, don’t you dare—”

  I turned toward the wall of otherworldly fog, tightened my grip on the sword and, injuries or no injuries, I ran.

  I faltered just a little, the moment before I hit the cloud. If I were wrong about Excalibur, I could just disappear. Just step into the mist and vanish, as Lydia had vanished. Presumably I’d come back if Charley dissolved the city, of course, but that didn’t quell my instinctive revulsion at the idea.

  And if I were wrong to do this… if I were just wrong…

  I’m so sorry, Lydia.

  I entered the city again.

  XXXI

  It was like stepping into the end of the world. At once, my eyes were blinded by a white glow, harsh and pitiless as a flare from an atomic bomb. Almost as blinding was the noise. It struck me in an endless roar. It took me a moment to realize that it was made up of words. Hundreds of thousands of intermingled voices, each crying over each other in fragments.

  Chapter One. I am Born

  You have been in every line I have read.

  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else…

  And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.

  These pages must show.

  Usually, when Charley puts something back, it goes with a flash of light. Just one flash, between one heartbeat and the next, and it’s gone. But Dickens or Uriah Heep or the Cat in the Hat was a good deal smaller to hold in a thought than an entire world. This was a flash drawn out over minutes. And for once, I wasn’t watching it from the outside. I was inside the light.

  Think of a story, I remembered belatedly. It was what Charley had told me to do as we passed through the edges of this world. It looked as though it was all edges now.

  There was so much light, I could hardly see. I made out the outlines of buildings, and of streets, and of lampposts, and of steeples and domes and roofs. It didn’t help, because they weren’t in the order they had been in before. They weren’t in any sort of order at all. Lydia and I had been to an exhibit of Escher lithographs once—it came to the museum on tour, and it was a rainy weekend. The city now felt like those prints. Paths went nowhere, or doubled back on themselves. Buildings folded over like the pages of a book.

  Liminal space. The space between two worlds.

  Where the light was strongest, there were no buildings—at least, none of bricks and mortar. They shone through with words. The city at the edges dissolved into block text, and the ground under my feet was shifting with printed sentences. In places the buildings looked like thinly painted watercolor over newsprint. In others there were holes torn through walls or across the sky itself, and words teemed from those holes—or out of them, I couldn’t tell. Everything was in motion. And noise. There was so much noise.

  There was no sign of Charley. There was no sign of anything so concrete. All signs were starting to break down.

  A story. I needed a story.

  And I had one.

  “My name is Robert Sutherland.” It was the story I told myself without thinking every day. The world around me paused to listen. Chapter One. I am Born. “I was four and half years old when my brother was born. I want him back.”

  The words twisted before me, and writhed into the shape of Uriah Heep. He stood there bleeding ink around the edges. His mouth when it opened was a rip in the world.

  “You don’t want him back,” Uriah Heep said. “You never wanted him at all. I know you.”

  “You don’t know me,” I said.

  “I am you,” he said. “I am the part of you that hates, and resents, and dreams of revenge. I am the part of Charles Sutherland that he won’t acknowledge, the part that hates you too. I am the child buried under the tree, the narrative sacrifice, the life lost so that David Copperfield could thrive. I am the darkness at the heart of the world, the darkness that even Dickens couldn’t defeat.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You’re all of that. But I still want my brother back.”

  “If he comes back,” Uriah said, “he’ll bring all this with him. Chaos, and story. It’s what he is.”

  “I know. I still want him back.”

  “He’ll destroy your world.”

  “I know.” I wasn’t being defiant. I was too tired for defiance, and Uriah Heep was too elemental to defy. Besides, I agreed with every word. “I know he will, one day or another. I don’t care. I want him back.”

  “Why?”

  “Because whatever he is,” I said, “I knew the first day I saw him that I would destroy the whole world to keep him safe. I thought it was a feeling. Now I suspect it was also a prophecy. Charley would probably call it narrative foreshadowing. Either way, it was true. It still is.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It doesn’t have to,” I said. “It’s a story.”

  And then I saw him.

  He was standing there in the midst of the disintegrating world, the book open in his hands. Its pages were glowing, casting light about the streets and on his face. The words that were spilling out of it or into it, that were making up the city, were making him up as well. They flickered behind his eyes and shone through his face.

  He was David Copperfield, and Sherlock Holmes, and Charles Dickens. He was Dr. Charles Sutherland, author of the world that was crumbling around us. He was words, and thought, and memory. He was a creature of metaphor and simile, of hopes and autobiography and dead people. And he was my brother.

  “Charley!” My voice was lost again in the gusts of words streaming around us, but somehow he heard me. He looked up. I saw his eyes blink, darken, and focus on my face. The world around me faltered as his attention diverted. In front of me, Uriah Heep dissolved into text.

  “I’ve come back for you,” I said.

  He didn’t answer. I think he heard me, but he couldn’t afford to listen. His concentration was taken up with trying to hold an entire city in his mind.

  “Come on.” I took a step closer and held out my hand. “Come back with me.”

  His face was utterly remote. I’m not even sure he was behind it anymore. I kept moving forward anyway.

  “I’m sorry I let you do this,” I said. “I’m sorry I let you be scared, and worried,
and hurt. I’m sorry I let you think I didn’t want you. I’m sorry for reading you the way I wanted to see you, all your life. That’s enough to be sorry for, okay? I refuse to be sorry I lost you.”

  It was hard to walk now. I glanced down, quickly, and saw that this was because the cobbles beneath my feet were falling away.

  The streets and buildings and lampposts and sky were fading. Already, I thought I could see the neon lights and straight lines of the real city beneath it, Courtenay Place on Friday night. The city was a whisper in the mist, nothing more, and in moments it would pass away and leave nothing at all, not even the mist.

  I wasn’t fading. I was still real and solid. Wherever the city was going, I wasn’t going with it.

  My brother was. Before my eyes, I saw him blur about the edges, and then I saw his face translucent and his body all but transparent. For just a moment, his eyes shifted again to meet mine, and his mouth twitched in a tiny smile. It was the smile he had given me before he boarded the plane for England, when he was thirteen and I was seventeen, and we were both leaving home for the first time. My heart had given that treacherous little tug then, because I had known that he was terrified. And then he had gone through that gate, and out of my life.

  “Don’t you dare,” I said.

  I don’t really know, in that moment, what I was trying to do. I don’t know if I thought I could bring him out, or if I thought I could go with him—into a book, or into nothing, wherever it was fictional characters went. I only know what I did and what happened.

  I knocked the book out of his grip and grabbed hold of his hand.

  The world shattered.

  Chapter One. I am Born

  I existed, and I didn’t exist. I felt the real world and my brother’s world, pulling at me and tearing me apart.

  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life…

  I saw, as if from above, the long ramshackle line of Courtenay Place wreathed in fog. I saw that fog lift, and the streets of Wellington hard and glittering in the streetlights.

  I saw the city, Charley’s London, solid and real, made of words and thoughts and ideas and interpretation, sprawling out as far as I could see. It was disappearing: not into nothing, as Moriarty had feared, but into something I couldn’t begin to understand. It was passing into pure language. In another moment, perhaps, I would disappear with it.

  For this moment, we were here. Liminal space. The space between two worlds. A fictional landscape to be traversed. The place where the impossible happened.

  … or whether that station will be held by anybody else…

  “No,” I said. The words were strange: not so much heard as absorbed into the narrative around me. “Not this time. It’s my turn.”

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t know how to close read, or interpret. It had never made much sense to me. But I knew the feel of a case coming together out of a myriad of details; I knew the feel of being in touch with something bigger than myself. It was the feeling of a story being told. I told this one.

  “My name is Robert Sutherland,” I said. “I am thirty years old. I live in Wellington, New Zealand. I was four and half years old when my brother was born.”

  I saw myself at two, playing by the creek while my mother held my hand. I saw myself at four, peering into a crib and feeling my heart tugged from me. I saw myself at seventeen, walking away from a schoolyard fight; at twenty-two, a brand-new lawyer in a city that I loved; at twenty-six, asking Lydia if she wanted to go get coffee sometime. I put out all the threads I could to my real world, and I held them tightly.

  And then I let this world in. I saw myself playing Pac-Man with Sherlock Holmes, chasing Uriah Heep through the English department in the early morning, standing under the shelter of a tree in the rain watching a crowd of stars. I saw the Street in all its shambolic glory. I saw all the times Charley had tried to show me something beautiful and I hadn’t wanted to look. I let it all become part of the story. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

  I couldn’t see Charley through any of this. I couldn’t even feel his hands in mine. But when I heard his voice, I knew that I was still, impossibly, holding on to him.

  “What are you doing here?” the voice said.

  “I came back for you,” I replied.

  “Why? Who are you?”

  I nearly told him. Something stopped my tongue at the last moment. It was too big a question. I felt, very strongly, that the wrong word here would ruin everything.

  “You know who I am,” I said instead.

  “I don’t…” The voice was slow, hesitant. “I think I do. I don’t know. I think you shouldn’t be here.”

  I laughed at that. It was strange, in a place of pure language, to hear my own laugh bounce around and come back to us. “Well, you might say that. But neither should you. I came to get you out.”

  “Oh.” He paused. “Who am I?”

  And then I understood. I had helped him read himself back before by telling him who he was. That wouldn’t work this time. He had already gone too far; if I tried, what I would pull out would not be the Charley I knew but some figment of my own interpretation. That was what Eric had accused me of doing to him his entire life. If Charley was to come back, he would need to bring himself back.

  “Who do you think you are?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I think I was trying not to know. I think…”

  I spoke the first thing that came into my head. The first story.

  “Do you know what I thought of this afternoon?” I said. “When we used to play around the tree out back. Do you remember?”

  “I think so.” His voice grew a little firmer. “Yes. We used it as a pirate ship. You helped me get to the top branches.”

  “Exactly. Remember that one evening, when the storm clouds rolled in while we were in those branches? You were only about four or five. We started to climb down when the first drops fell, but it came over so fast we had only just reached the bottom when the clouds burst. We just stood close to the tree trunk and stared at it. It was raining so hard and the clouds were so dark that it was like night had come early. We could see the lights of the house in the distance, behind the veil of rain. The fire was going. And you made the stars come out.”

  “Yes.” He said it with wonder. “I remember that. The crowd of stars. They were from Yeats.”

  “I know. I don’t think you meant to make them; the poem came into your head, and you hadn’t learned to shut up about poetry yet. They weren’t like proper stars—I mean, scientific stars. They swarmed around our heads and glittered in the branches like fireflies. When the rain caught one, it would hiss, and steam would rise from them. But they weren’t fireflies. They were real stars. More real than real. And the garden around us opened up, and the air felt thin and crisp, and it was as if we were miles above everyone, us and the tree alone on top of the entire world.”

  “And then Dad came out to get us with the umbrella,” he said. “Mum sent him. I had to put the stars back, and they told me off, but not too badly because we were soaked through. We got dried off, and were given hot chocolate by the fire. You let me read your comic book.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember that part.”

  “I do,” he said.

  He was in front of me now. I could see him. I could see all of it. And the city glowing with the light of pure meaning was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  … these pages must show.

  The world came back together.

  We were right where we had been before, on the high street of the new city, only the streets had quieted. It might be more correct to say that the streets were utterly quiet. Nothing moved, nothing stirred: not a breath of wind, not a bird, not a whisper. The air felt too hushed to breathe. Even the sky overhead, still and high and the palest blue, seemed to contrive to make as little noise as possible.

  My hand was still around Charley’s; as the feeling returned to my body, that was the first thing I felt. His han
d was barely substantial when I had taken it. Now, even as I stood there, I felt it solidify. He formed around it, as a ghost out of the air.

  “Hey,” I said. Almost before I’d spoken, warmth and feeling rushed back into his face. He drew a sharp breath, then coughed. His hand slipped from mine as he crumpled to the ground, still coughing. Air rushed into his lungs for the first time in a long while; his heart took its first beats. His body shuddered as life entered it again.

  “Steady.” I crouched down beside him and put my hand on his shoulder, partly to support him, mostly to reassure myself that he was real and solid. “Just breathe.”

  “I’m okay,” he said breathlessly. “Give me a minute. What—?”

  Another fit of coughing grabbed him before he could finish the question, much to my relief. I didn’t want to have to explain what happened. The cold certainty that had been mine only moments ago evaporated in the light of day, wherever this day was. I was no longer sure what had happened, or if it was right.

  Charley caught his breath, and sat up.

  “Take it slow,” I said. “I think you just read yourself back to life.”

  “I didn’t mean to.” The confusion on his face was beginning to clear. “I was almost gone. Something called me back. I—”

  He turned to look at me.

  “That was you, wasn’t it?” His eyes were suddenly brimming with hurt bewilderment. I didn’t care. He was back behind them, and that was what mattered. “What did you do?”

  “I saved your life, I think,” I said. “Beyond that, I was hoping you’d explain.”

  “I almost had it! You pulled me back. You made me pull myself back.”

  “I know that much. But where are we? We’re not in a book, are we?”

  As I spoke, I knew the answer. I had just been as close to the inside of a book as I would probably ever get. It was nothing like this.

  “No.” The question distracted him briefly. “No, I don’t think we’re in a book. I don’t know where we are. We might have just snapped back to reality. This might all be overlaying Wellington, right where it was before… Why did you do that? I told you to get out!”