by H. G. Parry
I snorted. “And since when do I do what you tell me?”
“I meant it, Rob! You could have just ruined everything!”
“I know,” I said. “Fine, it was stupid. But I couldn’t do it, all right? I wasn’t going to let you just fade away like that.”
“Did it occur to you that maybe I wanted to just fade away like that?”
“Not really. And if it had, I would have only come to get you sooner, because that would be disturbed. Did you?”
He didn’t quite answer. “It was my choice.”
“Well, tough. It was my choice not to let you go. God knows why. I wish I had, if you’re going to be this much of a pain about it.”
He made a small, inarticulate noise of frustration, and I knew he was backing down. He wasn’t very good at nonacademic arguments.
“If you’ve ruined it, then Lydia can’t come back,” he said. “Nobody can, but not her either.”
“Do you really think,” I said tightly, “that I hadn’t considered that?”
The last of the fight drained from him. “Of course you did.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any of that. I just—I’m tired. And I thought it was over.”
I felt that sharp, familiar tug in my chest. I’d resisted that feeling for about twenty years: inconsistently, which made it worse, and stupidly. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m tired too. I understand.”
I did. I understood more than I wanted to, and a lot more than I wanted to talk about.
“Can you stand yet?” I asked.
The idea caught him off guard, as if he’d forgotten that might be a good short-term goal. “I don’t know. Yes. I think so.”
I got to my feet, and he followed. It took him a couple of attempts, but I held back, and he made it in the end.
“I’m okay,” he said, and this time sounded almost convincing. He pushed his hair back from his eyes, and looked around. “I don’t actually think we’ve overtaken Wellington. I don’t think you pulled us far enough for that. We might just be partway, like the Oliver Twist house, or even less substantial. Then Lydia should be free. The cloud would have lifted enough for the real world to bleed back through. I can let you out, and finish the unreading. We just need to find the edges of this place.”
“You’re not reading anything else away.” Some of the between-world clarity had returned to me. “Not now. Whatever’s here, whatever world we’ve made, we made it together. It’s done.”
“I don’t quite understand what we have made, yet.”
“I’ve never understood any of these unreal places,” I said. “Let alone this one.”
There were no walls at all, that I could see. The streets really did seem to go on forever. They’d grown. I wondered with a thrill of fear if I’d been wrong, and we really were in a book. Lost in a book. It was difficult for fear to strike too deep, though. It was too quiet. Even my feelings seemed muffled.
I don’t know how long we stood there before we both saw, at more or less the same time, that someone was walking toward us. We turned to each other.
“Are you seeing that?” I asked quietly.
He nodded.
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know.” He ran his hand over his eyes. “I can’t tell. There’s too much fog.”
The figure was coming closer. I felt my muscles tense, painfully, and was reminded again of every blow and tear they had suffered already today. Whoever it was made a dark shadow through the haze. They seemed to be hesitating too. Perhaps they were as unsure of us as we were of them. That would be hopeful, if it were true.
“I don’t suppose you can tweak the atmospheric conditions at all?”
I didn’t mean it, but Charley’s brow furrowed slightly in concentration, and a moment later the fog lightened. Sunlight crept into the shadows and a breeze danced down the street, stirring the mist and blowing it away.
The figure came out of the few shreds of fog that remained. A short figure, dressed in jeans and a long coat, with curls that bounced and eyes that, when we drew near enough to see each other, kindled in relief.
“There you are, you two!” Millie Radcliffe-Dix exclaimed. “I’ve been looking for you fellows everywhere!”
I think my mouth may have dropped open. It’s never done that before. This was its limit.
“How on earth—?” I tried to say, and stopped there.
“Oh, thank goodness,” Charley sighed. I think he was just too tired to be surprised. “If you had been something hostile, there is no way I could have dealt with you. I think I’m about to pass out.”
“Don’t be modest,” Millie said cheerfully. “You are certainly about to pass out. Did you just lift the fog?”
“Rob told me to.”
“I didn’t mean for you to do it,” I protested, finally finding my voice. “You don’t have to take everything so literally. What are you, six? Millie—how did you get here?”
“Through the Street,” Millie said. “It was the strangest thing. The shadow lifted, first of all. Central Wellington came back. The Street’s still where it was before—it hasn’t gone anywhere—but it doesn’t stop anymore. It just winds on and on, as far as I can see. I thought—well, that’s a Charles Sutherland–type thing to happen. If you two were anywhere I could ever find you again, you’d be here. So I started looking. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.”
“The new world’s become part of the Street?” I said slowly.
“It does sound peculiar when you put it that way—I would say the Street’s become part of the new world—but yes. They’ve been reaching for each other all this time. They’ve finally joined.”
“We knew they’d do that,” Charley said. He was frowning. “But why—?” His face cleared suddenly. “Unless—”
“Here we go,” I sighed. I was resigned to weirdness by this point.
“I was putting it back. I was putting it all back. And then you stopped me, Rob—you grabbed me right when I was somewhere between reality and fiction. That’s where the Street always existed: not quite in the world, and not quite out of it. That’s where we’ve stopped. Right on the border between worlds.”
“But—you said the cloud’s gone?” That had only just caught up to me. “The real city’s back?”
“All clear,” Millie confirmed. “This is tucked away behind the wall, the way we always were. Everyone who was swallowed up is back—I don’t know Lydia personally, but I’m sure she is too. You’ll have to introduce us.”
I’d never felt relief like that. My knees nearly buckled underneath me. She was back. I hadn’t killed central Wellington, and I hadn’t killed Lydia. She was safe.
“She doesn’t know about what I can do,” Charley was telling Millie. “Rob doesn’t want her to know.”
“Don’t you start getting at me for that,” I complained.
“I’m not. I’m just saying—Millie wanted to meet Lydia, and if she did—”
“She’ll have to know now, anyway,” Millie said. She sounded regretful—actually, she sounded suddenly sad. “Everyone will. I had to tell the police about this place, or they wouldn’t have let me come. So now they’ve seen a city disappear in front of them, and a woman walk through a wall, and they’re about to see two more people come out of one. And some of the characters they’re examining don’t quite pass as human on close inspection. We’re going to have to tell them something, and I really think it’s going to have to be the truth.”
Charley nodded. He had known this all along, I suspected. Perhaps it was one more reason why he had wanted to disappear.
“I think so too. It’s exactly what we were afraid would happen, isn’t it? Beth brought us out in the open. We’re in the new world after all.”
“But not Beth’s new world,” Millie said. “Beth wanted to erase the real world and populate it with her own creations. She wanted to retreat into a made-up past. This is the future.” She paused. “Dorian said—before we lost him—that we couldn’t stay secret fore
ver in the modern world, even with the Street. He said the one advantage the Street had given us was that we weren’t alone anymore. We had a place where we could find each other, and a place from which to make a stand. They can’t get in here, you know—not without us helping them over the threshold.”
“Beth wanted to use that advantage to start a war.”
“We need to strike peace. And jolly quickly. There’s an army out there looking very uneasy, and our people are in their custody. But at least we can negotiate from here. This city is ours—assuming it’s no longer dangerous.”
“No. Well, no more than anything fictional is a little bit dangerous. There’s darkness here, but there’s also hope, illustrated by the network of connections between people across the social divides. I covered that in chapter ten. It balances.”
“Sounds like life.”
“It is.” He paused. “How are the others? You said they were in police custody?”
“Except for Maui, and a few that he took with him. He flew away, and when the police looked, some of the others had vanished too. They thought it was magic, but it was a trick, of course. Bound to be. Misdirection, and all that. But the others are still being held. Some of them are in a bad way.”
“Well,” Charley said. “We’ll go get them, to start. The rest we’ll just have to write as we go.”
“We will.” Millie looked at him, then hugged him suddenly. He hugged her back, just as tightly, and for a moment they seemed to fit together, as though made of the same material. I looked away, obviously.
“Come on,” Millie said. “Let’s go out and meet the new world.”
The world was waiting. When we came out through the wall, having walked through the familiar street, the small alley off the Left Bank Arcade was ringed with police and army officers and even a medic or two. New barricades were up, blocking off the entrance at both ends. My most immediate impression, though, was of faces. Pale faces, dark faces, round faces, thin faces: perhaps only about ten altogether, but all looking at us. I was used to being looked at, in a courtroom, but not like that. For one thing, each face was accompanied by the barrel of a gun.
“It’s all right,” Millie said to them. Somehow, her Jacqueline Blaine voice made the guns seem a little foolish. “I said I’d bring them out. And I have. Now will you let the others go?”
“Which is the one you told us about?” The speaker seemed to be in charge. “The one you say sent the cloud away?”
That was a hopeful emphasis, at least.
“I’m the one you want,” Charley said. And at once, all the faces that were on us were only on him. I saw him shrink from them, instinctively, then unfurl and brace himself to meet them.
“We need to talk, I think,” he said.
The man nodded.
I wanted to be there with him; actually, if I were honest, I wanted to be in front of him, between him and whatever was about to come. The trouble was, now that I was out here, I also couldn’t stop thinking of Lydia. My body was straining against itself to get out and find her. I didn’t say anything, but Charley obviously knew.
“It’s okay,” he said quietly as the policemen conferred among themselves and their radios. He smiled a little, with effort, but he meant it. “Really, this time. Go. We’ve got this.”
I tried to say thanks, but my voice had stopped working, so I just gave him a nod and left. One of the policemen made a half-hearted move to take hold of me; I gave him my best counsel-for-the-defense stare, and he moved off. I suspect he had no more idea of what he should be doing than the rest of us.
I raised my phone to my ear as I started to walk, then run, to Courtenay Place. It was ringing.
The streets were a swarm of people: people who had been trapped inside the cloud when it descended, people who had been trapped outside while their loved ones had gone, reporters and officials and God knows who else. I pushed through, searching desperately, and telling myself she was going to be exactly where she said she would. She had to be.
She was. I saw her standing at the base of the giant statue of a tripod across the road from the theater. Her phone was in her hand, as was mine, and I could see the same strained look on her face as had been on mine as she scanned the crowd. When she saw me, her face relaxed.
She pushed toward me through the crowds, so that we met in the middle. When we did, I caught her in my arms, and she did the same to me, and we held each other tightly.
Dr. Charles Sutherland, age nineteen
Extract from Dickens’s Criminal Underworld. Oxford University Press, 2012
The opening lines of David Copperfield may be the most perfect in the history of literature; certainly they are among the most well-known, and the most well loved. Because they are all our opening lines. They are how our stories all begin.
This is why we love Dickens; why today, when many of the social issues this book discusses have become history, he is still among the most popular authors of all time. We love Dickens because he tells us that things happen for a reason, that chance encounters mean everything, that we are all—rich or poor, good or evil—bound up in the plots of each other’s lives. We love Dickens because he tells us that life is funny, and cruel, often both at the same time. We love Dickens because he tells us the truth, when the dominant strand of contemporary postmodern literature so often tells us that there is no truth. And there isn’t, perhaps, not that can be put in words. Truth, at least complete truth, isn’t held in words. But there would be no truth at all without them. It lies behind them and lurks around them and shines through them, in glimpses of metaphor, and connotation, and story.
We love Dickens because he tells us stories, and because he tells us that we are all stories. We are. We are more than stories, of course. But we have to start somewhere. And there are many worse places to start than, “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.”
Charles Sutherland, age two
Hello. My name is Charles Sutherland. I am two years old. This is the first thing I have written down ever. I made the letters but not the words because I wanted to get them right. Now I have written them down and I exist. Things in writing exist. They are not always true. But they exist.
My favorite books are The Hound of the Baskervilles and Green Eggs and Ham. And the first part of Great Expectations. I havent read the rest yet.
XXXII
For the next few days, everything was chaos. I think I had expected the shell-shocked calm that follows a major storm, if I had expected anything. It wasn’t; or if it was, the calm lasted less than the time it takes to draw breath to scream.
At first, there was a very real chance that the Street’s inhabitants, Charley included, would not be allowed to return to the Street or anywhere else again. They were liminal creatures once more, this time existing in the spaces between laws: they were illegal refugees, yet they had brought their own world with them; they were dangerous monsters, yet they were human beings. There was real talk of taking them into custody, and unofficially, I’m sure there was real talk that if they went in, they would never come out. Had I realized this, I would never have left Millie and Charley alone to negotiate their own release. But I did, and perhaps it was for the best. By midnight, someone made the decision, probably out of fear for their own life, to let the Street’s inhabitants back through the wall without a fight; many of Moriarty’s freed creations went with them. And so the first painful steps toward a new world began.
The Left Bank Arcade became a border between reality and fiction, guarded by barbed wire and armed forces, lined with reporters and police and sightseers. Academics and scientists insisted on their right to study the creatures formed from words. Various literary estates put in claims, without being quite sure what they were claiming and why. Critics wanted to meet Charles Dickens. Readers wanted to meet Mr. Darcy. There were other, more dangerous calls: cries for them to be cataloged, deported, des
troyed.
Lydia and I were outside the furor, though we had storms of our own. She was hurt, scared, and furious. I understood this perfectly, and should have just asked her to forgive me. But I had too much of my own hurt, fear, and fury shut up inside me, and as soon as we reached home, the closing of the front door was an opening of the floodgates. One of us started shouting, the other shouted back, and soon we were in the midst of a blazing argument that was probably heard across the new borders of reality. Arguments are meant to clear the air. This one, when it finally burned out, filled it with smoldering resentment like the acrid aftermath of a chemical fire.
But the air did clear. The floodgates did close. I am, I think all this has proved, neither as articulate nor as intelligent nor as kind as I need to be, but I’m not a complete idiot. The following morning, I went up to Lydia, who was sitting by the window after a night that had probably been as dark and sleepless as my own.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She nodded. “Your father called,” she said. “He and your mother want us to come over as soon as we feel like it. They say this affects all of us, and we need to talk it through. Charley, too, of course, but nobody can reach him.”
“Yes.” My heart sank at the thought of that particular family meeting; not, this time, because Charley was going to be a problem, but because he was going to be hurt. “Of course. Do you still—I mean, do you want to come?”
“Yes.” She knew what I was asking. “Do you want me to, this time?”
“Yes. God, absolutely, yes.”
A tiny smile crossed her face; just for an instant, but it was there. “I talked to your father; he wanted to talk to me, otherwise I would have come to get you. Your mother kept an even bigger secret from him than you kept from me, and he’s forgiven her—or he’s trying to. He’s far more forgiving than me all around, of course. But let’s see how we go.”
And we did.
We didn’t see or hear from Charley directly in all that time, but we saw a good deal of him. The whole world did, though Millie tended to take center stage. She and Charley were the spokespeople for the new world. They were the two who had, after all, lived and worked between both worlds with the most success for years. There were negotiations to be made, with the New Zealand government and the United Nations and anyone vaguely official. The new world could keep reasonably safe from attack, sandwiched between realities, but it had no resources of its own: if it was to survive at all, its people needed to come and go between the borders to trade for food and supplies. There were many who didn’t want it to survive. There was a question of whether any characters would be prosecuted for their perceived roles in Beth’s invasion, though no damage had in the end been done, or even simply prosecuted for living illegally in the country for so long. There was a lot of fear, mingled with genuine curiosity and sympathy, and a good deal of real hate.
