by H. G. Parry
“You substituted Sherlock Holmes for me?”
“Well. You did grow up to go after the truth of crimes for a living.”
“I don’t go after the truth,” I said, and tried not to say it bitterly. “Like Holmes or anybody else. If anyone’s Sherlock Holmes, you are. I investigate my clients’ claims, and I present them as convincingly as possible. Maybe I tell their stories.”
“Well, yes,” Charley said, as if unsure where I was going. “That’s telling their truth, isn’t it?”
That shone a light on something I had been fumbling after for a long time. Just a brief one, but it was a start. I turned it over in my head for a while experimentally, then put it away for later.
“I haven’t heard any other summoners announce themselves,” I said. “Do you think you and Mum really are the only ones?”
“Possibly,” Charley said. “Millie has a theory that there’s only one natural-born summoner every century or so. The real Beth was the last one. Mum would be the next. All this was brought about only because the two of us came into being with our gifts intact, and changed everything. But I don’t know if I believe it. For one thing, we know the gift isn’t unique to the English language, because of Scheherazade, so it’s highly likely there are summoners in other countries even if there are no more in the English-speaking world. I think they just haven’t dared come out until they see how things unfold. I don’t blame them. A couple of times this week we’ve seemed poised on the brink of the war Beth wanted after all.”
“You won’t let that happen.”
“No, we won’t. But I don’t know what we’ll do if we’re not given permission to live and work on New Zealand soil. The Street isn’t self-sustaining. We don’t have our own resources. As it is, a lot of people behind that wall are deeply frightened, and Millie doesn’t know what to tell them. Also, we don’t know what to do with the dragon. I know Mum meant well, and it saved our lives, but it’s a mess of contradictory readings. I can’t do anything with it. It just flaps around the city, nesting on the sturdiest chimneys.”
“‘The dragon stayed where he was,’” I quoted, “‘and nobody minded.’ That’s how the book ends.”
“Well,” he said. “Here, that’s only where everything starts.”
“You know I’ll help, don’t you? If you ask me to. I know something about legal questions. I’m probably the only lawyer in the business related to a literary character.”
“Only if you want to,” he said. “I mean, I’d love it, we’d all be very grateful, but—”
“I want to. I really do.”
“All right.” He smiled. “Then that would be great. And I’ll phone Mum and Dad after dinner. I promise.”
“Good.” I hesitated, wondering whether or not to ask the question on my mind.
“What is it?” Charley asked.
“Well. I probably shouldn’t ask this, but… who are you now? You nearly went into a book. And then you read yourself out, with my help. Are you the same person who went in, or did you… change yourself, in some way? Did I change you?”
“Well, of course.” It was almost defensive. “That’s what people do to each other every day, and to themselves. Are you the same person who nearly went into a book?”
“That’s different.”
“I know,” he conceded. “Everything’s different now. But I don’t know how to answer any other way. I don’t feel substantially different. I—do I seem different?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
It wasn’t quite true. As he said, everything was different now. Our lives had altered around us, and of course we were all trying to alter to fit, to the best of our abilities. But I still knew him, and that was what he was asking.
“What did it feel like?” I asked. “Where were you going, when I pulled you back? I think I saw some of it. But you went further than I did.”
His face turned thoughtful. “I don’t know,” he said. I don’t know why he always says he doesn’t know the answer to a question before he answers it. It’s just him. I waited. “It felt like I’d slipped through the gaps in the text, and I was falling deeper and deeper into what lay behind it. I’ve spent my whole life doing that, in some shape or form. Trying to see the glimpses of truth behind words, or in words. I think that’s what I was falling into. It was so close, I could almost touch it. Or become it.”
“You’re making me sorry I pulled you out,” I said.
He shook his head. “Don’t be.”
And I wasn’t. I didn’t even mind that he had made me miss the rerun of last night’s rugby match because he had been asleep in the living room all morning, or that from now on I was going to be known as the lawyer with the fictional brother, or that my world had changed forever into something strange and elusive because I had forced him back into it. I wasn’t sorry.
“Did you know there’s another ending to A Lion in the Meadow?” Charley said. “An earlier version—it’s hard to find these days. Mostly it’s the same. But in that version, the mother learns her lesson, and never makes up a story again.”
“God, that’s boring,” I said. “No wonder they changed it.”
After dinner, and the dishes, and the feeding of the Hound of the Baskervilles, Lydia left us to go pay a last-minute visit to her hotel. It was opening tomorrow, along with most of Courtenay Place. The last of the lingering Dickensian fog had cleared. I left Charley curled up reading a book by the fire, and followed Lydia out to the car. The wind was blowing from the coast, and I could see the city lights in the distance.
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” I asked her. “I mean, all of this…”
“Will you stop asking me that?” she said. “The only thing I mind is that I missed Maui, apparently. Not to mention Frankenstein. You’d better introduce me to the ones left on the Street. I mean it: I want to meet Millie Radcliffe-Dix. I loved those books growing up.”
“Apparently,” I said, “a lot of people did.”
As I came back inside out of the cold, there was a flare of light by the fireplace.
“Oh,” I heard Charley say. “I’m sorry…”
“It’s okay,” I said. “He can stay if he wants to.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why not? There’s an inflatable mattress in the closet somewhere.” I glanced over at the figure now sitting in the armchair by the fire. “Hello, Mr. Holmes.”
“Good evening, Mr. Sutherland,” replied the great detective, and his eyes when he inclined his head were warmer than I’d seen them before.
I changed into pajamas and poured a mug of coffee, then I went to join them. Charley had moved on to The Princess Bride; Mr. Holmes was reading Agatha Christie. I had a lot of reading to do myself, in self-defense, and because I was interested now. I had finished David Copperfield two nights ago. I was halfway through Great Expectations.
“It’s better than David Copperfield,” Charley said, when he saw me open it.
“Are you allowed to say that?” I asked. “Considering.”
“If I’m not,” he said absently, because he’d already returned his attention to his own book, “then I don’t know who is.”
It was quiet as I settled in to read alongside Sherlock Holmes and David Copperfield. But for the crackle of the fire and the ever-present whistle of the wind outside, it was as quiet as it had been in the city, after everything changed. And for a moment, the space between heartbeats, I felt I could glimpse the world Charley saw. A world of light and shadows, of fact, truth and story, each blurring into one another as sleep and wakefulness blur in the early morning. The moments of our lives unfolding as pages in a book. And everything connected, everyone joined, by an ever-shifting web of language, by words that caught us as prisms caught light and reflected us back at ourselves.
“We changed again, and yet again,” I read, “and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.”
; Acknowledgments
Special thanks are owed to my agent, Hannah Bowman, for pulling me out of the query trenches, supporting me, and reading far more of my drafts than any human being should ever have to. Also to my editor, Sarah Guan, for asking page after page of impossible questions and teasing out the heart of the story in the process. You both taught me to write.
Thanks so much to the amazing team at Orbit/Redhook for everything they’ve done to make this story into a book. Lisa Marie Pompilio’s art is breathtaking, and I’m honored to have it on my cover.
This book is a love letter to literary analysis, so thanks are owed to the English department of Victoria University of Wellington. You all taught me to read. Please know that although the Prince Albert University bears curiously geographical similarities to Victoria, none of its fictional staff are in any way based on you. (Not even you, Charles, I swear.) Also, Harry, I’m sorry about the insult to Kipling.
Any interpretations I have of Great Expectations have grown from David Norton’s lectures in ENGL209, which I was fortunate enough to hear first as a student and then as a tutor. Thanks also to the many scholars and biographers whose books and articles have illuminated Dickens for me. (It was obviously just for me.)
Most importantly, thank you to my family: my parents, for their love, support, and belief, and my sister, Sarah, for her insight, enthusiasm, and kindness. This book wouldn’t exist without you.
Thank you to my rabbits, O’Connell and Fleischman, who are just rabbits, and that is everything. Also to the guinea pigs, Jonathan Strange, Mr. Norrell, and Thistledown, who weren’t actually born when this book was written, but who would have helped if they could.
And lastly, thanks to Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Margaret Mahy, Roald Dahl, C. S. Lewis, Emily Brontë, and the other authors whose creations grace the pages of this book. You’re wonderful. Your words are wonderful. I’m sorry for what I did to them.
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