Mrs Cooke’s Books

It’s my stop on the blogtour for The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep and I am pleased to share an extract with you today!

Synopsis

For his entire life, Charley Sutherland has concealed a magical ability he can’t quite control: he can bring characters from books into the real world. His older brother, Rob – a young lawyer with an utterly normal life – hopes that this strange family secret will disappear with disuse, and he will be discharged from his duty of protecting Charley and the real world from each other.

But then, literary characters start causing trouble in their city, making threats about destroying the world, and for once, it isn’t Charley’s doing. There’s someone else out there who shares his powers and it’s up to Charley and a reluctant Rob to stop them – before anyone gets to The End.

Extract

I was four and a half years old when my brother was born. He nearly died before he drew his first breath. Everybody thought he was dead, for a long time—complications during delivery, the doctor said. They had abandoned all efforts to resuscitate him, and wrapped him in a blanket, ready to be taken away and cremated or whatever they do to infants. My mother was holding him when he started to cry. Everyone thought it was some kind of miracle, and most of them were sure he’d suffer some kind of long-term brain damage. That’s very funny, in retrospect.
I wasn’t one of those there to see the miracle. I was meant to be. He was born at home, in our rambling old house out in the country; the plan was for me to be there, too, to pace the living room with my father while my mother fought to bring him into the world. For some reason, they thought this would be good for me. But he came early, by quite a bit—setting the pattern for the rest of his development, though certainly not his punctuality—and I had been sent to stay for the weekend with Grandmother Sutherland. I remember being brought to see him the next day, bundled up in his crib in the room I had helped paint for him. Apparently all I could talk about before he came was the fact I was going to have a little brother; apparently I was very excited about it. And yet, I must not have really under- stood what it meant, because I remember being silenced by surprise and awe at the sight of him: how real and solid he was and yet how small and fragile, the way his huge, dark eyes reached into mine and tugged at my heart. I’d expected the baby to have blue eyes, like me. I remember that Mum and Dad left the room for some reason, perhaps to go get my things out of the car, and he began to whimper fearfully at being on his own. And I remember knowing, at that moment, that I would do anything—I would kill the whole world—to keep him from being scared or hurt.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m here. I’ll look after you.”
I can’t remember if he quieted at the sound of my voice; probably not. He never really gave me moments like that. But I remember I was going to be the best elder brother ever. I wasn’t one of those chil- dren who was jealous of a new baby in the house. I was going to teach him everything I knew.
At eight months old, he began talking. Really talking. If he ever needed the usual infant sound play and noises, he worked them out himself, in his head, without any help from us. When he spoke his first words, they were in proper sentences, and grew more proper by the day: he’d be so frustrated with himself if he didn’t know the word for something, or if the syntax was wrong. About that time, I taught him the names of all the colors in his room, which was mostly yellow. I think that was the last time I ever taught him anything.
By two years old, he was reading my books. By three, he had read most of our parents’. People started to call him a prodigy; others, more cautiously, used the term “highly gifted.”
And at four, he began to bring people and things out of books. It started small. There would be scents lingering in the air after he’d been reading: a cake baking, fresh country grass, ocean spray. Our mother found him with a funny-looking paperweight one day; when she asked where it came from, he said, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” And then, one day, she walked in to tell him dinner was ready and found him playing with the Cat in the Hat.
Most people, I think, would be justified in losing their head when their four-year-old conjures a Dr. Seuss character from thin air. Mum, impressively, kept hers. She told him firmly to put the cat back right now; I doubt Charley had any idea he could do so, but he obeyed, and found he could. Then she took him by the shoulders and told him that he was never to bring anything out again. Ever. To be fair to him, I think he really tried, and still does. But, apparently, there are some things even he can’t do.
I wasn’t there for the arrival of the Cat in the Hat either. I seem to miss all the family stories. This time, I was at a friend’s house, in town. Mum told me about it when I got back, and she told me that it needed to be a secret. Charley would be taken away from us if I told anyone, she said. We all had to keep him safe.
There were plenty of times when I thought I wouldn’t have minded Charley being taken away, as long as it wasn’t anywhere too horrible. I didn’t understand, growing up, why everything was so easy for him, even things that weren’t physically possible. I was confused, and then I was resentful, and then I was bitter. Gradually, the protective hold he’d taken of my heart loosened, or I learned to ignore it. I wanted to show him things, and instead he kept trying to show me. He wasn’t what I’d been expecting in a little brother.
When he was thirteen, he left to study at Oxford, on the other side of the world. I left that same year to study law in Wellington, an hour’s drive away. I fell, with increasing delight, into a world of courtrooms and cafés and city streets; he was enveloped in books and language and ancient halls. Outside of Christmas holidays and birthdays, we had almost no communication with each other. When he phoned me late at night from England three years ago, I almost didn’t recognize his voice.
“Hi, Rob,” he said. “It’s me. Um. I don’t know if Mum and Dad have told you, but I’ve just been offered a position in Wellington. I’d be flying over to take it up next month. Is that all right with you?”
“Why wouldn’t it be all right with me?” I said, and knew my whole life as I had built it was over. Charley couldn’t help it; I understood, even at my most bitter, that this was true. It was nothing he did, or at least nothing he did on purpose. It was simply what he was. He had come into the world trailing dreams and stories and improbabilities, and I knew he would come into my city doing the same.

The Unlikely escape of Uriah Heep is out now in paperback now and you can buy it here

My thanks go to Compulsive Readers for the invitation to the blogtour and Orbit Books for my proof copy of the book.

If you liked my post, please do check out my others, and also the other stops on the blog tour (see below).

Until next time!

@mrscookesbooks