Neverwhere (9 page)

“Can you speed it up?” asked the marquis. “Find the last entry?”

Door nodded. She touched an ivory lever at the side: the image ghosted, fragmented, re-formed.

Now Portico wore a long coat. His skullcap was gone. There was a scarlet gash down one side of his head. He was no longer sitting at his desk. He was talking urgently, quietly. “I do not know who will see this, who will find this. But whoever you are, please take this to my daughter, the Lady Door, if she lives . . .” A static burst wiped across the picture and the sound. Then, “Door? Girl, this is bad. I don’t know how long I’ve got before they find this room. I think my poor Portia and your brother and sister are dead.” The sound and picture quality began to degrade.

The marquis glanced at Door. Her face was wet: tears were brimming from her eyes, glistening down her cheeks. She seemed unaware that she was crying, made no attempt to wipe away the tears. She just stared at her father’s image, listened to his words.
Crackle. Wipe. Crackle.
“Listen to me, girl,” said her dead father. “Go to Islington . . . you can trust Islington. . . . You must believe in Islington . . .” He ghosted. Blood dripped from his forehead into his eyes. He he wiped it off. “Door? Avenge us. Avenge your family.”

A loud bang came from the gramophone horn. Portico turned his head to look offscreen, puzzled and nervous. “What?” he said, and he stepped out of frame. For a moment, the picture remained unchanged: the desk, the blank white wall behind it. Then an arc of vivid blood splashed across the wall. Door flicked a lever on the side, blanking the screen, and turned away.

“Here.” The marquis passed her a handkerchief.

“Thanks.” She wiped her face, blew her nose vigorously. Then she stared into space. Eventually, she said, “Islington.”

“I’ve never had any dealings with Islington,” said the marquis.

“I thought it was just a legend,” she said.

“Not at all.” He reached across the desk, picked up the gold pocket-watch, thumbed it open. “Nice workmanship,” he observed.

She nodded. “It was my father’s.”

He closed the cover with a click. “Time to go to market. It starts soon. Mister Time is not our friend.”

She blew her nose once more, put her hands deep into the pockets of her leather jacket. Then she turned to him, elfin face frowning, odd-colored eyes bright. “Do you honestly think we can find a bodyguard who will be able to deal with Croup and Vandemar?”

The marquis flashed his white teeth at her. “There’s been no one since Hunter who’d even have a chance. No, I’ll settle for someone who could give you the time you might need to get away.” He fastened the fob of the watch chain to his waistcoat, slid the watch into his vest pocket.

“What are you doing?” asked Door. “That’s my father’s watch.”

“He’s not using it anymore, is he?” He adjusted the golden chain. “There. That looks rather elegant.” He watched the emotions flicker across her face: quiet anger and, finally, resignation.

“We’d better go,” was all she said.

“The Bridge isn’t very far now,” said Anaesthesia.

Richard hoped that was true. They were now on their third candle. The walls flickered and oozed, the passageway seemed to stretch on forever. He was astonished that they were still under London: he was half-convinced that they had walked most of the way to Wales.

“I’m really scared,” she continued. “I’ve never crossed the bridge before.”

“I thought you said you’d been to this market already,” he asked, mystified.

“It’s the
Floating
Market, silly. I told you already. It moves. Different places. Last one I went to was held in that big clock tower. Big . . . someone. And the next was—”

“Big Ben?” he suggested.

“Maybe. We were inside where all the big wheels went around, and that was where I got this—” She held up her necklace. The candlelight glimmered yellow off the shiny quartz. She smiled, like a child. “Do you like it?” she asked.

“It’s great. Was it exspensive?”

“I swapped some stuff for it. That’s how things work down here. We swap stuff.” And then they turned a corner, and saw the bridge. It could have been one of the bridges over the Thames, five hundred years ago, thought Richard; a huge stone bridge spanning out over a vast black chasm, into the night. But there was no sky above it, no water below. It rose into darkness. Richard wondered who had built it, and when. He wondered how something like this could exist, beneath the city of London, without everyone knowing. He felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was, he realized, deeply, pathetically scared of the bridge itself.

“Do we have to go across it?” he asked. “Can’t we get to the market some other way?” They paused at the base of the bridge.

Anaesthesia shook her head. “We can get to the place it’s in,” she said. “But the market wouldn’t be there.”

“Huh? But that’s ridiculous. I mean, something’s either there or it’s not. Isn’t it?”

She shook her head. There was a buzz of voices from behind them, and someone pushed Richard to the ground. He looked up: a huge man, crudely tattooed, dressed in improvised rubber and leather clothes that looked like they had been cut out of the inside of cars, stared back down at him, dispassionately. Behind the huge man were a dozen others, male and female: people who looked like they were on their way to a particularly low-rent costume party. “Somebody,” said Varney, who was not in a good mood, “was in my way. Somebody ought to watch where he’s going.”

Once, as a small boy walking home from school, Richard had encountered a rat in a ditch by the side of the road. When the rat saw Richard it had reared up onto its hind legs and hissed and jumped, terrifying Richard. He backed away marvelling that something so small had been so willing to fight something so much larger than itself. Now Anaesthesia stepped between Richard and Varney. She was less than half his size, but she glared at the big man and bared her teeth, and she hissed like an angry rat at bay. Varney took a step backwards. He spat at Richard’s shoes. Then he turned away, and, taking the knot of people with him, he walked across the bridge and into the dark.

“Are you all right?” asked Anaesthesia, helping Richard back to his feet.

“I’m fine,” he said. “That was really brave of you.”

She looked down, shyly. “I’m not really brave,” she said.

“I’m still scared of the bridge. Even they were scared. That was why they all went over together. Safety in numbers.”

“If you are crossing the bridge, I will go with you,” said a female voice, rich as cream and honey, coming from behind them. Richard was not able to place her accent. He turned, and standing there was a tall woman, with long, tawny hair, and skin the color of burnt caramel. She wore dappled leather clothes, mottled in shades of gray and brown. She had a battered leather duffel bag over her shoulder. She was carrying a staff, and she had a knife at her belt and an electric flashlight strapped to her wrist. She was also, without question, the most beautiful woman that Richard had ever seen.

“Safety in numbers. You’re welcome to come with us,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “My name’s Richard Mayhew. This is Anaesthesia. She’s the one us who knows what she’s doing.” The rat-girl preened.

The leather woman looked him up and looked him down. “You’re from London Above,” she told him.

“Yes.” As lost as he was in this strange otherworld, he was at least learning to play the game. His mind was too numb to make any sense of where he was, or why he was here, but it was capable of following the rules.

“Travelling with a rat-speaker. My word.”

“I’m his guardian,” said Anaesthesia, truculently. “Who are you? Who do you owe fealty to?”

The woman smiled. “I owe no man fealty, rat-girl. Have either of you crossed Night’s Bridge before?” Anaesthesia shook her head. “Well. Isn’t this going to be fun?”

They walked toward the bridge. Anaesthesia handed Richard her candle-lamp. “Here,” she said.

“Thanks.” Richard looked at the woman in leather. “Is there anything, really, to be scared of?”

“Only the night on the bridge,” she said.

“The kind in armor?”

“The kind that comes when day is over.”

Anaesthesia’s hand sought Richard’s. He held it tightly, her tiny hand in his. She smiled at him, squeezed his hand. And then they set foot on Night’s Bridge and Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth . . .

With each step they took the light of the candle became dimmer. He realized the same thing was happening to the leather woman’s flashlight. It felt not so much as if the lights were being turned down but as if the darkness were being turned up. Richard blinked, and opened his eyes on nothing—nothing but darkness, complete and utter.
Sounds
. A rustling, a squirming. Richard blinked, blinded by the night. The sounds were nastier, hungrier. Richard imagined he could hear voices: a horde of huge, misshapen trolls, beneath the bridge . . . .

Something slithered past them in the dark. “What’s that?” squeaked Anaesthesia. Her hand was shaking in his.

“Hush,” whispered the woman. “Don’t attract its attention.”

“What’s happening?” whispered Richard.

“Darkness is happening,” said the leather woman, very quietly. “Night is happening. All the nightmares that have come out when the sun goes down, since the cave times, when we huddled together in fear for safety and for warmth, are happening. Now,” she told them, “now is the time to be afraid of the dark.” Richard knew that something was about to creep over his face. He closed his eyes: it made no difference to what he saw or felt. The night was complete. It was then that the hallucinations started.

He saw a figure falling toward him through the night, burning, its wings and hair on fire.

He threw up his hands: there was nothing there.

Jessica looked at him, with contempt in her eyes. He wanted to shout to her, tell her he was sorry.

Place one foot after another.

He was a small child, walking home from school, at night, down the one road with no streetlights. No matter how many times he did it, it never got any easier, never got any better.

He was deep in the sewers, lost in a labyrinth. The Beast was waiting for him. He could hear a slow drip of water. He knew the Beast was waiting. He gripped his spearThen a rumbling bellow, deep in its throat, from behind him. He turned. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, it charged at him, through the dark.

And it charged.

He died.

And kept walking.

Slowly, agonizingly slowly, it charged at him, over and over, through the dark.

There was a sputter, and a flare so bright it hurt, making Richard squint and stagger. It was the candle flame, in its lemonade-bottle holder. He had never known how brightly a single candle could burn. He held it up, gasping and gulping and shaking with relief. His heart was pounding and shuddering in his chest.

“We would appear to have crossed successfully,” said the leather woman.

Richard’s heart was pounding in his chest so hard that, for a few moments, he was unable to talk. He forced himself to breathe slowly, to calm down. They were in a large anteroom, exactly like the one on the other side. In fact, Richard had the strange feeling that it was the same room they had just left. Yet the shadows were deeper, and there were afterimages floating before Richard’s eyes, like those one saw after a camera flash. “I suppose,” Richard said, haltingly, “we weren’t in any real danger . . . . It was like a haunted house. A few noises in the dark . . . and your imagination does the rest. There wasn’t really anything to be scared of, was there?”

The woman looked at him, almost pityingly; and Richard realized that there was nobody holding his hand. “Anaesthesia?”

From the darkness at the crown of the bridge came a gentle noise, like a rustle or a sigh. A handful of irregular quartz beads pattered down the curve of the bridge toward them. Richard picked one up. It was from the rat-girls necklace. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Then he found his voice. “We’d better. We have to go back. She’s . . .”

The woman raised her flashlight, shone it across the bridge. Richard could see all the way across the bridge. It was deserted. “Where is she?” he asked.

“Gone,” said the woman, flatly. “The darkness took her.”

“We’ve got to do something,” said Richard urgently.

“Such as?”

Once again, he opened his mouth. This time, he found no words. He closed it again. He fingered the lump of quartz, looked at the others on the ground.

“She’s gone,” said the woman. “The bridge takes its toll. Be grateful it didn’t take you too. Now if you’re going to the market, it’s through here, up this way.” She gestured toward a narrow passageway that rose up into the dimness in front of them, barely illuminated by the beam of her flashlight.

Richard did not move. He felt numb. He found it hard to believe that the rat girl was gone—lost, or stolen, or strayed, or . . . —and harder to believe that the leather woman was able to carry on as if nothing at all out of the ordinary had happened—as if this were utterly usual. Anaesthesia could not be dead . . .

He completed the thought. She could not be dead, because if she were, then it was his fault. She had not asked to go with him. He held the quartz bead so tightly it hurt his hand, thinking of the pride with which Anaesthesia had shown it to him, of how fond he had become of her in the handful of hours that he had known her.

“Are you coming?”

Richard stood there in the darkness for a few pounding heartbeats, then he placed the quartz bead gently into the pocket of his jeans. He followed the woman, who was still some paces ahead of him. As he followed her, he realized that he still did not know her name.

P
eople slipped and slid through the darkness about them, holding lamps, torches, flashlights, and candles. It made Richard think of documentary films he had seen of schools of fish, glittering and darting through the ocean . . . Deep water, inhabited by things that had lost the use of their eyes.

Richard followed the leather woman up some steps. Stone steps, edged with metal. They were in an Underground station. They joined a line of people waiting to slip through a grille, which had been opened a foot or so to uncover the door, which led out onto the pavement.

Immediately in front of them were a couple of young boys, each with a string tied around his wrist. The strings were held by a pallid, bald man, who smelled of formaldehyde. Immediately behind them in the line waited a gray-bearded man with a black-and-white kitten sitting on his shoulder. It washed itself, intently licked the man’s ear, then curled up on his shoulder and went to sleep. The line moved slowly, as, one by one, the figures at the end slipped through the space between the grille and the wall and edged into the night. “Why are you going to the market, Richard Mayhew?” asked the leather woman, in a low voice. Richard still could not place her accent: he was beginning to suspect that she was African or Aus-tralian—or perhaps she came from somewhere even more exotic and obscure.

“I have friends I’m hoping to meet there. Well, just one friend. I don’t actually know many people from this world. I was sort of getting to know Anaesthesia, but . . .” he trailed off. Asked the question he had not dared to voice until this moment. “Is she dead?”

The woman shrugged. “Yes. Or as good as. I trust your visit to the market will make her loss worthwhile.”

Richard shivered. “I don’t think it could,” he said. He felt empty, and utterly alone. They were approaching the front of the line. “What do you do?” he asked.

She smiled. “I sell personal physical services.”

“Oh,” he said. “What kind of personal physical services?” he asked.

“I rent my body.” She did not elaborate.

“Ah.” He was too weary to pursue it, to press her to explain just what she meant; he had an idea, though. And then they stepped out into the night. Richard looked back. The sign on the station said
KNIGHTSBRIDGE
. He didn’t know whether to smile or to mourn. It felt like the small hours of the morning. Richard looked down at his watch and was not surprised to notice that the digital face was now completely blank. Perhaps the batteries had died, or, he thought, more likely, time in London Below had only a passing acquaintance with the kind of time he was used to. He did not care. He unstrapped the watch and dropped it into the nearest garbage can.

The odd people were crossing the road in a stream, walking through the double doors facing them. “There?” he said, appalled.

The woman nodded. “There.”

The building was large, and it was covered with many thousands of burning lights. Conspicuous coats of arms on the wall facing them proudly proclaimed that it sold all sorts of things by appointment to various members of the British Royal Family. Richard, who had spent many a footsore weekend hour trailing behind Jessica through every prominent shop in London, recognized it immediately, even without the huge sign, proclaiming it to be, “Harrods?”

The woman nodded. “Only for tonight,” she said. “The next market could be anywhere.”

“But I mean,” said Richard. “Harrods.” It seemed almost sacrilegious to be sneaking into this place at night.

They walked in through the side door. The room was dark. They passed the
bureau de change
and the gift-wrapping section, through another darkened room selling sunglasses and figu-rines, and then they stepped into the Egyptian Room. Color and light broke over Richard like a wave hitting the shore. His companion turned to him: she yawned, catlike, shading the vivid pinkness of her mouth with the back of her caramel hand. And then she smiled, and said, “Well. You’re here. Safe and, more or less, sound. I have business to attend to. Fare you well.” She nodded curtly and slipped away into the crowd.

Richard stood there, alone in the throng, drinking it in. It was pure madness—of that there was no doubt at all. It was loud, and brash, and insane, and it was, in many ways, quite wonderful. People argued, haggled, shouted, sang. They hawked and touted their wares, and loudly declaimed the superiority of their merchandise. Music was playing—a dozen different kinds of music, being played a dozen different ways on a score of different instruments, most of them improvised, improved, improbable. Richard could smell food. All kinds of food—the smells of curries and spices seemed to predominate, with, beneath them, the smells of grilling meats and mushrooms. Stalls had been set up all throughout the shop, next to, or even on, counters that, during the day, had sold perfume, or watches, or amber, or silk scarves. Everybody was buying. Everybody was selling. Richard listened to the market cries as he began to wander through the crowds.

“Lovely fresh dreams. First-class nightmares. We got ’em. Get yer lovely nightmares here.”

“Weapons! Arm yourself! Defend your cellar, cave, or hole! You want to hit ’em? We got ’em. Come on darling, come on over here . . .”

“Rubbish!” screamed a fat, elderly woman, in Richard’s ear, as he passed her malodorous stall. “Junk!” she continued. “Garbage! Trash! Offal! Debris! Come and get it! Nothing whole or undamaged! Crap, tripe, and useless piles of shit. You know you want it.”

A man in armor beat a small drum and chanted, “Lost Property. Roll up, roll up, and see for yourself. Lost property. None of your found things here. Everything guaranteed properly lost.”

Richard wandered through the huge rooms of the store, like a man in a trance. He was unable to even guess how many people there were at the night market. A thousand? Two thousand? Five thousand?

One stall was piled high with bottles, full bottles and empty bottles of every shape and every size, from bottles of booze to one huge glimmering bottle that could have contained nothing but a captive djinn; another sold lamps with candles, made of many kinds of wax and tallow; a man thrust what appeared to be a child’s severed hand clutching a candle toward him as he passed, muttering, “Hand of Glory, sir? Send ’em up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. Guaranteed to work.” Richard hurried past, not wishing to find out what a Hand of Glory was, nor how it worked; he passed a stall selling glittering gold and silver jewelry, another selling jewelry made from what looked like the valves and wires of antique radios; there were stalls that sold every manner of book and magazine; others that sold clothes—old clothes patched, and mended, and made strange; several tattooists; something that he was almost certain was a small slave market (he kept well clear of this); a dentist’s chair, with a hand-operated manual drill, with a line of miserable people standing beside it, waiting to have their teeth pulled or filled by a young man who seemed to be having altogether too good a time; a bent old man selling unlikely things that might have been hats and might have been modern art; something that looked very much like a portable shower facility; even a blacksmith’s . . .

And every few stalls there would be somebody selling food. Some of them had food cooking over open fires: curries, and potatoes, and chestnuts, and huge mushrooms, and exotic breads. Richard found himself wondering why the smoke from the fires didn’t set off the building’s sprinkler system. Then he found himself wondering why no one was looting the store: why set up their own little stalls? Why not just take things from the shop itself? He knew better, at this point, than to risk asking anyone . . . . He seemed marked as a man from London Above, and thus worthy of great suspicion.

There was something deeply tribal about the people, Richard decided. He tried to pick out distinct groups: there were the ones who looked like they had escaped from a historical reenactment society; the ones who reminded him of hippies; the albino people in gray clothes and dark glasses; the polished, dangerous ones in smart suits and black gloves; the huge, almost identical women who walked together in twos and threes, and nodded when they saw each other; the tangle-haired ones who looked like they probably lived in sewers and who smelled like hell; and a hundred other types and kinds . . .

He wondered how normal London—
his
London—would look to an alien, and that made him bold. He began to ask them, as he went, “Excuse me? I’m looking for a man named de Carabas and a girl called Door. Do you know where I’d find them?” People shook their heads, apologized, averted their eyes, moved away.

Richard took a step back and stepped on someone’s foot. Someone was well over seven feet tall, and was covered in tufty ginger-colored hair. Someone’s teeth had been sharpened to points. Someone picked Richard up with a hand the size of a sheep’s head, and put Richard’s head so close to someone’s mouth that Richard almost gagged. “I’m really sorry,” said Richard. “I—I’m looking for a girl named Door. Do you know—” But someone dropped him onto the floor and moved on.

Another whiff of cooking food wafted across the floor, and Richard, who had managed to forget how hungry he was ever since he had declined the prime cut of tomcat—he could not think how many hours before—now found his mouth watering, and his thinking processes beginning to grind to a halt.

The iron-haired woman running the next food stall he approached did not reach to Richard’s waist. When Richard tried to talk to her, she shook her head, drew a finger across her lips. She could not talk, or did not talk, or did not want to talk. Richard found himself conducting the negotiations for a cottage cheese and lettuce sandwich and a cup of what looked and smelled like home-brewed lemonade, in sign language. His food cost him a ballpoint pen, and a book of matches he had forgotten he had. The little woman must have felt that she had got by far the better of the deal, for, as he took his food, she threw in a couple of small, nutty cookies.

Richard stood in the middle of the throng, listening to the music—someone was, for no reason that Richard could easily discern, singing the lyrics of “Greensleeves” to the tune of “Yakkety-Yak”—watching the bizarre bazaar unfold around him, and eating his sandwiches.

As he finished the last of the sandwiches, he realized that he had no idea how anything he had just eaten had tasted; and he resolved to slow down, and chew the cookies more slowly. He sipped the lemonade, making it last. “You need a bird, sir?” asked a cheery voice, close at hand. “I got rooks and ravens, crows and starlings. Fine, wise birds. Tasty
and
wise. Brilliant.”

Richard said, “No, thank you,” and turned around.

The hand-painted sign above the stall said:

OLD BAILEY’S BIRDS AND INFORMATION

There were other, smaller, signs scattered about:
YOU WANTS IT, WE KNOWS IT
, and
YOU WON’T FIND A PLUMPER STARLING!!!!
and
WHEN IT’S TIME FOR A ROOK, IT’S TIME FOR OLD BAILEY!!
Richard found himself thinking of the man he had seen when he had first come to London, who used to stand outside Leicester Square Tube station with a huge hand-painted sandwich board that exhorted the world to “Less Lust Through Less Protein, Eggs, Meat, Beans, Cheese and Sitting.”

Birds hopped and fluttered about small cages that looked as if they had been woven out of TV antennae. “Information, then?” continued Old Bailey, warming to his own sales-pitch. “Roof-maps? History? Secret and mysterious knowledge? If I don’t knows it, it’s probbly better forgot. That’s what I says.” The old man still wore his feathered coat, was still wrapped about with ropes and cords. He blinked at Richard, then pulled on the pair of spectacles tied about his neck with string. He inspected Richard carefully through them. “Hang on— knows you. You was with the marquis de Carabas. On the rooftops. Remember? Eh? I’m Old Bailey. Remember me?” He thrust out his hand, pumped Richard’s hand furiously.

“Actually,” said Richard, “I’m looking for the marquis. And for a young lady named Door. I think they’re probably together.”

The old man did a little jig, causing several feathers to detach themselves from his coat; this provoked a chorus of raucous disapproval from the various birds around them. “Information! Information!” he announced to the crowded room. “See? I told ’em. Diversify, I said.
Diversify!
You can’t sell rooks for the stewpot forever—anyway, they taste like boiled slipper. And they’re so stupid. Thick as custard. You ever eaten rook?” Richard shook his head. That was something he could be certain of, at any rate. “What’ll you give me?” asked Old Bailey.

“Sorry?” said Richard, awkwardly leaping from ice floe to ice floe in the stream of the old man’s consciousness.

“If’n I give ye your information. What’ll I get?”

“I don’t have any money,” said Richard. “And I just gave my pen away.”

He began to pull out the contents of Richard’s pockets. “There,” said Old Bailey. “That!”

“My hankie?” asked Richard. It was not a particularly clean handkerchief; it had been a present from his Aunt Maude, on his last birthday. Old Bailey seized it and waved it above his head, happily.

“Never you fear, laddie,” he sang, triumphantly. “Your quest is at an end. Go down there, through that door. You can’t miss them. They’re auditioning.” He was pointing towards Harrods’ extensive network of Food Halls. A rook cawed maliciously. “None of your beak,” said Old Bailey, to the rook. And, to Richard, he said, “Thank’ee for the little flag.” He jigged around his stall, delighted, waving Richard’s handkerchief to and fro.

Auditioning?
thought Richard. And then he smiled. It didn’t matter. His quest, as the mad old roof-man had put it, was at an end. He walked toward the Food Halls.

Fashion, in bodyguards, seemed to be everything. They all had a Knack of one kind or another, and each of them was desperate to demonstrate it to the world. At the moment, Ruislip was facing off against the Fop With No Name.

The Fop With No Name looked somewhat like an early eighteenth-century rake, one who hadn’t been able to find real rake clothes and had had to make do with what he could find at the Salvation Army store. His face was powdered to white, his lips painted red. Ruislip, the Fop’s opponent, resembled a bad dream one might have if one fell asleep watching sumo wrestling on the television with a Bob Marley record playing in the background. He was a huge Rastafarian who looked like nothing so much as an obese and enormous baby.