Neverwhere (16 page)

“Hmph. Why did you kill Door’s family?”

“Orders from our employer,” said Mr. Croup, his smile becoming more foxy by the moment.

“Why didn’t you kill Door, when you had a chance?”

Before Mr. Croup could answer, Mr. Vandemar said, “Got to keep her alive. She’s the only one that can open the door.”

Mr. Croup glared up at his associate. “That’s it,” he said. “Tell him everything, why don’t you?”

“I wanted a turn,” muttered Mr. Vandemar.

“Right,” said Mr. Croup. “So you’ve got three answers, for all the good that will do you. My first question: why are you protecting her?”

“Her father saved my life,” said the marquis, honestly. “I never paid off my debt to him. I prefer debts to be in my favor.”

“I’ve got a question,” said Mr. Vandemar.

“As have I, Mr. Vandemar. The Upworlder, Richard Mayhew. Why is he traveling with her? Why does she permit it?”

“Sentimentality on her part,” said the marquis de Carabas. He wondered, as he said it, if that was the whole truth. He had begun to wonder whether there might, perhaps, be more to the upworlder than met the eye.

“Now me,” said Mr. Vandemar. “What number am I thinking of?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What number am I thinking of?” repeated Mr. Vandemar. “It’s between one and a lot,” he added, helpfully.

“Seven,” said the marquis. Mr. Vandemar nodded, impressed. Mr. Croup began, “Where is the—” but the marquis shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Now we’re getting greedy.”

There was a moment of utter silence, in that dank cellar. Then once more water dripped, and maggots rustled; and the marquis said, “An hour’s head start, remember.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Croup.

The marquis de Carabas tossed the figurine to Mr. Croup, who caught it eagerly, like an addict catching a plastic baggie filled with white powder of dubious legality. And then, without a backward glance, the marquis left the cellar.

Mr. Croup examined the figurine minutely, turning it over and over in his hands, a Dickensian curator of the Museum of the Damned contemplating a prize exhibit. His tongue flicked out, from time to time, like a snake’s. A perceptible flush appeared on his pallid cheeks. “Oh, fine, fine,” he whispered. “T’ang dynasty indeed. Twelve hundred years old, the finest pottery figurines ever made on this earth. This was created by Kai Lung, finest of potters: there is not a twin to it in existence. Examine the color of the glaze; the sense of proportion; the life . . .” He was smiling now, like a baby; the innocent smile looked lost and confused on the shady terrain of Mr. Croup’s face. “It adds a little wonder and beauty to the world.”

And then he grinned, too widely, and lowered his face to the figurine, and crushed its head in his teeth, chomping and chewing wildly, swallowing in lumps. His teeth ground the china to a fine powder, which dusted the lower part of his face.

He gloried in its destruction, throwing himself into it with the strange madness and uncontrolled blood lust of a fox in a henhouse. And then, when the statue was nothing but dust, he turned to Mr. Vandemar. He seemed strangely mellow, almost languid. “How long did we say we’d give him?”

“An hour.”

“Mmm. And how long has it been?”

“Six minutes.”

Mr. Croup lowered his head. He ran a finger across his chin, licked the powdered clay from his fingertip. “You follow him, Mister Vandemar,” said Mr. Croup. “I need a little more time in which to savor the occasion.”

Hunter could hear them walking down the steps. She was standing in the shadows, with her arms folded, in the same position she had been in when they left her. Richard was humming loudly. Door was giggling helplessly; then she would stop, and tell Richard to be quiet. Then she would start giggling again. They walked past Hunter without noticing her.

She stepped out of the shadows, and said, “You have been gone for eight hours.” It was a statement of fact, without reproach or curiosity.

Door blinked at her. “It didn’t
seem
that long.” Hunter said nothing.

Richard grinned blearily at her. “Don’t you want to know what happened? Well, we got ambushed by Mister Croup and Mister Vandemar. Unfortunately we didn’t have a bodyguard around. Still, I gave them a good run for their money.”

Hunter raised a perfect eyebrow. “I am in awe of your pugilistic talents,” she said coolly.

Door giggled. “He’s kidding. Actually—they killed us.”

“As an expert in the termination of bodily functions,” Hunter said, “I must beg to differ. You are neither of you dead. At a guess, you are both very drunk.”

Door stuck her tongue out at her bodyguard. “Nonsense. Touched hardly a drop.
That
much.” She held out two fingers to show how tiny an amount “that much” was.

“Just went to a party,” said Richard, “and saw Jessica and saw a real angel and got a little black pig and came back here.”

“Just a little drink,” continued Door, intently. “Old, old drink. Tiiiiny little drink. Very small. Almost not there.” She began to hiccup. Then she giggled again. A hiccup interrupted her, and she sat down suddenly on the platform. “I think maybe we are a bit smashed,” she said, soberly. Then she closed her eyes, and began, solemnly, to snore.

The marquis de Carabas was running through the underways as if all the hounds of Hell had his scent and were on his trail. He was splashing through six gray inches of the Tyburn, the hangman’s river, kept safe in the darkness in a brick sewer beneath Park Lane on its way south to Buckingham Palace. He had been running for seventeen minutes.

Thirty feet below Marble Arch, he paused. The sewer divided into two branches. The marquis de Carabas ran down the left-hand branch.

Several minutes later, Mr. Vandemar walked through the sewer. And when he reached the junction he, too, paused for a few moments, sniffing the air. And then he, too, walked down the left-hand branch.

Hunter dropped Richard Mayhew’s unconscious body into a pile of straw, with a grunt. He rolled in the straw, said something that sounded like “Forthril bjugly mobble wug,” and went back to sleep. She put Door down in the straw next to him, more gently. Then she stood beside Door, in the dark stables under the ground, on guard still.

The marquis de Carabas was exhausted. He leaned against the tunnel wall and stared at the steps that went up ahead of him. Then he pulled out the golden pocket-watch and looked at the time. Thirty-five minutes had passed since he had fled the hospital cellar.

“Is it an hour yet?” asked Mr. Vandemar. He was sitting on the steps ahead of the marquis, picking his nails with a knife.

“Not even close,” gasped the marquis.

“Felt like an hour,” said Mr. Vandemar, helpfully.

There was a shiver in the world, and Mr. Croup stood behind the marquis de Carabas. He still had powder on his chin. De Carabas stared at Mr. Croup. He turned back to look at Mr. Vandemar. And then, spontaneously, the marquis de Car-abas began to laugh. Mr. Croup smiled. “You find us funny, Messire Marquis, do you not? A source of amusement. Is that not so? With our pretty clothes, and our convoluted circumlocutions—”

Mr. Vandemar murmured, “I haven’t got a circumlo . . . ”

“—and our little sillinesses of manner and behavior. And perhaps we
are
funny.”

Mr. Croup raised one finger then, and waggled it at de Carabas. “But you must never imagine,” he continued, “that just because something is funny, Messire Marquis, it is not also dangerous.”

And Mr. Vandemar threw his knife at the marquis, hard and accurately. It hit him, hilt first, on the temple. His eyes rolled up in his head, and his knees buckled. “Circumlocution,” said Mr. Croup to Mr. Vandemar. “It’s a way of speaking around something. A digression. Verbosity.”

Mr. Vandemar picked up the marquis de Carabas by his waistband and dragged him up the stairs, his head bump-bump-bumping on each step as they went, and Mr. Vandemar nodded. “I wondered,” he said.

Watching their dreams, now, as they sleep.

Hunter sleeps standing up.

In her dream, Hunter is in the undercity beneath Bangkok. It is partly a maze, and partly a forest, for the wilderness of Thailand has retreated deep beneath the ground, under the airport and the hotels and the streets. The world smells of spice and dried mango, and it also smells, not unpleasantly, of sex. It is humid, and she is sweating. It is dark, broken by phosphorescent patches on the wall, greenish grey fungi that give light enough to fool the eye, light enough to walk by.

In her dream Hunter moves silent as a ghost through the wet tunnels, pushing her way through vegetation. She holds a weighted throwing stick in her right hand; a leather shield covers her left forearm.

She smells it, in her dream, acrid and animal, and she pauses beside a wall of ruined masonry, and she waits, part of the shadows, one with the darkness. Hunting, like life, Hunter believes, consists chiefly of waiting. In Hunter’s dream, however, she does not wait. Upon her arrival, it comes through the underbrush, a fury of brown and of white, undulating gently, like a wet-furred snake, its red eyes bright and peering through the darkness, its teeth like needles, a carnivore and a killer. The creature is extinct in the world above. It weighs almost three hundred pounds, and is a little over fifteen feet long, from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail.

As it passes her, she hisses like a snake, and, momentarily, old instincts kicking in, it freezes. And then it leaps at her, nothing but hate and sharp teeth. She remembers, then, in her dream, that this had happened before, and that when it had happened, that time in the past, she had pushed the leather arm-shield into its mouth and crushed its skull with the leaden throwing stick taking care not to damage the pelt. She had given the Great Weasel’s pelt to a girl who had caught her eye, and the girl had been appropriately grateful.

But now, in her dream, that is not happening. Instead, the weasel is reaching out a forepaw toward her, and she is dropping her throwing stick and taking its paw. And then and there, in the undercity beneath Bangkok, they are dancing together, in one intricate unending dance: and Hunter is watching them from outside herself, and she is admiring the elaborate movements they make as they move, tail and legs and arms and fingers and eyes and hair all tumbling and twisting powerfully and strangely into the underneath and out across forever.

There is a tiny noise in the waking world, a dreaming whimper from the child Door, and Hunter moves from sleeping to waking fluidly and instantly; she is alert once more, and on guard. She forgets her dream entirely upon waking.

Door is dreaming of her father.

In her dream, he is showing her how to open things. He picks up an orange, and gestures: in one smooth movement it inverts, and twists: the orange flesh is on the outside, now, and the skin is in the center, on the inside.
One must always maintain parity
, her father tells her, peeling off an inside-out orange segment for her.
Parity, symmetry, topology: these will be our subjects for the months to come, Door. But the most important thing for you to understand is this: all things want to open. You must feel that need, and use it
. Her father’s hair is brown and thick, as it was a decade before his death, and he has an easy smile, which she remembers but which time had diminished as the years went on.

In her dream, he passes her a padlock. She takes it from him. Her hands are the size and shape of her hands today, although she knows that, in truth, this occurred when she was a tiny child, that she is taking moments and conversations and lessons from over a dozen years and is compressing them into one lesson.
Open it,
he tells her.

She holds it in her hand, feeling the cold metal, feeling the weight of the lock in her hands. Something is bothering her. There is something she has to know. Door learned to open some time after she learned to walk. She remembers her mother holding her tightly, opening a door from Door’s bedroom to the playroom, remembers watching her brother Arch separating linked silver rings, joining them back together.

She tries to open the padlock. She fumbles at it with her fingers, and with her mind. Nothing happens. She throws the padlock down onto the floor and begins to cry. Her father reaches down and picks up the padlock, puts it back into her hand. His long finger brushes away a tear from her cheek.

Remember, he tells her,
the padlock wants to open. All you have to do is let it do what it wants.

It sits there in her hand, cold and inert and heavy. And then, suddenly, she understands, and, somewhere in her heart, she lets it be what it wants to be. There is a loud click, and the padlock opens. Her father is smiling.

There,
she says.

Good girl
, says her father.
That’s all there is to opening. Everything else is just technique.

She realizes what it is that is bothering her.
Father?
she asks.
Your journal. Who put it away? Who could have hidden it?
But he is receding from her, and already she is forgetting. She calls to him, but he cannot hear her, and although she can hear his voice in the distance, she can no longer make out what he is saying.

In the waking world, Door whimpers softly. Then she rolls over, cradles her arm around her face, snorts once, twice, then sleeps once more, sleeps without dreaming.

Richard knows it waits for them. Each tunnel he goes down, each turning, each branch he walks, the feeling grows in urgency and weight. He knows it is there, waiting, and the sense of impending catastrophe increases with every step. He knows that it should have been a relief when he turns the final corner, and sees it standing there, framed in the tunnel, waiting for him. Instead he feels only dread. In his dream it is the size of the world: there is nothing left in the world but the Beast, its flanks steaming, broken spars and juts of old weapons prickling from its hide. There is dried blood on its horns and on its tusks. It is gross, and vast, and evil. And then it charges.

He raises his hand (but it isn’t
his
hand) and he throws the spear at the creature.