Neverwhere (22 page)

“She was going to kill me,” stammered Richard.

“Not immediately,” said the marquis, dismissively. “You would have died eventually, though, when she finished eating your life.”

Richard stared at the marquis. His skin was filthy, and he seemed ashen beneath the dark of his skin. His coat was gone: instead, he wore an old blanket wrapped about his shoulders, like a poncho, with something bulky—Richard could not tell what—strapped beneath it. He was barefoot, and, in what Richard took to be some kind of bizarre fashion affectation, there was a discolored cloth wrapped all the way around his throat.

“We were looking for you,” said Richard.

“And now you’ve found me,” croaked the marquis, drily.

“We were expecting to see you at the market.”

“Yes. Well. Some people thought I was dead. I was forced to keep a low profile.”

“Why . . . why did some people think you were dead?”

The marquis looked at Richard with eyes that had seen too much and gone too far. “Because they killed me,” he said. “Come on, the others can’t be too far ahead.”

Richard looked over the side of the path, across the central well. He could see Door and Hunter, across the well, on the level below. They were looking around—for him, he assumed. He called to them, shouted and waved, but the sound did not carry. The marquis laid a hand upon Richard’s arm. “Look,” he said. He pointed to the level beneath Door and Hunter. Something moved. Richard squinted: he could make out two figures, standing in the shadows. “Croup and Vandemar,” said the marquis. “It’s a trap.”

“What do we do?”

“Run!” said the marquis. “Warn them. I can’t run yet . . . go, damn you!”

And Richard ran. He ran as fast as he could, as hard as he could, down the sloping stone road under the world. He felt a sudden stabbing pain in his chest: a stitch. And he pushed himself on, and still he ran.

He turned a corner, and he saw them all. “Hunter! Door!” he gasped, breathless. “Stop! Watch out!”

Door turned. Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar stepped out from behind a pillar. Mr. Vandemar yanked Door’s hands behind her back and bound them in one movement with a nylon strip. Mr. Croup was holding something long and thin in a brown cloth cover, like the kind Richard’s father had used to carry his fishing poles in. Hunter stood there, her mouth open. Richard shouted, “Hunter. Quickly.”

She nodded, spun around, and kicked out one foot, in a smooth, almost balletic, motion.

Her foot caught Richard squarely in the stomach. He fell to the floor several feet away, winded and breathless and hurt. “Hunter?” he gasped.

“I’m afraid so,” said Hunter, and she turned away. Richard felt sick, and saddened. The betrayal hurt him as much as the blow.

Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar ignored Richard and Hunter entirely. Mr. Vandemar was trussing Door’s arms, while Mr. Croup stood and watched. “Don’t think of us as murderers and cutthroats, miss,” Mr. Croup was saying, conversationally. “Think of us as an escort service.”

Hunter stood beside the rock face, looking at none of them, and Richard lay on the rock floor and writhed and tried, somehow, to suck air back into his lungs. Mr. Croup turned back to Door and smiled, showing many teeth. “You see, Lady Door. We are going to make sure you get safely to your destination.”

Door ignored him. “Hunter,” she called, “what’s happening?” Hunter did not move, nor did she answer.

Mr. Croup beamed, proudly. “Before Hunter agreed to work for you, she agreed to work for our principal. Taking care of you.”

“We told you,” crowed Mr. Vandemar. “We told you one of you was a traitor.” He threw back his head, and howled like a wolf.

“I thought you were talking about the marquis,” said Door.

Mr. Croup scratched his head of orange hair, theatrically. “Talking of the marquis, I wonder where he is. He’s a bit
late
, isn’t he, Mister Vandemar?”

“Very
late
indeed, Mister Croup. As
late
as he possibly could be.” Mr. Croup coughed sententiously and delivered his punch line. “Then from now on, we’ll have to call him the
late
marquis de Carabas. I’m afraid he’s ever-so-slightly—”

“Dead as a doornail,” finished Mr. Vandemar.

Richard finally managed to get enough air into his lungs to gasp, “You traitorous bitch.”

Hunter glanced at the ground. “No hard feelings,” she whispered.

“The key you obtained from the Black Friars,” said Mr. Croup to Door. “Who has it?”

“I do,” gasped Richard. “You can search me, if you like. Look.” He fumbled in his pockets—noticing something hard and unfamiliar in his back pocket, but there was no time to investigate that now—and he pulled out the front-door key of his old flat. He dragged himself to his feet and staggered over to Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar. “Here.”

Mr. Croup reached over and took the key from him. “Good gracious me,” he said, scarcely glancing at it. “I find myself utterly taken in by his cunning ploy, Mister Vandemar.”

He passed the key to Mr. Vandemar, who held it up between finger and thumb, and crushed it like brass foil. “Fooled again, Mister Croup,” he said.

“Hurt him, Mister Vandemar,” said Mr. Croup.

“With pleasure, Mister Croup,” said Mr. Vandemar, and he kicked Richard in the kneecap. Richard fell to the ground, in agony. As if from a long way away, he could hear Mr. Vandemar’s voice; it appeared to be lecturing him. “People think it’s how hard you kick that hurts,” Mr. Vandemar’s voice was saying. “But it’s not how hard you kick. It’s where. I mean, this’s really a very gentle kick . . . ”—something slammed into Richard’s left shoulder. His left arm went numb, and a purple-white blossom of pain opened up in his shoulder. It felt like his whole arm was on fire, and freezing, as if someone had jabbed an electrical prod deep into his flesh, and turned up the current as high as it would go. He whimpered. And Mr. Vandemar was saying, “. . . but it hurts just as much as
this
—which is much harder . . . ” and the boot rammed into Richard’s side like a cannonball. He could hear himself screaming.

“I’ve got the key,” he heard Door say.

“If only you had a Swiss army knife,” Mr. Vandemar told Richard, helpfully, “I could show you what I do with all the different bits. Even the bottle-opener, and the thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves.”

“Leave him, Mister Vandemar. There will be time enough for Swiss army knives. Does she have the token?” Mr. Croup fumbled in Door’s pockets, and took out the carved obsidian figure: the tiny Beast the angel had given her.

Hunter’s voice was low and resonant. “What about me? Where’s my payment?”

Mr. Croup sniffed. He tossed her the fishing pole case. She caught it one-handed. “Good hunting,” said Mr. Croup. Then he and Mr. Vandemar turned and walked off down the twisting slope of Down Street, with Door between them. Richard lay on the floor and watched them go, with a terrible feeling of despair spreading outward from his heart.

Hunter knelt on the ground and began to undo the straps on the case. Her eyes were wide and shining. Richard ached. “What is it?” he asked. “Thirty pieces of silver?” She pulled it, slowly, from its fabric cover, her fingers caressing it, stroking it, loving it. “A spear,” she said, simply.

It was made of a bronze-colored metal; the blade was long, and it curved like a
kris,
sharp on one side, serrated on the other; there were faces carved into the side of the haft, which was green with verdigris, and decorated with strange designs and odd curlicues. It was about five feet long, from the tip of the blade to the end of the haft. Hunter touched it, almost fearfully, as if it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“You sold Door out for a spear,” said Richard. Hunter said nothing. She wetted a fingertip with her pink tongue, then gently ran it across the side of the head of the spear, testing the edge on the blade; and then she smiled, as if she were satisfied with what she felt. “Are you going to kill me?” Richard asked. He was suprised to find himself no longer scared of death—or at least, he realized, he was not scared of that death.

She turned her head, then, and looked at him. She looked more alive than he had ever seen her; more beautiful, and more dangerous. “And what kind of challenge would I have hunting you, Richard Mayhew?” she asked, with a vivid smile. “I have bigger game to kill.”

“This is your Great-Beast-of-London-hunting spear, isn’t it?” he said.

She looked at the spear in a way that no woman had ever looked at Richard. “They say that nothing can stand against it.”

“But Door trusted you.
I
trusted you.”

She was no longer smiling. “Enough.”

Slowly, the pain was beginning to abate, dwindling to a dull ache in his shoulder and his side and his knee. “So who are you working for? Where are they taking her? Who’s behind all this?”

“Tell him, Hunter,” rasped the marquis de Carabas. He was holding a crossbow pointed at Hunter. His bare feet were planted on the ground; his face was implacable.

“I wondered whether you were as dead as Croup and Vandemar claimed you were,” said Hunter, barely turning her head. “You struck me as a hard man to kill.”

He inclined his head, in an ironic bow, but his eyes did not move, and his hands remained steady. “And you strike me that way too, dear lady. But a crossbow bolt to the throat, and a fall of several thousand feet may prove me wrong, eh? Put the spear down and step back.” She placed the spear on the floor, gently, lovingly; then she stood up and stepped back from it. “You may as well tell him, Hunter,” said the marquis. “I know; I found out the hard way. Tell him who’s behind all this.”

“Islington,” she said.

Richard shook his head, as if he were trying to brush away a fly. “It can’t be,” he said. “I mean, I’ve met Islington. He’s an angel.” And then, almost desperately, he asked, “Why?”

The marquis’s eyes had not left Hunter, nor had the point of the crossbow wavered. “I wish I knew. But Islington is at the bottom of Down Street, and at the bottom of this mess. And between us and Islington is the labyrinth and the Beast. Richard, take the spear. Hunter, walk in front of me, please.”

Richard picked up the spear, and then, awkwardly, using the spear to lean on, he pulled himself up to a standing position. “You want her to come with us?” he asked, puzzled.

“Would you prefer her behind us?” asked the marquis, drily.

“You could kill her,” said Richard.

“I will, if there are no other alternatives,” said the marquis, “but I would hate to remove an option, before it was entirely necessary. Anyway, death is so final, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” asked Richard.

“Sometimes,” said the marquis de Carabas. And they went down.

T
hey walked for hours in silence, following the winding stone road downwards. Richard was still in pain; he was limping, and experiencing a strange mental and physical turmoil: feelings of defeat and betrayal roiled within him, which, combined with the near loss of his life to Lamia, the damage inflicted by Mr. Vandemar, and his experiences on the plank far above, left him utterly wrecked. Yet, he was certain that his experiences of the last day paled into something small and insignificant when placed beside whatever the marquis had experienced. So he said nothing.

The marquis kept silent, as every word he uttered hurt his throat. He was content to let it heal, and to concentrate on Hunter. He knew that, should he let his attention flag for even a moment, she would know it, and she would be away, or she would turn on them. So he said nothing.

Hunter walked a little ahead of them. She, also, said nothing.

After some hours, they reached the bottom of Down Street. The street ended in a vast Cyclopean gateway—built of enormous rough stone blocks.
Giants built that gate
, thought Richard, half-remembered tales of long-dead kings of mythical London churning in his head, tales of King Bran and of the giants Gog and Magog, with hands the size of oak trees, and severed heads as big as hills. The portal itself had long since rusted and crumbled away. Fragments of it could be seen in the mud beneath their feet, dangling uselessly from a rusted hinge on the side of the gate. The hinge was taller than Richard.

The marquis gestured for Hunter to stop. He moistened his lips, and said, “This gate marks the end of Down Street, and the beginning of the labyrinth. And beyond the labyrinth waits the Angel Islington. And in the labyrinth is the Beast.”

“I still don’t understand,” said Richard. “Islington. I actually met him. It. Him. He’s an angel. I mean, a real angel.”

The marquis smiled, without humor. “When angels go bad, Richard, they go worse than anyone. Remember, Lucifer used to be an angel.”

Hunter watched Richard with nut brown eyes. “The place you visited is Islington’s citadel, and also its prison,” she said. It was the first thing she had said in hours. “It cannot leave.”

The marquis addressed her directly. “I assume that the labyrinth and the Beast are there to discourage visitors.”

She inclined her head. “So I would assume also.”

Richard turned on the marquis, all his anger and impotence and frustration spewing out of him in one angry blast. “Why are you even talking to her? Why is she still with us? She was a traitor—she tried to make us think that you were the traitor.”

“And I saved your life, Richard Mayhew,” said Hunter, quietly. “Many times. On the bridge. At the gap. On the board up there.” She looked into his eyes, and it was Richard who looked away.

Something echoed through the tunnels: a bellow, or a roar. The hairs on the back of Richard’s neck prickled. It was far away, but that was the only thing about it in which he could take any comfort. He knew that sound: he had heard it in his dreams, but now it sounded neither like a bull nor like a boar; it sounded like a lion; it sounded like a dragon.

“The labyrinth is one of the oldest places in London Below,” said the marquis. “Before King Lud founded the village on the Thames marshes, there was a labyrinth here.”

“No Beast, though,” said Richard.

“Not then.”

Richard hesitated. The distant roaring began again. “I . . . I think I’ve had dreams about the Beast,” he said.

The marquis raised an eyebrow. “What kind of dreams?”

“Bad ones,” said Richard.

The marquis thought about this, eyes flickering. And then he said, “Look, Richard. I’m taking Hunter. But if you want to wait here, well, no one could accuse you of cowardice.”

Richard shook his head. Sometimes there is nothing you can do. “I’m not turning back. Not now. They’ve got Door.”

“Right,” said the marquis. “Well then. Shall we go?”

Hunter’s perfect caramel lips twisted into a sneer. “You’d have to be mad to go in there,” she said. “Without the angel’s token you could never find your way. Never get past the boar.”

The marquis reached his hand under his poncho blanket and produced the little obsidian statue he had taken from Door’s father’s study. “One of these, you mean?” he asked. The marquis felt, then, that much of what he had gone through in the previous week was made up for by the expression on Hunter’s face. They went through the gate, into the labyrinth.

Door’s arms were bound behind her back, and Mr. Vandemar walked behind her, one huge beringed hand resting on her shoulder, pushing her along. Mr. Croup scuttled on ahead of them, holding the talisman he had taken from her on high, and peering edgily from side to side, like a particularly pompous weasel on its way to raid the henhouse.

The labyrinth itself was a place of pure madness. It was built of lost fragments of London Above: alleys and roads and corridors and sewers that had fallen through the cracks over the millennia, and entered the world of the lost and the forgotten. The two men and the girl walked over cobbles, and through mud, and through dung of various kinds, and over rotting wooden boards. They walked through daylight and night, through gaslit streets, and sodium-lit streets, and streets lit with burning rushes and links. It was an ever-changing place: and each path divided and circled and doubled back on itself.

Mr. Croup felt the tug of the talisman, and let it take him where it wanted to go. They walked down a tiny alleyway, which had once been part of a Victorian “rookery”—a slum comprised in equal parts of theft and penny gin, of twopenny-halfpenny squalor and threepenny sex—and they heard it, snuffling and snorting somewhere nearby. And then it bellowed, deep and dark. Mr. Croup hesitated, before hurrying forward, up a short wooden staircase; and then, at the end of the alley, he stopped, squinting about him, before he led them down some steps into a long stone tunnel that had once run across the Fleet Marshes, in the Templars’ time.

Door said, “You’re afraid, aren’t you?”

Croup glared at her. “Hush your tongue.”

She smiled, although she did not feel like smiling. “You’re scared that your safe-conduct token won’t get you past the Beast. What are you planning now? To kidnap Islington? Sell both of us to the highest bidder?”

“Quiet,” said Mr. Vandemar. But Mr. Croup simply chuckled; and Door knew then that the Angel Islington was not her friend.

She began to shout. “Hey! Beast! Here!” Mr. Vandemar cuffed her head and knocked her against the wall. “Said to be quiet,” he told her, calmly. She tasted blood in her mouth and spat scarlet on the mud. Then she parted her lips to begin shouting once more. Mr. Vandemar, anticipating this, had taken a handkerchief from his pocket, and he forced it into her mouth. She tried to bite his thumb as he did so, but it made no appreciable impression on him.

“Now you’ll be quiet,” he told her.

Mr. Vandemar was very proud of his handkerchief, which was spattered with green and brown and black and had originally belonged to an overweight snuff dealer in the 1820s, who had died of apoplexy and been buried with his handkerchief in his pocket. Mr. Vandemar still occasionally found fragments of snuff merchant in it, but it was, he felt, a fine handkerchief for all that.

They continued in silence.

Richard made another entry in his mental diary.
Today
, he thought,
I’ve survived walking the plank, the kiss of death, and a lecture on inflicting pain. Right now, I’m on my way through a labyrinth with a mad bastard who came back from the dead and a bodyguard who turned out to be a . . . whatever the opposite of a bodyguard is. I am so far out of my depth that . . .
Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that
are
, and it was changing him.

They were wading through a narrow passage of wet, marshy ground, between dark stone walls. The marquis held both the token and the crossbow, and he took care to walk, at all times, about ten feet behind Hunter. Richard, in the lead, was carrying Hunter’s Beast spear and a yellow flare the marquis had produced from beneath his blanket, which illuminated the stone walls and the mud, and he walked well in front of Hunter. The marshland stank, and huge mosquitoes had begun to settle upon Richard’s arms and legs and face, biting him painfully and raising huge, itching welts. Neither Hunter nor the marquis so much as mentioned the mosquitoes.

Richard was beginning to suspect that they were quite lost. It did not help his mood any that there were a large number of dead people in the marsh: leathery preserved bodies, discolored skeletal bones, and pallid, water-swollen corpses. He wondered how long the corpses had been there, and whether they had been killed by the Beast or by the mosquitoes. He said nothing as they walked on for another five minutes and eleven mosquito bites, and then he called out, “I think we’re lost. We’ve been through this way before.”

The marquis held up the token. “No. We’re fine,” he said. “The token is leading us straight. Clever little thing.”

“Yeah,” said Richard, who was not impressed. “Very clever.”

It was then that the marquis stepped, barefoot, on the shattered rib cage of a half-buried corpse, puncturing his heel, and causing him to stumble. The little black statue went flying through the air and tumbled into the black marsh with the satisfied plop of a leaping fish returning to the water. The marquis righted himself and pointed the crossbow at Hunter’s back.

“Richard,” he called. “I dropped it. Can you come back here?” Richard walked back, holding the flare high, hoping for the glint of flame on obsidian, seeing nothing but wet mud. “Get down into the mud and look,” said the marquis.

Richard groaned.

“You’ve dreamed of the Beast, Richard,” said the marquis. “Do you really want to encounter it?”

Richard thought about this for not very long, then he pushed the haft of the bronze spear into the surface of the marsh and stood the flare up into the mud beside it, illuminating the surface of the marsh with a fitful amber light. He got down on his hands and knees in the bog, searching for the statue. He ran his hands over the surface of the marsh, hoping not to encounter any dead faces or hands. “It’s hopeless. It could be anywhere.”

“Keep looking,” said the marquis.

Richard tried to remember how he usually found things. First he let his mind go as blank as he could, then he let his gaze wander over the surface of the marsh, purposelessly, idly. Something glittered on the boggy surface, five feet to his left. It was the Beast statue. “I can see it,” called Richard.

He floundered toward it through the mud. The little glassy beast was head-down in a puddle of dark water. Perhaps the mud was disturbed by Richard’s approach; more likely, as Richard was convinced forever after, it was just the sheer cussedness of the material world. Whatever the cause, he was almost next to the little statue when the marsh made a noise that sounded like a giant stomach rumbling, and a large bubble of gas floated up and popped noxiously and obscenely beside the talisman, which vanished beneath the water.

Richard reached the place where the talisman had been and pushed his arms deep into the mud, searching for it wildly, not caring what else his fingers might encounter. It was no use. It was gone forever. “What do we do now?” asked Richard.

The marquis sighed. “Get back over here, and we’ll figure out something.”

Richard said, quietly, “Too late.”

It was coming toward them so slowly, so ponderously that he thought for a fragment of a second that it was old, sick, even dying. That was his first thought. And then he realized how much ground it was covering as it approached, mud and foul water splashing up from its hooves as it ran, and he realized how wrong he had been in thinking it slow. Thirty feet away from them the Beast slowed, and stopped, with a grunt. Its flanks were steaming. It bellowed, in triumph, and in challenge. There were broken spears, and shattered swords, and rusted knives, bristling from its sides and back. The yellow flare light glinted in its red eyes, and on its tusks, and its hooves.

It lowered its massive head. It was some kind of boar, thought Richard, and then realized that that had to be nonsense: no boar could be so huge. It was the size of an ox, of a bull elephant, of a lifetime. It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heartbeats.

Hunter knelt, in one fluid motion, and pulled up the spear from the Fleet Marsh, which released it with a sucking noise. And, in a voice that was pure joy, she said, “Yes. At last.”

She had forgotten them all; forgotten Richard down in the mud, and the marquis and his foolish crossbow, and the world. She was delighted and transported, in a perfect place, the world she lived for. Her world contained two things: Hunter, and the Beast. The Beast knew that too. It was the perfect match, the hunter, and the hunted. And who was who, and which was which, only time would reveal; time and the dance.

The Beast charged.

Hunter waited until she could see the white spittle dripping from its mouth, and as it lowered its head she stabbed up with the spear; but, as she tried to sink the spear into its side, she understood that she had moved just a fraction of a second too late, and the spear went tumbling out of her numbed hands, and a tusk sharper than the sharpest razor blade opened her side. And as she fell beneath its monstrous weight, she felt its sharp hooves crushing down on her arm, and her hip, and her ribs. And then it was gone, vanished back into the darkness, and the dance was done.

Mr. Croup was more relieved than he would have admitted to be through the labyrinth. But he and Mr. Vandemar were through it, unharmed, as was their prey. There was a rock face in front of them, an oaken double door set in the rock face, and an oval mirror set in the right-hand door.

Mr. Croup touched the mirror with one grimy hand. The surface of the mirror clouded at his touch, seethed for a moment, bubbling and roiling like a vat of boiling quicksilver, and then was still. The Angel Islington looked out at them. Mr. Croup cleared his throat. “Good morning, sir. It is us, and we have the young lady you sent us to fetch for you.”