Neverwhere (24 page)

“So your employer’s leaving,” said the marquis to Mr. Croup. “I hope you’ve both been paid in full.”

Croup peered at the marquis, and said, “What?”

“Well,” said Richard, wondering what the marquis was trying to do, but willing to play along, “you don’t think you’re ever going to see him again, do you?”

Mr. Vandemar blinked, slowly, like an antique camera, and said, “What?”

Mr. Croup scratched his chin. “The corpses-to-be have a point,” he said to Mr. Vandemar. He walked toward the angel, who stood, arms folded, in front of the door. “Sir? It might be wise for you to settle up, before you commence the next stage of your travels.”

The angel turned, and looked down at him as if he were less important than the least speck of dirt. Then it turned away. Richard wondered what it was contemplating. “It is of no matter now,” said the angel. “Soon, all the rewards your revolting little minds can conceive of will be yours. When I have my throne.”

“Jam tomorrow, eh?” said Richard.

“Don’t like jam,” said Mr. Vandemar. “Makes me belch.”

Mr. Croup waggled a finger at Mr. Vandemar. “He’s welching out on us,” he said. “You don’t welch on Mister Croup and Mister Vandemar, me bucko. We collect our debts.”

Mr. Vandemar walked over to where Mr. Croup was standing. “In full,” he said.

“With interest,” barked Mr. Croup.

“And meat hooks,” said Mr. Vandemar.

“From Heaven?” called Richard, from behind them. Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar walked toward the contemplative angel. “Hey!” said Mr. Croup.

The door had opened, only a crack, but it was open. Light flooded through the crack in the door. The angel took a step forward. It was as if it were dreaming with its eyes wide open. The light from the crack in the door bathed its face, and it drank it in like wine. “Have no fear,” it said. “For when the vastness of creation is mine, and they gather about my throne to sing hosannas to my name, I shall reward the worthy and cast down those who are hateful in my sight.”

With an effort, Door wrenched the black door fully open. The view through the door was blinding in its intensity: a swirling maelstrom of color and light. Richard squinted his eyes, and turned his head away from the glare, all vicious orange and retinal purple.
Is that what Heaven looks like? It seems more like Hell.

And then he felt the wind.

A candle flew past his head, and vanished through the door. And then another. And then the air was filled with candles, all spinning and tumbling through the air, heading for the light. It was as if the whole room were being sucked through the door. It was more than a wind, though. Richard knew that. His wrists began to hurt where they were manacled—it was as if, suddenly, he weighed twice as much as he ever had before. And then his perspective changed. The view through the doorway—it was looking
down
: it was not merely the wind that was pulling everything toward the door. It was gravity. The wind was only the air in the hall being sucked into the place on the other side of the door. He wondered what was on the other side of the door—the surface of a star, perhaps, or the event horizon of a black hole, or something he could not even imagine.

Islington grabbed hold of the pillar beside the door, and held on desperately. “That’s not Heaven,” it shouted, gray eyes flashing, spittle on its perfect lips. “You mad little witch. What have you done?”

Door was clutching the chains that held her to the black pillar, white-knuckled. There was triumph in her eyes. Mr. Vandemar had caught hold of a table leg, while Mr. Croup, in his turn, had caught hold of Mr. Vandemar. “It wasn’t the real key,” said Door, triumphantly, over the roar of the wind. “That was just a copy of the key I had Hammersmith make in the market.”

“But it opened the door,” screamed the angel.

“No,” said the girl with the opal eyes, distantly. “I opened a door. As far and hard away as I could, I opened a door.”

There was no longer any trace of kindness or compassion on the angel’s face; only hatred, pure and honest and cold. “I will kill you,” it told her.

“Like you killed my family? I don’t think you’re going to kill anyone anymore.”

The angel was hanging onto the pillar with pale fingers, but its body was at a ninety-degree angle to the room, and was most of the way through the door. It looked both comical and dreadful. It licked its lips. “Stop it,” it pleaded. “Close the door. I’ll tell you where your sister is . . . She’s still alive . . .”

Door flinched.

And Islington was sucked through the door, a tiny, plummeting figure, shrinking as it tumbled into the blinding gulf beyond. The pull was getting stronger. Richard prayed that his chains and manacles would hold: he could feel himself being sucked toward the opening, and, from the corner of his eye, he could see the marquis dangling from his chains, like a string-puppet being sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.

The table, the leg of which Mr. Vandemar was holding tightly, flew through the air and jammed in the open doorway. Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar were dangling out of the door. Mr. Croup, who was clinging, quite literally, to Mr. Vandemar’s coattails, took a deep breath and began slowly to clamber, hand over hand, up Mr. Vandemar’s back. The table creaked. Mr. Croup looked at Door, and he smiled like a fox. “
I
killed your family,” said Mr. Croup. “Not him. And now I’m—finally—going to finish the . . .”

It was at that moment that the fabric of Mr. Vandemar’s dark suit gave way. Mr. Croup tumbled, screaming, into the void, clutching a long strip of black material. Mr. Vandemar looked down at the flailing figure of Mr. Croup as it fell away from them. He, too, looked over at Door, but there was no menace in his gaze. He shrugged, as best as one can shrug while holding on to a table leg for dear life, and then he said, mildly, “Bye-bye,” and let go of the table leg.

Silently he plunged through the door, into the light, shrinking as he fell, heading for the tiny figure of Mr. Croup. Soon the two shapes merged into one little blob of blackness in a sea of churning purple and white and orange light, and then the black dot, too, was gone. It made some sort of sense, Richard thought: they were a team, after all.

It was getting harder to breathe. Richard felt giddy and light-headed. The table in the doorway splintered and was sucked away through the door. One of Richard’s manacles popped open, and his right arm whipped free. He grabbed the chain holding the left hand, and gripped it as tightly as he could, grateful that the broken finger was on the hand that was still in the manacle; even so, red and blue flashes of pain were shooting up his left arm. He could hear himself, distantly, shouting in pain.

He could not breathe. White blotches of light exploded behind his eyes. He could feel the chain beginning to give way . . .

The sound of the black door slamming closed filled his whole world. Richard fell violently back against the cold iron pillar, and slumped to the floor. There was silence, then, in the hall—silence, and utter darkness, in the Great Hall under the earth. Richard closed his eyes: it made no difference to the darkness, and he opened his eyes once more.

The hush was broken by the marquis’s voice, asking, drily, “So where did you send them?”

And then Richard heard a girl’s voice talking. He knew it had to be Door’s, but it sounded so young, like the voice of a tiny child at bedtime, at the end of a long and exhausting day. “I don’t know . . . a long way away. I’m . . . very tired now. I . . .”

“Door,” said the marquis. “Snap out of it.” It was good that he was saying it, thought Richard, somebody had to, and Richard could no longer remember how to talk. There was a click, then, in the darkness: the sound of a manacle opening, followed by the sound of chains falling against a metal pillar. Then the sound of a match being struck. A candle was lit: it burned weakly, and flickered in the thin air.
Fire and fleet and candlelight
, thought Richard, and he could not remember why.

Door walked, unsteadily, to the marquis, holding her candle. She reached out a hand, touched his chains, and his manacles clicked open. He rubbed his wrists. Then she walked over to Richard, and touched his single remaining manacle. It fell open. Door sighed, then, and sat down beside him. He reached out his good arm and cradled her head, holding her close to him. He rocked her slowly back and forth, crooning a wordless lullaby. It was cold, cold, there in the angel’s empty hall; but soon the warmth of unconsciousness reached out and enveloped them both.

The marquis de Carabas watched the sleeping children. The idea of sleep—of returning, even for a short time, to a state so horribly close to death—scared him more than he would have ever believed. But, eventually, even he put his head down on his arm, and closed his eyes.

And then there were none.

T
he Lady Serpentine, who was, but for Olympia, the oldest of the Seven Sisters, walked through the labyrinth beyond Down Street, her head held high, her white leather boots squashing through the dank mud. This was, after all, the furthest she had been from her house in over a hundred years. Her wasp-waisted majordomo, dressed from head to foot all in black leather, walked ahead of her, holding a large carriage-lamp. Two of Serpentine’s other women, similarly dressed, walked behind her at a respectful distance.

The ripped lace train of Serpentine’s dress dragged in the mire behind her, but she paid it no mind. She saw something glinting in the lamplight ahead of them, and, beside it, a dark and bulky shape.

“There it is,” she said.

The two women who had been walking behind her hurried forward, splashing through the marsh, and as Serpentine’s butler approached, bringing with her a swinging circle of warm light, the shape resolved into objects. The light had been glinting from a long bronze spear. Hunter’s body, twisted and bloody and wretched, lay on its back, half-buried in the mud, in a large pool of scarlet gore, its legs trapped beneath the body of an enormous boarlike creature. Her eyes were closed.

Serpentine’s women hauled the body out from under the Beast, and lay it in the mud. Serpentine knelt in the wet mire and ran one finger down Hunter’s cold cheek, until it reached her blood-blackened lips, where she let it linger for some moments. Then she stood up. “Bring the spear,” said Serpentine.

One of the women picked up Hunter’s body; the other pulled the spear from the carcass of the Beast and put it over her shoulder. And then the four figures turned, and went back the way they had come; a silent procession deep beneath the world. The lamplight flickered on Serpentine’s ravaged face as she walked; but it revealed no emotion of any kind, neither happy nor sad.

F
or a moment, upon waking, he had no idea at all who he was. It was a tremendously liberating feeling, as if he were free to be whatever he wanted to be: he could be anyone at all—able to try on any identity; he could be a man or a woman, a rat or a bird, a monster or a god. And then someone made a rustling noise, and he woke up the rest of the way, and in waking he found that he was Richard Mayhew, whoever that was, whatever that meant. He was Richard Mayhew, and he did not know where he was.

There was crisp linen pressed against his face. He hurt all over; in some places—the little finger on his left hand, for example—more than others.

Someone was nearby. Richard could hear breathing, and the hesitant rustling noises of a person in the same room he was in, trying to be discreet. Richard raised his head, and discovered, in the raising, more places that hurt. Some of them hurt very badly. Far away—rooms and rooms away—people were singing. The song was so distant and quiet he knew he would lose it if he opened his eyes: a deep, melodious chanting . . .

He opened his eyes. The room was small, and dimly lit. He was on a low bed, and the rustling sound he had heard was made by a cowled figure in a black robe, with his back to Richard. The black figure was dusting the room, with an incongruously brightly colored feather duster. “Where am I?” asked Richard.

The black figure nearly dropped its feather duster, then it turned, revealing a very nervous, thin, dark brown face. “Would you like some water?” the Black Friar asked, in the manner of one who has been told that if the patient wakes up, he is to be asked if he would like some water, and has been repeating it to himself over and over for the last forty minutes to make sure that he didn’t forget.

“I . . .” and Richard realized that he was most dreadfully thirsty. He sat up in the bed. “Yes, I would. Thank you very much.” The friar poured some water from a battered metal jug into a battered metal cup and passed it to Richard. Richard sipped the water slowly, restraining the impulse to gulp it down. It was crystal cold and clear and tasted like diamonds and ice.

Richard looked down at himself. His clothes were gone. He had been dressed in a long robe, like one of the Black Friars’ habits, but gray. His broken finger had been splinted and neatly bandaged. He raised a finger to his ear; there was a bandage on it, and what felt like stitches beneath the bandage. “You’re one of the Black Friars,” said Richard.

“Yes, sir.”

“How did I get here? Where are my friends?”

The friar pointed to the corridor, wordlessly and nervously. Richard got out of the bed. He checked under his gray robe: he was naked. His torso and legs were covered in a variety of deep indigo and purple bruises, all of which seemed to have been rubbed with some kind of ointment: it smelt like cough syrup and buttered toast. His right knee was bandaged. He wondered where his clothes were. There were sandals beside the bed, and he put them on, then he walked out into the corridor. The abbot was coming down the passage toward him, holding onto the arm of Brother Fuliginous, his blind eyes pearlescent in the darkness beneath his cowl.

“You are awake, then, Richard Mayhew,” said the abbot. “How do you feel?”

Richard made a face. “My hand . . .”

“We set your finger. It had been broken. We tended your bruises and your cuts. And you needed rest, which we gave you.”

“Where’s Door? And the marquis? How did we get here?”

“I had you brought here,” said the abbot. The two friars began to walk down the corridor, and Richard walked with them.

“Hunter,” said Richard. “Did you bring back her body?”

The abbot shook his head. “There was no body. Only the Beast.”

“Ah, um. My clothes . . .” They came to the door of a cell, much like the one Richard had woken in. Door was sitting on the edge of her bed, reading a copy of
Mansfield Park
that Richard was certain the friars had not previously known that they had. She, too, wore a gray monk’s robe, which was much, much too big for her, almost comically so. She looked up as they entered. “Hello,” she said. “You’ve been asleep for ages. How are you feeling?”

“Fine, I think. How are you?”

She smiled. It was not a very convincing smile. “A bit shaky,” she admitted. There was a loud rattling in the corridor, and Richard turned to see the marquis de Carabas being wheeled toward them in a rickety and antique wheelchair. The wheelchair was being pushed by a large Black Friar. Richard wondered how the marquis managed to make being pushed around in a wheelchair look like a romantic and swashbuckling thing to do. The marquis honored them with an enormous smile. “Good evening, friends,” he said.

“Now,” said the abbot, “that you are all here, we must talk.”

He led them to a large room, warmed by a roaring scrap wood fire. They arranged themselves around a table. The abbot gestured for them all to sit down. He felt for his chair and sat down in it. Then he sent Brother Fuliginous and Brother Tenebrae (who had been pushing the marquis’s wheelchair) out of the room.

“So,” said the abbot. “To business. Where is Islington?”

Door shrugged. “As far away as I could send him. Halfway across space and time.”

“I see,” said the abbot. And then he said, “Good.”

“Why didn’t you warn us about him?” asked Richard.

“That was not our responsibility.”

Richard snorted. “What happens now?” he asked them all.

The abbot said nothing.

“Happens? In what way?” asked Door.

“Well, you wanted to avenge your family. And you have. And you’ve sent everyone involved off to some distant corner of nowhere. I mean, no one’s going to try and kill you anymore, are they?”

“Not for right now,” said Door, seriously.

“And you?” Richard asked the marquis de Carabas. “Have you got what you wanted?”

The marquis nodded. “I believe so. My debt to Lord Portico has been paid in full, and the Lady Door owes me a significant favor.”

Richard looked to Door. She nodded. “So what about me?” he asked.

“Well,” said Door. “We couldn’t have done it without you.”

“That’s not what I meant. What about getting me back home?”

The marquis raised an eyebrow. “Who do you think she is—the Wizard of Oz? We can’t send you home. This is your home.”

Door said, “I tried to tell you that before, Richard.”

“There has to be a way,” said Richard, and he slammed his left hand down on the table, hard, for emphasis. It hurt his finger, but he kept his face composed. And then he said, “Ow,” but he said it very quietly, because he had gone through much worse.

“Where is the key?” asked the abbot.

Richard inclined his head. “Door,” he said.

She shook her pixy head. “I don’t have it,” she told him.

“I slipped it back into your pocket at the last market. When you brought the curry.”

Richard opened his mouth, and then he closed it again. Then he opened it and said, “You mean, when I told Croup and Vandemar that I had it, and they were welcome to search me . . . I had it?” She nodded. He remembered the hard object in his back pocket, on Down Street; remembered her hugging him on the ship . . .

The abbot reached out. His wrinkled brown fingers picked up a small bell from the table, which he shook, summoning Brother Fuliginous. “Bring me the Warrior’s trousers,” he said. Fuliginous nodded and left.

“I’m no warrior,” said Richard.

The Abbot smiled gently. “You killed the Beast,” he explained, almost regretfully. “You are the Warrior.”

Richard folded his arms, exasperated. “So, after all this, I still don’t get to go home, but as a consolation prize I’ve made it onto some kind of archaic underground honors list?”

The marquis looked unsympathetic. “You can’t go back to London Above. A few individuals manage a kind of half-life—you’ve met Iliaster and Lear. But that’s the best you could hope for, and it isn’t a good life.”

Door reached out a hand, and touched Richard’s arm. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “But look at all the good you’ve done. You got the key for us.”

“Well,” he asked, “what was the point of that? You just forged a new key—” Brother Fuliginous reappeared, carrying Richard’s jeans; they were ripped, and covered in mud, and splashed with dried blood, and they stank. The friar handed the trousers to the abbot, who commenced to go through the pockets. Door smiled, sweetly. “I couldn’t have had Ham-mersmith copy it without the original,” she reminded him.

The abbot cleared his throat. “You are all very stupid people,” he told them, graciously, “and you do not know anything at all.” He held up the silver key. It glinted in the firelight. “Richard passed the Ordeal of the Key. He is its master, until he returns it to our keeping. The key has power.”

“It’s the key to Heaven . . .” said Richard, unsure of what the abbot was getting at, of what point he was trying to make.

The old man’s voice was deep and melodious. “The key is the key to all reality. If Richard wants to return to London Above, then the key will take him back to London Above.”

“It’s that simple?” asked Richard. The old man nodded his blind head, beneath the shadows of his cowl. “Then when could we do this?”

“As soon as you are ready,” said the abbot.

The friars had washed and repaired his clothes and returned them to him. Brother Fuliginous led him through the abbey, up a vertiginous series of ladders and steps, up into the bell tower. There was a heavy wooden trapdoor in the top of the tower. Brother Fuliginous unlocked it, and the two men pushed through it and found themselves in a narrow tunnel, thickly cobwebbed, with metal rungs set in the side of one wall. They climbed the rungs, going up for what seemed like thousands of feet, and came out on a dusty Underground station platform.

NIGHTINGALE LANE

said the old signs on the wall. Brother Fuliginous wished Richard well and told him to wait there and he would be collected, and then he clambered down the side of the wall, and he was gone.

Richard sat on the platform for twenty minutes. He wondered what kind of station this was: it seemed neither abandoned, like British Museum, nor real, like Blackfriars: instead it was a ghost-station, an imaginary place, forgotten and strange. He wondered why the marquis had not said good-bye. When Richard had asked Door, she had said that she didn’t know, but that maybe good-byes were something else, like comforting people, at which the marquis wasn’t much good. Then she told him that she had something in her eye, and she gave him a paper with his instructions on, and she went away.

Something waved from the darkness of the tunnel: something white. It was a handkerchief on a stick. “Hello?” called Richard.

The feather-wrapped roundness of Old Bailey stepped out of the gloom, looking self-conscious and ill at ease. He was waving Richard’s handkerchief, and he was sweating. “It’s me little flag,” he said, pointing to the handkerchief.

“I’m glad it’s come in useful.”

Old Bailey grinned uneasily. “Right. Just wanted to say. Something I got for you. Here you go.” He thrust a hand into a coat pocket and pulled out a long black feather with a blue-purple-green sheen to it; red thread had been wound around the quill end of the feather.

“Um. Well, thanks,” said Richard, unsure of what he ought to do with it.

“It’s a feather,” explained Old Bailey. “And a good one. Memento. Souvenir. Keepsake. And it’s free. A gift. Me to you. Bit of a thank-you.”

“Yes. Well. Very kind of you.”

Richard put it in his pocket. A warm wind blew through the tunnel: a train was coming. “This’ll be your train now,” said Old Bailey. “I don’t take trains, me. Give me a good roof any day.” He shook Richard’s hand, and fled.

The train pulled in at the station. Its headlights were turned off, and there was nobody standing in the driver’s compartment in the front. It came to a full stop: all the carriages were dark, and no doors opened. Richard knocked on the door in front of him, hoping that it was the correct one. The door gaped open, flooding the imaginary station with warm yellow light. Two small, elderly gentlemen holding long, copper-colored bugles stepped off the train and onto the platform. Richard recognized them: Dagvard and Halvard, from Earl’s Court; although he could no longer recall, if he had ever known, which gentleman was which. They put their bugles to their lips and performed a ragged, but sincere, fanfare. Richard got onto the train, and they walked in behind him.

The earl was sitting at the end of the carriage, petting the enormous Irish wolfhound. The jester—Tooley, thought Richard, that was his name—stood beside him. Other than that, and the two men-at-arms, the carriage was deserted. “Who is it?” asked the earl.

“It’s him, sire,” said his jester. “Richard Mayhew. The one who killed the Beast.”

“The Warrior?” The Earl scratched his red-gray beard thoughtfully. “Bring him here.”

Richard walked down to the earl’s chair. The earl eyed him up and down pensively and gave no indication that he remembered ever meeting Richard before. “Thought you’d be taller,” said the earl, at length.

“Sorry.”

“Well, better get on with it.” The old man stood up and addressed the empty car. “Good evening. Here to honor young Mayflower. What was it the bard said?” And then he recited, in a rhythmic alliterative boom, “
Crimson the cuts in the carcass, Fast falls the foe, Dauntless devout defender, Bravest of boys
. . . Not really a boy anymore, though, is he, Tooley?”

“Not particularly, Your Grace.”

The earl reached out his hand. “Give me your sword, boy.” Richard put his hand to his belt and pulled out the knife that Hunter had given him. “Will this do?” he asked.

“Yes-yes,” said the old man, taking the knife from him.

“Kneel,” said Tooley, in a stage whisper, pointing to the train floor. Richard went down on one knee; the earl tapped him gently on each shoulder with the knife. “Arise,” he bellowed, “Sir Richard of Maybury. With this knife I do give to you the freedom of the Underside. May you be allowed to walk freely, without let or hindrance . . . and so on and so forth . . . et cetera . . . blah blah blah,” he trailed off, vaguely.