Neverwhere (6 page)

The line hissed and crackled as if the call were coming from a long way away. The voice at the other end of the phone was unfamiliar. “Mister Mayhew?” it said. “Mister Richard Mayhew?”

“Yes,” he said. And then, delighted, “You can hear me. Oh thank God. Who is this?”

“My associate and I met you on Saturday, Mister Mayhew. I was enquiring as to the whereabouts of a certain young lady. Do you remember?” The tones were oily, nasty, foxy.

“Oh. Yes. It’s you.”

“Mister Mayhew. You said Door wasn’t with you. We have reason to believe that you were embroidering the truth more than perhaps a little.”

“Well,
you
said you were her brother.”

“
All
men are brothers, Mister Mayhew.”

“She’s not here anymore. And I don’t know where she is.”

“We know that, Mister Mayhew. We are perfectly cognizant of both of those facts. And to be magnificently frank, Mister Mayhew—and I’m sure you want me to be frank, don’t you?— were I you, I would no longer worry about the young lady. Her days are numbered, and the number in question isn’t even in the double digits.”

“Why are you calling me?”

“Mister Mayhew,” said Mr. Croup, helpfully, “do you know what your own liver tastes like?” Richard was silent. “Because Mister Vandemar has promised me that he’s personally going to cut it out and stuff it into your mouth before he slits your sad little throat. So you’ll find out, won’t you?”

“I’m calling the police. You can’t threaten me like this.”

“Mister Mayhew. You can call anyone you wish. But I’d hate you to think we were making a threat. Neither myself nor Mister Vandemar make threats, do we Mister Vandemar?”

“No? Then what the hell
are
you doing?”

“We’re making a promise,” said Mr. Croup through the static and the echo and the hiss. “And we do know where you live.” And he hung up.

Richard held the phone tightly, staring at it, then he stabbed the nine key three times: Fire, Police, and Ambulance. “Emergency services,” said the emergency operator. “What service do you require?”

“Can you put me through to the police, please? A man just threatened to kill me, and I don’t think he was joking.”

There was a pause. He hoped he was being put through to the police. After a few moments, the voice said, “Emergency services. Hello? Is there anyone there? Hello?” And then Richard put down the phone, went into his bedroom, and put his clothes on, because he was cold and naked and scared, and there wasn’t really anything else he could do.

Eventually, and after some deliberation, he took the black sports bag from under the bed and put socks into it. Underpants. Some T-shirts. His passport. His wallet. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, a thick sweater. He remembered the way the girl who called herself Door had said good-bye. The way she had paused, the way she had said she was sorry . . . .

“You knew,” he said to the empty apartment. “You knew this would happen.” He went into the kitchen, took some fruit from the bowl, put that into the bag. Then he zipped it up and walked out onto the darkened street.

The ATM took his card with a whirr.
PLEASE ENTER YOUR PIN NUMBER
, it said. Richard typed in his secret pin number (D-I-C-K). The screen went blank.
PLEASE WAIT
, it said, and the screen went blank. Somewhere in the depths of the machine something grumbled and growled.

THIS CARD IS NOT VALID. PLEASE CONTACT CARD ISSUER.
There was a chunking noise, and the card slid out again.

“Spare any change?” said a tired voice from behind him. Richard turned: the man was short and old and balding, his scraggly beard a matted tangle of yellow and gray. The lines of his face were etched deeply in black dirt. He wore a filthy coat over the ruin of a dark gray sweater. His eyes were gray as well, and rheumy.

Richard handed the man his card. “Here,” he said. “Keep it. There’s about fifteen hundred pounds in there, if you can get to it.”

The man took the card in his street-blackened hands, looked at it, turned it over, and said, flatly, “Thanks a bunch. That and sixty pence’ll get me a nice cup of coffee.” He gave Richard his card back, and began to walk down the street.

Richard picked up his bag. Then he went after the man and said, “Hey. Hang on. You can see me.”

“Nothing wrong with
my
eyes,” said the man.

“Listen,” said Richard, “have you ever heard of a place called ‘The Floating Market’? I need to get there. There’s a girl called Door . . .” But the man had begun, nervously, to back away from Richard. “Look, I really need help,” said Richard. “Please?”

The man stared at him, without pity. Richard sighed. “Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry I troubled you.” He turned away, and, clenching the handle of his bag in both hands so that they hardly shook at all, he began to walk down the High Street.

“Oy,” hissed the man. Richard looked back at him. He was beckoning. “Come on, down here, quickly man.” The man hurried down some steps on the derelict houses at the side of the road—garbage-strewn steps, leading down to abandoned basement apartments. Richard stumbled after him. At the bottom of the steps was a door, which the man pushed open. He waited for Richard to go through, and shut the door behind them. Through the door, they were in darkness. There was a scratch, and the noise of a match flaring into life: the man touched the match to the wick of an old railwayman’s lamp, which caught, casting slightly less light than the match had, and they walked together through a dark place.

It smelled musty, of damp and old brick, of rot and the dark. “Where are we?” Richard whispered. His guide shushed him to silence. They reached another door set in a wall. The man rapped on it rhythmically. There was a pause, and then the door swung open.

For a moment, Richard was blinded by the sudden light. He was standing in a huge, vaulted room, an underground hall, filled with firelight and smoke. Small fires burned around the room. Shadowy people stood by the flames, roasting small animals on spits. People scurried from fire to fire. It reminded him of Hell—or rather, the way that he had thought of Hell, as a schoolboy. The smoke irritated his lungs, and he coughed. A hundred eyes turned, then, and stared at him: a hundred eyes, unblinking and unfriendly.

A man scuttled toward them. He had long hair, a patchy brown beard, and his ragged clothes were trimmed with fur—orange-and-white-and-black fur, like the coat of a calico cat. He would have been taller than Richard, but he walked with a pronounced stoop, his hands held up at his chest, fingers pressed together. “What? What is it? What is this?” he asked Richard’s guide. “Who’ve you brought us, Iliaster? Talk-talk-talk.”

“He’s from the Upside,” said the guide. (
Iliaster?
thought Richard.) “Was asking about the Lady Door. And the Floating Market. Brought him to you, Lord Rat-speaker. Figured you’d know what to do with him.” There were now more than a dozen of the fur-trimmed people standing around them, women and men, and even a few children. They moved in scurries: moments of stillness, followed by hasty dashes toward Richard.

The Lord Rat-speaker reached inside his fur-trimmed rags and pulled out a wicked-looking sliver of glass, about eight inches long. Some poorly cured fur had been tied around the bottom half of it to form an improvised grip. Firelight glinted from the glass blade. The Lord Rat-speaker put the shard to Richard’s throat. “Oh yes. Yes-yes-yes,” he chittered, excitedly. “I know
exactly
what to do with him.”

M
r. Croup and Mr. Vandemar had set up their home in the cellar of a Victorian hospital, closed down ten years earlier because of National Health Service budget cutbacks. The property developers, who had announced their intention of turning the hospital into an unparalleled block of unique luxury-living accommodations, had faded away as soon as the hospital had been closed, and so it stood there, year after year, gray and empty and unwanted, its windows boarded up, its doors padlocked shut. The roof was rotten, and rain dripped through the empty hospital’s interior, spreading damp and decay through the building. The hospital was ranged around a central well, which let in a certain amount of gray and unfriendly light.

The basement world beneath the empty hospital wards comprised more than a hundred tiny rooms, some of them empty, others containing abandoned hospital supplies. One room held a squat, giant metal furnace, while the next room housed the blocked and waterless toilets and showers. Most of the basement floors were covered with a thin layer of oily rain-water, which reflected the darkness and the decay back toward the rotting ceilings.

If you were to walk down the hospital steps, as far down as you could go, through the abandoned shower rooms, past the staff toilets, past a room filled with broken glass, where the ceiling had collapsed entirely, leaving it open to the stairwell above, you would reach a small, rusting iron staircase, from which the once-white paint was peeling in long, damp strips. And if you went down the staircase, and traversed the marshy place at the bottom of the steps, and pushed your way through a half-decayed wooden door, you would find yourself in the sub-cellar, a huge room in which a hundred and twenty years of hospital waste had accumulated, been abandoned, and, eventually, forgotten; and it was here that Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar had, for the present, made their home. The walls were damp, and water dripped from the ceiling. Odd things moldered in corners: some of them had once been alive.

Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar were killing time. Mr. Vandemar had obtained from somewhere a centipede—a reddish orange creature, almost eight inches long, with vicious, poisonous fangs—and was letting it run over his hands, watching it as it twined between his fingers, vanished up one sleeve, appeared a minute later out of the other. Mr. Croup was playing with razor blades. He had found, in a corner, a whole box of fifty-year-old razor blades, wrapped in wax paper, and he had been trying to think of things to do with them.

“If I might have your attention, Mister Vandemar,” he said, at length. “Pipe your beady eyes on this.”

Mr. Vandemar held the centipede’s head delicately between a huge thumb and a massive forefinger to stop it wriggling. He looked at Mr. Croup.

Mr. Croup put his left hand against a wall, fingers spread. He took five razor blades in his right hand, took careful aim, and threw them at the wall. Each blade stuck into the wall, between Mr. Croup’s fingers; it was like a top knife-thrower’s act in miniature. Mr. Croup took his hand away, leaving the blades in the wall, outlining the place his fingers had been, and he turned to his partner for approval.

Mr. Vandemar was unimpressed. “What’s so clever about that, then?” he asked. “You didn’t even hit
one
finger.”

Mr. Croup sighed. “I didn’t?” he said. “Well, slit my gullet, you’re right. How could I have been such a ninny?” He pulled the razor blades out of the wall, one by one, and dropped them onto the wooden table. “Why don’t you show me how it should have been done?”

Mr. Vandemar nodded. He put his centipede back into its empty marmalade jar. Then he put his left hand against the wall. He raised his right arm: his knife, wicked and sharp and perfectly weighted, was in his right hand. He narrowed his eyes, and he threw. The knife flew through the air and thudded into the damp plaster wall blade-first, the blade having first hit and penetrated the back of Mr. Vandemar’s hand on its way.

A telephone began to ring.

Mr. Vandemar looked around at Croup, satisfied, his hand still pinned to the wall. “
That’s
how it’s done,” he said.

There was an old telephone in the corner of the room, an antique, two-part telephone, unused in the hospital since the 1920s, made of wood and Bakelite. Mr. Croup picked up the earpiece, which was on a long, cloth-wrapped cord, and spoke into the mouthpiece, which was attached to the base. “Croup and Vandemar,” he said, smoothly, “the Old Firm. Obstacles obliterated, nuisances eradicated, bothersome limbs removed and tutelary dentistry.”

The person at the other end of the phone said something. Mr. Croup cringed. Mr. Vandemar tugged at his left hand. It wasn’t coming free.

“Oh. Yes, sir. Yes, indeed. And might I say how your telephonic confabulation brightens up and cheers our otherwise dreary and uneventful day?” Another pause. “Of course I’ll stop toadying and crawling. Delighted to. An honor, and—what do we know? We know that—” An interruption; he picked his nose, reflectively, patiently, then: “No, we don’t know where she is at this precise moment. But we don’t have to. She’ll be at the market tonight and—” His mouth tightened, and, “We have no intention of violating their market truce. More of waiting till she has left the market and scrobbling her . . .” He was silent then, and listened, nodding from time to time.

Mr. Vandemar tried to pull the knife out of the wall with his free hand, but the knife was stuck quite fast.

“That might be arranged, yes,” said Mr. Croup, into the mouthpiece. “I mean it
will
be arranged. Of course. Yes. I realize that. And, sir, perhaps we could talk about—” But the caller had hung up. Mr. Croup stared at the earpiece for a moment, then put it back on its hook. “You think you’re so damned clever,” he whispered. Then he noticed Mr. Vande-mar’s predicament and said, “Stop that.” He leaned over, pulled the knife out of the wall and out of the back of Mr. Vandemar’s hand, and put it down on the table.

Mr. Vandemar shook his left hand and flexed the fingers, then wiped the fragments of damp plaster from his knife-blade. “Who was that?”

“Our employer,” said Mr. Croup. “It seems the other one isn’t going to work out. Not old enough. It’s going to have to be the Door female.”

“So we aren’t allowed to kill her any more?”

“That, Mister Vandemar, would be about the short and the long of it, yes. Now, it seems that Little Miss Door has announced that she shall be hiring a bodyguard. At the market. Tonight.”

“So?” Mr. Vandemar spat on the back of his hand, where the knife had gone in, and on the palm of his hand, where the knife had come out. He rubbed at the spit with a massive thumb. The flesh closed, knitted, was whole again.

Mr. Croup picked up his old coat, heavy, black, and shiny with age, from the floor. He put it on. “So, Mister Vandemar,” he said, “shall we not also hire ourselves a bodyguard?”

Mr. Vandemar slid his knife back into the holster in his sleeve. He put his coat on as well, pushed his hands deep into the pockets, and was pleasantly surprised to find an almost untouched mouse in one pocket. Good. He was hungry. Then he pondered Mr. Croup’s last statement with the intensity of an anatomist dissecting his one true love, and, realizing the flaw in his partner’s logic, Mr. Vandemar said, “We don’t need a bodyguard, Mister Croup. We hurt people. We don’t get hurt.”

Mr. Croup turned out the lights. “Oh, Mister Vandemar,” he said, enjoying the sound of the words, as he enjoyed the sound of all words, “if you cut us, do we not bleed?”

Mr. Vandemar pondered this for a moment, in the dark. Then he said, with perfect accuracy, “No.”

“A spy from the Upworld,” said the Lord Rat-speaker. “Heh? I should slit you from gullet to gizzard and tell fortunes with your guts.”

“Look,” said Richard, his back against the wall, with the glass dagger pressed against his Adam’s apple. “I think you’re making a bit of a mistake here. My name is Richard Mayhew. I can prove who I am. I’ve got my library cards. Credit cards. Things,” he added, desperately.

At the opposite end of the hall, Richard noticed, with the dispassionate clarity that comes when a lunatic is about to slit your throat with a piece of broken glass, people were throwing themselves to the ground, bowing low, and remaining on the floor. A small black shape was coming toward them along the ground. “I think a moment’s reflection might prove that we’re all being very silly,” said Richard. He had no idea what the words meant, just that they were coming out of his mouth, and that as long as he was talking, he was not dead. “Now, why don’t you put that away, and—excuse me, that’s my bag,” this last to a thin, bedraggled girl in her late teens who had taken Richard’s bag and was roughly tipping his possessions out onto the ground.

The people in the hall continued to bow, and to stay bowed, as the small shape came closer. It reached the group of people around Richard, although not a one of them noticed it. They were all looking at Richard.

It was a rat, which looked up at Richard, curiously. He had the bizarre and momentary impression that it
winked
one of of its little black oildrop eyes at him. Then it chittered, loudly.

The man with the glass dagger threw himself on his knees. So did the people gathered around them. So, too, after a moment’s hesitation, and a little more awkwardly, did the homeless man, the one they had called Iliaster. In a moment, Richard was the only one standing. The thin girl tugged at his elbow, and he, too, went down on one knee.

Lord Rat-speaker bowed so low that his long hair brushed the ground, and he chittered back at the rat, wrinkling his nose, showing his teeth, squeaking and hissing, for all the world like an enormous rat himself.

“Look, can anybody tell me . . .” muttered Richard.

“Quiet!” said the thin girl.

The rat stepped—a little disdainfully, it seemed—into the Lord Rat-speaker’s grubby hand, and the man held it, respectfully, up in front of Richard’s face. It waved its tail languidly as it inspected Richard’s features. “This is Master Longtail, of the clan Gray,” said the Lord Rat-speaker. “He says you looks exceeding familiar. He wants to know if he’s met you afore.”

Richard looked at the rat. The rat looked at Richard. “I suppose it’s possible,” he admitted.

“He says he was discharging an obligation to the marquis de Carabas.”

Richard stared at the animal more closely. “It’s
that
rat? Yes, we’ve met. Actually, I threw the TV remote control at it.” Some of the people standing around looked shocked. The thin girl actually squeaked. Richard hardly noticed them; at least something was familiar in this madness. “Hello, Ratty,” he said. “Good to see you again. Do you know where Door is?”

“Ratty!” said the girl in something between a squeak and a horrified swallow. She had a large, water-stained red button pinned to her ragged clothes, the kind that comes attached to birthday cards. It said, in yellow letters,
I AM 11
.

Lord Rat-speaker waved his glass dagger admonishingly at Richard. “You must not address Master Longtail, save through me,” he said. The rat squeaked an order. The man’s face fell. “Him?” he said, looking at Richard disdainfully. “Look, I can’t spare a soul. How about if I simply slice his throat and send him down to the Sewer Folk . . . . ”

The rat chittered once more, decisively, then leapt from the man’s shoulder onto the ground and vanished into one of the many holes that lined the walls.

The Lord Rat-speaker stood up. A hundred eyes were fixed on him. He turned back to the hall and looked at his subjects, crouched beside their greasy fires. “I don’t know what you lot are all looking at,” he shouted. “Who’s turning the spits, eh? You want the grub to burn? There’s nothing to see. Go on. Get-get away with the lot of you.” Richard stood up, nervously. His left leg had gotten numb, and he rubbed life into it, as it prickled with pins and needles. Lord Rat-speaker looked at Iliaster. “He’s got to be taken to the market. Master Longtail’s orders.”

Iliaster shook his head, and spat onto the ground. “Well, I’m not taking him,” he said. “More than my life’s worth, that journey. You rat-speakers have always been good to me, but I can’t go back there. You know that.”

The Lord Rat-speaker nodded. He put his dagger away, in the furs of his robe. Then he smiled at Richard with yellow teeth. “You don’t know how lucky you were, just then,” he said.

“Yes I do,” said Richard. “I really do.”

“No,” said the man, “you don’t. You really don’t.” And he shook his head and said to himself, marvelling, “ ‘Ratty.’ ”

The Lord Rat-speaker took Iliaster by the arm, and the two of them walked a little way out of earshot and began to talk, darting looks back at Richard as they did so.

The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard’s bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen. “You know, that was going to be my breakfast,” said Richard. She looked up at him guiltily. “My name’s Richard. What’s yours?”

The girl, who, he realized, had already managed to eat most of the fruit that Richard had brought with him, swallowed the last of the banana and hesitated. Then she half-smiled, and said something that sounded a lot like Anaesthesia. “I was hungry,” she said.

“Well, so’m I,” he told her.

She glanced at the little fires across the room. Then she looked back at Richard. She smiled again. “Do you like cat?” she said.

“Yes,” said Richard. “I quite like cats.”

Anaesthesia looked relieved. “Thigh?” she asked. “Or breast?”

The girl called Door walked down the court, followed by the marquis de Carabas. There were a hundred other little courts and mews and alleys in London just like this one, tiny spurs of old-time, unchanged for three hundred years. Even the smell of piss here was the same as it had been in Pepys’s time, three hundred years before. There was still an hour until dawn, but the sky was beginning to lighten, turning a stark, leaden color. Strands of mist hung like livid ghosts on the air.

The door was roughly boarded up and covered with stained posters for forgotten bands and long-closed nightclubs. The two of them stopped in front of it, and the marquis eyed it, all boards and nails and posters, and he appeared unimpressed; but then, unimpressed was his default state.