by Neil Gaiman
And then Gary smiled and said, “Hi. Yeah. I’m Gary Perunu. Can I help you?”
“I don’t think so,” said Richard, coldly, and he walked out of the office, leaving his briefcase behind him.
Richard’s offices were on the third floor of a big, old, drafty building, just off the Strand. Jessica worked about halfway up a large crystalline, mirrored structure in the City of London, fifteen minutes’ walk up the road.
Richard jogged up that road. He got to the Stockton building in ten minutes, walked straight past the uniformed security guards on duty on the ground floor, stepped into the elevator, and went up. The inside of the elevator was mirrored, and he stared at himself as he went up. His tie was half-undone and askew, his coat was ripped, his pants torn, his hair was a sweaty mess . . . . God, he looked awful.
There was a fluting tone, and the elevator door opened. Jessica’s floor was quite opulent, in an underdecorated sort of way. There was a receptionist by the elevator, a poised and elegant creature who looked like her take-home pay beat Richard’s hands down. She was reading Cosmopolitan. She did not look up as Richard came over.
“I need to talk to Jessica Bartram,” said Richard. “It’s important. I have to speak with her.”
The receptionist ignored him, intent upon examining her nails. Richard walked down the corridor until he got to Jessica’s office. He opened the door and went in. She was standing in front of three large posters, each advertising “Angels over England—A Traveling Exhibition,” each with a different image of an angel on it. She turned as he came in, and she smiled warmly at him.
“Jessica. Thank God. Listen, I think I’m going mad or something. It started when I couldn’t get a taxi this morning, and then the office and the Tube and—” He showed her his ragged sleeve. “It’s like I’ve become some kind of non-person.” She smiled at him some more, reassuringly. “Look,” said Richard. “I’m sorry about the other night. Well, not about what I did, but about upsetting you, and . . . look, I’m sorry, and it’s all crazy, and I don’t honestly know what to do.”
And Jessica nodded, and continued to smile sympathetically, and then she said, “You’re going to think I’m absolutely awful, but I have a really dreadful memory for faces. Give me a second, and I know I’ll get it.”
And at that point, Richard knew that it was real, and a heavy dread settled in the pit of his stomach. Whatever madness was happening that day was really happening. It was no joke, no trick or prank. “It’s okay,” he said, dully. “Forget it.”
And he walked away, out the door and down the corridor. He was almost at the lift when she called his name.
“Richard!”
He turned. It had been a joke. Some kind of petty revenge. Something he could explain. “Richard . . . Maybury?” She seemed proud of herself for remembering that much.
“Mayhew,” said Richard, and he got into the elevator, and the doors sang a sad fluting downward trill as they closed behind him.
Richard walked back to his flat, upset and confused and angry. Sometimes he would wave at taxis, but never with any real hope that they would stop, and none of them did. His feet hurt, and his eyes stung, and he knew that soon enough he would wake up from today and a proper Monday, a sensible Monday, a decent, honest Monday would begin.
When he reached the apartment, he filled the bathtub with hot water, abandoned his clothes on the bed, and, naked, walked through the hall and climbed into the relaxing waters. He had almost dozed off when he heard a key turn, a door open and close, and a smooth male voice say, “Of course, you’re the first I’ve shown around today, but I’ve got a list of people as long as your arm who are interested.”
“It’s not as large as I imagined, from the details your office sent us,” said a woman.
“It’s compact, yes. But I like to think of that as a virtue.”
Richard had not bothered locking the bathroom door. He was, after all, the only person there.
A gruffer, rougher male voice said, “Thought you said it was an unfurnished apartment. Looks pretty damned furnished to me.”
“The previous tenant must have left some of his accoutrements behind. Funny. They never told me anything about that.”
Richard stood up in the bathtub. Then, because he was naked, and the people could walk in at any moment, he sat back down. Rather desperately, he looked around the bathroom for a towel. “Oh look, George,” said the woman in the hallway. “Someone’s left a towel on this chair.”
Richard inspected and rejected as poor towel substitutes a loofah, a half-empty bottle of shampoo, and a small yellow rubber duck. “What’s the bathroom like?” asked the woman. Richard grabbed a washcloth and draped it in front of his crotch. Then he stood up, with his back to the wall, and prepared to be mortified. The door was pushed open. Three people walked into the bathroom: a young man in a camel-hair coat, and a middle-aged couple. Richard wondered if they were as embarrassed as he was.
“It’s a bit small,” said the woman.
“Compact,” corrected the camel-hair coat, smoothly. “Easy to take care of.” The woman ran her finger along the side of the sink and wrinkled her nose. “I think we’ve seen it all,” said the middle-aged man. They walked out of the bathroom.
“It would be very convenient for everything,” said the woman. A conversation continued in lower tones. Richard climbed out of the bath and edged over to the door. He spotted the towel on the chair in the hall, and he leaned out and grabbed it. “We’ll take it,” said the woman.
“You will?” said the camel-hair coat.
“It’s just what we want,” she explained. “Or it will be, once we’ve made it homey. Could it be ready for Wednesday?”
“Of course. We’ll have all of this rubbish cleaned out of here tomorrow, no problem.”
Richard, cold and dripping and wrapped in his towel, glared at them from the doorway. “It’s not rubbish,” he said. “It’s my stuff.”
“We’ll pick up the keys from your office, then.”
“Excuse me,” said Richard, plaintively. “I live here.”
They pushed past Richard on their way to the front door. “Pleasure doing business with you,” said the camel-hair coat.
“Can you . . . can any of you hear me? This is my apartment. I live here.”
“If you fax contract details to my office—” said the gruff man, then the door slammed behind them and Richard stood in the hallway of what used to be his apartment. He shivered, in the silence, from the cold. “This,” announced Richard to the world, in direct defiance of the evidence of his senses, “is not happening.” The Batphone shrilled, and its headlights flashed. Richard picked it up, warily. “Hello?”
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. “Bec
ause 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.”
Four
Mr. 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 rainwater, 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.