by Neil Gaiman
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. Vandemar’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 h
ead, 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.
“So this is the entrance?” he said.
She nodded. “One of them.”
He folded his arms. “Well? Say ‘Open sesame,’ or whatever it is that you do.”
“I don’t want to do this,” she said. “I’m really not sure that we’re doing the right thing.”
“Very well,” he unfolded his arms. “I’ll be seeing you, then.” He turned on his heel and began to walk back the way that they had come. Door seized his arm. “You’d abandon me?” she asked. “Just like that?”
He grinned, without humor. “Certainly. I’m a very busy man. Things to see. People to do.”
“Look, hold on.” She let go of his sleeve, bit her lower lip. “The last time I was here . . .” she trailed off.
“The last time you were here, you found your family dead. Well, there you are. You don’t have to explain it anymore. If we aren’t going in, then our business relationship is at an end.”
She looked up at him, her elfin face pale in the pre-dawn light. “And that’s all?”
“I could wish you the best of luck in your future career, but I’m afraid I rather doubt you’ll live long enough to have one.”
“You’re a piece of work, aren’t you?”
He said nothing. She walked back toward the door. “Well,” she said. “Come on. I’ll take us in.” Door put her left hand on the boarded-up door, and with her right hand she took the marquis’s huge brown hand. Her tiny fingers twined into his larger ones. She closed her eyes.
. . . something whispered and shivered and changed . . .
. . . and the door collapsed into darkness.
The memory was fresh, only a few days old: Door moved through the House Without Doors calling “I’m home,” and “Hello?” She slipped from the anteroom to the dining room, to the library, to the drawing room; no one answered. She moved to another room.
The swimming pool was an indoor Victorian structure, constructed of marble and of cast iron. Her father had found it when he was younger, abandoned and about to be demolished, and he had woven it into the fabric of the House Without Doors. Perhaps in the world outside, in London Above, the room had long been destroyed and forgotten. Door had no idea where any of the rooms of her house were, physically. Her grandfather had constructed the house, taking a room from here, a room from there, all through London, discrete and doorless; her father had added to it.
She walked along the side of the old swimming pool, pleased to be home, puzzled by the absence of her family. And then she looked down.
There was someone floating in the water, trailing twin clouds of blood behind him, one from the throat, one from the groin. It was her brother, Arch. His eyes were open wide and sightless. She realized that her mouth was open. She could hear herself screaming.
“That hurt,” said the marquis. He rubbed his forehead, hard, twisted his head around on his neck, as if he were trying to ease a sudden, painful crick.
“Memories,” she explained. “They’re imprinted in the walls.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You could have warned me.”
They were in a huge white room. Every wall was covered with pictures. Each picture was of a different room. The white room contained no doors: no openings of any kind. “Interesting décor,” acknowledged the marquis.
“This is the entrance hall. We can go from here to any room in the House. They are all linked.”
“Where are the other rooms located?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Miles away, probably. They’re scattered all over the Underside.”
The marquis had managed to cover the whole room in a series of impatient strides. “Quite remarkable. An associative house, every room of which is located somewhere else. So imaginative. Your grandfather was a man of vision, Door.”
“I never knew him.” She swallowed, then continued, talking to herself as much as to him. “We should have been safe here. Nobody should have been able to hurt us. Only my family could move around it.”
“Let’s hope your father’s journal gives us some clues,” he said. “Where do we start looking?” Door shrugged. “You’re certain he kept a journal?” he pressed.
She nodded. “He used to go into his study, and private the links until he’d finished dictating.”
“We’ll start in the study, then.”
“But I looked there. I did. I looked there. When I was cleaning up the body . . .” And she began to cry, in low, raging sobs, that sounded like they were being tugged from inside her.
“There. There,” said the marquis de Carabas, awkwardly, patting her shoulder. And he added, for good measure, “There.” He did not comfort well.
Door’s odd-colored eyes were filled with tears. “Can you . . . can you just give me a sec? I’ll be fine.” He nodded and walked to the far end of the room. When he looked back she was still standing there, on her own, silhouetted in the white entrance chamber filled with pictures of rooms, and she was hugging herself, and shuddering, and crying like a little girl.
Richard was still upset about the loss of his bag.
The Lord Rat-speaker remained unmoved. He stated baldly that the rat—Master Longtail—had said nothing at all about returning Richard’s things. Just that he was to be taken to market. Then he told Anaesthesia that she was taking the Upworlder to the market, and that, yes, it was an order. And to stop snivelling, and to get a move on. He told Richard that if he, Lord Rat-speaker, ever saw him, Richard, again, then he, Richard, would be in a great deal of trouble. He reiterated that Richard did not know how lucky he was, and, ignoring Richard’s requests that he return Richard’s stuff—or at least the wallet—he led them to a door and locked it behind them.
> Richard and Anaesthesia walked into the darkness side by side.
She carried an improvised lamp made of a candle, a can, some wire, and a wide-mouthed glass lemonade bottle. Richard was surprised at how quickly his eyes became used to the near darkness. They seemed to be walking through a succession of underground vaults and storage cellars. Sometimes he thought he could see movement in far corners of the vaults, but whether human, or rat, or something else altogether, it was always gone by the time they reached the place it had been. When he tried to talk to Anaesthesia about the movements, she hissed him to silence.
He felt a cold draught on his face. The rat-girl squatted without warning, put down her candle-lamp, and tugged and pulled hard at a metal grille set in the wall. It opened suddenly, sending her sprawling. She motioned Richard to come through. He crouched, edged through the hole in the wall; after about a foot, the floor stopped completely. “Excuse me,” whispered Richard. “There’s a hole here.”
“It’s not a big drop,” she told him. “Go on.”
She shut the grille behind her. She was now uncomfortably close to Richard. “Here,” she said. She gave him the handle of her little lamp to hold, and she clambered down into the darkness. “There,” she said. “That wasn’t that bad, was it?” Her face was a few feet below Richard’s dangling feet. “Here. Pass me the lamp.”
He lowered it down to her. She had to jump to take it from him. “Now,” she whispered. “Come on.” He edged nervously forward, climbed over the edge, hung for a moment, then let go. He landed on his hands and feet in soft, wet mud. He wiped the mud off his hands onto his sweater. A few feet forward, and Anaesthesia was opening another door. They went through it, and she pulled it closed behind them. “We can talk now,” she said. “Not loud. But we can. If you want to.”
“Oh. Thanks,” said Richard. He couldn’t think of anything to say. “So. Um. You’re a rat, are you?” he said.
She giggled, like a Japanese girl, covering her hand with her face as she laughed. Then she shook her head, and said, “I should be so lucky. I wish. No, I’m a rat-speaker. We talk to rats.”