by Neil Gaiman
“What, just chat to them?”
“Oh no. We do stuff for them. I mean,” and her tone of voice implied that this was something that might never have occurred to Richard unassisted, “there are some things rats can’t do, you know. I mean, not having fingers, and thumbs, an’ things. Hang on—” She pressed him against the wall, suddenly, and clamped a filthy hand over his mouth. Then she blew out the candle.
Nothing happened.
Then he heard distant voices. They waited, in the darkness and the cold. Richard shivered.
People walked past them, talking in low tones. When all sounds had died away, Anaesthesia took her hand from Richard’s mouth, relit the candle, and they walked on. “Who were they?” asked Richard.
She shrugged. “It dun’t matter,” she said.
“Then what makes you think that they wouldn’t have been pleased to see us?”
She looked at him rather sadly, like a mother trying to explain to an infant that, yes this flame was hot, too. All flames were hot. Trust her, please. “Come on,” she said. “I know a shortcut. We can nip through London Above for a bit.” They went up some stone steps, and the girl pushed open a door. They stepped through, and the door shut behind them.
Richard looked around, puzzled. They were standing on the Embankment, the miles-long walkway that the Victorians had built along the the north shore of the Thames, covering the drainage system and the newly created District Line of the Underground, and replacing the stinking mudflats that had festered along the banks of the Thames for the previous five hundred years. It was still night—or perhaps it was night once more. He was unsure how long they had been walking through the underplaces and the dark.
There was no moon, but the night sky was a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars. There were streetlights too, and lights on buildings and on bridges, which looked like earth-bound stars, and they glimmered, repeated, as they were reflected with the city in the night water of the Thames. It’s fairyland, thought Richard.
Anaesthesia blew out her candle. And Richard said, “Are you sure this is the right way?”
“Yes,” she said. “Pretty sure.”
They were approaching a wooden bench, and the moment he set eyes on it, it seemed to Richard that that bench was one of the most desirable objects he had ever seen. “Can we sit down?” he asked. “Just for a minute.”
She shrugged. They sat down at opposite ends of the bench. “On Friday,” said Richard, “I was with one of the finest investment analyst firms in London.”
“What’s a investment an’ a thing?”
“It was my job.”
She nodded, satisfied. “Right. And . . . ?”
“Just reminding myself, really. Yesterday . . . it was like I didn’t exist anymore, to anybody up here.”
“That’s ’cos you don’t,” explained Anaesthesia.
A late-night couple, who had been slowly walking along the Embankment toward them, holding hands, sat down in the middle of the bench, between Richard and Anaesthesia, and commenced to kiss each other, passionately. “Excuse me,” said Richard to them. The man had his hand inside the woman’s sweater and was moving it around enthusiastically, a lone traveler discovering an unexplored continent. “I want my life back,” Richard told the couple.
“I love you,” said the man to the woman.
“But your wife—” she said, licking the side of his face.
“Fuck her,” said the man.
“Don’ wanna fuck her,” said the woman, and she giggled, drunkenly. “Wanna fuck you . . .” She put a hand on his crotch and giggled some more.
“Come on,” said Richard to Anaesthesia, feeling that the bench had started to become a less desirable neighborhood. They got up and walked away. Anaesthesia peered back, curiously, at the couple on the bench, who were gradually becoming more horizontal.
Richard said nothing. “Something wrong?” asked Anaesthesia.
“Only everything,” said Richard. “Have you always lived down there?”
“Nah. I was born up here,” she hesitated. “You don’t want to hear about me.” Richard realized, almost surprised, that he really did.
“I do. Really.”
She fingered the rough quartz beads that hung in a necklace around her neck, and she swallowed. “There was me and my mother and the twins . . .” she said, and then she stopped talking. Her mouth clamped shut.
“Go on,” said Richard. “It’s all right. Really it is. Honest.”
The girl nodded. She took a deep breath, and then she began to talk, without looking at him as she talked, her eyes fixed on the ground ahead of her. “Well, my mother had me an’ my sisters, but she got a bit funny in the head. One day I got home from school, and she was crying and crying, and she didn’t have any clothes on, and she was breaking stuff. Plates and stuff. But she never hurt us. She never did. The lady from the social services came and took the twins away, an’ I had to go and stay with my aunt. She was living with this man. I didn’t like him. And when she was out of the house . . .” The girl paused; she was quiet for so long that Richard wondered if she had finished. Then she began once more, “Anyway. He used to hurt me. Do other stuff. In the end, I told my aunt, an’ she started hitting me. Said I was lying. Said she’d have the police on me. But I wasn’t lying. So I run away. It was my birthday.”
They had reached the Albert Bridge, a kitsch monument spanning the Thames, joining Battersea to the south with the Chelsea end of the Embankment, a bridge hung with thousands of tiny white lights.
“I didn’t have anywhere to go. And it was so cold,” said Anaesthesia, and she stopped again. “I slept on the streets. I’d sleep in the day, when it was a bit warmer, and walk around at night, just to keep moving. I was only eleven. Stealing bread an’ milk off people’s doorsteps to eat. Hated doing that so I started hanging around the street markets, taking the rotten apples an’ oranges an’ things people threw away. Then I got really sick. I was living under an overpass in Notting Hill. When I come to, I was in London Below. The rats had found me.”
“Have you ever tried to return to all this?” he asked, gesturing. Quiet, warm, inhabited houses. Late-night cars. The real world . . . she shook her head. All fire burns, little baby. You’ll learn. “You can’t. It’s one or the other. Nobody ever gets both.”
“I’m sorry,” said Door, hesitantly. Her eyes were red, and she looked as if she had been vigorously blowing her nose and scrubbing her tears from her eyes and cheeks.
The marquis had been amusing himself while he waited for her to collect herself by playing a game of knucklebones with some old coins and bones he kept in one of the many pockets of his coat. He looked up at her coldly. “Indeed?”
She bit her lower lip. “No. Not really. I’m not sorry. I’ve been running and hiding and running so hard that . . . this was the first chance I’ve really had to . . .” she stopped.
The marquis swept up the coins and the bones, and returned them to their pocket. “After you,” he said. He followed her back to the wall of pictures. She put one hand on the painting of her father’s study and took the marquis’s large black hand with the other.
. . . reality twisted . . .
They were in the conservatory, watering the plants. First Portia would water a plant, directing the flow of the water toward the soil at the base of the plant, avoiding the leaves and the blossoms. “Water the shoes,” she said to her youngest daughter. “Not the clothes.”
Ingress had her own little watering can. She was so proud of it. It was just like her mother’s, made of steel, painted bright green. As her mother finished with each plant, Ingress would water it with her tiny watering can. “On the shoes,” she told her mother. She began laughing, then, spontaneous little-girl laughter.
And her mother laughed too, until foxy Mr. Croup pulled her hair back, hard and sudden, and cut her white throat from ear to ear.
“Hello, Daddy,” said Door, quietly.
She touched the bust of her father with
her fingers, stroking the side of his face. A thin, ascetic man, almost bald. Caesar as Prospero, thought the marquis de Carabas. He felt a little sick. That last image had hurt. Still: he was in Lord Portico’s study. That was a first.
The marquis took in the room, eyes sliding from detail to detail. The stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling; the leather-bound books, an astrolabe, convex and concave mirrors, odd scientific instruments; there were maps on the walls, of lands and cities de Carabas had never heard of; a desk, covered in handwritten correspondence. The white wall behind the desk was marred by a reddish-brown stain. There was a small portrait of Door’s family on the desk. The marquis stared at it. “Your mother and your sister, your father, and your brothers. All dead. How did you escape?” he asked.
She lowered her hand. “I was lucky. I’d gone off exploring for a few days . . . did you know there are still some Roman soldiers camped out by the Kilburn River?”
The marquis had not known this, which irritated him. “Hmm. How many?”
She shrugged. “A few dozen. They were deserters from the Nineteenth Legion, I think. My Latin’s a bit patchy. Anyway, when I got back here . . .” She paused, swallowed, her opal-colored eyes brimming with tears.
“Pull yourself together,” said the marquis, shortly. “We need your father’s journal. We have to find out who did this.”
She frowned at him. “We know who did this. It was Croup and Vandemar—”
He opened a hand, waggled his fingers as he spoke. “They’re arms. Hands. Fingers. There’s a head that ordered it, that wants you dead, too. Those two don’t come cheap.” He looked around the cluttered office. “His journal?” said the marquis.
“It’s not here,” she said. “I told you. I looked.”
“I was under the misapprehension that your family was skilled in locating doors, both obvious and otherwise.”
She glowered at him. Then she closed her eyes and put her finger and thumb on each side of the bridge of her nose. Meanwhile, the marquis examined the objects on Portico’s desk. An inkwell; a chess-piece; a bone die; a gold pocket-watch; several quill-feathers and . . .
Interesting.
It was a small statue of a boar, or a crouching bear, or perhaps a bull. It was hard to tell. It was the size of a large chess-piece, and it had been roughly carved out of black obsidian. It reminded him of something, but of what he could not say. He picked it up casually, turned it over, curled his fingers around it.
Door lowered her hand from her face. She looked puzzled and confused. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“It is here,” she said, simply. She began to walk through the study, head turning first to one side and then to the other. The marquis slipped the carving discreetly into an inside pocket.
Door stood before a high cabinet. “There,” she said. She reached out a hand: there was a click, and a small panel in the side of the cabinet swung open. Door reached into the darkness and removed something roughly the size and shape of a small cannonball. She passed it to the marquis. It was a sphere, constructed of old brass and polished wood, inset with polished copper and glass lenses. He took it from her.
“This is it?”
She nodded.
“Well done.”
She looked grave. “I don’t know how I could have missed it before.”
“You were upset,” said the marquis. “I was certain it would be here. And I am so rarely wrong. Now . . .” he held the little wooden globe up. The light caught the polished glass and glinted from the brass and copper fittings. It galled him to admit ignorance about anything, but he said it anyway. “How does this work?”
Anaesthesia led Richard into a small park on the south side of the bridge, then down some stone steps, set beside a wall. She relit her candle-in-a-bottle, and then she opened a workman’s door and closed it behind them. They went down some steps, with the darkness all around them.
“There’s a girl named Door,” said Richard. “She’s a bit younger than you. Do you know her?”
“The Lady Door. I know who she is.”
“So which, um, barony is she part of?”
“No barony. She’s of the House of the Arch. Her family used to be very important.”
“Used to be? Why did they stop?”
“Somebody killed them.”
Yes, he remembered the marquis saying something about that, now. A rat cut across their path. Anaesthesia stopped on the steps and performed a deep curtsey. The rat paused. “Sire,” she said, to the rat. “Hi,” said Richard. The rat looked at them for a heartbeat, then it darted off down the steps. “So,” said Richard. “What is a floating market?”
“It’s very big,” she said. “But rat-speakers hardly ever need to go to the market. To tell the truth—” She hesitated. “Nah. You’ll laugh at me.”
“I won’t,” said Richard, honestly.
“Well,” said the thin girl. “I’m a little scared.”
“Scared? Of the market?”
They had reached the bottom of the steps. Anaesthesia hesitated and then turned left. “Oh. No. There’s a truce in the market. If anyone hurt anyone there, the whole of London Below would be down on them like a ton of sewage.”
“So what are you scared of?”
“Getting there. They hold it in a different place every time. It moves around. And to get to the place it’ll be tonight . . .” she fingered the quartz beads around her neck, nervously. “We’ll have to go through a really nasty neighborhood.” She did sound scared.
Richard suppressed the urge to put an arm around her. “And where would that be?” he asked. She turned to him, pushed the hair from her eyes, and told him.
“Knightsbridge,” repeated Richard, and he began to chuckle, gently.
The girl turned away. “See?” she said. “I said you’d laugh.”
The deep tunnels had been dug in the 1920s, for a high-speed extension to the Northern Line of London’s Underground Railway system. During the Second World War troops had been quartered there in the thousands, their waste pumped up by compressed air to the level of the sewers far above. Both sides of the tunnels had been lined with metal bunk beds for the troops to sleep on. When the war ended the bunk beds had stayed, and on their wire bases cardboard boxes were stored, each box filled with letters and files and papers: secrets, of the dullest kind, stored down deep, to be forgotten. The need for economy had closed the deep tunnels completely in the early 1990s. The boxes of secrets were removed, to be scanned and stored on computers, or shredded, or burned.
Varney made his home in the deepest of the deep tunnels, far beneath Camden Town Tube. He had piled abandoned metal bunk beds in front of the only entrance. Then he had decorated. Varney liked weapons. He made his own, out of whatever he could find, or take, or steal, parts of cars and rescued bits of machinery, which he turned into hooks and shivs, crossbows and arbalests, small mangonels and trebuchets for breaking walls, cudgels, glaives and knobkerries. They hung on the wall of the deep tunnel, or sat in corners, looking unfriendly.
Varney looked like a bull might look, if the bull were to be shaved, dehorned, covered in tattoos, and suffered from complete dental breakdown. Also, he snored. The oil lamp next to his head was turned down low. Varney slept on a pile of rags, snoring and snuffling, with the hilt of a homemade two-bladed sword on the ground beside his hand.
A hand turned up the oil lamp.
Varney had the two-bladed sword in his hand, and he was on his feet almost before his eyes were open. He blinked, stared around him. There was no one there: nothing had disturbed the pile of bunk beds blocking the door. He began to lower the sword.
A voice said, “Psst.”
“Hh?” said Varney.
“Surprise,” said Mr. Croup, stepping into the light.
Varney took a step back: a mistake. There was a knife at his temple, the point of the blade next to his eye. “Further movements are not recommended,” said Mr. Croup, helpfully. “Mister Vandemar might have a little accident
with his old toad-sticker. Most accidents do occur in the home. Is that not so, Mister Vandemar?”
“I don’t trust statistics,” said Mr. Vandemar’s blank voice. A gloved hand reached down from behind Varney, crushed his sword, and dropped the twisted thing to the floor.
“How are you, Varney?” asked Mr. Croup. “Well, we trust? Yes? In fine form, fetlock and fettle for the market tonight? Do you know who we are?”
Varney did the nearest thing he could to a nod that didn’t actually involve moving any muscles. He knew who Croup and Vandemar were. His eyes were searching the walls. Yes, there: the morning-star: a spiked wooden ball, studded with nails, on a chain, in the far corner of the room . . .
“There is talk that a certain young lady will be auditioning bodyguards this evening. Had you thought of trying out for the task?” Mr. Croup picked at his tombstone teeth. “Enunciate clearly.”
Varney picked up the morning-star with his mind. It was his Knack. Gentle, now . . . slowly . . . He edged it off the hook and pulled it up toward the top of the tunnel archWith his mouth, he said, “Varney’s the best bravo and guard in the Underside. They say I’m the best since Hunter’s day.”
Varney mentally positioned the morning-star in the shadows above and behind Mr. Croup’s head. He would crush Croup’s skull first, then he’d take Vandemar . . .
The morning-star plunged toward Mr. Croup’s head: Varney flung himself down, away from the knife-blade at his eye. Mr. Croup did not look up. He did not turn. He simply moved his head, obscenely fast, and the morning-star crashed past him, into the floor, where it threw up chips of brick and concrete. Mr. Vandemar picked Varney up with one hand. “Hurt him?” he asked his partner.
Mr. Croup shook his head: not yet. To Varney, he said, “Not bad. So, ‘best bravo and guard,’ we want you to get yourself to the market tonight. We want you to do whatever you have to, to become that certain young lady’s personal bodyguard. Then, when you get the job, one thing you don’t forget. You may guard her from the rest of the world, but when we want her, we take her. Got it?”