by Neil Gaiman
“Door?” he said.
She looked furious; she looked beyond fury. “Temple and Arch, Richard. I don’t believe it. What are you doing here?”
“It’s nice to see you, too,” said Richard, weakly. He sat up and wondered if he was suffering from a concussion. He wondered how he’d know if he was, and he wondered why he had ever thought that Door would have been pleased to see him. She stared intently at her nails, nostrils flaring, as if she did not trust herself to say anything else.
The big man with the very bad teeth, the man who had knocked Richard over on the bridge, was fighting with a dwarf. They were fighting with crowbars, and the fight was not as unequal as one might have imagined. The dwarf was preternaturally fast: he rolled, he struck, he bounced, he dove; his every movement made Varney appear lumbering and awkward by comparison.
Richard turned to the marquis, who was watching the fight intently. “What is happening?” he asked.
The marquis spared him a glance, and then returned his gaze to the action in front of them. “You,” he said, “are out of your league, in deep shit, and, I would imagine, a few hours away from an untimely and undoubtedly messy end. We, on the other hand, are auditioning bodyguards.” Varney connected his crowbar with the dwarf, who instantly stopped bouncing and darting, and instantly began lying insensible. “I think we’ve seen enough,” said the marquis, loudly. “Thank you all. Mister Varney, if you could wait behind?”
“Why did you have to come here?” Door said to Richard, frostily.
“I didn’t really have much choice,” said Richard.
She sighed. The marquis was walking around the perimeter, dismissing the various bodyguards who had already auditioned, distributing a few words of praise here, of advice there. Varney waited patiently, off to one side. Richard essayed a smile at Door. It was ignored. “How did you get to the market?” she asked.
“There are these rat people—” Richard began.
“Rat-speakers,” she said.
“And you see, the rat who brought us the marquis’s message—”
“Master Longtail,” she said.
“Well, he told them they had to get me here.”
She raised an eyebrow, cocked her head slightly on one side. “A rat-speaker brought you here?”
He nodded. “Most of the way. Her name was Anaesthesia. She . . . well, something happened to her. On the bridge. This other lady brought me the rest of the way here. I think she was a . . . you know.” He hesitated, then said it. “Hooker.”
The marquis had returned. He stood in front of Varney, who looked obscenely pleased with himself. “Weapons expertise?” asked the marquis.
“Whew,” said Varney. “Put it like this. If you can cut someone with it, blow someone’s head off with it, break a bone with it, or make a nasty hole in someone with it, then Varney’s the master of it.”
“Previous satisfied employers include?”
“Olympia, the Shepherd Queen, the Crouch Enders. I done security for the May Fair for a bit, as well.”
“Well,” said the marquis de Carabas. “We’re all very impressed with your skill.”
“I had heard,” said a female voice, “that you had put out a call for bodyguards. Not for enthusiastic amateurs.” Her skin was the color of burnt caramel, and her smile would have stopped a revolution. She was dressed entirely in soft mottled gray and brown leathers. Richard recognized her immediately.
“That’s her,” Richard whispered to Door. “The hooker.”
“Varney,” said Varney, affronted, “is the best guard and bravo in the Underside. Everyone knows that.”
The woman looked at the marquis. “You’ve finished the trials?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Varney.
“Not necessarily,” said the marquis.
“Then,” she told him. “I would like to audition.”
There was a beat before the marquis de Carabas said, “Very well,” and stepped backward.
Varney was undoubtedly dangerous, not to mention a bully, a sadist, and actively harmful to the physical health of those around him. What he was not, though, was particularly quick on the uptake. He stared at the marquis as the penny dropped, and dropped, and kept on dropping. Finally, in disbelief, he asked, “I have to fight her?”
“Yes,” said the leather woman. “Unless you’d like a little nap, first.” Varney began to laugh: a manic giggle. He stopped laughing a moment later, when the woman kicked him, hard, in the solar plexus, and he toppled like a tree.
Near his hand, on the floor, was the crowbar he had used in the fight with the dwarf. He grabbed it, slammed it into the woman’s face—or would have, had she not ducked out of the way. She clapped her open hands onto his ears, very fast. The crowbar went flying across the room. Still reeling from the pain in his ears, Varney pulled a knife from his boot. He was not entirely sure what happened after that: only that the world swung out from under him, and then he was lying, face down, on the ground, with blood coming from his ears, and his own knife at his throat, while the marquis de Carabas was saying,
“Enough!”
The woman looked up, still holding Varney’s knife to his throat. “Well?” she said.
“Very impressive,” said the marquis. Door nodded.
Richard was thunderstruck: it had been like watching Emma Peel, Bruce Lee, and a particularly vicious tornado, all rolled into one and sprinkled with a generous helping of a mongoose killing a king cobra. That was how she had moved. That was how she had fought.
Richard normally found displays of real violence unnerving. But he found watching this woman in action exhilarating, as if she were finding a part of him he had not known existed. It seemed utterly right, in this unreal mirror of the London he had known, that she should be here and that she should be fighting so dangerously and so well.
She was part of London Below. He understood that now. And as he thought that, he thought about London Above, and a world in which no one fought like this—no one needed to fight like this—a world of safety and of sanity and, for a moment, the homesickness engulfed him like a fever.
The woman looked down at Varney. “Thank you, Mister Varney,” she said, politely. “I’m afraid we won’t be needing your services after all.” She got off him, and put his knife away in her belt.
“And you are called?” asked the marquis.
“I’m called Hunter,” she said.
Nobody said anything. Then Door spoke, hesitantly, “The Hunter?”
“That’s right,” said Hunter, and she brushed the dust of the floor from her leather leggings. “I’m back.”
From somewhere a bell sounded, twice, a deep bonging noise that made Richard’s teeth vibrate. “Five minutes,” muttered the marquis. Then he said, to the remains of the crowd, “I think we’ve found our bodyguard. Thank you all very much. Nothing more to see.”
Hunter walked over to Door, and looked her up and down. “Can you stop people from killing me?” asked Door. Hunter inclined her head toward Richard. “I saved his life three times today, crossing the bridge, coming to the market.”
Varney, who had stumbled to his feet, picked up the crowbar with his mind. The marquis watched him do it; he said nothing.
The ghost of a smile hovered about Door’s lips. “That’s funny,” she said. “Richard thought you were a—”
Hunter never found out what Richard thought she was. The bar came hurtling toward her head. She simply reached out a hand and caught it: it thwapped, satisfyingly, into the palm of her hand.
She walked over to Varney. “Is this yours?” she asked. He bared his teeth at her, yellow and black and brown. “Right now,” said Hunter, “we’re under Market Truce. But if you try something like that again, I’ll waive the truce, and I’ll break off both your arms and make you carry them home in your teeth. Now,” she continued, bending his wrist behind his back, “say sorry, nicely.”
“Ow,” said Varney.
“Yes?” she said, encouragingly.
He spat it out as if it were choking him. “I’m sorry.” She let him go. Varney backed away to a safe distance, plainly scared and furious, watching Hunter. When he reached the door to the Food Halls, he hesitated, and shouted, “You’re dead. You’re fucking dead, you are!” in a voice that hovered on the edge of tears, and then he turned, and he ran from the room.
“Amateurs,” sighed Hunter.
They walked back through the store the way that Richard had come. The bell he had heard was now tolling deeply and continually. When they came upon it, he saw that it was a huge brass bell, suspended on a wooden frame, with a rope suspended from the clapper. It was being tolled by a large black man, wearing the black robes of a Dominican monk, and it had been set up next to Harrods’ gourmet jelly bean stand.
Impressive as the market had been to watch, Richard found the speed at which it was being dismantled, broken down, and put away even more impressive. All evidence that it had ever been there was vanishing: stalls were being taken apart, loaded onto people’s backs, hauled off into the streets. Richard noticed Old Bailey, his arms filled with his crude signs and with bird cages, stumbling out of the store. The old man waved happily at Richard and vanished off into the night.
The crowds thinned, the market vanished, and almost instantly the ground floor of Harrods looked as usual, as sedate, elegant, and clean as any time he had walked around it in Jessica’s wake on a Saturday afternoon. It was as if the market had never existed.
“Hunter,” said the marquis. “I’ve heard of you, of course. Where have you been, all this time?”
“Hunting,” she said, simply. Then, to Door. “Can you take orders?”
Door nodded. “If I have to.”
“Good. Then maybe I can keep you alive,” said Hunter. “If I take the job.”
The marquis stopped. His eyes flickered over her, distrustfully. “You said, if you take the job . . . ?”
Hunter opened the door, and they stepped out onto the pavement of London at night. It had rained while they had been at the market, and the streetlights now glimmered on the wet tarmac. “I’ve taken it,” said Hunter.
Richard stared at the glistening street. It all seemed so normal, so quiet, so sane. For a moment, he felt that all he needed to get his life back would be to hail a taxi and tell it to take him home. And then he would sleep the night through in his own bed. But a taxi would not see him or stop for him, and he had nowhere to go, even if one did.
“I’m tired,” he said.
No one said anything. Door would not meet his eyes, the marquis was cheerfully ignoring him, and Hunter was treating him as an irrelevance. He felt like a small child, unwanted, following the bigger children around, and that made him irritated. “Look,” he said, clearing his throat, “I know you are all very busy people. But what about me?”
The marquis turned and stared at him, eyes huge and white in his dark face. “You?” he said. “What about you?”
“Well,” said Richard. “How do I get back to normal again? It’s like I’ve walked into a nightmare. Last week everything made sense, and now nothing makes sense . . .” He trailed off. Swallowed. “I want to know how to get my life back,” he explained.
“You won’t get it back traveling with us, Richard,” said Door. “It’s going to be hard enough for you anyway. I . . . I really am sorry.”
Hunter, in the lead, knelt down on the pavement. She took a small metal rod from her belt and used it to unlock the cover to a sewer. She pulled up the sewer cover, looked into it warily, climbed down, then ushered Door into the sewer. Door did not look at Richard as she went down. The marquis scratched the side of his nose. “Young man,” he said, “understand this: there are two Londons. There’s London Above—that’s where you lived—and then there’s London Below—the Underside—inhabited by the people who fell through the cracks in the world. Now you’re one of them. Good night.”
He began to climb down the sewer ladder. Richard said, “Wait,” and caught the sewer cover before it could close. He followed the marquis down. It smelled like drains at the top of the sewer—a dead, soapy, cabbagey smell. He expected it to get worse as he went down, but instead the smell quickly dissipated as he approached the floor of the sewer. Gray water ran, shallow but fast, along the bottom of the brick tunnel. Richard stepped into it. He could see the lights of the others up ahead, and he ran and splashed down the tunnel until he caught up with them.
“Go away,” said the marquis.
“No,” he said.
Door glanced up at him. “I am really sorry, Richard,” she said.
The marquis stepped between Richard and Door. “You can’t go back to your old home or your old job or your old life,” he said to Richard, almost gently. “None of those things exist. Up there, you don’t exist.” They had reached a junction: a place where three tunnels came together. Door and Hunter set off along one of them, the one that was empty of water, and they did not look back. The marquis lingered.
“You’ll just have to make the best of it down here,” he said to Richard, “in the sewers and the magic and the dark.” And then he smiled, hugely, whitely: a gleaming grin, monumental in its insincerity. “Well—delightful to see you again. Best of luck. If you can survive for the next day or two,” he confided, “you might even make it through a whole month.” And with that he turned and strode off through the sewer, after Door and Hunter.
Richard leaned against a wall and listened to their footsteps, echoing away, and to the rush of the water running past on its way to the pumping stations of East London, and the sewage works. “Shit,” he said. And then, to his surprise, for the first time since his father died, alone in the dark, Richard Mayhew began to cry.
The Underground station was quite empty, and quite dark. Varney walked through it, keeping close to walls, darting nervous looks behind him, and in front of him, and from side to side. He had picked the station at random, had headed for it over the rooftops and through the shadows, making certain that he was not being followed. He was not heading back to his lair in the Camden Town deep tunnels. Too risky. There were other places where Varney had cached weapons and food. He would go to ground for a little while, until this all blew over.
He stopped beside a ticket machine and listened, in the darkness: absolute silence. Reassured that he was alone, he allowed himself to relax. He stopped at the top of the spiral staircase and drew a deep breath.
An oily voice from beside him said conversationally, “Varney’s the finest bravo and guard in the Underside. Everyone knows that. Mister Varney told us so himself.” A voice from the other side of him responded, dully, “It’s not nice to lie, Mister Croup.”
In the pitch darkness, Mr. Croup expanded on his theme. “It isn’t, Mister Vandemar. I have to say, I regard it as a personal betrayal, and I was deeply wounded by it. And disappointed. When you don’t have any redeeming features, you don’t take particularly kindly to disappointment, do you, Mister Vandemar?”
“Not kindly at all, Mister Croup.”
Varney threw himself forward, and ran, headlong, in the dark, down the spiral staircase. A voice from the top of the stairs, Mr. Croup’s: “Really,” it said, “we ought to look upon it as a mercy killing.”
The sound of Varney’s feet clattered off the metal railings, echoed throughout the stairwell. He puffed, and he panted, his shoulders glancing off the walls, tumbling blindly downwards in the dark. He reached the bottom of the steps, next to the sign warning travelers that there were 259 steps up to the top, and only healthy people should even think about attempting it. Everyone else, suggested the sign, should use the elevator.
The elevator?
Something clanked, and the elevator doors opened, magnificently slowly, flooding the passageway with light. Varney fumbled for his knife: cursed, when he realized the Hunter-bitch still had it. He reached for the machete in his shoulder sheath. It was gone.
He heard a polite cough behind him, and he turned.
Mr. Vandemar was sitting on the s
teps, at the bottom of the spiral staircase. He was picking his fingernails with Varney’s machete.
And then Mr. Croup fell upon him, all teeth and talons and little blades; and Varney never had a chance to scream. “Bye,” said Mr. Vandemar, impassively, and he continued paring his nails. After that the blood began to flow. Wet, red blood in enormous quantities, for Varney was a big man, and he had been keeping it all inside. When Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar were finished, however, one would have been hard put even to notice the slight stain on the floor at the bottom of the spiral staircase.
The next time the floors were washed, it was gone forever.
Hunter was in the lead. Door walked in the middle. The marquis de Carabas took up the rear. None of them had said a word since leaving Richard half an hour earlier.
Door stopped, suddenly. “We can’t do this,” she said, flatly. “We can’t leave him back there.”
“Of course we can,” said the marquis. “We did.”
She shook her head. She had felt guilty and stupid ever since she saw Richard, lying on his back beneath Ruislip, at the audition. She was tired of it.
“Don’t be foolish,” said the marquis.
“He saved my life,” she told him. “He could have left me on the sidewalk. He didn’t.”
It was her fault. She knew that was true. She had opened a door to someone who could help her, and help her he had. He had taken her somewhere warm, and he had cared for her, and he had brought her help. The action of helping her had tumbled him from his world into hers.
It was foolish to even think about bringing him with them. They could not afford to bring someone with them: she was unsure that the three of them would be able to take care of themselves on the journey that confronted them.
She wondered, briefly, if it were simply the door that she had opened, that had taken her to him, which had allowed him to notice her, or if there were, somehow, more to it than that.
The marquis raised an eyebrow: he was detached, removed, a creature of pure irony. “My dear young lady,” he said. “We are not bringing a guest along on this expedition.”