by Neil Gaiman
There was broken glass there, as well, broken glass in abundance. There were also several mattresses, some of which looked like they had at some point been set on fire. Grass grew up through the springs. An entire ecology had evolved around the ornamental fountain in the center of the well, which had for a long time been neither particularly ornamental nor a fountain. A cracked and leaking water pipe nearby had, with the aid of some rainwater, transformed it into a breeding ground for a number of little frogs who plopped about cheerfully, rejoicing in their freedom from any non-airborne natural predators. Crows and blackbirds and even occasional seagulls, however, regarded the place as a cat-free delicatessen, specializing in frogs.
Slugs sprawled indolently under the springs of the burnt mattresses; snails left slime trails across the broken glass; large black beetles scuttled industriously over smashed gray plastic telephones and mysteriously mutilated Barbie dolls.
Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar had come up for a change of air. They were walking slowly around the perimeter of the central yard, broken glass crunching beneath their feet; they looked like shadows in their frayed black suits. Mr. Croup was in a cold fury. He was walking twice as fast as Mr. Vandemar, circling him, and almost dancing in his anger. At times, as if unable to contain the rage inside, Mr. Croup would fling himself at the hospital wall, physically attack it with his fists and feet, as if it were a poor substitute for a real person. Mr. Vandemar, on the other hand, simply walked. It was too consistent, too steady and inexorable a walk to be described as a stroll: Death walked like Mr. Vandemar. Mr. Vandemar watched Mr. Croup, impassively, as Mr. Croup kicked a sheet of glass that had been leaning against a wall. It shattered with a satisfying crash.
“I, Mister Vandemar,” said Mr. Croup, surveying the wreckage, “I, for one, have had almost as much as I’m willing to take. Almost. Pussyfooting, trifling, lollygagging, shilly-shallying . . . whey-faced toad—I could pop out his eyes with my thumbs . . .”
Mr. Vandemar shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “He’s our boss. For this job. After we’ve been paid, maybe we could have some fun on our own time.”
Mr. Croup spat on the ground. “He’s a worthless, conniving dunderhead . . . . We should butcher the bitch. Annul, cancel, inhume, and amortize her.”
A telephone began to ring, loudly. Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar looked around, puzzled. Eventually Mr. Vandemar found the telephone, halfway down a pile of rubble on top of a scree of water-stained medical records. Broken wires trailed from the back of it. He picked it up and passed it to Mr. Croup. “For you,” he said. Mr. Vandemar did not like telephones.
“Mister Croup here,” said Croup. Then, obsequiously, “Oh. It’s you, sir ” A pause. “At present, as you requested, she is walking around, free as a daisy. I’m afraid your bodyguard idea went down like a dead baboon . . . Varney? Yes, he’s quite dead.” Another pause.
“Sir, I am commencing to have certain conceptual problems with the role of myself and my partner in these shenanigans.” There was a third pause, and Mr. Croup went paler than pale. “Unprofessional?” he asked, mildly. “Us?” He curled his hand into a fist, which he slammed, hard, into the side of a brick wall. There was no change, however, in his tone of voice as he said, “Sir. Might I with due respect remind you that Mister Vandemar and myself burned down the City of Troy? We brought the Black Plague to Flanders. We have assassinated a dozen kings, five popes, half a hundred heroes and two accredited gods. Our last commission before this was the torturing to death of an entire monastery in sixteenth-century Tuscany. We are utterly professional.”
Mr. Vandemar, who had been amusing himself by catching little frogs and seeing how many he could stuff into his mouth at a time, said, with his mouth full, “I liked doing that . . .”
“My point?” asked Mr. Croup, and he flicked some imaginary dust from his threadbare black suit, ignoring the real dust as he did so. “My point is that we are assassins. We are cutthroats. We kill.” He listened to something, then said, “Well, what about the Upworlder? Why can’t we kill him?” Mr. Croup twitched, spat once more, and kicked the wall, as he stood there holding the rust-stained, half-broken telephone.
“Scare her? We’re cutthroats, not scarecrows.” A pause. He took a deep breath. “Yes, I understand, but I don’t like it.” The person at the other end of the phone had hung up. Mr. Croup looked down at the telephone. Then he hefted it in one hand and proceeded methodically to smash it into shards of plastic and metal by banging it against the wall.
Mr. Vandemar walked over. He had found a large black slug with a bright orange underbelly, and he was chewing it, like a fat cigar. The slug was trying to crawl away down Mr. Vandemar’s chin. “Who was that?” asked Mr. Vandemar.
“Who the hell do you think it was?”
Mr. Vandemar chewed, thoughtfully, then sucked the slug into his mouth. “A scarecrow man?” he ventured.
“Our employer.”
“That was going to be my next guess.”
“Scarecrows,” spat Mr. Croup, disgusted. He was moving from a red rage to an oily gray sulk.
Mr. Vandemar swallowed the contents of his mouth and wiped his lips on his sleeve. “Best way to scare crows,” said Mr. Vandemar, “you just creep up behind them and put your hand round their little crow necks and squeeze until they don’t move anymore. That scares the stuffing out of them.”
And then he was silent; and from far above they heard the sound of crows flying, cawing angrily.
“Crows. Family Corvidae. Collective noun,” intoned Mr. Croup, relishing the sound of the word, “a murder.”
Richard waited against the wall, next to Door. She said very little; she chewed her fingernails, ran her hands through her reddish hair until it was sticking up in all directions, then tried to push it back down again. She was certainly unlike anyone he had ever known. When she noticed him looking at her, she shrugged and shimmied down further into her layers of clothes, deeper into her leather jacket. Her face looked out at the world from inside the jacket. The expression on her face made Richard think of a beautiful homeless child he had seen, the previous winter, behind Covent Garden: he had not been certain whether it was a girl or a boy. Its mother was begging, pleading with the passers-by for coins to feed the child and the infant that she carried in her arms. But the child stared out at the world and said nothing, although it must have been cold and hungry. It just stared.
Hunter stood by Door, looking back and forth down the platform. The marquis had told them where to wait, and then he had slipped away. From somewhere, Richard heard a baby begin to cry. The marquis slipped out of an exit-only door and walked toward them. He was chewing on a piece of candy.
“Having fun?” asked Richard. A train was coming toward them, its approach heralded by a gust of warm wind.
“Just taking care of business,” said the marquis. He consulted the piece of paper and his watch. He pointed to a place on the platform. “This should be the Earl’s Court train. Stand behind me here, you three.” Then, as the Underground train—a rather boring-looking, normal train, Richard was disappointed to observe—rumbled and rattled its way into the station, the marquis leaned across Richard and said to Door, “My lady? There is something that perhaps I should have mentioned earlier.”
She turned her odd-colored eyes on him. “Yes?”
“Well,” he said, “the earl might not be entirely pleased to see me.”
The train slowed down and stopped. The car that had pulled up in front of Richard was quite empty: its lights were turned off, it was bleak and empty and dark. From time to time Richard had noticed cars like this one, locked and shadowy, on Tube trains, and he had wondered what purpose they served. The other doors on the train hissed open, and passengers got on and got off. The doors of the darkened car remained closed. The marquis drummed on the door with his fist, an intricate rhythmic rap. Nothing happened. Richard was just wondering if the train would now pull out without them on it, when the door of the dark car was pushed open from the ins
ide. It opened about six inches, and an elderly, bespectacled face peered out at them.
“Who knocks?” he said.
Through the opening, Richard could see flames burning, and people, and smoke inside the car. Through the glass in the doors, however, he still saw a dark and empty carriage. “The Lady Door,” announced the marquis, smoothly, “and her companions.”
The door slid open all the way, and they were inside Earl’s Court.
Seven
There was straw scattered on the floor, over a layer of rushes. There was an open log fire, sputtering and blazing in a large fireplace. There were a few chickens, strutting and pecking on the floor. There were seats with hand-embroidered cushions on them, and there were tapestries covering the windows and the doors.
Richard stumbled forward as the train lurched out of the station. He reached out, grabbed hold of the nearest person, and regained his balance. The nearest person happened to be a short, gray, elderly man-at-arms, who would have looked, Richard decided, exactly like a recently retired minor official were it not for the tin hat, the surcoat, the rather clumsily knitted chain mail, and the spear; instead he looked like a recently retired minor official who had, somewhat against his will, been dragooned into his local amateur dramatic society, where he had been forced to play a man-at-arms.
The little gray man blinked shortsightedly at Richard as Richard grabbed him, and then he said, lugubriously, “Sorry about that.”
“My fault,” said Richard.
“I know,” said the man.
An enormous Irish wolfhound padded down the aisle and stopped beside a lute player, who sat on the floor picking at a melody in a desultory fashion. The wolfhound glared at Richard, snorted with disdain, then lay down and went to sleep. At the far end of the carriage an elderly falconer, with a hooded falcon on his wrist, was exchanging pleasantries with a small knot of damsels of a certain age. Some passengers obviously stared at the four travelers; others, just as obviously, ignored them. It was, Richard realized, as if someone had taken a small medieval court and put it, as best they could, in one car of an Underground train.
A herald raised his bugle to his lips and played a tuneless blast, as an immense, elderly man, in a huge fur-lined dressing gown and carpet slippers, staggered through the connecting door from the next compartment, his arm resting on the shoulder of a jester in shabby motley. The old man was larger than life in every way: he wore an eye-patch over his left eye, which had the effect of making him look slightly helpless, and unbalanced, like a one-eyed hawk. There were fragments of food in his red-gray beard, and what appeared to be pajama pants were visible at the bottom of his shabby fur gown.
That, thought Richard, correctly, must be the earl.
The earl’s jester was an elderly man with a pinched, humorless mouth and a painted face. He led the earl to a throne-like carved wooden seat in which, a trifle unsteadily, the earl sat down. The wolfhound got up, padded down the length of the carriage, and settled itself at the earl’s slippered feet.
Earl’s Court, thought Richard. Of course. And then he began to wonder whether there was a baron in Barons Court Tube station, or a Raven in Ravenscourt or, . . .
The little old man-at-arms coughed asthmatically and said, “Right then, you lot. State your business.” Door stepped forward. She held her head up high, suddenly seeming taller and more at ease than Richard had previously seen her, and she said, “We seek an audience with His Grace the Earl.”
The earl called down the carriage. “What did the little girl say, Halvard?” he asked. Richard wondered if he was deaf.
Halvard, the elderly man-at-arms, shuffled around and cupped his hand to his mouth. “They seek an audience, Your Grace,” he shouted, over the rattle of the train.
The earl pushed aside his thick fur cap and scratched his head, meditatively. He was balding underneath his cap. “They do? An audience? How splendid. Who are they, Halvard?”
Halvard turned back to them. “He wants to know who you all are. Keep it short, though. Don’t go on.”
“I am the Lady Door,” announced Door. “The Lord Portico was my father.”
The earl brightened at this, leaned forward, peered through the smoke with his one good eye. “Did she say she was Portico’s oldest girl?” he asked the jester.
“Yus, your grace.”
The earl beckoned to Door. “Come here,” he said. “Come-come-come. Let me look at you.” She walked down the swaying carriage, grabbing the thick rope straps that hung from the ceiling as she went, to keep her balance. When she stood before the earl’s wooden chair, she curtseyed. He scratched at his beard and stared at her. “We were all quite devastated to hear of your father’s unfortunate—” said the earl, and then he interrupted himself, and said, “Well, all your family, it was a—” and he trailed off, and said, “You know I had warmest regards for him, did a bit of business together. . . good old Portico . . . full of ideas . . .” He stopped. Then he tapped the jester on the shoulder and whispered, in a querulous boom, loud enough that it could be heard easily over the noise of the train, “Go and make jokes at them, Tooley. Earn your keep.”
The earl’s fool staggered up the aisle with an arthritic step. He stopped in front of Richard. “And who might you be?” he asked.
“Me?” said Richard. “Um. Me? My name? It’s Richard. Richard Mayhew.”
“Me?” squeaked the fool, in an elderly, rather theatrical imitation of Richard’s Scottish accent. “Me? Um. Me? La, nuncle. ’Tis not a man, but a mooncalf.” The courtiers sniggered, dustily.
“And I,” de Carabas told the jester, with a blinding smile, “call myself the marquis de Carabas.” The fool blinked.
“De Carabas the thief?” asked the jester. “De Carabas the bodysnatcher? De Carabas the traitor?” He turned to the courtiers around them. “But this cannot be de Carabas. For why? Because de Carabas has long since been banished from the earl’s presence. Perhaps it is instead a strange new species of stoat, who grew particularly large.” The courtiers tittered uneasily, and a low buzz of troubled conversation began. The earl said nothing, but his lips were pressed together tightly, and he had begun to tremble.
“I am called Hunter,” said Hunter to the jester.
The courtiers were silent then. The jester opened his mouth, as if he were going to say something, and then he looked at her, and he closed his mouth again. A hint of a smile played at the corner of Hunter’s perfect lips. “Go on,” she said. “Say something funny.”
The jester stared at the trailing toes of his shoes. Then he muttered, “My hound hath no nose.”
The earl, who had been staring at the marquis de Carabas with eyes like a slow-burning fuse, now exploded to his feet, a gray-bearded volcano, an elderly berserker. His head brushed the roof of the carriage. He pointed at the marquis and shouted, spittle flying, “I will not stand for it, I will not. Make him come forward.”
Halvard waggled a gloomy spear at the marquis, who sauntered to the front of the train, until he stood beside Door in front of the earl’s throne. The wolfhound growled in the back of its throat.
“You,” said the earl, stabbing the air with a huge, knotted finger. “I know you, de Carabas. I haven’t forgotten. I may be old, but I haven’t forgotten.”
The marquis bowed. “Might I remind Your Grace,” he said urbanely, “that we had a deal? I negotiated the peace treaty between your people and the Raven’s Court. And in return you agreed to provide a little favor.” So there is a raven’s court, thought Richard. He wondered what it was like.
“A little favor?” said the earl. He turned a deep beet red color. “Is that what you call it? I lost a dozen men to your foolishness in the retreat from White City. I lost an eye.”
“And if you don’t mind my saying so, Your Grace,” said the marquis, graciously, “that is a very fetching patch. It sets off your face perfectly.”
“I swore . . .” fulminated the earl, beard bristling, “I swore . . . that if you ever set foot in my domain
I would . . .” he trailed off. Shook his head, confused and forgetful. Then he continued. “It’ll come back to me. I do not forget.”
“He might not be entirely pleased to see you?” whispered Door to de Carabas.
“Well, he’s not,” he muttered back.
Door stepped forward once more. “Your Grace,” she said, loudly, clearly, “de Carabas is here with me as my guest and my companion. For the fellowship there has ever been between your family and mine, for the friendship between my father and—”
“He abused my hospitality,” boomed the earl. “I swore that . . . if he ever again entered my domain I would have him gutted and dried . . . like, like something that had been gutted, first . . . like . . .”
“Perchance—then dried a kipper, my lord?” suggested the jester.
The earl shrugged. “It is of no matter. Guards, seize him.” And they did. While neither of the guards would ever see sixty again, each of them was holding a crossbow, pointed at the marquis, and their hands did not tremble, neither with age nor with fear. Richard looked at Hunter. She seemed untroubled by this: she was watching it almost with amusement, like someone attending the theater.
Door folded her arms and stood taller, putting her head back, raising her pointed chin. She looked less like a ragged street pixie; more like someone used to getting her own way. The opal eyes flashed. “Your Grace, the marquis is with me as my companion, on my quest. Our families have been friends for a long time now—”
“Yes. They have,” interrupted the earl, helpfully. “Hundreds of years. Hundreds and hundreds. Knew your grandfather, too. Funny old fellow. Bit vague,” he confided.