Neverwhere

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," a

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. "Because 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 cluttered, excitedly. "I know exactly what to do with him."