Neverwhere

FOUR

Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar had set up their home in the cellar of a Victorian hospital, closed down ten years earlier because of National Health Service budget cutbacks. The property developers, who had a

The basement world beneath the empty hospital wards comprised more than a hundred tiny rooms, some of them empty, others containing abandoned hospital supplies. One room held a squat, giant metal furnace, while the next room housed the blocked and waterless toilets and showers. Most of the basement floors were covered with a thin layer of oily rainwater, which reflected the darkness and the decay back toward the rotting ceilings.

If you were to walk down the hospital steps, as far down as you could go, through the abandoned shower rooms, past the staff toilets, past a room filled with broken glass, where the ceiling had collapsed entirely, leaving it open to the stairwell above, you would reach a small, rusting iron staircase, from which the once-white paint was peeling in long, damp strips. And if you went down the staircase, and traversed the marshy place at the bottom of the steps, and pushed your way through a half-decayed wooden door, you would find yourself in the sub-cellar, a huge room in which a hundred and twenty years of hospital waste had accumulated, been abandoned, and, eventually, forgotten; and it was here that Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar had, for the present, made their home. The walls were damp, and water dripped from the ceiling. Odd things moldered in corners: some of them had once been alive.

Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar were killing time. Mr. Vandemar had obtained from somewhere a centipede—a reddish orange creature, almost eight inches long, with vicious, poisonous fangs—and was letting it run over his hands, watching it as it twined between his fingers, vanished up one sleeve, appeared a minute later out of the other. Mr. Croup was playing with razor blades. He had found, in a corner, a whole box of fifty-year-old razor blades, wrapped in wax paper, and he had been trying to think of things to do with them.

"If I might have your attention, Mister Vandemar," he said, at length. "Pipe your beady eyes on this."

Mr. Vandemar held the centipede's head delicately between a huge thumb and a massive forefinger to stop it wriggling. He looked at Mr. Croup.

Mr. Croup put his left hand against a wall, fingers spread. He took five razor blades in his right hand, took careful aim, and threw them at the wall. Each blade stuck into the wall, between Mr. Croup's fingers; it was like a top knife-thrower's act in miniature. Mr. Croup took his hand away, leaving the blades in the wall, outlining the place his fingers had been, and he turned to his partner for approval.

Mr. Vandemar was unimpressed. "What's so clever about that, then?" he asked. "You didn't even hit one finger."

Mr. Croup sighed. "I didn't?" he said. "Well, slit my gullet, you're right. How could I have been such a ni

Mr. Vandemar nodded. He put his centipede back into its empty marmalade jar. Then he put his left hand against the wall. He raised his right arm: his knife, wicked and sharp and perfectly weighted, was in his right hand. He narrowed his eyes, and he threw. The knife flew through the air and thudded into the damp plaster wall blade-first, the blade having first hit and penetrated the back of Mr. Vandemar's hand on its way.

A telephone began to ring.

Mr. Vandemar looked around at Croup, satisfied, his hand still pi

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 a

"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."