Neverwhere

"Look," said Richard, his back against the wall, with the glass dagger pressed against his Adam's apple. "I think you're making a bit of a mistake here. My name is Richard Mayhew. I can prove who I am. I've got my library cards. Credit cards. Things," he added, desperately.

At the opposite end of the hall, Richard noticed, with the dispassionate clarity that comes when a lunatic is about to slit your throat with a piece of broken glass, people were throwing themselves to the ground, bowing low, and remaining on the floor. A small black shape was coming toward them along the ground. "I think a moment's reflection might prove that we're all being very silly," said Richard. He had no idea what the words meant, just that they were coming out of his mouth, and that as long as he was talking, he was not dead. "Now, why don't you put that away, and—excuse me, that's my bag," this last to a thin, bedraggled girl in her late teens who had taken Richard's bag and was roughly tipping his possessions out onto the ground.

The people in the hall continued to bow, and to stay bowed, as the small shape came closer. It reached the group of people around Richard, although not a one of them noticed it. They were all looking at Richard.

It was a rat, which looked up at Richard, curiously. He had the bizarre and momentary impression that it winked one of its little black oildrop eyes at him. Then it cluttered, loudly.

The man with the glass dagger threw himself on his knees. So did the people gathered around them. So, too, after a moment's hesitation, and a little more awkwardly, did the homeless man, the one they had called Iliaster. In a moment, Richard was the only one standing. The thin girl tugged at his elbow, and he, too, went down on one knee.

Lord Rat-speaker bowed so low that his long hair brushed the ground, and he chittered back at the rat, wrinkling his nose, showing his teeth, squeaking and hissing, for all the world like an enormous rat himself.

"Look, can anybody tell me . . . " muttered Richard.

"Quiet!" said the thin girl.

The rat stepped—a little disdainfully, it seemed—into the Lord Rat-speaker's grubby hand, and the man held it, respectfully, up in front of Richard's face. It waved its tail languidly as it inspected Richard's features. "This is Master Longtail, of the clan Gray," said the Lord Rat-speaker. "He says you looks exceeding familiar. He wants to know if he's met you afore."

Richard looked at the rat. The rat looked at Richard. "I suppose it's possible," he admitted.

"He says he was discharging an obligation to the marquis de Carabas."

Richard stared at the animal more closely. "It's that rat? Yes, we've met. Actually, I threw the TV remote, control at it." Some of the people standing around looked shocked. The thin girl actually squeaked. Richard hardly noticed them; at least something was familiar in this madness. "Hello, Ratty," he said. "Good to see you again. Do you know where Door is?"

"Ratty!" said the girl in something between a squeak and a horrified swallow. She had a large, water-stained red button pi

Lord Rat-speaker waved his glass dagger admonishingly at Richard. "You must not address Master Longtail, save through me," he said. The rat squeaked an order. The man's face fell. "Him?" he said, looking at Richard disdainfully. "Look, I can't spare a soul. How about if I simply slice his throat and send him down to the Sewer Folk . . . "

The rat chittered once more, decisively, then leapt from the man's shoulder onto the ground and vanished into one of the many holes that lined the walls.

The Lord Rat-speaker stood up. A hundred eyes were fixed on him. He turned back to the hall and looked at his subjects, crouched beside their greasy fires. "I don't know what you lot are all looking at," he shouted. "Who's turning the spits, eh? You want the grub to burn? There's nothing to see. Go on. Get-get away with the lot of you." Richard stood up, nervously. His left leg had gotten numb, and he rubbed life into it, as it prickled with pins and needles. Lord Rat-speaker looked at Iliaster. "He's got to be taken to the market. Master Longtail's orders."

Iliaster shook his head, and spat onto the ground. "Well, I'm not taking him," he said. "More than my life's worth, that journey. You rat-speakers have always been good to me, but I can't go back there. You know that."

The Lord Rat-speaker nodded. He put his dagger away, in the furs of his robe. Then he smiled at Richard with yellow teeth. "You don't know how lucky you were, just then," he said.

"Yes I do," said Richard. "I really do."

"No," said the man, "you don't. You really don't." And he shook his head and said to himself, marvelling, " 'Ratty.' "

The Lord Rat-speaker took Iliaster by the arm, and the two of them walked a little way out of earshot and began to talk, darting looks back at Richard as they did so.

The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard's bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen. "You know, that was going to be my breakfast," said Richard. She looked up at him guiltily. "My name's Richard. What's yours?"

The girl, who, he realized, had already managed to eat most of the fruit that Richard had brought with him, swallowed the last of the banana and hesitated. Then she half-smiled, and said something that sounded a lot like Anaesthesia. "I was hungry," she said.

"Well, so'm I," he told her.

She glanced at the little fires across the room. Then she looked back at Richard. She smiled again. "Do you like cat?" she said.

"Yes," said Richard. "I quite like cats."

Anaesthesia looked relieved. "Thigh?" she asked. "Or breast?"

The girl called Door walked down the court, followed by the marquis de Carabas. There were a hundred other little courts and mews and alleys in London just like this one, tiny spurs of old-time, unchanged for, three hundred years. Even the smell of piss here was the same as it had been in Pepys's time, three hundred years before. There was still an hour until dawn, but the sky was begi

The door was roughly boarded up and covered with stained posters for forgotten bands and long-closed nightclubs. The two of them stopped in front of it, and the marquis eyed it, all boards and nails and posters, and he appeared unimpressed; but then, unimpressed was his default state.

"So this is the entrance?" he said.

She nodded. "One of them."

He folded his arms. "Well? Say 'Open sesame,' or whatever it is that you do."

"I don't want to do this," she said. "I'm really not sure that we're doing the right thing."

"Very well," he unfolded his arms. "I'll be seeing you, then." He turned on his heel and began to walk back the way that they had come. Door seized his arm. "You'd abandon me?" she asked. "Just like that?"

He gri

"Look, hold on." She let go of his sleeve, bit her lower lip. "The last time I was here . . . " she trailed off.

"The last time you were here, you found your family dead. Well, there you are. You don't have to explain it anymore. If we aren't going in, then our business relationship is at an end."

She looked up at him, her elfin face pale in the pre-dawn light. "And that's all?"

"I could wish you the best of luck in your career, but I'm afraid I rather doubt you'll live long enough to have one."

"You're a piece of work, aren't you?"

He said nothing. She walked back toward the door. "Well," she said. "Come on. I'll take us in." Door put her left hand on the boarded-up door, and with her right hand she took the marquis's huge brown hand. Her tiny fingers twined into his larger ones. She closed her eyes.