Neverwhere

"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 tu

"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 tu

"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 ru

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 tu

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 steps, 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."

"Don't patronize me, de Carabas," said Door. She was so tired. "And I think I can decide who comes with us. You are working for me, aren't you? Or is it the other way around?" Her sorrow and exhaustion had drained her of her patience. She needed de Carabas—she couldn't afford to drive him away– but she had reached her limit.

De Carabas stared at her, coldly angry. "He is not coming with us," he stated, flatly. "Anyway, he's probably dead by now."

Richard was not dead. He was sitting in the dark, on a ledge, on the side of a storm drain, wondering what to do, wondering how much further out of his league he could possibly get. His life so far, he decided, had prepared him perfectly for a job in Securities, for shopping at the supermarket, for watching soccer on the television on the weekends, for turning up the thermostat if he got cold. It had magnificently failed to prepare him for a life as an un-person on the roofs and in the sewers of London, for a life in the cold and the wet and the dark.