Neverwhere (5 page)

The eyes flashed. “Exactly what kind of favor?”

“A really big one,” said Richard. “She said she was going to have to owe you a really big favor.”

De Carabas grinned to himself, a hungry panther sighting a lost peasant child. Then he turned on Richard. “And you left her alone?” he asked. “With Croup and Vandemar out there? Well, what are you waiting for?” He knelt down and took from his pocket a small metal object, which he pushed into a manhole cover at the edge of the alley and twisted. The manhole cover came up easily; the marquis put away the metal object and took something out of another pocket that reminded Richard a little of a long firework, or a flare. He held it in one hand, ran his other hand along it, and the far end erupted into scarlet flame.

“Can I ask a question?” said Richard.

“Certainly not,” said the marquis. “You don’t ask any questions. You don’t get any answers. You don’t stray from the path. You don’t even think about what’s happening to you right now. Got it?”

“But—”

“Most important of all: no buts,” said de Carabas. “And time is of the essence. Move.” He pointed into the depths revealed by the open manhole cover. Richard moved, clambering down the metal ladder set into the wall beneath the manhole, feeling so far out of his depth that it didn’t even occur to him to question any further.

Richard wondered where they were. This didn’t seem to be a sewer. Perhaps it was a tunnel for telephone cables, or for very small trains. Or for . . . something else. He realized that he did not know very much about what went on beneath the streets of London. He walked nervously, worried that he’d catch his feet in something, that he’d stumble in the darkness and break his ankle. De Carabas strode on ahead, nonchalantly, apparently not caring whether Richard was with him or not. The crimson flame cast huge shadows on the tunnel walls.

Richard ran to catch up. “Let’s see . . .” said de Carabas. “I’ll need to get her to the market. The next one’s in, mm, two days’ time, if I recall correctly, as of course I unfailingly do. I can hide her until then.”

“Market?” asked Richard.

“The Floating Market. But you don’t want to know about that.

No more questions.” Richard looked around. “Well, I was going to ask you where we are now. But I suppose you were going to refuse to tell me.”

The marquis grinned once more. “Very good,” he said, approvingly. “You are in enough trouble already.”

“You can say that again,” sighed Richard. “My fiancée’s dumped me, and I’ll probably have to get a new telephone—”

“Temple and Arch. A telephone is the least of your troubles.” De Carabas put the flare down on the ground, resting it against the wall, where it continued to sputter and flame, and he began to climb up some metal rungs set into the wall. Richard hesitated, and then followed him. The rungs were cold and rusted; he could feel them crumbling roughly against his hands as he climbed, fragments of rust getting in his eyes and mouth. The scarlet light from below was flickering, and then it went out. They climbed in total darkness.

“So, are we going back to Door?” Richard asked.

“Eventually. There’s a little something I need to organize first. Insurance. And when we get into daylight, don’t look down.”

“Why not?” asked Richard. And then daylight hit his face, and he looked down.

It was daylight (
how was it daylight? a tiny voice asked, in the back of his head. It had been almost night when he entered the alley, what, an hour ago?
), and he was holding onto a metal ladder that ran up the outside of a very high building (
but a few seconds ago he was climbing up the same ladder, and he had been inside, hadn’t he?
), and below him, he could see . . .

London.

Tiny cars. Tiny buses and taxis. Tiny buildings. Trees. Miniature trucks. Tiny, tiny people. They swam in and out of focus beneath him.

To say that Richard Mayhew was not very good at heights would be perfectly accurate, but it would fail to give the full picture. Richard hated clifftops, and high buildings: somewhere not far inside him was the fear—the stark, utter, silently screaming terror—that if he got too close to the edge, then something would take over and he would find himself walking to the edge of a clifftop and stepping off into space. It was as if he could not entirely trust himself, and that scared Richard more than the simple fear of falling ever could. So he called it vertigo, and hated it and himself, and kept away from high places.

Richard froze on the ladder. His hands clamped tightly to the rungs. His eyes hurt, somewhere behind the eyeballs. He started breathing too fast, too deeply. “Somebody,” said an amused voice above him, “wasn’t listening, was he?”

“I . . .” Richard’s throat didn’t work. He swallowed, moistening it. “I can’t move.” His hands were sweating. What if they sweated so much that he simply slipped off into the void . . . ?

“Of course you can move. Or, if you don’t you can stay here, hanging onto the side of the wall until your hands freeze and your legs buckle and you tumble to a messy death a thousand feet below.” Richard looked up at the marquis. He was looking down at Richard, and still smiling; when he saw that Richard was watching him, he let go of the rungs with both his hands, and waggled his fingers at him.

Richard felt a wave of sympathetic vertigo run through him. “Bastard,” he said, under his breath, and he let go of the rung with his right hand and moved it up eight inches, until it found the next rung. Then he moved his right leg up one rung. Then he did it again, with his left hand. After a while he found himself at the edge of a flat roof, and he stepped over it and collapsed.

He was aware that the marquis was striding along the roof, away from him. Richard felt the rooftop with his hands, and felt the solid structure beneath him. His heart was pounding in his chest.

A gruff voice some distance away shouted, “You’re not wanted here, de Carabas. Get away. Clear off.”

“Old Bailey,” he heard de Carabas say. “You’re looking wonderfully healthy.”

And then footsteps shuffled toward him, and a finger prodded him gently in the ribs. “You all right, laddie? I’ve got some stew cookin’ back there. You want some? It’s starling.”

Richard opened his eyes. “No thank you,” he said.

He saw the feathers, first. He wasn’t sure if it was a coat, or a cape, or some kind of strange covering that had no name, but whatever kind of outer garment it was, it was covered thickly and entirely in feathers. A face, kind and creased, with grey muttonchop whiskers, peered out from the top of the feathers. The body beneath the face, where it was not covered with feathers, was wound round and about with ropes. Richard found himself remembering a theatrical performance of
Robinson Crusoe
he had been taken to as a child: this was what Robinson Crusoe might have looked like, if he had been shipwrecked on a rooftop instead of a desert island.

“They call me Old Bailey, lad,” said the man. He fumbled at a battered pair of glasses, on a string around his neck, and pulled them on, staring through them at Richard. “I don’t recognize ye. What barony do you give fealty to? What’s your name?”

Richard pulled himself into a sitting position. They were on the roof of an old building, built of brown stone, with a tower above them. Weathered gargoyles, missing wings and limbs and, in a couple of cases, even heads, jutted sadly from the corners of the tower. From far below he could hear the wail of a police siren, and the muted roar of traffic. Across the rooftop, in the shadow of the tower, was something that looked like a tent; an old brown tent, much mended, spackled white with bird shit. He opened his mouth to tell the old man his name.

“You. Shut up,” said the marquis de Carabas. “Don’t say another word.” Then he turned to Old Bailey. “People who put their noses where they aren’t wanted sometimes”—he snapped his fingers, loudly, beneath the old man’s nose, making him jump—“lose them. Now. You’ve owed me a favor for twenty years, Old Bailey. A big favor. And I’m calling it in.”

The old man blinked. “I was a fool,” he said quietly.

“No fool like an old fool,” agreed the marquis. He reached a hand into an inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a silver box, larger than a snuffbox, smaller than a cigar box, and a good deal more ornate than either. “Do you know what this is?”

“I wish I didn’t.”

“You’ll keep it safe for me.”

“I don’t want it.”

“You don’t have any choice,” said the marquis. The old roof-man took the silver box from him and held it, awkwardly, in both hands, as if it were something that might explode at any moment. The marquis prodded Richard gently with his square-toed black boot. “Right,” he said. “We’d better get a move on, hadn’t we?” He strode off across the roof, and Richard got to his feet and followed, keeping well away from the side of the building. The marquis opened a door in the side of the tower, beside a high cluster of chimneys, and they went down a poorly lit spiral staircase.

“Who was that man?” asked Richard, peering through the dim light. Their footsteps echoed and reverberated down the metal stairs.

The marquis de Carabas snorted. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you? You’re in trouble already. Everything you do, everything you say, everything you hear, just makes it worse. You had better pray you haven’t stepped too far in.”

It was now completely dark, and Richard stumbled slightly as he reached the last of the steps and found himself looking for a step that wasn’t there. “Mind your head,” said the marquis, and he opened a door. Richard banged his forehead into something hard and said “ow,” and then he stepped out through a low door, shielding his eyes against the light.

Richard rubbed his forehead, then he rubbed his eyes. The door they had just come through was the door to the broom closet in the stairwell of his apartment building. It was filled with brooms, an elderly mop, and a huge variety of cleaning fluids, powders, and waxes. It had no stairs at the back of it that he could see, just a wall on which a stained old calendar hung, quite uselessly—unless 1979 ever came back around.

The marquis was examining the
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?
poster stuck beside Richard’s front door. “Not her best side,” he said.

Richard shut the door to the broom closet. He took his keys from his back pocket, unlocked his front door, and he was home. It was, he was rather relieved to see through the kitchen windows, nighttime once more.

“Richard,” said Door. “You did it.” She had washed herself while he was gone, and her layers of clothes looked like she had at least made an effort to get the worst of the filth and the blood off them. The grime was gone from her face and hands. Her hair, when washed, was a dark shade of auburn, with copper and bronze highlights. Richard wondered how old she was: fifteen? Sixteen? Older? He still couldn’t tell.

She had put on the brown leather jacket she had been wearing when he had found her, huge and enveloping, like an old flying jacket, which somehow made her look smaller than she was, and even more vulnerable.

“Well, yes,” said Richard.

The marquis de Carabas went down on one knee to the girl and lowered his head. “My lady,” he said.

She seemed uncomfortable. “Oh, do get up, de Carabas. I’m pleased you came.”

He stood in one smooth movement. “I understand,” he said, “that the words
favor
,
really,
and
big
have been used. In conjunction.”

“Later.” She walked over to Richard and took his hands in hers. “Richard. Thanks. I really appreciate everything you’ve done. I changed the sheets on the bed. And I wish there was something I could do to pay you back.”

“You’re leaving?”

She nodded. “I’ll be safe now. More or less. I hope. For a little while.”

“Where are you going now?”

She smiled gently and shook her head. “Uh-uh. I’m out of your life. And you’ve been wonderful.” She went up on tiptoes then and kissed him on the cheek, as friends kiss friends.

“If I ever need to get in touch with you—?”

“You don’t. Ever. And . . .” and then she paused. “Look, I’m sorry, okay?”

Richard inspected his feet, in an awkward sort of way. “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” he said, and added, doubtfully, “it was fun.” Then he looked up again.

But there was nobody there.

O
n Sunday morning Richard took the Batmobile-shaped telephone he had been given for Christmas several years earlier by his Aunt Maude out of the drawer at the bottom of the closet and plugged it into the wall. He tried telephoning Jessica, but without success. Her answering machine was turned off, as was her cellular phone. He supposed she had gone back to her parents’ house in the country, and he had no desire to phone her there. Richard found Jessica’s parents deeply intimidating, each in their separate ways. Neither of them had entirely approved of him as a future son-in-law: in fact, her mother had, on one occasion, mentioned to him quite casually how disappointed they were by Richard and Jessica’s engagement, and her conviction that Jessica could, if she wanted to, do so much better.

Richard’s own parents were both dead. His father had died quite suddenly when Richard was still a small boy, of a heart attack. His mother died very slowly after that, and once Richard left home she simply faded away: six months after he moved to London he took the train back up to Scotland, to spend her last two days in a small county hospital sitting beside her bed. Sometimes she had known him; at other times she had called him by his father’s name.

Richard sat on his couch, and he brooded. The events of the previous two days became less and less real, increasingly less likely. What was real was the message that Jessica had left on his machine, telling him she did not want to see him again. He played it, and replayed it, that Sunday, hoping each time that she would relent, that he’d hear warmth in her voice. He never did.

He thought about going out and buying a Sunday paper but decided not to. Arnold Stockton, Jessica’s boss, a many-chinned, self-made caricature of a man, owned all the Sunday papers that Rupert Murdoch had failed to buy. His own papers talked about him, and so did the rest. Reading a Sunday paper would, Richard suspected, probably end up reminding him of the dinner he had failed to attend on Friday night. So instead Richard had a long hot bath and a number of sandwiches, and several cups of tea. He watched a little Sunday afternoon television and constructed conversations with Jessica in his head. At the end of each mental dialogue they would fall into each other’s arms, make wild, angry, tear-stained and passionate love; and then everything would be all right.

On Monday morning Richard’s alarm failed to go off. He came out onto the street at a run at ten to nine, briefcase swinging, staring up and down the road like a madman, praying for a taxi. Then he sighed with relief, because a big black car was heading down the road toward him, its yellow “taxi” sign bright. He waved at it and yelled.

The taxi slid gently past him, ignoring him completely; it turned a corner and was gone.

Another taxi. Another yellow light that meant the taxi was available. This time Richard stepped out into the middle of the road to flag it down. It swerved past him and continued on its way. Richard began to swear under his breath. Then he ran for the nearest Tube station.

He pulled out a pocketful of coins, stabbed the button of the ticket machine for a single ticket to Charing Cross, and thumbed his change into the slot. Every coin he put in went straight through the guts of the machine and clattered into the tray at the bottom. No ticket appeared. He tried another ticket machine, with the same lack of result. And another. The ticket seller in the office was speaking to someone on the telephone when Richard went over to complain and to buy his ticket manually; and despite—or perhaps because of—Richard’s cries of “Hey!” and “Excuse me!” and his desperate tapping on the plastic barrier with a coin, the man remained resolutely on the telephone.

“Fuck it,” announced Richard, and he vaulted the barrier. No one stopped him; no one seemed to care. He ran, breathless and sweating, down the escalator, and made it onto the crowded platform just as a train came in.

As a child, Richard had had nightmares in which he simply wasn’t there, in which, no matter how much noise he made, no matter what he did, nobody ever noticed him at all. He began to feel like that now, as people pushed in front of him; he was buffeted by the crowd, pushed this way and that by commuters getting off, by others getting on.

He persisted, pushing and shoving in his turn, until he was almost on the train—he had one arm inside—when the doors began to hiss closed. He pulled his hand back, but his coat-sleeve was trapped. Richard began to hammer on the door, and to shout, expecting the driver at least to open the door enough for him to free his sleeve. But instead the train began to move off, and Richard was forced to run down the platform, stumbling, faster and faster. He dropped his briefcase onto the platform, pulled desperately at his sleeve with his free hand. The sleeve ripped, and he fell forward, scraping his hand on the platform, ripping his trousers at the knee. Richard climbed, a little unsteadily, to his feet, then walked back down the platform and retrieved his briefcase.

He looked at his ripped sleeve and his grazed hand and his torn trousers. Then he walked up the stone stairs and out of the Underground station. Nobody asked him for a ticket on the way out.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” said Richard, to no one in particular in the crowded office. The clock on the office wall said that it was 10:30. He dropped his briefcase on his chair, wiped the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. “You wouldn’t believe what it was like getting here,” he continued. “It was a nightmare.”

He looked down at his desktop. There was something missing. Or, more precisely, there was everything missing. “Where are my things?” he asked the room, a little more loudly. “Where is my telephone? Where are my trolls?”

He checked the desk drawers. They were empty too: not even a Mars bar wrapper or a twisted paper clip to show that Richard had ever been there. Sylvia was coming toward him, in conversation with two rather hefty gentlemen. Richard walked over to her. “Sylvia? What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry?” said Sylvia, politely. She pointed the desk out to the hefty gentlemen, who each took an end of it, and began to carry it out of the office. “Careful now,” she told them.

“My desk. Where are they taking it?”

Sylvia stared at him, gently puzzled. “And you are . . . ?”

I don’t need this shit
, thought Richard. “Richard,” he said, sarcastically. “Richard Mayhew.”

“Ah,” said Sylvia. Then her attention slid off Richard, like water off an oiled duck, and she said, “No, not over there. For heaven’s sakes,” to the removal men, and hurried after them as they carried off Richard’s desk.

Richard watched her go. Then he walked through the of-fice until he got to Gary’s workstation. Gary was answering e-mail. Richard looked at the screen: the e-mail Gary seemed to be writing was both sexually explicit and addressed to someone who was not Gary’s girlfriend. Embarrassed, Richard moved around to the other side of the desk.

“Gary. What’s going on? Is this a joke or something?” Gary looked around, as if he had heard something. He flicked the keyboard, activating a screen-saver of dancing hippopotami, then he shook his head as if to clear it, picked up the telephone, and began to dial. Richard slammed his hand down on the phone, cutting Gary off.

“Look, this isn’t funny. I don’t know what everyone’s playing at.” Finally, to his enormous relief, Gary looked up at him. Richard continued, “If I’ve been fired then just tell me I’ve been fired, but all this pretending I’m not here . . .”

And then Gary smiled and said, “Hi. Yeah. I’m Gary Perunu. Can I help you?”

“I don’t think so,” said Richard, coldly, and he walked out of the office, leaving his briefcase behind him.

Richard’s offices were on the third floor of a big, old, drafty building, just off the Strand. Jessica worked about halfway up a large crystalline, mirrored structure in the City of London, fifteen minutes’ walk up the road.

Richard jogged up that road. He got to the Stockton building in ten minutes, walked straight past the uniformed security guards on duty on the ground floor, stepped into the elevator, and went up. The inside of the elevator was mirrored, and he stared at himself as he went up. His tie was half-undone and askew, his coat was ripped, his pants torn, his hair was a sweaty mess . . . . God, he looked awful.

There was a fluting tone, and the elevator door opened. Jessica’s floor was quite opulent, in an underdecorated sort of way. There was a receptionist by the elevator, a poised and elegant creature who looked like her take-home pay beat Richard’s hands down. She was reading
Cosmopolitan
. She did not look up as Richard came over.

“I need to talk to Jessica Bartram,” said Richard. “It’s important. I have to speak with her.”

The receptionist ignored him, intent upon examining her nails. Richard walked down the corridor until he got to Jessica’s office. He opened the door and went in. She was standing in front of three large posters, each advertising “Angels over England—A Traveling Exhibition,” each with a different image of an angel on it. She turned as he came in, and she smiled warmly at him.

“Jessica. Thank God. Listen, I think I’m going mad or something. It started when I couldn’t get a taxi this morning, and then the office and the Tube and—” He showed her his ragged sleeve. “It’s like I’ve become some kind of non-person.” She smiled at him some more, reassuringly. “Look,” said Richard. “I’m sorry about the other night. Well, not about what I did, but about upsetting you, and . . . look, I’m sorry, and it’s all crazy, and I don’t honestly know what to do.”

And Jessica nodded, and continued to smile sympathetically, and then she said, “You’re going to think I’m absolutely awful, but I have a really dreadful memory for faces. Give me a second, and I know I’ll get it.”

And at that point, Richard knew that it was real, and a heavy dread settled in the pit of his stomach. Whatever madness was happening that day was really happening. It was no joke, no trick or prank. “It’s okay,” he said, dully. “Forget it.”

And he walked away, out the door and down the corridor. He was almost at the lift when she called his name.

“Richard!”

He turned. It
had
been a joke. Some kind of petty revenge. Something he could explain. “Richard . . . Maybury?” She seemed proud of herself for remembering that much.

“Mayhew,” said Richard, and he got into the elevator, and the doors sang a sad fluting downward trill as they closed behind him.

Richard walked back to his flat, upset and confused and angry. Sometimes he would wave at taxis, but never with any real hope that they would stop, and none of them did. His feet hurt, and his eyes stung, and he knew that soon enough he would wake up from today and a proper Monday, a sensible Monday, a decent, honest Monday would begin.

When he reached the apartment, he filled the bathtub with hot water, abandoned his clothes on the bed, and, naked, walked through the hall and climbed into the relaxing waters. He had almost dozed off when he heard a key turn, a door open and close, and a smooth male voice say, “Of course, you’re the first I’ve shown around today, but I’ve got a list of people as long as your arm who are interested.”

“It’s not as large as I imagined, from the details your office sent us,” said a woman.

“It’s compact, yes. But I like to think of that as a virtue.”

Richard had not bothered locking the bathroom door. He was, after all, the only person there.

A gruffer, rougher male voice said, “Thought you said it was an unfurnished apartment. Looks pretty damned furnished to me.”

“The previous tenant must have left some of his accoutrements behind. Funny. They never told me anything about that.”

Richard stood up in the bathtub. Then, because he was naked, and the people could walk in at any moment, he sat back down. Rather desperately, he looked around the bathroom for a towel. “Oh look, George,” said the woman in the hallway. “Someone’s left a towel on this chair.”

Richard inspected and rejected as poor towel substitutes a loofah, a half-empty bottle of shampoo, and a small yellow rubber duck. “What’s the bathroom like?” asked the woman. Richard grabbed a washcloth and draped it in front of his crotch. Then he stood up, with his back to the wall, and prepared to be mortified. The door was pushed open. Three people walked into the bathroom: a young man in a camel-hair coat, and a middle-aged couple. Richard wondered if they were as embarrassed as he was.

“It’s a bit small,” said the woman.

“Compact,” corrected the camel-hair coat, smoothly. “Easy to take care of.” The woman ran her finger along the side of the sink and wrinkled her nose. “I think we’ve seen it all,” said the middle-aged man. They walked out of the bathroom.

“It
would
be very convenient for everything,” said the woman. A conversation continued in lower tones. Richard climbed out of the bath and edged over to the door. He spotted the towel on the chair in the hall, and he leaned out and grabbed it. “We’ll take it,” said the woman.

“You will?” said the camel-hair coat.

“It’s just what we want,” she explained. “Or it will be, once we’ve made it homey. Could it be ready for Wednesday?”

“Of course. We’ll have all of this rubbish cleaned out of here tomorrow, no problem.”

Richard, cold and dripping and wrapped in his towel, glared at them from the doorway. “It’s not rubbish,” he said. “It’s my stuff.”

“We’ll pick up the keys from your office, then.”

“Excuse me,” said Richard, plaintively. “I live here.”

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,” announced Richard to the world, in direct defiance of the evidence of his senses, “is not happening.” The Batphone shrilled, and its headlights flashed. Richard picked it up, warily. “Hello?”