Neverwhere(108)

The marquis looked unsympathetic. “You can’t go back to London Above. A few individuals manage a kind of half-life—you’ve met Iliaster and Lear. But that’s the best you could hope for, and it isn’t a good life.”

Door reached out a hand, and touched Richard’s arm. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “But look at all the good you’ve done. You got the key for us.”

“Well,” he asked, “what was the point of that? You just forged a new key—” Brother Fuliginous reappeared, carrying Richard’s jeans; they were ripped, and covered in mud, and splashed with dried blood, and they stank. The friar handed the trousers to the abbot, who commenced to go through the pockets. Door smiled, sweetly. “I couldn’t have had Hammersmith copy it without the original,” she reminded him.

The abbot cleared his throat. “You are all very stupid people,” he told them, graciously, “and you do not know anything at all.” He held up the silver key. It glinted in the firelight. “Richard passed the Ordeal of the Key. He is its master, until he returns it to our keeping. The key has power.”

“It’s the key to Heaven . . . ” said Richard, unsure of what the abbot was getting at, of what point he was trying to make.

The old man’s voice was deep and melodious. “The key is the key to all reality. If Richard wants to return to London Above, then the key will take him back to London Above.”

“It’s that simple?” asked Richard. The old man nodded his blind head, beneath the shadows of his cowl. “Then when could we do this?”

“As soon as you are ready,” said the abbot.



The friars had washed and repaired his clothes and returned them to him. Brother Fuliginous led him through the abbey, up a vertiginous series of ladders and steps, up into the bell tower. There was a heavy wooden trapdoor in the top of the tower. Brother Fuliginous unlocked it, and the two men pushed through it and found themselves in a narrow tunnel, thickly cobwebbed, with metal rungs set in the side of one wall. They climbed the rungs, going up for what seemed like thousands of feet, and came out on a dusty Underground station platform.

NIGHTINGALE LANE

said the old signs on the wall. Brother Fuliginous wished Richard well and told him to wait there and he would be collected, and then he clambered down the side of the wall, and he was gone.

Richard sat on the platform for twenty minutes. He wondered what kind of station this was: it seemed neither abandoned, like British Museum, nor real, like Blackfriars: instead it was a ghost-station, an imaginary place, forgotten and strange. He wondered why the marquis had not said good-bye. When Richard had asked Door, she had said that she didn’t know, but that maybe good-byes were something else, like comforting people, at which the marquis wasn’t much good. Then she told him that she had something in her eye, and she gave him a paper with his instructions on, and she went away.

Something waved from the darkness of the tunnel: something white. It was a handkerchief on a stick. “Hello?” called Richard.

The feather-wrapped roundness of Old Bailey stepped out of the gloom, looking self-conscious and ill at ease. He was waving Richard’s handkerchief, and he was sweating. “It’s me little flag,” he said, pointing to the handkerchief.

“I’m glad it’s come in useful.”

Old Bailey grinned uneasily. “Right. Just wanted to say. Something I got for you. Here you go.” He thrust a hand into a coat pocket and pulled out a long black feather with a blue-purple-green sheen to it; red thread had been wound around the quill end of the feather.

“Um. Well, thanks,” said Richard, unsure of what he ought to do with it.

“It’s a feather,” explained Old Bailey. “And a good one. Memento. Souvenir. Keepsake. And it’s free. A gift. Me to you. Bit of a thank-you.”

“Yes. Well. Very kind of you.”

Richard put it in his pocket. A warm wind blew through the tunnel: a train was coming. “This’ll be your train now,” said Old Bailey. “I don’t take trains, me. Give me a good roof any day.” He shook Richard’s hand, and fled.

The train pulled in at the station, its headlights were turned off, and there was nobody standing in the driver’s compartment in the front. It came to a full stop: all the carriages were dark, and no doors opened. Richard knocked on the door in front of him, hoping that it was the correct one. The door gaped open, flooding the imaginary station with warm yellow light. Two small, elderly gentlemen holding long, copper-colored bugles stepped off the train and onto the platform. Richard recognized them: Dagvard and Halvard, from Earl’s Court; although he could no longer recall, if he had ever known, which gentleman was which. They put their bugles to their lips and performed a ragged, but sincere, fanfare. Richard got onto the train, and they walked in behind him.