It smelled musty, of damp and old brick, of rot and the dark. “Where are we?” Richard whispered. His guide shushed him to silence. They reached another door set in a wall. The man rapped on it rhythmically. There was a pause, and then the door swung open.
For a moment, Richard was blinded by the sudden light. He was standing in a huge, vaulted room, an underground hall, filled with firelight and smoke. Small fires burned around the room. Shadowy people stood by the flames, roasting small animals on spits. People scurried from fire to fire. It reminded him of Hell—or rather, the way that he had thought of Hell, as a schoolboy. The smoke irritated his lungs, and he coughed. A hundred eyes turned, then, and stared at him: a hundred eyes, unblinking and unfriendly.
A man scuttled toward them. He had long hair, a patchy brown beard, and his ragged clothes were trimmed with fur—orange-and-white-and-black fur, like the coat of a calico cat. He would have been taller than Richard, but he walked with a pronounced stoop, his hands held up at his chest, fingers pressed together. “What? What is it? What is this?” he asked Richard’s guide. “Who’ve you brought us, Iliaster? Talk-talk-talk.”
“He’s from the Upside,” said the guide. (Iliaster? thought Richard.) “Was asking about the Lady Door. And the Floating Market. Brought him to you, Lord Rat-speaker. Figured you’d know what to do with him.” There were now more than a dozen of the fur-trimmed people standing around them, women and men, and even a few children. They moved in scurries: moments of stillness, followed by hasty dashes toward Richard.
The Lord Rat-speaker reached inside his fur-trimmed rags and pulled out a wicked-looking sliver of glass, about eight inches long. Some poorly cured fur had been tied around the bottom half of it to form an improvised grip. Firelight glinted from the glass blade. The Lord Rat-speaker put the shard to Richard’s throat. “Oh yes. Yes-yes-yes,” he cluttered, excitedly. “I know exactly what to do with him.”
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 announced their intention of turning the hospital into an unparalleled block of unique luxury-living accommodations, had faded away as soon as the hospital had been closed, and so it stood there, year after year, gray and empty and unwanted, its windows boarded up, its doors padlocked shut. The roof was rotten, and rain dripped through the empty hospital’s interior, spreading damp and decay through the building. The hospital was ranged around a central well, which let in a certain amount of gray and unfriendly light.
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.