Neverwhere(24)

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 beginning to lighten, turning a stark, leaden color. Strands of mist hung like livid ghosts on the air.

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 grinned, without humor. “Certainly. I’m a very busy man. Things to see. People to do.”

“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.

. . . something whispered and shivered and changed . . .

. . . and the door collapsed into darkness.



The memory was fresh, only a few days old: Door moved through the House Without Doors calling “I’m home,” and “Hello?” She slipped from the anteroom to the dining room, to the library, to the drawing room; no one answered. She moved to another room.

The swimming pool was an indoor Victorian structure, constructed of marble and of cast iron. Her father had found it when he was younger, abandoned and about to be demolished, and he had woven it into the fabric of the House Without Doors. Perhaps in the world outside, in London Above, the room had long been destroyed and forgotten. Door had no idea where any of the rooms of her house were, physically. Her grandfather had constructed the house, taking a room from here, a room from there, all through London, discrete and doorless; her father had added to it.