Neverwhere(39)

The woman looked down at Varney. “Thank you, Mister Varney,” she said, politely. “I’m afraid we won’t be needing your services after all.” She got off him, and put his knife away in her belt.

“And you are called?” asked the marquis.

“I’m called Hunter,” she said.

Nobody said anything. Then Door spoke, hesitantly, “The Hunter?”

“That’s right,” said Hunter, and she brushed the dust of the floor from her leather leggings. “I’m back.”

From somewhere a bell sounded, twice, a deep bonging noise that made Richard’s teeth vibrate. “Five minutes,” muttered the marquis. Then he said, to the remains of the crowd, “I think we’ve found our bodyguard. Thank you all very much. Nothing more to see.”

Hunter walked over to Door, and looked her up and down. “Can you stop people from killing me?” asked Door. Hunter inclined her head toward Richard. “I saved his life three times today, crossing the bridge, coming to the market.”

Varney, who had stumbled to his feet, picked up the crowbar with his mind. The marquis watched him do it; he said nothing.

The ghost of a smile hovered about Door’s lips. “That’s funny,” she said. “Richard thought you were a—“

Hunter never found out what Richard thought she was. The bar came hurtling toward her head. She simply reached out a hand and caught it: it thwapped, satisfyingly, into the palm of her hand.

She walked over to Varney. “Is this yours?” she asked. He bared his teeth at her, yellow and black and brown. “Right now,” said Hunter, “we’re under Market Truce. But if you try something like that again, I’ll waive the truce, and I’ll break off both your arms and make you carry them home in your teeth. Now,” she continued, bending his wrist behind his back, “say sorry, nicely.”

“Ow,” said Varney.

“Yes?” she said, encouragingly.

He spat it out as if it were choking him. “I’m sorry.” She let him go. Varney backed away to a safe distance, plainly scared and furious, watching Hunter. When he reached the door to the Food Halls, he hesitated, and shouted, “You’re dead. You’re fucking dead, you are!” in a voice that hovered on the edge of tears, and then he turned, and he ran from the room.

“Amateurs,” sighed Hunter.



They walked back through the store the way that Richard had come. The bell he had heard was now tolling deeply and continually. When they came upon it, he saw that it was a huge brass bell, suspended on a wooden frame, with a rope suspended from the clapper. It was being tolled by a large black man, wearing the black robes of a Dominican monk, and it had been set up next to Harrods’ gourmet jelly bean stand.

Impressive as the market had been to watch, Richard found the speed at which it was being dismantled, broken down, and put away even more impressive. All evidence that it had ever been there was vanishing: stalls were being taken apart, loaded onto people’s backs, hauled off into the streets. Richard noticed Old Bailey, his arms filled with his crude signs and with bird cages, stumbling out of the store. The old man waved happily at Richard and vanished off into the night.

The crowds thinned, the market vanished, and almost instantly the ground floor of Harrods looked as usual, as sedate, elegant, and clean as any time he had walked around it in Jessica’s wake on a Saturday afternoon. It was as if the market had never existed.

“Hunter,” said the marquis. “I’ve heard of you, of course. Where have you been, all this time?”

“Hunting,” she said, simply. Then, to Door. “Can you take orders?”

Door nodded. “If I have to.”

“Good. Then maybe I can keep you alive,” said Hunter. “If I take the job.”

The marquis stopped. His eyes flickered over her, distrustfully. “You said, if you take the job . . . ?”

Hunter opened the door, and they stepped out onto the pavement of London at night. It had rained while they had been at the market, and the streetlights now glimmered on the wet tarmac. “I’ve taken it,” said Hunter.

Richard stared at the glistening street. It all seemed so normal, so quiet, so sane. For a moment, he felt that all he needed to get his life back would be to hail a taxi and tell it to take him home. And then he would sleep the night through in his own bed. But a taxi would not see him or stop for him, and he had nowhere to go, even if one did.

“I’m tired,” he said.

No one said anything. Door would not meet his eyes, the marquis was cheerfully ignoring him, and Hunter was treating him as an irrelevance. He felt like a small child, unwanted, following the bigger children around, and that made him irritated. “Look,” he said, clearing his throat, “I know you are all very busy people. But what about me?”