The marquis turned and stared at him, eyes huge and white in his dark face. “You?” he said. “What about you?”
“Well,” said Richard. “How do I get back to normal again? It’s like I’ve walked into a nightmare. Last week everything made sense, and now nothing makes sense . . . ” He trailed off. Swallowed. “I want to know how to get my life back,” he explained.
“You won’t get it back traveling with us, Richard,” said Door. “It’s going to be hard enough for you anyway. I . . . I really am sorry.”
Hunter, in the lead, knelt down on the pavement. She took a small metal rod from her belt and used it to unlock the cover to a sewer. She pulled up the sewer cover, looked into it warily, climbed down, then ushered Door into the sewer. Door did not look at Richard as she went down. The marquis scratched the side of his nose. “Young man,” he said, “understand this: there are two Londons. There’s London Above—that’s where you lived—and then there’s London Below—the Underside—inhabited by the people who fell through the cracks in the world. Now you’re one of them. Good night.”
He began to climb down the sewer ladder. Richard said, “Wait,” and caught the sewer cover before it could close. He followed the marquis down. It smelled like drains at the top of the sewer—a dead, soapy, cabbagey smell. He expected it to get worse as he went down, but instead the smell quickly dissipated as he approached the floor of the sewer. Gray water ran, shallow but fast, along the bottom of the brick tunnel. Richard stepped into it. He could see the lights of the others up ahead, and he ran and splashed down the tunnel until he caught up with them.
“Go away,” said the marquis.
“No,” he said.
Door glanced up at him. “I am really sorry, Richard,” she said.
The marquis stepped between Richard and Door. “You can’t go back to your old home or your old job or your old life,” he said to Richard, almost gently. “None of those things exist. Up there, you don’t exist.” They had reached a junction: a place where three tunnels came together. Door and Hunter set off along one of them, the one that was empty of water, and they did not look back. The marquis lingered.
“You’ll just have to make the best of it down here,” he said to Richard, “in the sewers and the magic and the dark.” And then he smiled, hugely, whitely: a gleaming grin, monumental in its insincerity. “Well—delightful to see you again. Best of luck. If you can survive for the next day or two,” he confided, “you might even make it through a whole month.” And with that he turned and strode off through the sewer, after Door and Hunter.
Richard leaned against a wall and listened to their footsteps, echoing away, and to the rush of the water running past on its way to the pumping stations of East London, and the sewage works. “Shit,” he said. And then, to his surprise, for the first time since his father died, alone in the dark, Richard Mayhew began to cry.
The Underground station was quite empty, and quite dark. Varney walked through it, keeping close to walls, darting nervous looks behind him, and in front of him, and from side to side. He had picked the station at random, had headed for it over the rooftops and through the shadows, making certain that he was not being followed. He was not heading back to his lair in the Camden Town deep tunnels. Too risky. There were other places where Varney had cached weapons and food. He would go to ground for a little while, until this all blew over.
He stopped beside a ticket machine and listened, in the darkness: absolute silence. Reassured that he was alone, he allowed himself to relax. He stopped at the top of the spiral staircase and drew a deep breath.
An oily voice from beside him said conversationally, “Varney’s the finest bravo and guard in the Underside. Everyone knows that. Mister Varney told us so himself.” A voice from the other side of him responded, dully, “It’s not nice to lie, Mister Croup.”
In the pitch darkness, Mr. Croup expanded on his theme. “It isn’t, Mister Vandemar. I have to say, I regard it as a personal betrayal, and I was deeply wounded by it. And disappointed. When you don’t have any redeeming features, you don’t take particularly kindly to disappointment, do you, Mister Vandemar?”
“Not kindly at all, Mister Croup.”
Varney threw himself forward, and ran, headlong, in the dark, down the spiral staircase. A voice from the top of the stairs, Mr. Croup’s: “Really,” it said, “we ought to look upon it as a mercy killing.”
The sound of Varney’s feet clattered off the metal railings, echoed throughout the stairwell. He puffed, and he panted, his shoulders glancing off the walls, tumbling blindly downwards in the dark. He reached the bottom of the steps, next to the sign warning travelers that there were 259 steps up to the top, and only healthy people should even think about attempting it. Everyone else, suggested the sign, should use the elevator.