The elevator?
Something clanked, and the elevator doors opened, magnificently slowly, flooding the passageway with light. Varney fumbled for his knife: cursed, when he realized the Hunter-bitch still had it. He reached for the machete in his shoulder sheath. It was gone.
He heard a polite cough behind him, and he turned.
Mr. Vandemar was sitting on the steps, at the bottom of the spiral staircase. He was picking his fingernails with Varney’s machete.
And then Mr, Croup fell upon him, all teeth and talons and little blades; and Varney never had a chance to scream. “Bye,” said Mr. Vandemar, impassively, and he continued paring his nails. After that the blood began to flow. Wet, red blood in enormous quantities, for Varney was a big man, and he had been keeping it all inside. When Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar were finished, however, one would have been hard put even to notice the slight stain on the floor at the bottom of the spiral staircase.
The next time the floors were washed, it was gone forever.
Hunter was in the lead. Door walked in the middle. The marquis de Carabas took up the rear. None of them had said a word since leaving Richard half an hour earlier.
Door stopped, suddenly. “We can’t do this,” she said, flatly. “We can’t leave him back there.”
“Of course we can,” said the marquis. “We did.”
She shook her head. She had felt guilty and stupid ever since she saw Richard, lying on his back beneath Ruislip, at the audition. She was tired of it.
“Don’t be foolish,” said the marquis.
“He saved my life,” she told him. “He could have left me on the sidewalk. He didn’t.”
It was her fault. She knew that was true. She had opened a door to someone who could help her, and help her he had. He had taken her somewhere warm, and he had cared for her, and he had brought her help. The action of helping her had tumbled him from his world into hers.
It was foolish to even think about bringing him with them. They could not afford to bring someone with them: she was unsure that the three of them would be able to take care of themselves on the journey that confronted them.
She wondered, briefly, if it were simply the door that she had opened, that had taken her to him, which had allowed him to notice her, or if there were, somehow, more to it than that.
The marquis raised an eyebrow: he was detached, removed, a creature of pure irony. “My dear young lady,” he said. “We are not bringing a guest along on this expedition.”
“Don’t patronize me, de Carabas,” said Door. She was so tired. “And I think I can decide who comes with us. You are working for me, aren’t you? Or is it the other way around?” Her sorrow and exhaustion had drained her of her patience. She needed de Carabas—she couldn’t afford to drive him away— but she had reached her limit.
De Carabas stared at her, coldly angry. “He is not coming with us,” he stated, flatly. “Anyway, he’s probably dead by now.”
Richard was not dead. He was sitting in the dark, on a ledge, on the side of a storm drain, wondering what to do, wondering how much further out of his league he could possibly get. His life so far, he decided, had prepared him perfectly for a job in Securities, for shopping at the supermarket, for watching soccer on the television on the weekends, for turning up the thermostat if he got cold. It had magnificently failed to prepare him for a life as an un-person on the roofs and in the sewers of London, for a life in the cold and the wet and the dark.
A light glimmered. Footsteps came toward him. If, he decided, it was a bunch of murderers, cannibals, or monsters, he would not even put up a fight. Let them end it all for him; he’d had enough. He stared down into the dark, to the place where his feet should be. The footsteps came closer.
“Richard?” The voice was Door’s. He jumped. Then he studiously ignored her. If it weren’t for you, he thought . . . “Richard?”
He didn’t look up. “What?” he said.
“Look,” she said. “You really wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for me,” You can say that again, he thought. “And I don’t think you’ll be any safer with us. But. Well.” She stopped. A deep breath. “I’m sorry. I really am. Are you coining?”
He looked at her then: a small creature with huge eyes staring at him urgently from a heart-shaped, pale face. Okay, he said to himself. I guess I’m not quite ready to just give up and die. “Well, I don’t have anywhere else to be right now,” he said, with a studied unconcern that bordered on hysteria. “Why not?”
Her face changed. She threw her arms around his chest and hugged him, tightly. “And we will try to get you back home again,” she said. “Promise. Once we’ve found what I’m looking for.” He wondered if she meant it, suspected, for the first time, that what she was offering might be impossible. But he pushed that thought out of his head. They began to walk down the tunnel. Richard could see Hunter and the marquis waiting for them at the tunnel’s mouth. The marquis looked as if he had been forced to swallow a pulped lemon.