“What are you looking for, anyway?”, asked Richard, cheering up a little.
Door took a deep breath, and answered after a long pause. “It’s a long story,” she said, solemnly. “Right now we’re looking for an angel named Islington.” It was then that Richard began to laugh; he couldn’t help himself. There was hysteria in there, certainly, but there was also the exhaustion of someone who had managed, somehow, to believe several dozen impossible things in the last twenty-four hours, without ever getting a proper breakfast. His laughter echoed down the tunnels.
“An angel?” he said, giggling helplessly. “Called Islington?”
“We’ve got a long way to go,” said Door.
And Richard shook his head, and felt wrung out, and emptied, and flayed. “An angel,” he whispered, hysterically, to the tunnels and the dark. “An angel.”
There were candles all over the Great Hall: candles stood by the iron pillars that held the roof up; candles waited by the waterfall that ran down one wall and into the small rock-pool below; candles clustered on the sides of the rock wall; candles huddled on the floor; candles were set into candlesticks by the huge door that stood between two dark iron pillars. The door was built of polished black flint set into a silver base that had tarnished, over the centuries, almost to black. The candles were unlit; but as the tall form walked past, they flickered into flame. No hand touched them; no fires touched their wicks.
The figure’s robe was simple, and white; or more than white. A color, or an absence of all colors, so bright as to be startling. Its feet were bare on the cold rock floor of the Great Hall. Its face was pale and wise, and gentle; and, perhaps, a little lonely.
It was very beautiful.
Soon every candle in the Hall was burning. It paused by the rock-pool; knelt beside the water, cupped its hands, lowered them into the clear water, raised them, and drank. The water was cold, but very pure. When it had finished drinking the water it closed its eyes for a moment, as if in benediction. Then it stood up, and walked away, back through the Hall, the way it had come; and the candles went out as it passed, as they had done for tens of thousands of years. It had no wings; but still, it was, unmistakably, an angel.
Islington left the Great Hall; and the last of the candles went out, and the darkness returned.
Neverwhere
SIX
Richard wrote a diary entry in his head.
Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiancee, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as any life makes sense.) Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement, and I tried to be a Good Samaritan. Now I’ve got no fiancee, no home, no job, and I’m walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruit fly. “This way,” said the marquis, gesturing elegantly, his filthy lace cuff flowing.
“Don’t all these tunnels look the same?” asked Richard, tabling his diary entry for the moment. “How can you tell which is which?”
“You can’t,” said the marquis, sadly. “We’re hopelessly lost. We’ll never be seen again. In a couple of days we’ll be killing each other for food.”
“Really?” He hated himself for rising to the bait, even as he said it.
“No.” The marquis’s expression said that torturing this poor fool was too easy to even be amusing. Richard found that he cared less and less what these people thought of him, however. Except, perhaps, for Door.
He went back to writing his mental diary. There are hundreds of people in this other London. Thousands maybe. People who come from here, or people who have fallen through the cracks. I’m wandering around with a girl called Door, her bodyguard, and her psychotic grand vizier. We slept last night in a small tunnel that Door said was once a section of Regency sewer. The bodyguard was awake when I went to sleep, and awake when they woke me up. I don’t think she ever sleeps. We had some fruitcake for breakfast; the marquis had a large lump of it in his pocket. Why would anyone have a large lump of fruitcake in his pocket? My shoes dried out mostly while I slept.
I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.
At least the tunnel they were now walking down was dry. It was a high-tech tunnel: all silvery pipes and white walls. The marquis and Door walked together, in front. Richard tended to stay a couple of paces behind them. Hunter moved about: sometimes she was behind them, sometimes to one side of them or to the other, often a little way in front, merging with the shadows. She made no sound when she moved, which Richard found rather disconcerting.