Richard chased up the steps, as fast as he could, in the dark. Soon he saw Door’s lamp-light above him. “Wait,” he panted. “Please.” She stopped, and waited for him to catch up. And then, when he had caught up, and was standing next to her on a claustrophobically small landing, she waited for him to catch his breath. “You can’t just go running off like that,” said Richard. Door said nothing; the line of her lips became slightly more compressed; the angle of her chin was ever-so-slightly raised. “She’s your bodyguard,” he pointed out.
Door began to walk up the next flight of steps. Richard followed her. “Well, we’ll be back soon enough,” said Door. “She can start guarding me again then.”
The air was close, dank and oppressive. Richard wondered how you could tell if the air was bad, in the absence of a canary, and he contented himself with hoping that it wasn’t. “I think the marquis probably did know. About her curse, or whatever it is,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I expect he did.”
“He . . . ” Richard began. “The marquis. Well, you know, to be honest, he seems a little bit dodgy to me.”
Door stopped. The steps dead-ended in a rough brick wall. “Mm,” she agreed. “He’s a little bit dodgy in the same way that rats are a little bit covered in fur.”
“Then why go to him for help? Wasn’t there someone else who could have helped you?”
“We’ll talk about it later.” She opened the scroll the earl had given her, glanced over the spidery handwriting, then rolled it back up. “We’ll be fine,” she said, decisively. “It’s all in here. We’ve just got to get into the British Museum. We find the Angelus, we get out. Easy. Nothing to it. Close your eyes.”
Richard closed his eyes, obediently. “Nothing to it,” he repeated. “When people say that on films, it always means that something awful is going to happen.”
He felt a breeze against his face. Something in the quality of the darkness beyond his closed eyelids changed. “So what’s your point?” asked Door. The acoustics had altered as well: they were in a bigger room. “You can open your eyes now.”
He opened his eyes. They were on the other side of the wall, he assumed, in what appeared to be a junk room. Not just any old junk room, though: there was something rather strange and special about the quality of this junk. It was the kind of magnificent, rare, strange, and expensive junk one would only expect to see somewhere like . . . “Are we in the British Museum?” he asked. She frowned, and seemed to be thinking, or listening. “Not exactly. We’re very near. I think this must be some kind of storage space or something.” She reached up to touch the fabric of a suit of antique clothing, displayed on a wax dummy.
“I wish we’d stayed back with the bodyguard” said Richard.
Door tipped her head on one side and looked at him gravely. “And what do you need guarding from, Richard Mayhew?”
“Nothing,” he admitted. And then they turned the corner, and he said, “Well . . . maybe them,” and, at the same time, Door said, “Shit.” Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar were standing on plinths on each side of the aisle down which they walked.
They reminded Richard horridly of an exhibition of contemporary art Jessica had once taken him to: an exciting young artist had announced that he would break down all the Taboos of Art, and to this end, had embarked on a campaign of systematic grave robbery, displaying the thirty most interesting results of his depredations in glass cases. The exhibit was closed after the artist sold Stolen Cadaver Number 25 to an advertising agency for a six-figure sum, and the relatives of Stolen Cadaver Number 25, seeing a photo of the sculpture in the Sun, had sued both for a share of the proceeds and to change the name of the art piece to Edgar Fospring, 1919-1987 Loving Husband, Father and Uncle. Rest in Peace, Daddy. Richard had stared at the glass-bound corpses in their stained suits and damaged dresses with horror: he hated himself for looking, but he had not been able to turn away.
Mr. Croup smiled like a snake with a crescent moon stuck in its mouth, and his resemblance to Stolen Cadavers Numbers 1 to 30 was, if anything, increased by this. “What?” said the smiling Mr. Croup. “No Mister ‘I’m So Clever and Know Everything’ Marquis? No ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? Whoops! I can’t go upstairs?’ Hunter?” He paused, for dramatic effect. “So paint me gray and call me a dire wolf if it isn’t two little lost lambs, out on their own, after dark.”
“You could call me a wolf, too, Mister Croup,” said Mr. Vandemar, helpfully.