Mr. Croup clambered down from his plinth. “A gentle word in your woolly ears, little lambkins,” he said. Richard looked around them. There had to be somewhere they could run. He reached down, clasped Door’s hand, and looked around, desperately.
“No, please. Stay just where you are,” said Mr. Croup. “We like you like that. And we don’t want to have to hurt you.”
“We do,” said Mr. Vandemar.
“Well, yes, Mister Vandemar, once you put it like that. We want to hurt you both. We want to hurt you a lot. But that’s not why we’re here right now. We’re here to make things more interesting. You see, when things get dull, my partner and I become restive and, hard as you may find this to believe, we lose our sunny and delightful dispositions.”
Mr. Vandemar showed them his teeth, demonstrating his sunny and delightful disposition. It was unquestionably the most horrible thing that Richard had ever seen.
“Leave us alone,” said Door. Her voice was clear and steady. Richard squeezed her hand. If she could be brave, so could he. “If you want to hurt her,” he said, “you’ll have to kill me first.”
Mr. Vandemar seemed genuinely pleased by this. “All right,” he said. “Thanks.”
“And we’ll hurt you, too,” said Mr. Croup.
“Not yet, though,” said Mr. Vandemar.
“You see,” explained Mr. Croup, in a voice like rancid butter, “right now, we’re just here to worry you.”
Mr. Vandemar’s voice was a night wind blowing over a desert of bones. “Make you suffer,” he said. “Spoil your day.”
Mr. Croup sat down at the base of Mr. Vandemar’s plinth. “You visited Earl’s Court today,” he said, in what Richard suspected he fondly imagined were light and conversational tones.
“So?” said Door. She was edging away from them, now.
Mr. Croup smiled. “How did we know that? How did we know where to find you now?”
“Can get to you any time at all,” said Mr. Vandemar, almost in a whisper.
“You’ve been sold out, little ladybird,” said Mr. Croup to Door—and, Richard realized, to Door alone. “There’s a traitor in your nest. A cuckoo.”
“Come on,” she said, and she ran. Richard ran with her, through the hall filled with junk, toward a door. At Door’s touch, it opened.
“Bid them farewell, Mister Vandemar,” said Mr. Croup’s voice, from behind them.
“Bye bye,” said Mr. Vandemar.
“No-no,” corrected Mr. Croup. “Au revoir.” He made a noise then—the cuck-koo cuck-koo that a cuckoo might make, if it were five and a half feet high and had a weakness for human flesh—while Mr. Vandemar, truer to his nature, threw back his bullet head and howled like a wolf, ghostly and feral and mad.
They were outside, in the open air, at night, running down a pavement in Bloomsbury’s Russell Street. Richard thought his heart would pound its way through his chest. A large black car went by. The British Museum was on the other side of some high, black-painted railings. Discreet concealed lights illuminated the outside of the high white Victorian building, the huge pillars of the facade, the steps up to the front door. This was the repository of so many of the world’s treasures, looted and found and rescued and donated over hundreds of years.
They reached a gate in the railings. Door grabbed it with both hands and pushed against it. Nothing happened. “Can’t you make it open?” asked Richard.
“What does it look like I’m trying to do?” she snapped back, an unfamiliar edge to her voice. A few hundred feet down the pavement, at the main gate, large cars were drawing up, couples in smart clothes were climbing out, walking along the drive toward the museum.
“Down there,” said Richard. “The main gate.”
Door nodded. She looked behind them. “Those two don’t seem to be following us,” she said. They hurried toward the main gate.
“Are you all right?” asked Richard. “What happened just then?”
Door hunched deep into her leather jacket. She was looking paler than usual, which was extremely pale indeed, and there were dark semicircles beneath her eyes. “I’m tired,” she said, flatly. “Opened too many doors today. Takes a lot out of me, each time. I need a little time to recover. Something to eat, and I’ll be fine.”
There was a guard on the gate, minutely examining the engraved invitations that each of the well-shaven men in dinner jackets and the fragrant women in evening dresses needed to present, then ticking their names off on a list, before allowing them through. A uniformed policeman beside him surveyed the guests implacably. Richard and Door walked through the gate, and no one glanced at them twice. There was a line of people standing on the stone steps that led up to the museum doors, and Richard and Door joined the line. A white-haired man, accompanied by a woman bravely wearing a mink coat, joined the line immediately and neatly behind them. A thought struck Richard. “Can they see us?” he asked.