Neverwhere(71)

The wasp-waisted woman was now standing next to Richard, holding a small tray. On the tray was a small glass, containing an aggressively emerald-colored liquid. Richard stared at it, then looked at Door.

“What are you giving him?” asked Door.

“Nothing that will hurt him,” said Serpentine, with a frosty smile. “You are guests.”

Richard knocked back the green liquid, which tasted of thyme and peppermint and winter mornings. He felt it go down and prepared himself to try to keep it from coming back up again. Instead he took a deep breath and realized, with a little surprise, that his head no longer hurt, and that he was starving.



Old Bailey was not, intrinsically, one of those people put in the world to tell jokes. Despite this handicap, he persisted in trying. He loved to tell shaggy-dog stories of inordinate length, which would end in a sad pun although, often as not, Old Bailey would be unable to remember it by the time he got there. The only public for Old Bailey’s jokes consisted of a small captive audience of birds, who, particularly the rooks, viewed his jokes as deep and philosophical parables containing profound and penetrating insights into what it meant to be human, and who would actually ask him, from time to time, to tell them another of his amusing stories.

“All right, all right, all right,” Old Bailey was saying. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There was a man walked into a bar. No, he wasn’t a man. That’s the joke. Sorry. He was a horse. A horse . . . no . . . a piece of string. Three pieces of string. Right. Three pieces of string walk into a bar.”

A huge old rook croaked a question. Old Bailey rubbed his chin, then shrugged. “They just do. It’s a joke. They can walk in the joke. He asks for a drink for himself and one for each of his friends. And the barman says, ‘We don’t serve pieces of string here.’ To one of the pieces of string. So. It goes back to its friends and says, ‘They don’t serve strings here’ And it’s a joke, so the middle one does it too, three of them, you see, then the last one, he ties himself around the middle and he pulls the end of him all out. And he orders a drink.” The rook croaked again, sagely. “Three drinks. Right. And the barman says, ‘here, aren’t you one of those pieces of string?’ And he says, the piece of string, he says, ‘No.’I'm a frayed knot.’ Afraid not, y’see, a frayed knot. Pun. Very, very funny.”

The starlings made polite noises. The rooks nodded their heads, put their heads on one side. Then the oldest rook cawed at Old Bailey. “Another? I’m not made of hilarity, y’know. Let me think . . . “

There was a noise from the tent, a deep, pulsing noise, like the beating of a distant heart. Old Bailey hurried into his tent. The noise was coming from an old wooden chest in which Old Bailey kept those things he most prized. He opened the chest. The throbbing noise became much louder. The small silver box was sitting on the top of Old Bailey’s treasures. He reached down one gnarly hand and picked it up. A red light rhythmically pulsed and glowed inside it, like a heartbeat, and shone out through the silver filigree, and through the cracks and fastenings. “He’s in trouble,” said Old Bailey.

The oldest rook cawed a question. “No. It’s not a joke. It’s the marquis,” said Old Bailey. “He’s in deep trouble.”



Richard was halfway through his second plate of breakfast when Serpentine pushed her chair back from the table.

“I think I have had my fill of hospitality,” she said. “Child, young man, good day. Hunter . . . ” she paused. Then she ran one clawlike finger along the line of Hunter’s jaw. “Hunter, you are always welcome here.” She nodded to them, imperiously, and stood up and walked away, followed by her wasp-waisted butler.

“We should leave now,” said Hunter. She stood up from the table, and Door and Richard, more reluctantly, followed her.

They walked along a corridor that was too thin to allow more than one of them to pass at a time. They went up some stone steps. They crossed an iron bridge in the darkness, while Underground trains echoed by beneath them. Then they entered what seemed like an endless network of underground vaults that smelled of damp and decay, of brick and stone and time. “That was your old boss, eh? She seemed nice enough,” said Richard to Hunter. Hunter said nothing.

Door, who had been somewhat subdued, said, “When they want to make children behave themselves in the Underside, they tell them, ‘Behave, or Serpentine will take you.’ “

“Oh,” said Richard. “And you worked for her, Hunter?”