Neverwhere(97)

Door’s arms were bound behind her back, and Mr. Vandemar walked behind her, one huge beringed hand resting on her shoulder, pushing her along. Mr. Croup scuttled on ahead of them, holding the talisman he had taken from her on high, and peering edgily from side to side, like a particularly pompous weasel on its way to raid the henhouse.

The labyrinth itself was a place of pure madness. It was built of lost fragments of London Above: alleys and roads and corridors and sewers that had fallen through the cracks over the millennia, and entered the world of the lost and the forgotten. The two men and the girl walked over cobbles, and through mud, and through dung of various kinds, and over rotting wooden boards. They walked through daylight and night, through gaslit streets, and sodium-lit streets, and streets lit with burning rushes and links. It was an ever-changing place: and each path divided and circled and doubled back on itself.

Mr. Croup felt the tug of the talisman, and let it take him where it wanted to go. They walked down a tiny alleyway, which had once been part of a Victorian “rookery”—a slum comprised in equal parts of theft and penny gin, of twopenny-halfpenny squalor and threepenny sex—and they heard it, snuffling and snorting somewhere nearby. And then it bellowed, deep and dark. Mr. Croup hesitated, before hurrying forward, up a short wooden staircase; and then, at the end of the alley, he stopped, squinting about him, before he led them down some steps into a long stone tunnel that had once run across the Fleet Marshes, in the Templars’ time. Door said, “You’re afraid, aren’t you?” Croup glared at her. “Hush your tongue.” She smiled, although she did not feel like smiling. “You’re scared that your safe-conduct token won’t get you past the Beast. What are you planning now? To kidnap Islington? Sell both of us to the highest bidder?”

“Quiet,” said Mr. Vandemar. But Mr. Croup simply chuckled; and Door knew then that the Angel Islington was not her friend.

She began to shout. “Hey! Beast! Here!” Mr. Vandemar cuffed her head and knocked her against the wall. “Said to be quiet,” he told her, calmly. She tasted blood in her mouth and spat scarlet on the mud. Then she parted her lips to begin shouting once more. Mr. Vandemar, anticipating this, had taken a handkerchief from his pocket, and he forced it into her mouth. She tried to bite his thumb as he did so, but it made no appreciable impression on him.

“Now you’ll be quiet,” he told her. Mr. Vandemar was very proud of his handkerchief, which was spattered with green and brown and black and had originally belonged to an overweight snuff dealer in the 1820s, who had died of apoplexy and been buried with his handkerchief in his pocket. Mr. Vandemar still occasionally found fragments of snuff merchant in it, but it was, he felt, a fine handkerchief for all that. They continued in silence.



Richard made another entry in his mental diary. Today, he thought, I’ve survived walking the plank, the kiss of death, and a lecture on inflicting pain. Right now, I’m on my way through a labyrinth with a mad bastard who came back from the dead and a bodyguard who turned out to be a . . . whatever the opposite of a bodyguard is. I am so far out of my depth that . . . Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.

They were wading through a narrow passage of wet, marshy ground, between dark stone walls. The marquis held both the token and the crossbow, and he took care to walk, at all times, about ten feet behind Hunter. Richard, in the lead, was carrying Hunter’s Beast spear and a yellow flare the marquis had produced from beneath his blanket, which illuminated the stone walls and the mud, and he walked well in front of Hunter. The marshland stank, and huge mosquitoes had begun to settle upon Richard’s arms and legs and face, biting him painfully and raising huge, itching welts. Neither Hunter nor the marquis so much as mentioned the mosquitoes.

Richard was beginning to suspect that they were quite lost. It did not help his mood any that there were a large number of dead people in the marsh: leathery preserved bodies, discolored skeletal bones, and pallid, water-swollen corpses. He wondered how long the corpses had been there, and whether they had been killed by the Beast or by the mosquitoes. He said nothing as they walked on for another five minutes and eleven mosquito bites, and then he called out, “I think we’re lost. We’ve been through this way before.”

The marquis held up the token. “No. We’re fine,” he said. “The token is leading us straight. Clever little thing.”

“Yeah,” said Richard, who was not impressed. “Very clever.”