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Inside the pub, Richard’s friends continued to celebrate his forthcoming departure, with an enthusiasm that, to Richard’s way of thinking, was beginning to border on the sinister.
‘You’ve a good heart,’ she told him. ‘Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go.’ Then she shook her head. ‘But mostly, it’s not.’
‘Buck up,’ hissed Mr Croup, encouragingly. ‘There will always be another rat. Now: onward. Things to do. People to damage.’
a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them,
it is almost beyond the human capacity for belief to accept how much museum cafeterias will brazenly charge for a slice of cake and a cup of tea.
Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn’t occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.
Not the most important day of her life, of course. That would come one day in the future, when, Richard had no doubt, they would make her Prime Minister, or Queen, or God.
‘Forgotten?’ He tried to remember what he could have forgotten.
It wasn’t the words that Richard found so unpleasant: it was the tone of voice in which the information was transmitted. A table for tonight should certainly have been booked years before, perhaps, it was implied, by Richard’s parents. A table for tonight was impossible: if the Pope, the Prime Minister and the President of France arrived this evening without a confirmed reservation, even they would be turned out into the street with a continental jeer.
If there was one thing Richard really hated, it was people who stated the obvious: the kind of people who came up to him and said things that he was incapable of failing to notice for himself, such as, for example, ‘It’s raining,’ or ‘The bottom just dropped out of your shopping bag and your food just fell into that puddle,’ or even, ‘Ooh. I bet that hurts.’ ‘You’re up, then,’ said Richard, and hated himself.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, seriously. ‘Most of the blood was someone else’s.’
‘She’s a little . . . funny,’ he added, and then he twirled one finger next to his temple, to indicate that the girl was in fact a complete lunatic.
‘Can I ask a question?’ said Richard. ‘Certainly not,’ said the Marquis. ‘You don’t ask any questions. You don’t get any answers. You don’t stray from the path. You don’t even think about what’s happening to you right now. Got it?’ ‘But—?’ ‘Most important of all: no buts, Now, we have a damsel to undistress,’ said de Carabas.
Richard moved, clambering down the metal ladder set into the wall beneath the manhole, feeling so far out of his depth that he would have needed a bathyscaphe to ever see the surface again.
To say that Richard Mayhew was not very good at heights would be perfectly accurate, but would fail to give the full picture; it would be like describing the planet Jupiter as bigger than a duck.
Richard put his head on one side. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I know this is a personal question. But are you clinically insane?’ ‘Possible, but very unlikely. Why?’ ‘Well,’ said Richard. ‘One of us must be.’
a stained old calendar hung, quite uselessly, unless 1979 ever came back around.
‘I understand,’ he said, ‘that the words favour, really, and big have been used. In conjunction, and the right order.’
‘Croup and Vandemar,’ he said, smoothly, ‘the Old Firm. Obstacles obliterated, nuisances eradicated, bothersome limbs removed and tutelary dentistry.’
Door seized his arm. ‘You’d abandon me?’ she asked. ‘Just like that?’ He grinned, without humour. ‘Certainly. I’m a very busy man. Things to see. People to do.’
And she began to cry, in low, raging sobs, that sounded like they were being tugged from inside her. ‘There. There,’ said the Marquis de Carabas, awkwardly, patting her shoulder. And he added, for good measure, ‘There.’ He did not comfort well.
Varney looked like a bull might look, if the bull were to be shaved, dehorned, covered in tattoos, and had suffered from complete dental breakdown. Also, he snored.
Varney took a step back: a mistake. There was a knife at his temple, the point of the blade next to his eye. ‘Further movements are not recommended,’ said Mr Croup, helpfully. ‘Mister Vandemar might have a little accident with his old toad-sticker. Most accidents do occur in the home. Is that not so, Mister Vandemar?’
Varney ran his tongue over the wreck of his teeth. ‘Are you bribing me?’ he asked. Mr Vandemar had picked up the morning-star. He was pulling the chain apart, with his free hand, link by link, and dropping the bits of twisted metal on to the floor. Chink. ‘No,’ said Mr Vandemar. Chink. ‘We’re intimidating you.’ Chink. ‘And if you don’t do what Mister Croup says, we’re . . .’ chink ‘. . . hurting you . . .’ chink ‘. . . very badly, before we’re . . .’ chink ‘. . . killing you, even badlier.’ ‘Ah,’ said Varney. ‘Then I’m working for you, aren’t I?’ ‘Yes, you are,’ said Mr Croup. ‘I’m afraid we
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Once, as a small boy walking home from school, Richard had encountered a rat, in a ditch by the side of the road. When the rat saw Richard it had reared up on to its hind legs and hissed, and jumped, terrifying Richard. He backed away, marvelling that something so small had been so willing to fight something so much larger than itself. Now Anaesthesia stepped between Richard and Varney. She was less than half his size, but she glared at the big man and bared her teeth, and she hissed like an angry rat at bay.
a dentist’s chair, with a foot-operated manual drill, with a line of miserable people standing beside it, waiting to have their teeth pulled or filled by a young man who seemed to be having altogether too good a time;
‘Nice in a bodyguard,’ lectured the Marquis, ‘is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters. He looks dangerous.’
Varney connected his crowbar with the dwarf, who instantly stopped bouncing and darting, and instantly began lying insensible.
The Marquis had returned. He stood in front of Varney, who looked obscenely pleased with himself. ‘Weapons expertise?’ asked the Marquis. ‘Whew,’ said Varney. ‘Put it like this. If you can cut someone with it, blow someone’s head off with it, break a bone with it or make a nasty hole in someone with it, then Varney’s the master of it.’
‘Right now,’ said Hunter, ‘we’re under Market Truce. But if you try something like that again, I’ll waive the truce, and I’ll break off both your arms and make you carry them home in your teeth. Now,’ she continued, bending his wrist behind his back, ‘say sorry, nicely.’
‘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.
Richard wrote a diary entry in his head. Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiancée, 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 fiancée, 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 mayfly.
Then he smiled, like a cat who had just been entrusted with the keys to a home for wayward but plump canaries.
The Earl, who had been staring at the Marquis de Carabas like a slow-burning fuse, pop-eyed, white-lipped, unable to believe the evidence of his senses, now exploded to his feet, a grey-bearded volcano, an elderly berserker.
Somehow, this was an oddity too many. He could accept the Mind the Gap thing, and the Earl’s Court, and even the strange library. But damn it, like all Londoners, he knew his Tube map, and this was going too far. ‘There isn’t a British Museum station,’ said Richard, firmly. ‘There isn’t?’ boomed the Earl. ‘Then, mm, then you must be very careful as you get off the train.’ And he guffawed, delightedly, and tapped his jester on the shoulder. ‘Hear that, Tooley? I am as funny as you are.’ The jester smiled as bleak a smile as ever was seen. ‘My sides are splitting, my ribs are cracking, and my
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‘Look, Hunter,’ Richard heard his own voice saying, ‘don’t be silly.’ For a moment he thought she was about to hit him, which would have been bad, or even to start crying, which would have been much, much worse.
‘He’s a little bit dodgy in the same way that rats are a little bit covered in fur.’
‘Well, yes, Mister Vandemar, once you put it like that. We want to hurt you both. We want to hurt you rather 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.
‘Scare her,’ muttered Mr Croup, disgustedly. ‘Scare her. That we should be brought to this.’ Mr Vandemar had found half a prawn and lettuce sandwich in a waste-bin, and was gently tearing it into small pieces, which he was tossing down on to the flagstones in front of him, attracting a small flock of peckish late-night pigeons. ‘Should have followed my idea,’ said Mr Vandemar. ‘Would have scared her lots more if I’d pulled his head off while she wasn’t looking, then put my hand up through his throat and wiggled my fingers about. They always scream,’ he confided, ‘when the eyeballs fall out.’
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Richard did not believe in angels. He never had believed in angels. He was damned if he was going to start now. Still, it was much easier not to believe in something when it is not actually looking directly at you, and saying your name.
‘If that should happen, you will in all probability be . . .’ he paused, and then said, ‘beyond caring. But do not fret, perhaps you will be the one to win the key, eh?’ There was a ghastly attempt at reassurance in his voice, which was more terrifying than any kind of attempt to scare him could have been.
The young woman was crying, in the way that grown-ups cry, keeping it inside as much as they can, and hating it when it still pushes out at the edges, making them ugly and funny-looking on the way.
‘I should have brought the Marquis,’ said Door; and she wondered where he was, and what he was doing. The Marquis de Carabas was being crucified on a large X-shaped wooden construction Mr Vandemar had knocked together from several old pallets, part of a chair, a wooden gate, and something that appeared to be a cartwheel.
Mr Croup walked over to the telephone, and picked up the handpiece. He looked rather pleased with himself. ‘Croup and Vandemar,’ he barked. ‘Eyes gouged, noses twisted, tongues pierced, chins cleft, throats slit.’
‘With cities, as with people, Mister Vandemar,’ said Mr Croup, fastidiously, ‘the condition of the bowels is all-important.’
The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys.
Hammersmith enveloped Richard’s hand in one several sizes up. His handshake was enthusiastic, but very gentle, as if he had, in the past, had a number of accidents shaking hands, and had practised it until he got it right.
And then, when it seemed that the wind would become so strong it would blow the world away and blow the stars away and send the people tumbling through the air like so many desiccated autumn leaves— Just then— —it was over, and the leaves and the papers and the plastic shopping bags tumbled to the earth, and the road, and the water.
He looked at the motley rabble on his doorstep with an expression that indicated that they had not been worth getting out of bed for. ‘Can I help you?’ said the footman. Richard had been told to fuck off and die with more warmth and good humour.
Then they waited while the footman lit each of the candles on a candelabra, of the sort normally only seen on paperback book covers, where it is traditionally clutched by a young lady in a flowing nightdress who is fleeing from the kind of manor house that only has one light on anywhere, burning in an attic window.
