Neverwhere

by Neil Gaiman

In the most conversational tones he could muster, he said, ‘Now would be a very bad time to discover that one was claustrophobic, wouldn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ said Door. ‘Then I won’t,’ said Richard.

The three women waited for Richard, who stood there. Richard noticed after a while that he did not seem to be starting to walk across the wooden plank, despite any ‘walk!’ commands he sent to his legs.

‘I’m not scared of falling,’ he told himself. ‘The bit I’m scared of is the bit where you stop falling, and start being dead.’

She looked at the spear in a way that no woman had ever looked at Richard.

The Marquis smiled, without humour. ‘When angels go bad, Richard, they go worse than anyone. Remember, Lucifer used to be an angel.’

Richard made another entry in his mental diary. Dear Diary, he thought. Today I’ve survived walking the plank, the kiss of death, and a lecture on kicking. 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.

‘Richard, have you ever used a spear?’ ‘No.’ ‘Take it,’ she whispered. ‘But . . .’ ‘Do it.’ Her voice was low and urgent. ‘Pick it up. Hold it at the blunt end.’ Richard picked up the fallen spear. He held it at the blunt end. ‘I knew that bit,’ he told her. A glimmer of a smile breathed across her face. ‘I know.’

‘Still,’ said Mr Croup chirpily, ‘Can’t make an omelette without killing a few people.’

‘He’s travelled so far beyond right and wrong he couldn’t see them with a telescope on a nice clear night,’ he confided.

‘I already killed you once today,’ it was saying. ‘What does it take to teach some people?’

‘Lucifer was an idiot. It wound up lord and master of nothing at all.’

It was as if the lid had been pulled off something dark and writhing: a place of derangement and fury and utter viciousness; and, in a time of scary things, it was the most frightening thing Richard had seen. The angel’s serene beauty cracked; its eyes flashed; and it screamed at them, crazy-scary and uncontrolled, utterly certain in its rightness, ‘They deserved it.’

And Islington said nothing, but it smiled, in the manner of a cat who has not only devoured the cream and the canary, but also the chicken you were saving for dinner, and the crème brûlée that would have been dessert.

‘Door,’ called Richard. ‘Don’t do it. Don’t set it free. We don’t matter.’ ‘Actually,’ said the Marquis, ‘I matter very much. But I have to agree. Don’t do it.’

‘Have no fear,’ it said. ‘For when the vastness of creation is mine, and they gather about my throne to sing hosannas to my name, I shall reward the worthy and cast down those who are hateful in my sight.’ And then it muttered something else, under its breath. Richard was never certain exactly what it had said, although, he later maintained, it had sounded a great deal like, ‘Bloody Gabriel, for a start.’

The Marquis de Carabas watched the sleeping children. The idea of sleep – of returning, even for a short time, to a state so horribly close to death – scared him more than he would have ever believed. But, eventually, even he put his head down on his arm, and closed his eyes.

‘There has to be a way,’ said Richard, and he slammed his left hand down on the table, hard, for emphasis. And then he said, ‘Ow,’ – because slamming your hand down on a table for emphasis is not a wise thing to do when you have a broken finger – but he said it very quietly, because he had gone through much worse.

The Abbot cleared his throat. ‘You are all very stupid people,’ he told them, graciously, ‘and you do not know anything at all.’

Richard began to smile. It was a huge and happy smile. You could not have killed that smile by hitting Richard over the back of the head with a brick.

‘Morning, Mister Mayhew,’ he said. It was not a welcoming ‘morning’. It was the kind of ‘morning’ that implied that the speaker really did not care if the recipient lived or died – nor indeed, for that matter, if it was even morning.

Then, because he had nothing else to do for the next ten minutes, he picked up an orange troll and menaced a slightly smaller green-haired troll with it. ‘I am the greatest warrior of London Below. Prepare to die,’ he said, in a dangerous trollish voice, waggling the orange troll. Then he picked up the green-haired troll, and said, in a smaller, trollish voice, ‘Aha! But first you shall drink the nice cup of tea . . .’ Someone knocked on the door, and, guiltily, he put down the trolls.

Gary, who had recently broken up with his girlfriend, due to what Gary persisted in describing as a slight misunderstanding (he had thought she would be rather more understanding about his sleeping with her best friend than she had in fact turned out to be when she found out),

Richard sat down on the pavement, and wondered quite how someone could make such a mess of their life as he had made of his.

The Marquis de Carabas raised an eyebrow. ‘Well?’ he said, irritably. ‘Are you coming?’ Richard stared at him for a heartbeat. Then Richard nodded, without trusting himself to speak, and stood up. And they walked away together through the hole in the wall, back into the darkness, leaving nothing behind them; not even the doorway.

It had thirty pockets, seven of which were obvious, nineteen of which were hidden, and four of which were more or less impossible to find – even, on occasion, for the Marquis himself.

‘You sold my corpse,’ said the Marquis. ‘These things happen. You also sold my possessions. I want them back. I’ll pay.’

The Marquis de Carabas wore a blanket as a substitute for his coat. He wore it swathed about him like Hell’s own poncho. It did not make him happy.

The Marquis de Carabas liked being who he was, and when he took risks he liked them to be calculated risks, and he was someone who double- and triple-checked his calculations. He checked his calculations for the fourth time.

‘I’ll take the curse,’ said the Elephant. ‘Although you’re probably making it up. You’ll like the next bit. The room fills with water, and then you drown. Then I let the water out, and I come in, and I laugh a lot.’

He tugged on the pole. It didn’t move. He tugged on it harder. It didn’t move some more.

The Marquis de Carabas always had a plan, and he always had a fallback plan; and beneath these plans he always had a real plan, one that he would not even let himself know about, for when the original plan and the fallback plan had both gone south. Now, it pained him to admit to himself, he had no plan. He did not even have a normal, boring, obvious plan that he could abandon as soon as things got tricky. He just had a want, and it drove him as their need for food or love or safety drove those the Marquis considered lesser men. He was planless. He just wanted his coat back.

When you create yourself from scratch you need a model of some kind, something to aim towards or head away from – all the things you want to be, or intentionally not be. The Marquis had known whom he had wanted not to be, when he was a boy. He had definitely not wanted to be like Peregrine. He had not wanted to be like anyone at all. He had, instead, wanted to be elegant, elusive, brilliant and, above all things, he had wanted to be unique. Just like Peregrine.

‘Don’t push your luck, mate,’ said the Elephant, with an irritable swish of his trunk.

He looked around and realised that Peregrine had slipped mysteriously and irritatingly away into the shadows, once more, without so much as a goodbye. The Marquis hated it when people did that.

And then, clad in his fine coat, he slipped mysteriously, even irritatingly, into the shadows, without so much as a goodbye, and he was gone.