Neverwhere

“Watch,” said Door. She placed the wooden ball onto a platform. Lights shone through the machine and into the ball. It began to spin around and around,

A patrician face appeared on the small screen, vividly colored. Slightly out of time, a voice came from the horn, crackling in mid-speech. ” . . . that two cities should be so near,” said the voice, “and yet in all things so far; the possessors above us, and the dispossessed, we who live below and between, who live in the cracks.”

Door stared at the screen, her face unreadable.

” . . . still,” said her father, “I am of the opinion that what cripples us, who inhabit the Underside, is our petty factionalism. The system of baronies and fiefdoms is both divisive and foolish.” The Lord Portico was wearing a threadbare old smoking jacket and a skullcap. His voice seemed to be coming to them across the centuries, not days or weeks. He coughed. “I am not alone in this belief. There are those who wish to see things the way they are. There are others who want the situation to worsen. There are those . . . “

“Can you speed it up?” asked the marquis. “Find the last entry?”

Door nodded. She touched an ivory lever at the side: the image ghosted, fragmented, re-formed.

Now Portico wore a long coat. His skullcap was gone. There was a scarlet gash down one side of his head. He was no longer sitting at his desk. He was talking urgently, quietly. “I do not know who will see this, who will find this. But whoever you are, please take this to my daughter, the Lady Door, if she lives . . . ” A static burst wiped across the picture and the sound. Then, “Door? Girl, this is bad. I don’t know how long I’ve got before they find this room. I think my poor Portia and your brother and sister are dead.” The sound and picture quality began to degrade.

The marquis glanced at Door. Her face was wet: tears were brimming from her eyes, glistening down her cheeks. She seemed unaware that she was crying, made no attempt to wipe away the tears. She just stared at her father’s image, listened to his words. Crackle. Wipe. Crackle. “Listen to me, girl,” said her dead father. “Go to Islington . . . you can trust Islington . . . You must believe in Islington . . . ” He ghosted. Blood dripped from his forehead into his eyes. He he wiped it off. “Door? Avenge us. Avenge your family.”

A loud bang came from the gramophone horn. Portico turned his head to look offscreen, puzzled and nervous. “What?” he said, and he stepped out of frame. For a moment, the picture remained unchanged: the desk, the blank white wall behind it. Then an arc of vivid blood splashed across the wall. Door flicked a lever on the side, blanking the screen, and turned away.

“Here.” The marquis passed her a handkerchief.

“Thanks.” She wiped her face, blew her nose vigorously. Then she stared into space. Eventually, she said, “Islington.”

“I’ve never had any dealings with Islington,” said the marquis.

“I thought it was just a legend,” she said.

“Not at all.” He reached across the desk, picked up the gold pocket-watch, thumbed it open. “Nice workmanship,” he observed.

She nodded. “It was my father’s.”

He closed the cover with a click. “Time to go to market. It starts soon. Mister Time is not our friend.”

She blew her nose once more, put her hands deep into the pockets of her leather jacket. Then she turned to him, elfin face frowning, odd-colored eyes bright. “Do you honestly think we can find a bodyguard who will be able to deal with Croup and Vandemar?”

The marquis flashed his white teeth at her. “There’s been no one since Hunter who’d even have a chance. No, I’ll settle for someone who could give you the time you might need to get away.” He fastened the fob of the watch chain to his waistcoat, slid the watch into his vest pocket.

“What are you doing?” asked Door. “That’s my father’s watch.”

“He’s not using it anymore, is he?” He adjusted the golden chain. “There. That looks rather elegant.” He watched the emotions flicker across her face: quiet anger and, finally, resignation.

“We’d better go,” was all she said.

“The Bridge isn’t very far now,” said Anaesthesia. Richard hoped that was true. They were now on their third candle. The walls flickered and oozed, the passageway seemed to stretch on forever. He was astonished that they were still under London: he was half-convinced that they had walked most of the way to Wales.

“I’m really scared,” she continued. “I’ve never crossed the bridge before.”

“I thought you said you’d been to this market already,” he asked, mystified.

“It’s the Floating Market, silly. I told you already. It moves. Different places. Last one I went to was held in that big clock tower. Big . . . someone. And the next was—“

“Big Ben?” he suggested.

“Maybe. We were inside where all the big wheels went around, and that was where I got this—” She held up her necklace. The candlelight glimmered yellow off the shiny quartz. She smiled, like a child. “Do you like it?” she asked.

“It’s great. Was it expensive?”

“I swapped some stuff for it. That’s how things work down here. We swap stuff.” And then they turned a corner, and saw the bridge. It could have been one of the bridges over the Thames, five hundred years ago, thought Richard; a huge stone bridge spanning out over a vast black chasm, into the night. But there was no sky above it, no water below. It rose into darkness. Richard wondered who had built it, and when. He wondered how something like this could exist, beneath the city of London, without everyone knowing. He felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was, he realized, deeply, pathetically scared of the bridge itself.

“Do we have to go across it?” he asked. “Can’t we get to the market some other way?” They paused at the base of the bridge.

Anaesthesia shook her head. “We can get to the place it’s in,” she said. “But the market wouldn’t be there.”

“Huh? But that’s ridiculous. I mean, something’s either there or it’s not. Isn’t it?”

She shook her head. There was a buzz of voices from behind them, and someone pushed Richard to the ground. He looked up: a huge man, crudely tattooed, dressed in improvised rubber and leather clothes that looked like they had been cut out of the inside of cars, stared back down at him, dispassionately. Behind the huge man were a dozen others, male and female: people who looked like they were on their way to a particularly low-rent costume party. “Somebody,” said Varney, who was not in a good mood, “was in my way. Somebody ought to watch where he’s going.”