Neverwhere

TWO

He is somewhere deep beneath the ground: in a tunnel, perhaps, or a sewer. Light comes in flickers, defining the darkness, not dispelling it. He is not alone. There are other people walking beside him, although he cannot see their faces. They are running, now, through the inside of the sewer, splashing through the mud and filth. Droplets of water fall slowly through the air, crystal clear in the darkness.

He turns a corner, and the beast is waiting for him.

It is huge. It fills the space of the sewer: massive head down, bristled body and breath steaming in the chill of the air. Some kind of boar, he thinks at first, and then realizes that no boar could be so huge. It is the size of a bull, of a tiger, of an ox.

It stares at him, and it pauses for a hundred years, while he lifts his spear. He glances at his hand, holding the spear, and observes that it is not his hand: the arm is furred with dark hair, the nails are almost claws.

And then the beast charges.

He throws his spear, but it is already too late, and he feels the beast slice his side with razor-sharp tusks, feels his life slip away into the mud: and he realizes he has fallen face down into the water, which crimsons in thick swirls of suffocating blood. And he tries so to scream, he tries to wake up, but he can breathe only mud and blood and water, he can feel only pain…

"Bad dream?" asked the girl.

Richard sat up on the couch, gasping for breath. The curtains were still drawn, the lights and the television still on, but he could tell, from the pale light coming in through the cracks, that it was morning. He fumbled on the couch for the remote control, which had wedged itself into the small of his back during the night, and he turned off the television.

"Yes," he said. "Sort of."

He wiped away the sleep from his eyes and took stock of himself, pleased to notice that he had at least taken off his shoes and jacket before he had fallen asleep. His shirtfront was covered with dried blood and with dirt. The homeless girl didn't say anything. She looked bad: pale, beneath the grime and brown dried blood, and small. She was dressed in a variety of clothes thrown over each other: odd clothes, dirty velvets, muddy lace, rips and holes through which other layers and styles could be seen. She looked, Richard thought, as if she'd done a midnight raid on the History of Fashion section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and was still wearing everything she'd taken. Her short hair was filthy, but looked like it might have been a dark reddish color under the dirt.

"You're awake," said Richard.

"Whose barony is this?" asked the girl. "Whose fiefdom?"

"Um. Sorry?"

She looked around her suspiciously. "Where am I?"

"Newton Mansions, Little Comden Street… " He stopped. She had opened the curtains, blinking at the cold daylight. The girl stared out at the rather ordinary view from Richard's window, astonished, peering wide-eyed at the cars and the buses and the tiny sprawl of shops-a bakery, a drugstore and a liquor store-below them.

"I'm in London Above," she said, in a small voice.

"Yes, you're in London," said Richard. Above what? he wondered. "I think maybe you were in shock or something last night. That is a nasty cut on your arm." He waited for her to say something, to explain. She glanced at him, and then looked back down at the buses and the shops. Richard continued: "I, um, found you on the pavement. There was a lot of blood."

"Don't worry," she said, seriously. "Most of the blood was someone else's."

She let the curtain fall back. Then she began to unwrap the scarf, now bloodstained and crusted, from her arm. She examined the cut and made a face. "We're going to have to do something about this," she said. "Do you want to give me a hand?"

Richard was beginning to feel a little out of his depth. "I don't really know too much about first aid," he said.

"Well," she said, "if you're really squeamish you only have to hold the bandages and tie the ends where I can't reach. You do have bandages, don't you?"

Richard nodded. "Oh yes," he said. "In the first aid kit. In the bathroom. Under the sink." And then he went into his bedroom and changed his clothes, wondering whether the mess on his shirt (his best shirt, bought for him by, oh God, Jessica, she would have a fit) would ever come off.

The bloody water reminded him of something, some kind of dream he had once had, perhaps, but he could no longer, for the life of him, remember exactly what. He pulled the plug, let the water out of the sink, and filled it with clean water again, to which he added a cloudy splash of liquid disinfectant: the sharp antiseptic smell seemed so utterly sensible and medicinal, a remedy for the oddness of his situation, and his visitor. The girl leaned over the sink, and he splashed warm water over her arm and shoulder.

Richard was never as squeamish as he thought he was. Or rather, he was squeamish when it came to blood on screen: a good zombie movie or even an explicit medical drama would leave him huddled in a corner, hyperventilating, with his hands over his eyes, muttering things like "Just tell me when it's over." But when it came to real blood, real pain, he simply did something about it. They cleaned out the cut-which was much less severe than Richard remembered it from the night before-and bandaged it up, and the girl did her very best not to wince in the process. And Richard found himself wondering how old she was, and what she looked like under the grime, and why she was living on the streets and-

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Richard. Richard Mayhew. Dick." She nodded, as if she were committing it to memory. The doorbell rang. Richard looked at the mess in the bathroom, and the girl, and wondered how it would look to an outside observer. Such as, for example… "Oh Lord," he said, realizing the worst. "I bet it's Jess. She's going to kill me." Damage control. Damage control. "Look," he told the girl. "You wait in here."

He shut the door of the bathroom behind him and walked down the hall. He opened the front door, and breathed a huge and quite heartfelt sigh of relief. It wasn't Jessica. It was-what? Mormons? Jehovah's Witnesses? The police? He couldn't tell. There were two of them, at any rate.

They wore black suits, which were slightly greasy, slightly frayed, and even Richard, who counted himself among the sartorially dyslexic, felt there was something odd about the cut of the coats. They were the kind of suits that might have been made by a tailor two hundred years ago who had had a modern suit described to him but had never actually seen one. The lines were wrong, and so were the grace notes.

A fox and a wolf, thought Richard, involuntarily. The man in front, the fox, was a little shorter than Richard. He had lank, greasy hair, of an unlikely orange color, and a pallid complexion; as Richard opened the door, he smiled, widely, and just a fraction too late, with teeth that looked like an accident in a graveyard. "A good morrow to you, good sir," he said, "on this fine and beautiful day."

"Ah. Hello," said Richard.

"We are conducting a personal enquiry of a delicate nature as it were, door to door. Do you mind if we come in?"

"Well, it's not very convenient right now," said Richard. Then he asked, "Are you with the police?" The second of the visitors, a tall man, the one he had thought of as a wolf, his gray and black hair cut bristle-short, stood a little behind his friend, holding a stack of photocopies to his chest. He had said nothing until this moment-just waited, huge and impassive. Now he laughed, once, low and dirtily. There was something unhealthy about that laugh.

"The police? Alas," said the smaller man, "we cannot claim that felicity. A career in law and order, although indubitably enticing, was not inscribed on the cards Dame Fortuna dealt my brother and me. No, we are merely private citizens. Allow me to make introductions. I am Mister Croup, and this gentleman is my brother, Mister Vandemar."

They did not look like brothers. They did not look like anything Richard had seen before. "Your brother?" asked Richard. "Shouldn't you have the same name?"

"I am impressed. What a brain, Mister Vandemar. Keen and incisive isn't the half of it. Some of us are so sharp," he said as he leaned in closer to Richard, went up on tiptoes into Richard's face, "we could just cut ourselves." Richard took an involuntary step backwards. "Can we come inside?" asked Mr. Croup.

"What do you want?"

Mr. Croup sighed, in what he obviously imagined was a rather wistful manner. "We are looking for our sister," he explained. "A wayward child, willful and headstrong, who has close to broken our poor dear widowed mother's heart."

"Ran away," explained Mr. Vandemar, quietly. He thrust a photocopied sheet into Richard's hands. "She's a little… funny," he added, and then he twirled one finger next to his temple in the universal gesture to indicate mental incapacity.

Richard looked down at the paper. It said: