by Neil Gaiman
“They had lost my reservation. And they said all the tables were booked.” Their steps echoed off the high walls.
“They’ll probably have us sitting by the kitchen,” said Jessica. “Or the door. Did you tell them it was for Mister Stockton?”
“Yes,” replied Richard.
Jessica sighed. She continued to drag him along, as a door opened in the wall, a little way ahead of them. Someone stepped out and stood swaying for one long terrible moment, and then collapsed to the concrete. Richard shivered and stopped in his tracks. Jessica tugged him into motion.
“Now, when you’re talking to Mister Stockton, you must make sure you don’t interrupt him. Or disagree with him—he doesn’t like to be disagreed with. When he makes a joke, laugh. If you’re in any doubt as to whether or not he’s made a joke, look at me. I’ll . . . mm, tap my forefinger.”
They had reached the person on the sidewalk. Jessica stepped over the crumpled form. Richard hesitated. “Jessica?”
“You’re right. He might think I’m bored,” she mused. “I know,” she said brightly, “if he makes a joke, I’ll rub my earlobe.”
“Jessica?” He could not believe that she was simply ignoring the figure at their feet.
“What?” She was not pleased to be jerked out of her reverie.
“Look.”
He pointed to the sidewalk. The person was face down, and enveloped in bulky clothes; Jessica took his arm and tugged him toward her. “Oh. I see. If you pay them any attention, Richard, they’ll walk all over you. They all have homes, really. Once she’s slept it off, I’m sure she’ll be fine.” She? Richard looked down. It was a girl. Jessica continued, “Now, I’ve told Mister Stockton that we . . .” Richard was down on one knee. “Richard? What are you doing?”
“She isn’t drunk,” said Richard. “She’s hurt.” He looked at his fingertips. “She’s bleeding.”
Jessica looked down at him, nervous and puzzled. “We’re going to be late,” she pointed out.
“She’s hurt.”
Jessica looked back at the girl on the sidewalk. Priorities: Richard had no priorities. “Richard. We’re going to be late. Someone else will be along; someone else will help her.”
The girl’s face was crusted with dirt, and her clothes were wet with blood. “She’s hurt,” he said, simply. There was an expression on his face that Jessica hadn’t seen before.
“Richard,” she warned, and then she relented, a little, and offered a compromise. “Dial 999 and call an ambulance then. Quickly, now.”
Suddenly the girl’s eyes opened, white and wide in a face that was little more than a smudge of dust and blood. “Not a hospital, please. They’ll find me. Take me somewhere safe. Please.” Her voice was weak.
“You’re bleeding,” said Richard. He looked to see where she had come from, but the wall was blank and brick and unbroken. He looked back to her still form, and asked, “Why not a hospital?”
“Help me?” the girl whispered, and her eyes closed.
Again he asked her, “Why don’t you want to go to the hospital?” This time there was no answer at all.
“When you call the ambulance,” said Jessica, “don’t give your name. You might have to make a statement or something, and then we’d be late . . . Richard? What are you doing?”
Richard had picked the girl up, cradling her in his arms. She was surprisingly light. “I’m taking her back to my place, Jess. I can’t just leave her. Tell Mister Stockton I’m really sorry, but it was an emergency. I’m sure he’ll understand.”
“Richard Oliver Mayhew,” said Jessica, coldly. “You put that girl down and come back here this minute. Or this engagement is at an end as of now. I’m warning you.”
Richard felt the sticky warmth of blood soaking into his shirt. Sometimes, he realized, there is nothing you can do. He walked away, leaving behind Jessica, who stood there on the sidewalk, her eyes stung with tears.
Richard did not, at any point on his walk, stop to think. It was not something over which he had any volition. Somewhere in the sensible part of his head, someone—a normal, sensible Richard Mayhew—was telling him how ridiculous he was being: that he should just have called the police, or an ambulance; that it was dangerous to lift an injured person; that he had really, seriously upset Jessica; that he was going to have to sleep on the sofa tonight; that he was ruining his only really good suit; that the girl smelled terrible . . . but Richard found himself placing one foot in front of the other, and, arms cramping and back hurting, ignoring the looks he got from passers-by, he just kept walking. And after a while he was at the ground floor door of his building, and he was stumbling up the staircase, and then he was standing in front of the door to his apartment and realizing that he had left his keys on the hall table, inside . . .
The girl reached out one filthy hand to the door, and it swung open.
Never thought I’d be pleased that the door hadn’t latched properly, thought Richard, and he carried the girl in—closing the door behind him with his foot—and put her down on his bed. His shirtfront was soaked in blood.
She seemed semiconscious; her eyes were closed, but fluttering. He peeled off her leather jacket. There was a long cut on her left upper arm and shoulder. Richard caught his breath. “Look, I’m going to call a doctor,” he said quietly. “Can you hear me?”
Her eyes opened, wide and scared. “Please, no. It’ll be fine. It’s not as bad as it looks. I just need sleep. No doctors.”
“But your arm—your shoulder—”
“I’ll be fine. Tomorrow. Please?” It was little more than a whisper.
“Um, I suppose, all right,” and with sanity beginning to assert itself, he said, “Look, can I ask—?”
But she was asleep. Richard took an old scarf from his closet and wrapped it firmly around her left upper arm and shoulder; he did not want her to bleed to death on his bed before he could get her to a doctor. And then he tiptoed out of his bedroom and shut the door behind him. He sat down on the sofa, in front of the television, and wondered what he had done.
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 cov
ered 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:
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?
Beneath that was a photocopy-gray photograph of a girl who looked to Richard like a cleaner, longer-haired version of the young lady he had left in his bathroom.
Under that it said:
ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF DOREEN.
BITES AND KICKS. RUN AWAY.
TELL US IF YOU SAW HER. WANT HER BACK. REWARD PAYED.
And below that, a telephone number. Richard looked back at the photograph. It was definitely the girl in his bathroom. “No,” he said. “I haven’t seen her, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”
Mr. Vandemar, however, was not listening. He had raised his head and was sniffing the air, like a man smelling something odd or unpleasant. Richard reached out to give him back his piece of paper, but the big man simply pushed past him and walked into the apartment, a wolf on the prowl. Richard ran after him. “What do you think you are doing? Will you stop that? Get out. Look, you can’t go in there—” Mr. Vandemar was headed straight for the bathroom. Richard hop
ed that the girl—Doreen?—had had the presence of mind to lock the bathroom door. But no; it swung open at Mr. Vandemar’s push. He walked in, and Richard, feeling like a small and ineffectual dog yapping at the heels of a postman, followed him in.
It was not a large bathroom. It contained a bathtub, a toilet, a sink, several bottles of shampoo, a bar of soap, and a towel. When Richard had left it, a couple of minutes before, it had also contained a dirty, bloody girl, a very bloody sink, and an open first aid kit. Now, it was gleamingly clean.
There was nowhere the girl could have been hiding. Mr. Vandemar stepped out of the bathroom and pushed open Richard’s bedroom door, walked in, looked around. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” said Richard. “But if you two don’t get out of my apartment this minute, I’m phoning the police.”
Then Mr. Vandemar, who had been in the process of examining Richard’s living room, turned back toward Richard, and Richard suddenly realized that he had never been so scared of another human being in his life.
And then foxy Mr. Croup said, “Why yes, whatever can have come over you, Mister Vandemar? It’s grief for our dear sweet sibling, I’ll wager, has turned his head. Now apologize to the gentleman, Mister Vandemar.”
Mr. Vandemar nodded, and pondered for a moment. “Thought I needed to use the toilet,” he said. “Didn’t. Sorry.”
Mr. Croup began to walk down the hall, pushing Mr. Vandemar in front of him. “There. Now, you’ll forgive my errant brother his lack of social graces, I trust. Worry over our poor dear widowed mother, and over our sister, whom even as we speak is wandering the streets of London unloved and uncared-for, has nigh unhinged him, I’ll be bound. But for all that, he’s a good fellow to have at your side. Is’t not so, stout fellow?” They were out of Richard’s apartment now, into the stairwell. Mr. Vandemar said nothing. He did not look unhinged with grief. Croup turned back to Richard and essayed another foxy smile. “You will tell us if you see her,” he said.
