by Neil Gaiman
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 onto 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.”
“Ah,” said Varney. “Then I’m working for you, aren’t I?”
“Yes, you are,” said Mr. Croup. “I’m afraid we don’t have any redeeming features.”
“That doesn’t bother me,” said Varney.
“Good,” said Mr. Croup. “Welcome aboard.”
It was a large but elegant mechanism, built of polished walnut and oak, of brass and glass, copper and mirrors and carved and inlaid ivory, of quartz prisms and brass gears and springs and cogs. The whole thing was rather larger than a wide-screen television, although the actual screen itself was no more than six inches across. A magnifying lens placed across it increased the size of the picture. There was a large brass horn coming out of the side—the kind you could find on an antique gramophone. The whole mechanism looked rather like a combined television and video player might look, if it had been invented and built three hundred years ago by Sir Isaac Newton. Which was, more or less, exactly what it was.
“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.”
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 onto 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. Varney took a step backwards. He spat at Richard’s shoes. Then he turned away, and, taking the knot of people with him, he walked across the bridge and into the dark.
“Are you all right?” asked Anaesthesia, helping Richard back to his feet.
“I’m fine,” he said. “That was really brave of you.”
She looked down, shyly. “I’m not really brave,” she said.
“I’m still scared of the bridge. Even they were scared. That was why they all went over together. Safety in numbers.”
“If you are crossing the bridge, I will go with you,” said a female voice, rich as cream and honey, coming from behind them. Richard was not able to place her accent. He turned, and standing there was a tall woman, with long, tawny hair, and skin the color of burnt caramel. She wore dappled leather clothes, mottled in shades of gray and brown. She had a battered leather duffel bag over her shoulder. She was carrying a staff, and she had a knife at her belt and an electric flashlight strapped to her wrist. She was also, without question, the most beautiful woman that Richard had ever seen.
“Safety in numbers. You’re welcome to come with us,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “My name’s Richard Mayhew. This is Anaesthesia. She’s the one us who knows what she’s doing.” The rat-girl preened.
The leather woman looked him up and looked him down. “You’re from London Above,” she told him.
“Yes.” As lost as he was in this strange otherworld, he was at least learning to play the game. His mind was too numb to make any sense of where he was, or why he was here, but it was capable of following the rules.
“Travelling with a rat-speaker. My word.”
“I’m his guardian,” said Anaesthesia, truculently. “Who are you? Who do you owe fealty to?”
The woman smiled. “I owe no man fealty, rat-girl. Have either of you crossed Night’s Bridge before?” Anaesthesia shook her head. “Well. Isn’t this going to be fun?”
They walked toward the bridge. Anaesthesia handed Richard her candle-lamp. “Here,” she said.
“Thanks.” Richard looked at the woman in leather. “Is there anything, really, to be scared of?”
“Only the night on the bridge,” she said.
“The kind in armor?”
“The kind that comes when day is over.”
Anaesthesia’s hand sought Richard’s. He held it tightly, her tiny hand in his. She smiled at him, squeezed his hand. And then they set foot on Night’s Bridge and Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth . . .
With each step they took the light of the candle became dimmer. He realized the same thing was happening to the leather woman’s flashlight. It felt not so much as if the lights were being turned down but as if the darkness were being turned up. Richard blinked, and opened his eyes on nothing—nothing but darkness, complete and utter. Sounds. A rustling, a squirming. Richard blinked, blinded by the night. The sounds were nastier, hungrier. Richard imagined he could hear voices: a horde of huge, misshapen trolls, beneath the bridge . . . .
Something slithered past them in the dark. “What’s that?” squeaked Anaesthesia. Her hand was shaking in his.
“Hush,” whispered the woman. “Don’t attract its attention.”
“What’s happening?” whispered Richard.
“Darkness is happening,” said the leather woman, very quietly. “Night is happening. All the nightmares that have come out when the sun goes down, since the cave times, when we huddled together in fear for safety and for warmth, are happening. Now,” she told them, “now is the time to be afraid of the dark.” Richard knew that something was about to creep over his face. He closed his eyes: it made no difference to what he saw or felt. The night was complete. It was then that the hallucinations started.
He saw a figure falling toward him through the night, burning, its wings and hair on fire.
He threw up his hands: there was nothing there.
Jessica looked at him, with contempt in her eyes. He wanted to shout to her, tell her he was sorry.
Place one foot after another.
He was a small child, walking home from school, at night, down the one road with no streetlights. No matter how many times he did it, it never got any easier, never got any better.
He was deep in the sewers, lost in a labyrinth. The Beast was waiting for him. He could hear a slow drip of water. He knew the Beast was waiting. He gripped his spearThen a rumbling bellow, deep in its throat, from behind him. He turned. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, it charged at him, through the dark.
And it charged.
He died.
And kept walking.
Slowly, agonizingly slowly, it charged at him, over and over, through the dark.
There was a sputter, and a flare so bright it hurt, making Richard squint and stagger. It was the candle flame, in its lemonade-bottle holder. He had never known how brightly a single candle could burn. He held it up, gasping and gulping and shaking with relief. His heart was pounding and shuddering in his chest.
“We would appear to have crossed successfully,” said the leather woman.
Richard’s heart was pounding in his chest so hard that, for a few moments, he was unable to talk. He forced himself to breathe slowly, to calm down. They were in a large anteroom, exactly like the one on the other side. In fact, Richard had the strange feeling that it was the same room they had just left. Yet the shadows were deeper, and there were afterimages floating before Richard’s eyes, like those one saw after a camera flash. “I suppose,” Richard said, haltingly, “we weren’t in any real danger . . . . It was like a haunted house. A few noises in the dark . . . and your imagination does the rest. There wasn’t really anything to be scared of, was there?”
The woman looked at him, almost pityingly; and Richard realized that there was nobody holding his hand. “Anaesthesia?”
From the darkness at the crown of the bridge came a gentle noise, like a rustle or a sigh. A handful of irregular quartz beads pattered down the curve of the bridge toward them. Richard picked one up. It was from the rat-girls necklace. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Then he found his voice. “We’d better. We have to go back. She’s . . .”
The woman raised her flashlight, shone it across the bridge. Richard could see all the way across the bridge. It was deserted. “Where is she?” he asked.
“Gone,” said the woman, flatly. “The darkness took her.”
“We’ve got to do something,” said Richard urgently.
“Such as?”
Once again, he opened his mouth. This time, he found no words. He closed it again. He fingered the lump of quartz, looked at the others on the ground.
“She’s gone,” said the woman. “The bridge takes its toll. Be grateful it didn’t take you too. Now if you’re going to the market, it’s through here, up this way.” She gestured toward a narrow passageway that rose up into the dimness in front of them, barely illuminated by the beam of her flashlight.
Richard did not move. He felt numb. He found it hard to believe that the rat girl was gone—lost, or stolen, or strayed, or . . . —and harder to believe that the leather woman was able to carry on as if nothing at all out of the ordinary had happened—as if this were utterly usual. Anaesthesia could not be dead . . .
He completed the thought. She could not be dead, becau
se if she were, then it was his fault. She had not asked to go with him. He held the quartz bead so tightly it hurt his hand, thinking of the pride with which Anaesthesia had shown it to him, of how fond he had become of her in the handful of hours that he had known her.
“Are you coming?”
Richard stood there in the darkness for a few pounding heartbeats, then he placed the quartz bead gently into the pocket of his jeans. He followed the woman, who was still some paces ahead of him. As he followed her, he realized that he still did not know her name.
Five
People slipped and slid through the darkness about them, holding lamps, torches, flashlights, and candles. It made Richard think of documentary films he had seen of schools of fish, glittering and darting through the ocean . . . Deep water, inhabited by things that had lost the use of their eyes.
Richard followed the leather woman up some steps. Stone steps, edged with metal. They were in an Underground station. They joined a line of people waiting to slip through a grille, which had been opened a foot or so to uncover the door, which led out onto the pavement.
Immediately in front of them were a couple of young boys, each with a string tied around his wrist. The strings were held by a pallid, bald man, who smelled of formaldehyde. Immediately behind them in the line waited a gray-bearded man with a black-and-white kitten sitting on his shoulder. It washed itself, intently licked the man’s ear, then curled up on his shoulder and went to sleep. The line moved slowly, as, one by one, the figures at the end slipped through the space between the grille and the wall and edged into the night. “Why are you going to the market, Richard Mayhew?” asked the leather woman, in a low voice. Richard still could not place her accent: he was beginning to suspect that she was African or Australian—or perhaps she came from somewhere even more exotic and obscure.
“I have friends I’m hoping to meet there. Well, just one friend. I don’t actually know many people from this world. I was sort of getting to know Anaesthesia, but . . .” he trailed off. Asked the question he had not dared to voice until this moment. “Is she dead?”
