by Neil Gaiman
The bolts were drawn back. Two loud bangs echoed through the room. The door to the tiny shrine was pushed open, letting in lamplight from the hall outside.
It was a small room with a high arched ceiling. A silver key hung from a thread, attached to the highest point of the ceiling. The wind caused by the opening of the door made the key swing back and forth, and then spin slowly, first one way, and then the other. The abbot held Brother Fuliginous’s arm, and the two men walked into the shrine, side by side. Then the abbot let go of the brother’s arm, and said, “Take the body, Brother Fuliginous.”
“But. But Father . . .”
“What is it?”
Brother Fuliginous went down on one knee. The abbot could hear fingers against cloth and skin. “He’s not dead.”
The abbot sighed. It was an evil thing to think, he knew, but he honestly felt it was so much kinder if they died outright. This was so much worse. “One of those, eh?” he said. “Ah well, we will look after the poor creature until it passes on to its ultimate reward. Lead it to the infirmary.”
And a weak voice said, quietly, but firmly, “I am not a poor creature.” The abbot heard someone stand up; heard Brother Fuliginous’s sharp intake of breath. “I . . . I think I got through it,” said Richard Mayhew’s voice, suddenly uncertain. “Unless this is more of the ordeal.”
“No, my son,” said the abbot. There was something in his voice that might have been awe, and might have been regret.
There was silence. “I . . . I think I will have that cup of tea now, if you don’t mind,” said Richard.
“Of course,” said the abbot. “This way.” Richard stared at the old man. The glaucous eyes gazed out at nothing at all. He seemed pleased that Richard was alive, but . . .
“Excuse me?” said Brother Fuliginous, respectfully, to Richard, breaking his train of thought. “Don’t forget your key.”
“Oh. Yes. Thanks.” He had forgotten about the key. He reached out and closed his hand upon the cold silver key, rotating slowly on its thread. He tugged, and the thread snapped easily.
Richard opened his hand, and the key stared up at him from his palm. “By my crooked teeth,” asked Richard, remembering, “who am I?”
He put it into his pocket, next to the small quartz bead, and together they left that place.
The fog had begun to thin. Hunter was pleased. She was confident now that, should it become necessary, she could get the Lady Door away from the friars entirely unharmed and get herself away with only minor flesh wounds.
There was a flurry of movement on the far side of the bridge. “Something’s happening,” said Hunter to Door, under her breath. “Get ready to make a run for it.”
The friars drew back. Richard Mayhew, the Upworlder, came toward them through the fog, walking beside the abbot. Richard looked different, some how Hunter scrutinized him, trying to work out what had changed. His center of balance had moved lower, become more centered. No . . . it was more than that. He looked less boyish. He looked as if he had begun to grow up.
“Still alive then?” said Hunter. He nodded; put his hand into his pocket, and pulled out a silver key. He tossed it to Door, who caught it, then flung herself at him, wrapping her arms around him, squeezing him as tightly as she could.
Then Door let go of Richard and ran to the abbot. “I can’t tell you how much this means to us,” she said to him.
He smiled, weakly but graciously. “May the Temple and the Arch be with you all, on your journey through the Underside,” he said.
Door curtseyed, and then, clutching the key tightly in her hand, she went back to Richard, and to Hunter. The three travelers walked down the bridge, and away. The friars stood on the bridge until they were out of sight, lost in the old fog of the world beneath the world.
“We have lost the key,” said the abbot to himself, as much as to any of them. “God help us all.”
Thirteen
The Angel Islington was dreaming a dark and rushing dream.
Huge waves were rising and crashing over the city; the night sky was rent with forks of white lightning from horizon to horizon; the rain fell in sheets, the city trembled; fires started near the great amphitheater and spread, quickly, through the city, defying the storm. Islington was looking down on everything from far above, hovering in the air, as one hovers in dreams, as it had hovered in those long-ago times. There were buildings in that city that were many hundreds of feet high, but they were dwarfed by the gray-green Atlantic waves. And then it heard the people scream. There were four million people in Atlantis, and, in its dream, Islington heard each and every one of their voices, clearly and distinctly, as, one by one, they screamed, and choked, and burned, and drowned, and died. The waves swallowed the city, and, at length, the storm subsided.
When dawn broke, there was nothing to indicate there had ever been a city there at all, let alone an island twice the size of Greece. Nothing of Atlantis remained but the water-bloated bodies of children, of women and of men, floating on the cold morning waves; bodies the seagulls, gray and white, were already beginning to pick with their cruel beaks.
And Islington woke. It was standing in the octagon of iron pillars, beside the great black door, made of flint and tarnished silver. It touched the cold smoothness of the flint, the chill of the metal. It touched the table. It ran its finger lightly along the walls. Then it walked through chambers of its hall, one after another, touching things, as if to reassure itself of their existence, to convince itself it was here, and now. It followed patterns, as it walked, smooth channels its bare feet had worn, over the centuries, in the rock. It stopped when it reached the rock-pool, kneeling down and letting its fingers touch the cold water.
There was a ripple in the water, which began with its fingertips and echoed out to the edges. The reflections in the pool, of the angel itself and the candle flames that framed it, shimmered and transformed. It was looking into a cellar. The angel concentrated for a moment; it could hear a telephone ring, somewhere in the distance.
Mr. Croup walked over to the telephone and picked up the receiver. He looked rather pleased with himself. “Croup and Vandemar,” he barked. “Eyes gouged, noses twisted, tongues pierced, chins cleft, throats slit.”
“Mister Croup,” said the angel. “They now have the key. I want the girl called Door kept safe on her journey back to me.”
“Safe,” repeated Mr. Croup, unimpressed. “Right. We’ll keep her safe. What a marvelous idea—such originality. Positively astounding. Most people would be content with hiring assassins for executions, sly killings, vile murders even. Only you, sir, would hire the two finest cutthroats in the whole of space and time, and then ask them to ensure a little girl remains unharmed.”
“See that she is, Mister Croup. Nothing is to hurt her. Permit her to be harmed in any way and you will displease me deeply. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Croup shifted uncomfortably.
“Is there anything else?” asked Islington.
“Yes, sir.” Croup coughed into his hand. “Do you remember the marquis de Carabas?”
“Of course.”
“I take it that there is no such similar prohibition on extirpating the marquis . . . ?”
“Not any longer,” said the angel. “Just protect the girl.”
It removed its hand from the water. The reflection was now merely candle flames and an angel of astonishing, perfectly androgynous, beauty. The Angel Islington stood up and returned to its inner chambers to await its eventual visitors.
“What did he say?” asked Mr. Vandemar.
“He said, Mister Vandemar, that we should feel free to do whatsoever we wished to the marquis.”
Vandemar nodded. “Did that include killing him painfully?” he asked, a little pedantically.
“Yes, Mister Vandemar, I would say, on reflection, it did.”
“That’s good, Mister Croup. Wouldn’t like another telling-off.” He looked up at the bloody thing hanging above them. “Better get rid of the
body, then.”
One of the front wheels on the supermarket shopping cart squeaked, and it had a pronounced tendency to pull to the left. Mr. Vandemar had found the metal cart on a grassed-in traffic island, near the hospital. It was, he had realized on seeing it, just the right size for moving a body. He could have carried the body, of course; but then it could have bled on him, or dripped other fluids. And he only had the one suit. So he pushed the shopping cart with the body of the marquis de Carabas in it through the storm drain, and the cart went squee, squee and pulled to the left. He wished that Mr. Croup would push the shopping cart, for a change. But Mr. Croup was talking. “You know, Mister Vandemar,” he was saying, “I am currently too overjoyed, too delighted, not to mention too utterly and illimitably ecstatic, to grouse, gripe or grumble—having finally been permitted to do what we do best—”
Mr. Vandemar negotiated a particularly awkward corner. “Kill someone, you mean?” he asked.
Mr. Croup beamed. “Kill someone I mean indeed, Mister Vandemar, brave soul, glittering, noble fellow. However, by now you must have sensed a lurking ‘but’ skulking beneath my happy, blithe, and chipper exterior. A minuscule vexation, like the teeniest lump of raw liver sticking to the inside of my boot. You must, I have no doubt, be saying to yourself, ‘All is not well in Mister Croup’s breast. I shall induce him to unburden himself to me.’ ”
Mr. Vandemar pondered this while he forced open the round iron door between the storm drain and the sewer and clambered through. Then he manhandled the wire cart with the marquis de Carabas’s body through the doorway. And then, more or less certain that he had been thinking nothing of the sort, he said, “No.”
Mr. Croup ignored this, and continued, “. . . And, were I then, in response to your pleadings, to divulge to you what vexes me, I would confess that my soul is irked by the necessity to hide our light under a bushel. We should be hanging the former marquis’s sad remains from the highest gibbet in London Below. Not tossing it away, like a used . . .” He paused, searching for the exact simile.
“Rat?” suggested Mr. Vandemar. “Thumbscrew? Spleen?” Squee, squee went the wheels of the shopping cart.
“Ah well,” said Mr. Croup. In front of them was a deep channel of brown water. Drifting on the water’s surface were off-white suds of foam, used condoms, and occasional fragments of toilet paper. Mr. Vandemar stopped the shopping cart. Mr. Croup leaned down and picked up the marquis’s head by the hair, hissing into its dead ear, “The sooner this business is over and done with, the happier I’ll be. There’s other times and other places that would properly appreciate two pair of dab hands with the garrotting wire and the boning knife.”
Then he stood up. “Goodnight, good marquis. Don’t forget to write.”
Mr. Vandemar tipped over the cart, and the marquis’s corpse tumbled out and splashed into the brown water below them. And then, because he had come to dislike it intensely, Mr. Vandemar pushed the shopping cart into the sewer as well, and watched the current carry it away.
Then Mr. Croup held his lamp up high, and he stared out at the place in which they stood. “It is saddening to reflect,” said Mr. Croup, “that there are folk walking the streets above who will never know the beauty of these sewers, Mister Vandemar. These red-brick cathedrals beneath their feet.”
“Craftsmanship,” agreed Mr. Vandemar.
They turned their backs on the brown water and made their way back into the tunnels. “With cities, as with people, Mister Vandemar,” said Mr. Croup, fastidiously, “the condition of the bowels is all-important.”
Door tied the key around her neck with a piece of string that she found in one of the pockets of her leather jacket. “That’s not going to be safe,” said Richard. The girl made a face at him. “Well,” he said. “It’s not.”
She shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll get a chain for it when we get to the market.” They were walking through a maze of caves, deep tunnels hacked from the limestone that seemed almost prehistoric.
Richard chuckled. “What’s so funny?” Door asked.
He grinned. “I was just thinking of the expression on the marquis’s face when we tell him we got the key from the friars without his help.”
“I’m sure he’ll have something sardonic to say about it,” she said. “And then, back to the angel. By the ‘long and dangerous way.’ Whatever that is.”
Richard admired the paintings on the cave walls. Russets and ochres and siennas outlined charging boars and fleeing gazelles, woolly mastodons and giant sloths: he imagined that the paintings had to be thousands of years old, but then they turned a corner, and he noticed that, in the same style, there were lorries, house cats, cars, and—markedly inferior to the other images, as if only glimpsed infrequently, and from a long way away—airplanes.
None of the paintings were very high off the ground. He wondered if the painters were a race of subterranean Nean-derthal pygmies. It was as likely as anything else in this strange world. “So where is the next market?” he asked.
“No idea,” said Door. “Hunter?”
Hunter slipped out of the shadows. “I don’t know.”
A small figure dashed past them, going back the way they had come. A few moments later another couple of tiny figures came toward them in fell pursuit. Hunter whipped out a hand as they passed, snagging a small boy by the ear. “Ow,” he said, in the manner of small boys. “Let me go! She stole my paintbrush.”
“That’s right,” said a piping voice from further down the corridor. “She did.”
“I didn’t,” came an even higher and more piping voice, from even further down the corridor.
Hunter pointed to the paintings on the cave wall. “You did these?” she asked.
The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys. “Yeah,” he said, truculently. “Some of them.”
“Not bad,” said Hunter. The boy glared at her.
“Where’s the next Floating Market?” asked Door.
“Belfast,” said the boy. “Tonight.”
“Thanks,” said Door. “Hope you get your paintbrush back. Let him go, Hunter.”
Hunter let go of the boy’s ear. He did not move. He looked her up and down, then made a face, to indicate that he was, without any question at all, unimpressed. “You’re Hunter?” he asked. She smiled down at him, modestly. He sniffed. “ You’re the best bodyguard in the Underside?”
“So they tell me.”
The boy reached one hand back and forward again, in one smooth movement. He stopped, puzzled, and opened his hand, examined his palm. Then he looked up at Hunter, confused. Hunter opened her hand to reveal a small switchblade with a wicked edge. She held it up, out of the boy’s reach. He wrinkled his nose. “How’d you do that?”
“Scram,” said Hunter. She closed the knife and tossed it back to the boy, who took off down the corridor without a backward glance, in pursuit of his paintbrush.
The body of the marquis de Carabas drifted east, through the deep sewer, face down.
London’s sewers had begun their lives as rivers and streams, flowing north to south (and, south of the Thames, south to north) carrying garbage, animal carcasses, and the contents of chamber pots into the Thames, which would, for the most part, carry the offending substances out to sea. This system had more or less worked for many years, until, in 1858, the enormous volume of effluent produced by the people and industries of London, combined with a rather hot summer, produced a phenomenon known at the time as the Great Stink: the Thames itself had become an open sewer. People who could leave London, left it; the ones who stayed wrapped cloths doused in carbolic around their faces and tried not to breathe through their noses. Parliament was forced to recess early in 1858, and the following year it ordered that a programme of sewer-building begin. The thousands of miles of sewers that were built were constructed with a gentle slope from the west to the east, and, somewhere beyond Greenwich, they were pumped into the Thames Estuary, and the sewa
ge was swept off into the North Sea. It was this journey that the body of the late marquis de Carabas was making, traveling west to east, toward the sunrise and the sewage works.
Rats on a high brick ledge, doing the things that rats do when no people are watching, saw the body go by. The largest of them, a big black male, chittered. A smaller brown female chittered back, then she leapt down from the ledge onto the marquis’s back and rode it down the sewer a little way, sniffing at the hair and the coat, tasting the blood, and then, precariously, leaning over, and scrutinizing what could be seen of the face.
She hopped off the head into the filthy water and swam industriously to the side, where she clambered up the slippery brickwork. She hurried back along a beam, and rejoined her companions.
“Belfast?” asked Richard.
Door smiled, impishly, and would say nothing more than, “You’ll see,” when he pressed her about it.
He changed his tack. “How do you know that kid was telling you the truth about the market?” he asked.
“It’s not something anyone down here ever lies about. I . . . don’t think we can lie about it.” She paused. “The market’s special.”
“How did that kid know where it was?”
“Someone told him,” said Hunter.
Richard brooded on this for a moment. “How did they know?”
“Someone told them,” explained Door.
“But . . .” He wondered who chose the locations in the first place, how the knowledge was spread, trying to frame the question in such a way that he did not sound stupid.
A rich female voice asked from the darkness, “Hss. Any idea when the next market is?”
She stepped into the light. She wore silver jewelry, and her dark hair was perfectly coiffed. She was very pale, and her long dress was jet black velvet. Richard knew immediately that he had seen her before, but it took him a few moments to place her: the first Floating Market, that was it—in Harrods. She had smiled at him.
