by Neil Gaiman
“Well,” he said, eventually. “It was very nice knowing you.” She was blinking hard. He wondered if she were going to tell him again that she had something in her eye. Instead she said, “Are you ready?”
He nodded.
“Have you got the key?”
He put down his bag and rummaged in his back pocket with his good hand. He took out the key and handed it to her. She held it out in front of her, as if it were being inserted in an imaginary door. “Okay,” she said. “Just walk. Don’t look back.”
He began walking down a small hill, away from the blue waters of the Thames. A gray gull swooped past. At the bottom of the hill, he looked back. She stood at the top of the hill, silhouetted by the rising sun. Her cheeks were glistening. The orange sunlight gleamed on the key.
Door turned it, with one decisive motion.
The world went dark, and a low roar filled Richard’s head, like the maddened growling of a thousand enraged beasts.
Twenty
The world went dark, and a low roar filled Richard’s head, like the maddened growling of a thousand enraged beasts. He blinked at the darkness, held tight to his bag. He wondered if he had been foolish, putting the knife away. Some people brushed past him in the dark. Richard started away from them. There were steps in front of him; Richard began to ascend, and, as he did so, the world began to resolve, to take shape and to re-form.
The growling was the roar of traffic, and he was coming out of an underpass in Trafalgar Square. The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.
It was midmorning, on a warm October day, and he stood in the square holding his bag and blinking at the sunlight. Black taxis and red buses and multicolored cars roared and careered about the square, while tourists threw handfuls of pigeon feed down for the legions of tubby pigeons and took their snapshots of Nelson’s Column and the huge Landseer lions that flanked it. He walked through the square, wondering if he was real or not. The Japanese tourists ignored him. He tried talking to a pretty fair-haired girl, who laughed, and shook her head, and said something in a language Richard thought might have been Italian, but was actually Finnish.
There was a small child of indeterminate sex, staring at some pigeons while orally demolishing a chocolate bar. He crouched down next to it. “Um. Hello, kiddie,” said Richard. The child sucked its chocolate bar intently and gave no indication of recognizing Richard as another human being. “Hello,” repeated Richard, a slight note of desperation creeping into his voice. “Can you see me? Kiddie? Hello?”
Two small eyes glared at him from a chocolate-covered face. And then its lower lip began to tremble, and the child fled, throwing its arms around the legs of the nearest adult female, and wailing, “Mommy? This man’s bothering me. He’s bothering me.”
The child’s mother turned on Richard with a formidable scowl. “What are you doing,” she demanded, “bothering our Leslie? There are places for people like you.”
Richard began to smile. It was a huge and happy smile. “I really am most frightfully sorry,” he said, grinning like a Cheshire cat. And then, clutching his bag, he ran through Trafalgar Square, accompanied by bursts of sudden pigeons, who took to the air in astonishment.
He took his cashcard out of his wallet, and he put it into the cash machine. It recognized his four-digit pin number, advised him to keep it a secret and not disclose it to anyone, and asked what kind of service he would like. He asked for cash, and it gave him cash in abundance. He punched the air in delight, and then, embarrassed, pretended that he had been hailing a cab.
A cab stopped for him—it stopped!—for him!—and he climbed in, and sat in the back, and beamed. He asked the driver to take him to his office. And when the cab driver pointed out that it would almost be quicker to walk, Richard grinned even wider, and said he did not care. And as soon as they were underway he asked—practically begged—the cab driver to regale him, Richard, with his opinions on Inner-City Traffic Problems, How Best to Deal with Crime, and Thorny Political Issues of the Day. The cab driver accused Richard of “taking the Mickey,” and sulked for all of the five-minute journey up the Strand. Richard did not care. He tipped the man ridiculously anyway. And then he walked into his office.
As he entered the building, he felt the smile begin to leave his face. Each step he took left him more anxious, more uneasy. What if he still had no job? What did it matter if small, chocolate-covered children and cab drivers could see him, if it turned out that, by some apalling mischance, he remained invisible to his colleagues?
Mr. Figgis, the security guard, looked up from a copy of Naughty Teenage Nymphets, which he had hidden inside his copy of the Sun, and he sniffed. “Morning Mister Mayhew,” he said. It was not a welcoming “morning.” It was the kind of “morning” that implied that the speaker really did not care if the recipient lived or died—nor indeed, for that matter, if it was even morning.
“Figgis!” exclaimed Richard, in delight. “And hello to you too, Mister Figgis, you exceptional security guard!”
Nobody had ever said anything remotely like that to Mr. Figgis before, not even naked ladies in his imagination; Figgis stared suspiciously at Richard until he got into the elevator and vanished from sight, then he returned his attention to the naughty teenage nymphets, none of whom, he was beginning to suspect, was ever likely to see twenty-nine again, lollipops or no lollipops.
Richard got out of the elevator and walked, slightly hesitantly, down the corridor. Everything will be all right, he told himself, if only my desk is there. If my desk is there, everything will be fine. He walked into the large room full of cubicles he had worked in for three years. People were working at desks, talking on telephones, rummaging through filing cabinets, drinking bad tea and worse coffee. It was his office.
And there was the place by the window, where his desk had once been, which was now occupied by a gray cluster of filing cabinets and a yucca plant. He was about to turn and run when someone handed him a cup of tea in a Styrofoam cup.
“The return of the prodigal, eh?” said Gary. “Here you go.”
“Hello Gary,” said Richard. “Where’s my desk?”
“This way,” said Gary. “How was Majorca?”
“Majorca?”
“Don’t you always go to Majorca?” asked Gary. They were walking up the back stairs that led to the fourth floor.
“Not this time,” said Richard.
“I was going to say,” said Gary. “Not much of a tan.”
“No,” agreed Richard. “Well. You know. I needed a change.”
Gary nodded. He pointed to a door that had, for as long as Richard had been there, been the door to the executive files and supplies room. “A change? Well, you’ve certainly got one now. And may I be the first to congratulate you?”
The plaque on the door said:
R. B. MAYHEW
JUNIOR PARTNER
“Lucky bastard,” said Gary, affectionately.
He wandered off, and Richard went through the door, utterly bemused. The room was no longer an executive supplies and file room: it had been emptied of files and supplies, and painted in gray and black and white, and recarpeted. In the center of the office was a large desk. He examined it: it was, unmistakably, his very own desk. His trolls had all been neatly put away in one of the desk drawers, and he took them all out, and arranged them around the office. He had his own window, with a nice view of the sludge-brown river and the South Bank of the Thames, beyond. There was even a large green plant, with huge waxy leaves, of the kind that looks artificial but isn’t. His old, dusty, cream-colored computer terminal had been replaced with a much sleeker, cleaner black computer terminal, which took up less desk space.
He walked over to the window and sipped his tea, staring out at the dirty brown river.
“You’ve found everything all right, then?” He looked up. Crisp and efficient, Sylvia, the MD’s PA, was standing in the doorway. She smiled when she saw him.
“Um.
Yes. Look, there are things I have to take care of at home . . . d’you think it’d be all right if I took the rest of the day off and—”
“Suit yourself. You aren’t meant to be back in till tomorrow anyway.”
“I’m not?” he asked. “Right.”
Sylvia frowned. “What happened to your finger?”
“I broke it,” he told her.
She looked at his hand with concern. “You weren’t in a fight, were you?”
“Me?”
She grinned. “Just teasing. I suppose you shut it in a door. That’s what my sister did.”
“No,” Richard began to admit, “I was in a fi . . .” Sylvia raised an eyebrow. “A door,” he finished lamely.
He went to the building he had once lived in by taxi. He was not sure that he trusted himself to travel by the Underground. Not yet. Having no door key, he knocked at the door of his flat and was more than disappointed when it was opened by the woman Richard last remembered meeting, or rather, failing to meet, in his bathroom. He introduced himself as the previous tenant, and quickly established that a) he, Richard, no longer lived there, and b) she, Mrs. Buchanan, had no idea what had happened to any of his personal possessions. Richard took some notes, and then he said good-bye very nicely, and took another black taxi to go and see a man in a camel-hair coat.
The smooth man in the camel-hair coat was not wearing his camel-hair coat, and was, in fact, a good deal less smooth than the last time Richard had encountered him. They were sitting in his office, and he had listened to Richard’s list of complaints with the expression of someone who has recently and accidentally swallowed whole a live spider and has just begun to feel it squirm.
“Well, yes,” he admitted, after looking at the files. “There does seem to have been some kind of problem, now you mention it. I can’t quite see how it could have happened.”
“I don’t think it matters how it happened,” said Richard, reasonably. “The fact of the matter is that while I was away for a few weeks, you rented my apartment to,” he consulted his notes, “George and Adele Buchanan. Who have no intention of leaving.”
The man closed the file. “Well,” he said. “Mistakes do happen. Human error. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about it.”
The old Richard, the one who had lived in what was now the Buchanans’ home, would have crumbled at this point, apologized for being a nuisance, and gone away. Instead, Richard said, “Really? Nothing you can do about it? You rented a property I was legally renting from your company to someone else, and in the process lost all my personal possessions, and there’s nothing you can do about it? Now, I happen to think, and I’m sure my lawyer will also think, that there is a great deal you can do about it.”
The man without the camel-hair coat looked as if the spider was beginning to crawl back up his throat. “But we don’t have any other vacant apartments like yours in the building,” he said. “There’s only the penthouse suite.”
“That,” Richard told the man, coldly, “would be fine . . .” The man relaxed. “. . . for living accommodation. Now,” said Richard, “let’s talk about compensation for my lost possessions.”
The new apartment was much nicer than the one he had left behind. It had more windows, and a balcony, a spacious lounge, and a proper spare bedroom. Richard prowled it, dissatisfied. The man-without-a-camel-hair-coat had, extremely grudgingly, had the apartment furnished with a bed, a sofa, several chairs, and a television set.
Richard put Hunter’s knife on the mantelpiece.
He bought a take-away curry from the Indian restaurant across the road, sat on the carpeted floor of his new apartment, and ate it, wondering if he had ever really eaten curry late at night in a street-market held on the deck of a gunship moored by Tower Bridge. It did not seem very likely, now that he thought about it.
The doorbell rang. He got up and answered the door. “We found a lot of your stuff, Mr. Mayhew,” said the man who was once more wearing his camel-hair coat. “Turned out it’d been put into storage. Right, bring the stuff in, lads.”
A couple of burly men hauled in several large wooden packing cases, filled with Richard’s stuff, and deposited them on the carpet in the middle of the living room.
“Thanks,” said Richard. He reached into the first box, unwrapped the first paper-covered object, which turned out to be a framed photograph of Jessica. He stared at it for some moments, and then he put it down again in the case. He found the box with his clothes in it, removed them, and put them away in his bedroom, but the other boxes sat, untouched, in the middle of the living room floor. As the days went on, he felt increasingly guilty about not unpacking them. But he did not unpack them.
He was in his office, sitting at his desk, staring out of the window, when the intercom buzzed. “Richard?” said Sylvia. “The MD wants a meeting in his office in twenty minutes to discuss the Wandsworth report.”
“I’ll be there,” he said. Then, because he had nothing else to do for the next ten minutes, he picked up an orange troll and menaced a slightly smaller green-haired troll with it. “I am the greatest warrior of London Below. Prepare to die,” he said, in a dangerous trollish voice, waggling the orange troll. Then he picked up the green-haired troll, and said, in a smaller trollish voice, “Aha! But first you shall drink the nice cup of tea . . .”
Someone knocked on the door, and, guiltily, he put down the trolls. “Come in.” The door opened, and Jessica came in, and stood in the doorway. She looked nervous. He had forgotten quite how beautiful she was. “Hello Richard,” she said.
“Hello Jess,” said Richard, and then he corrected himself. “Sorry—Jessica.”
She smiled, and tossed her hair. “Oh, Jess is fine,” she said, and looked as if she almost meant it. “Jessica—Jess. Nobody’s called me Jess for ages. I rather miss it.”
“So,” said Richard, “what brings, do I have the honor, you, um.”
“Just wanted to see you, really.”
He was not sure what he ought to say. “That’s nice,” he said.
She closed the door to his office and took a few steps toward him. “Richard. You know something strange? I remember calling the engagement off. But I hardly remember what we were arguing about.”
“No?”
“It’s not important, though. Is it?” She looked around the office. “You got a promotion?”
“Yes.”
“I’m happy for you.” She put a hand into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a small brown box. She put it down on Richard’s desk. He opened the box, although he knew what was inside it. “It’s our engagement ring. I thought that, well, maybe, I’d give it back to you, and then, well, if things worked out, well, perhaps one day you’d give it back to me.”
It glittered in the sunlight: the most money he had ever spent on anything. He closed the box, and gave it back to her. “You keep it, Jessica,” he said. And then, “I’m sorry.”
She bit her lower lip. “Did you meet someone?”
He hesitated. He thought of Lamia, and Hunter, and Anaesthesia, and even Door, but none of them were someones in the way that she meant. “No. No one else,” he said. And then, realizing it was true as he said it, “I’ve just changed, that’s all.”
His intercom buzzed. “Richard? We’re waiting for you.” He pressed the button. “Be right down, Sylvia.”
He looked at Jessica. She said nothing. Perhaps there was nothing she could trust herself to say. She walked away, and she closed the door quietly behind her.
Richard picked up the papers he would need, with one hand. He ran the other hand across his face, as if he were wiping something away: sorrow, perhaps, or tears, or Jessica.
He started taking the Tube again, to and from work, although he soon found that he had stopped buying newspapers to read on his journey in the morning and the evening, and instead of reading he would scan the faces of the other people on the train, faces of every kind and color, and wonder if they were all from London Above, wonder what went
on behind their eyes.
During the evening rush hour, a few days after his encounter with Jessica, he thought he saw Lamia across the carriage, with her back to him, her dark hair piled high on her head and her dress long and black. His heart began to pound in his chest. He pushed his way toward her through the crowded compartment. As he got closer, the train pulled into a station, the doors hissed open, and she stepped off. But it was not Lamia. Just another young London goth-girl, he realized, disappointed, off for a night on the town.
One Saturday afternoon he saw a large brown rat, sitting on top of the plastic garbage cans at the back of Newton Mansions, cleaning its whiskers and looking as if it owned the world. At Richard’s approach it leapt down onto the pavement and waited in the shadow of the garbage cans, staring up at him with wary bead-black eyes.
Richard crouched down. “Hello,” he said, gently. “Do we know each other?” The rat made no kind of response that Richard was able to perceive, but it did not run away. “My name is Richard Mayhew,” he continued, in a low voice. “I’m not actually a rat-speaker, but I, um, know a few rats, well, I’ve met some, and I wondered if you were familiar with the Lady Door . . .”
He heard a shoe scrape behind him, and he turned to see the Buchanans looking at him curiously. “Have you . . . lost something?” asked Mrs. Buchanan. Richard heard, but ignored, her husband’s gruff whisper of “Just his marbles.”
“No,” said Richard, honestly, “I was, um, saying hello to a . . .” The rat scurried off and away.
“Was that a rat?” barked George Buchanan. “I’ll complain to the council. It’s a disgrace. But that’s London for you, isn’t it?”
Yes, agreed Richard. It was. It really was.
Richard’s posessions continued to sit untouched in the wooden packing cases in the middle of the living room floor.
He had not yet turned on the television. He would come home at night, and eat, then he would stand at the window, looking out over London, at the cars and the rooftops and the lights, as the late autumn twilight turned into night, and the lights came on all over the city. He would watch, standing alone in his darkened flat, until the city’s lights began to be turned off. Eventually, reluctantly, he would undress, and climb into bed, and go to sleep.
