Neverwhere

«Thigh?» she asked. «Or breast?»
The girl called Door walked down the court, followed by the marquis de Carabas. There were a hundred other little courts and mews and alleys in London just like this one, tiny spurs of old-time, unchanged for, three hundred years. Even the smell of piss here was the same as it had been in Pepys’s time, three hundred years before. There was still an hour until dawn, but the sky was beginning to lighten, turning a stark, leaden color. Strands of mist hung like livid ghosts on the air.
The door was roughly boarded up and covered with stained posters for forgotten bands and long-closed nightclubs. The two of them stopped in front of it, and the marquis eyed it, all boards and nails and posters, and he appeared unimpressed; but then, unimpressed was his default state.
«So this is the entrance?» he said.
She nodded. «One of them.»
He folded his arms. «Well? Say ‘Open sesame,’ or whatever it is that you do.»
«I don’t want to do this,» she said. «I’m really not sure that we’re doing the right thing.»
«Very well,» he unfolded his arms. «I’ll be seeing you, then.» He turned on his heel and began to walk back the way that they had come. Door seized his arm. «You’d abandon me?» she asked. «Just like that?»
He grinned, without humor. «Certainly. I’m a very busy man. Things to see. People to do.»
«Look, hold on.» She let go of his sleeve, bit her lower lip. «The last time I was here . . . » she trailed off.
«The last time you were here, you found your family dead. Well, there you are. You don’t have to explain it anymore. If we aren’t going in, then our business relationship is at an end.»
She looked up at him, her elfin face pale in the pre-dawn light. «And that’s all?»
«I could wish you the best of luck in your career, but I’m afraid I rather doubt you’ll live long enough to have one.»
«You’re a piece of work, aren’t you?»
He said nothing. She walked back toward the door. «Well,» she said. «Come on. I’ll take us in.» Door put her left hand on the boarded-up door, and with her right hand she took the marquis’s huge brown hand. Her tiny fingers twined into his larger ones. She closed her eyes.
. . . something whispered and shivered and changed . . .
. . . and the door collapsed into darkness.
The memory was fresh, only a few days old: Door moved through the House Without Doors calling «I’m home,» and «Hello?» She slipped from the anteroom to the dining room, to the library, to the drawing room; no one answered. She moved to another room.
The swimming pool was an indoor Victorian structure, constructed of marble and of cast iron. Her father had found it when he was younger, abandoned and about to be demolished, and he had woven it into the fabric of the House Without Doors. Perhaps in the world outside, in London Above, the room had long been destroyed and forgotten. Door had no idea where any of the rooms of her house were, physically. Her grandfather had constructed the house, taking a room from here, a room from there, all. through London, discrete and doorless; her father had added to it.
She walked along the side of the old swimming pool, pleased to be home, puzzled by the absence of her family. And then she looked down.
There was someone floating in the water, trailing twin clouds of blood behind him, one from the throat, one from the groin. It was her brother, Arch. His eyes were open wide and sightless. She realized that her mouth was open. She could hear herself screaming.