Neverwhere

stone, which had, before it was even completed, begun to turn black from the soot and the filth in the smoky London air and now, following the cleaning of London in the 1970s, was more or less white again; but it was still St. Paul’s. He was not sure that the same could be said for the rest of the City of London: he peered over the roof, stared away from his beloved Sky, down to the sodium-lit pavement below. He could see security cameras affixed to a wall, and a few cars, and one late office worker, locking a door and then walking toward the Tube. Brrr. Even the thought of going underground made Old Bailey shudder. He was a roof-man and proud of it; had fled the world at ground level so long ago . . .
Old Bailey remembered when people had actually lived here in the City, not just worked; when they had lived and lusted and laughed, built ramshackle houses one leaning against the next, each house filled with noisy people. Why, the noise and the mess and the stinks and the songs from the alley across the way (then known, at least colloquially, as Shitten Alley) had been legendary in their time, but no one lived in the City now. It was a cold and cheerless place of offices, of people who worked in the day and went home to somewhere else at night. It was not a place for living anymore. He even missed the stinks.
The last smudge of orange sun faded into nocturnal purple. The old man covered the cages, so the birds could get their beauty sleep. They grumbled, then slept. Old Bailey scratched his nose, after which he went into his tent and fetched a blackened stew-pot, some water, some carrots and potatoes, salt, and a well-hanged pair of dead, plucked starlings. He walked out onto the roof, lit a small fire in a soot-blackened coffee can, and was putting his stew on to cook when he became aware that someone was watching him from the shadows by a chimney stack.
He picked up his toasting fork and waved it threateningly at the chimney stack. «Who’s there?»
The marquis de Carabas stepped out of the shadows, bowed perfunctorily, and smiled gloriously. Old Bailey lowered his toasting fork. «Oh,» he said. «It’s you. Well, what do you want? Knowledge? Or birds?»
The marquis walked over, picked a slice of raw carrot from Old Bailey’s stew, and munched it. «Information, actually,» he said.
Old Bailey chortled. «Hah,» he said. «There’s a first. Ehh?» Then he leaned toward the marquis. «What’ll you trade for it?»
«What do you need?»
«Maybe I should do what you do. I should ask for another favor. An investment for one day down the road.» Old Bailey grinned.
«Much too expensive, in the long run,» said the marquis, without humor.
Old Bailey nodded. Now the sun had gone down, it was getting very cold, very fast. «Shoes, then,» he said. «And a balaclava hat.» He inspected his fingerless gloves: they were more hole than glove. «And new gloveses. It’s going to be a bastard winter.»
«Very well. I’ll bring them to you.» The marquis de Carabas put his hand into an inside pocket and produced, like a magician producing a rose from thin air, the black animal figure he had taken from Portico’s study. «Now. What can you tell me about this?»
Old Bailey pulled on his glasses. He took the object from de Carabas. It was cold to the touch. He sat down on an air-conditioning unit, then, turning the black obsidian statue over and over in his hand, he announced: «It’s the Great Beast of London.» The marquis said nothing. His eyes flickered from the statue to Old Bailey, impatiently. Old Bailey, enjoying the marquis’s minor discomfort, continued at his own pace. «Now, they say that back in first King Charlie’s day—him ‘as got his head all chopped off, silly bugger—before the fire and the plague, this was, there was a butcher lived down by the Fleet Ditch, had some poor creature he was going to fatten up for Christmas. Some says it was a piglet, and some says it wusn’t, and there’s some—and I list meself as one of them—that wusn’t never properly certain. One night in December the beast runned away, ran into the Fleet Ditch, and vanished into the sewers. And it fed on the sewage, and it grew, and it grew. And it got meaner, and nastier. They’d send in hunting parties after it, from time to time.»
The marquis pursed his lips. «It must have died three hundred years ago.»
Old Bailey shook his head. «Things like that, they’re too vicious to die. Too old and big and nasty.»
The marquis sighed. «I thought it was just a legend,» he said. «Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City.»
Old Bailey nodded, sagely. «What, the big white buggers? They’re down there. I had a friend lost a head to one of them.» A moment of silence. Old Bailey handed the statue back to the marquis. Then he raised his hand and snapped it, like