Neverwhere

drink. Very small. Almost not there.» She began to hiccup. Then she giggled again. A hiccup interrupted her, and she sat down suddenly on the platform. «I think maybe we are a bit smashed,» she said, soberly. Then she closed her eyes, and began, solemnly, to snore.
The marquis de Carabas was running through the underways as if all the hounds of Hell had his scent and were on his trail. He was splashing through six gray inches of the Tyburn, the hangman’s river, kept safe in the darkness in a brick sewer beneath Park Lane on its way south to Buckingham Palace. He had been running for seventeen minutes.
Thirty feet below Marble Arch, he paused. The sewer divided into two branches. The marquis de Carabas ran down the left-hand branch.
Several minutes later, Mr. Vandemar walked through the sewer. And when he reached the junction he, too, paused for a few moments, sniffing the air. And then he, too, walked down the left-hand branch.
Hunter dropped Richard Mayhew’s unconscious body into a pile of straw, with a grunt. He rolled in the straw, said something that sounded like «Forth-ril bjugly mobble wug,» and went back to sleep. She put Door down in the straw next to him, more gently. Then she stood beside Door, in the dark stables under the ground, on guard still.
The marquis de Carabas was exhausted. He leaned against the tunnel wall and stared at the steps that went up ahead of him. Then he pulled out the golden pocket-watch and looked at the time. Thirty-five minutes had passed since he had fled the hospital cellar.
«Is it an hour yet?» asked Mr. Vandemar. He was sitting on the steps ahead of the marquis, picking his nails with a knife.
«Not even close,» gasped the marquis.
«Felt like an hour,» said Mr. Vandemar, helpfully.
There was a shiver in the world, and Mr. Croup stood behind the marquis de Carabas. He still had powder on his chin. De Carabas stared at Mr. Croup. He turned back to look at Mr. Vandemar. And then, spontaneously, the marquis de Carabas began to laugh. Mr. Croup smiled. «You find us funny, Messire Marquis, do you not? A source of amusement. Is that not so? With our pretty clothes, and our convoluted circumlocutions—»
Mr. Vandemar murmured, «I haven’t got a circumlo . . . »
«—and our little sillinesses of manner and behavior. And perhaps we are funny.»
Mr. Croup raised one finger then, and waggled it at de Carabas. «But you must never imagine,» he continued, «that just because something is funny, Messire Marquis, it is not also dangerous.»
And Mr. Vandemar threw his knife at the marquis, hard and accurately. It hit him, hilt first, on the temple. His eyes rolled up in his head, and his knees buckled. «Circumlocution,» said Mr. Croup to Mr. Vandemar. «It’s a way of speaking around something. A digression. Verbosity.»
Mr. Vandemar picked up the marquis de Carabas by his waistband and dragged him up the stairs, his head bump-bump-bumping on each step as they went, and Mr. Vandemar nodded. «I wondered,» he said.
Watching their dreams, now, as they sleep.
Hunter sleeps standing up.
In her dream, Hunter is in the undercity beneath Bangkok. It is partly a maze, and partly a forest, for the wilderness of Thailand has retreated deep beneath the ground, under the airport and the hotels and the streets. The world smells of spice and dried mango, and it also smells, not unpleasantly, of sex. It is humid, and she is sweating. It is dark, broken by phosphorescent patches on the wall, greenish grey fungi that give light enough to fool the eye, light enough to walk by.
In her dream Hunter moves silent as a ghost through the wet tunnels, pushing her way through vegetation. She holds a weighted throwing stick in her right hand; a leather shield covers her left forearm.
She smells it, in her dream, acrid and animal, and she pauses beside a wall of ruined masonry, and she waits, part of the shadows, one with the darkness. Hunting, like life, Hunter believes, consists chiefly of waiting. In Hunter’s dream, however, she does not wait. Upon her arrival, it comes through the underbrush, a fury of brown and of white, undulating gently, like a wet-furred snake, its red eyes bright and peering through the darkness, its teeth like needles, a carnivore and a killer. The creature is extinct in the world above. It weighs almost three hundred pounds, and is a little over fifteen feet long, from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail.
As it passes her, she hisses like a snake, and, momentarily, old instincts kicking in, it freezes. And then it leaps at her, nothing but hate and sharp teeth. She remembers, then, in her dream, that this had happened before, and that when it had happened, that time in the past, she had pushed the leather arm-shield into