I Shall Wear Midnight

This innocent enquiry appeared to floor the commander. ‘Oh! He … oh, I … he’s fine. Oh yes, fine. You were right. All he needed was a fizzy drink and a really big burp. Could I have a word with you in private, Mrs Proust?’ The look he gave Tiffany made it quite clear that ‘private’ didn’t include her, so she carefully made her way through the crowds of jolly, and sometimes too jolly, people waiting to have their pictures taken in front of the King’s Neck, and let herself fade into the foreground and listen to Rob Anybody command the troops, who would listen to him when there was nothing better to do.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘which one of you scunners decided to paint a real neck on the sign? I’m sure it’s no’ normally done like that.’

‘That was Wullie,’ said Big Yan. ‘He reckoned people would think it had always been like that. He is daft, ye ken.’

‘Sometimes daft works,’ said Tiffany. She looked around … And there he was, the man with no eyes, walking through the crowd, walking through the crowd, as if they were ghosts, but she could see that they felt his presence in some way; one man brushed his hand across his face, as if feeling the footsteps of a fly; another one slapped at his own ear. But afterwards they were … changed. When their eyes saw Tiffany they narrowed, and the ghostly man headed towards her and the whole of the crowd became one huge frown. And here came the stench, trailing behind him and turning the daylight grey. It was like the bottom of a pond, where things had died and rotted for centuries.

Tiffany looked around desperately. The turning of the King’s Head had filled the street with the curious and the thirsty. People were trying to go about their business, but were being hemmed in by the crowd in front and the crowd behind them and, of course, by the people with trays and little carts who swarmed through the city and would try to sell something to anyone who stood still for more than two seconds. She could feel the menace in the air, but in fact it was more than a menace — it was hatred, growing like a plant after rain, and still the man in black came nearer. It scared her. Of course, she had the Feegles with her, but generally speaking the Feegles got you out of trouble by getting you into a different kind of trouble.

The ground moved quite suddenly underneath her. There was a metallic scraping noise, and the bottom dropped out of her world, but only by about six feet. As she staggered in the gloom under the pavement, someone pushed past her with a cheerful ‘Excuse me.’ There were more inexplicable metal noises and the round hole now above her head vanished in darkness.

‘Real piece of luck there,’ said the polite voice. ‘The only one we’re going to get today, I fancy. Please try not to panic until I have lit the safety lantern. If you want to panic thereafter, that is entirely up to you. Stay close to me and when I say, “Walk as fast as possible while holding your breath,” do so, for the sake of your sanity, your throat, and possibly your life. I don’t care if you understand or not — just do it, because we may not have much time.’

A match flared. There was a small popping noise and a green-blue glow in the air just in front of Tiffany. ‘Only a bit of marsh gas,’ said the invisible informant. ‘Not too bad, nothing to worry about yet, but stay close, mind you!’

The green-blue glow began to move very fast, and Tiffany had to walk quickly to keep up, which was no mean feat, because the ground beneath her boots was, by turns, like gravel, mud or occasionally a liquid of some sort but probably not a sort that you would want to know about. Here and there, in the distance, there were tiny little glows of other mysterious lights, like will-o’-the-wisps you sometimes got over marshy ground.

‘Do keep up!’ said the voice ahead of her.

Soon Tiffany lost all sense of direction and, for that matter, time.

Then there was a click and the figure was outlined against what looked like a perfectly ordinary doorway, except that it was in an arch, and so the door itself came to a point at the top.

‘Please be so good as to wipe your feet very thoroughly on the mat just inside; it pays to take precautions down here.’