Neverwhere

Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiancee, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as any life makes sense.) Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement, and I tried to be a Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiancee, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruit fly. "This way," said the marquis, gesturing elegantly, his filthy lace cuff flowing.

"Don't all these tunnels look the same?" asked Richard, tabling his diary entry for the moment. "How can you tell which is which?"

"You can't," said the marquis, sadly. "We're hopelessly lost. We'll never be seen again. In a couple of days we'll be killing each other for food."

"Really?" He hated himself for rising to the bait, even as he said it.

"No." The marquis's expression said that torturing this poor fool was too easy to even be amusing. Richard found that he cared less and less what these people thought of him, however. Except, perhaps, for Door.

He went back to writing his mental diary. There are hundreds of people in this other London. Thousands maybe. People who come from here, or people who have fallen through the cracks. I'm wandering around with a girl called Door, her bodyguard, and her psychotic grand vizier. We slept last night in a small tunnel that Door said was once a section of Regency sewer. The bodyguard was awake when I went to sleep, and awake when they woke me up. I don't think she ever sleeps. We had some fruitcake for breakfast; the marquis had a large lump of it in his pocket. Why would anyone have a large lump of fruitcake in his pocket? My shoes dried out mostly while I slept.

I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.

At least the tunnel they were now walking down was dry. It was a high-tech tunnel: all silvery pipes and white walls. The marquis and Door walked together, in front. Richard tended to stay a couple of paces behind them. Hunter moved about: sometimes she was behind them, sometimes to one side of them or to the other, often a little way in front, merging with the shadows. She made no sound when she moved, which Richard found rather disconcerting.

There was a crack of light ahead of them. "There we go," said the marquis. "Bank Station. Good place to start looking."

"You're out of your mind," said Richard. He did not mean it to be heard, but the most sotto of voces carried and echoed in the darkness.

"Indeed?" said the marquis. The ground began to rumble: an Underground train was somewhere close at hand.

"Richard, just leave it," said Door.

But it was coming out of his mouth: "Well," he said. "You're both being silly. There are no such things as angels."

The marquis nodded, said, "Ah. Yes. I understand you now. There are no such things as angels. Just as there is no London Below, no rat-speakers, no shepherds in Shepherd's Bush."

"There are no shepherds in Shepherd's Bush. I've been there. It's just houses and stores and roads and the BBC. That's all," pointed out Richard, flatly.

"There are shepherds," said Hunter, from the darkness just next to Richard's ear. "Pray you never meet them." She sounded perfectly serious.

"Well," said Richard, "I still don't believe that there are flocks of angels wandering about down here."

"There aren't," said the marquis. "Just one." They had reached the end of the tunnel. There was a locked door in front of them. The marquis stood back. "My lady?" he said, to Door. She rested a hand on it, for a moment. The door opened, silently.

"Maybe," Richard said, persisting, "we're thinking of different things. The angels I have in mind are all wings, haloes, trumpets, peace-on-earth-goodwill-unto-men."