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Richard wondered vaguely if this was one of Gary's jokes. " Maybe this will help, "

said Gary. He raised his hands to his face, pushed at it, molded, shaped. His face oozed like warm Silly Putty.

" Is that better? " said the person who had been Gary, in a voice that was jarringly familiar. Richard knew the new face: he had shaved it most weekday mornings since he had left school; he had brushed its teeth, combed its hair, and, on occasion, wished it looked more like Tom Cruise's, or John Lennon's, or anyone else's, really. It was, of course, his face. " You're sitting on Blackfriars Station at rush hour, " said the other Richard, casually. " You're talking to yourself. And you know what they say about people who talk to themselves. It's just that you're starting to edge a little closer to sanity, now. "

The damp, muddy Richard stared into the face of the clean, well-dressed Richard, and he said, " I don't know who you are or what you're trying to do. But you aren't even very convincing: you don't really look like me. " He was lying, and he knew it.

His other self smiled encouragingly, and shook his head. " I'm you, Richard, " he said. " I'm whatever's left of your sanity. . . "

It was not the embarrassing echo of his voice he heard on answering machines, on tapes and home videos, that horrid parody of a voice that passed for his: the man spoke with Richard's true voice, the voice he heard in his head when he spoke, resonant and real.

" Concentrate! " shouted the man with Richard's face. " Look at this place, try to see the people, try to see the truth. . . you're already the closest to reality that you've been in a week. . . "

" This is bullshit, " said Richard, flatly, desperately. He shook his head, denying everything his other self was saying, but, still, he looked at the platform, wondering what it was he was meant to be seeing. Then something flickered, at the corner of his vision; he followed it with his head, but it was gone.

" Look, " whispered his double. " See. "

" See what? " He was standing on an empty, dimly lit station platform, a lonely mausoleum of a place. And then. . .

The noise and the light struck him like a bottle across the face: he was standing on Blackfriars Station, in the middle of the rush hour. People bustled by him: a riot of noise and light, of shoving, moving humanity. There was an Underground train waiting at the platform, and, reflected in its window, Richard could see himself. He looked crazy; he had a week's growth of beard; food was crusted around his mouth; one eye had recently been blackened, and a boil, an angry red carbuncle, was coming up on the side of his nose; he was filthy, covered in a black, encrusted dirt which filled his pores and lived under his fingernails; his eyes were red and bleary, his hair was matted and snarled. He was a crazy homeless person, standing on a platform of a busy Underground station, in the heart of the rush hour. Richard buried his face deep in his hands. When he raised his face, the other people were gone. The platform was dark again, and he was alone. He sat down on a bench and closed his eyes. A hand found his hand, held it for some moments, and then squeezed it. A woman's hand: he could smell a familiar perfume.

The other Richard sat on his left, and now Jessica sat on his right, holding his hand in hers, looking at him compassionately. He had never seen that expression on her face before.

" Jess? " he said.

Jessica shook her head. She let go of his hand. " I'm afraid not, " she said. " I'm still you. But you have to listen, darling. You're the closest to reality you've been—"

" You people keep saying, the closest to reality, the closest to sanity, I don't know what you. . . " He paused. Something came back to him, then. He looked at the other version of himself, at the woman he had loved. " Is this part of the ordeal? " he demanded.

" Ordeal? " asked Jessica. She exchanged a concerned glance with the-other-Richard-who-wasn't-him.

" Yes. Ordeal. With the Black Friars who live under London, " Richard said. As he said it, it became more real, " There's a key I have to get for this angel called Islington.

If I get him the key, he'll send me home again. . . " His mouth dried up, and he could talk no longer.

" Listen to yourself, " said the other Richard, gently. " Can't you tell how ridiculous all this sounds? " Jessica looked as if she were trying not to cry. Her eyes glistened.

" You're not going through an ordeal, Richard. You—you had some kind of nervous breakdown. A couple of weeks ago. I think you just cracked up. I broke off our engagement—you'd been acting so strangely, it was like you were a different person, I—I couldn't cope. . . Then you vanished. . . " The tears began to run down her cheeks, and she stopped talking to blow her nose on a tissue.

The other Richard began to speak. " I wandered, alone and crazy, through the streets of London, sleeping under bridges, eating food from garbage cans. Shivering and lost and alone. Muttering to myself, talking to people who weren't there. . . "

" I'm so sorry, Richard, " said Jessica. She was crying, now, her face contorted and unattractive. Her mascara was beginning to run, and her nose was red. He had never seen her hurting before, and he realized how much he wanted to take her pain away.

Richard reached out for her, to try to hold her, to comfort and reassure her, but the world slid and twisted and changed. . .

Someone stumbled into him, cursed and walked away. Richard was lying prone on the platform, in the rush-hour glare. The side of his face was sticky and cold. He pulled his head up off the ground. He had been lying in a pool of his own vomit. At least, he hoped it was his own. Passersby stared at him with revulsion, or, after one flick of the eyes, did not look at him again.

He wiped at his face with his hands and tried to get up, but he could no longer remember how. Richard began to whimper. He shut his eyes tightly, and he kept them shut. When he opened them, thirty seconds, or an hour, or a day later, the platform was in semidarkness. He climbed to his feet. There was nobody there. " Hello? " he called.

" Help me. Please. "

Gary was sitting on the bench, watching him. " What, you still need someone to tell you what to do? " Gary got up and walked over to where Richard was standing.

" Richard, " he said, urgently. " I'm you. The only advice I can give you is what you're telling yourself. Only, maybe you're too scared to listen. "

" You aren't me, " said Richard, but he no longer believed it.

" Touch me, " said Gary.

Richard reached a hand out: his hand pushed into Gary's face, squashing and distorting it, as if it were pushing into warm bubble gum. Richard felt nothing in the air around his hand. He pulled his fingers out of Gary's face.

" See? " said Gary. " I'm not here. All there is, is you, walking up and down the platform, talking to yourself, trying to get up the courage to. . . "

Richard had not meant to say anything; but his mouth moved and he heard his voice saying, " Trying to get up the courage to do what? "

A deep voice came over the loudspeaker, and echoed, distorted, down the platform. " London Transport would like to apologize for the delay. This is due to an incident at Blackfriars Station. " " To do that, " said Gary, inclining his head. " Become an incident at Blackfriars Station. To end it all. Your life's a joyless, loveless, empty sham. You've got no friends—"

" I've got you, " whispered Richard. Gary appraised Richard with frank eyes.

" I think you're an asshole, " he said, honestly. " A complete joke. "

" I've got Door, and Hunter, and Anaesthesia. "

Gary smiled. There was real pity in the smile, and it hurt Richard more than hatred or enmity could ever have done. " More imaginary 'friends? We all used to laugh at you round the office for those trolls. Remember them? On your desk. " He laughed. Richard started to laugh, too. It was all too horrible: there was nothing else to do but laugh.

After some time he stopped laughing. Gary put his hand into his pocket and produced a small plastic troll. It had frizzy purple hair, and it had once sat on the top of Richard's computer screen. " Here, " said Gary. He tossed the troll to Richard. Richard tried to catch it; he reached out his hands, but it fell through them as if they were not there. He went down onto his hands and knees on the empty platform, fumbling for the troll. It seemed to him, then, as if it were the only fragment he had of his real life: that if he could only get the troll back, perhaps he could get everything back. . .

Flash.

It was rush hour again. A train disgorged hundreds of people onto the platform, and hundreds of others tried to get on, and Richard was down on his hands and knees, being kicked and buffeted by the commuters. Somebody stepped on his fingers, hard.

He screamed shrilly, and stuck his fingers into his mouth, instinctively, like a burned child; they tasted disgusting. He did not care: he could see the troll at the platform's edge, now only ten feet away, and he crawled, slowly, on all fours, through the crowd, across the platform. People swore at him; they got in his way; they buffeted him. He had never imagined that ten feet could be such a long distance to travel.

Richard heard a high-pitched voice giggling, as he crawled, and he wondered who it could belong to. It was a disturbing giggle, nasty and strange. He wondered what manner of crazy person could giggle like that. He swallowed, and the giggling stopped, and then he knew.

He was almost at the edge of the platform. An elderly woman stepped onto the train, and as she did so, her foot knocked the purple-haired troll down into the darkness, down into the gap between the train and the platform. " No, " said Richard. He was still laughing, an awkward, wheezing laugh, but tears stung his eyes and spilled down his cheeks. He rubbed his eyes with his hands, making them sting even more.

Flash.

The platform was deserted and dark again. He climbed to his feet and walked, unsteadily, the last few feet, to the edge of the platform. He could see it there, down on the tracks, by the third rail: a small splash of purple, his troll. He looked ahead of him: there were enormous posters stuck to the wall on the other side of the tracks. The posters advertised credit cards and sports shoes and holidays in Cyprus. As he looked the words on the posters twisted and mutated.

New messages:

END IT ALL was one of them.

PUT YOURSELF OUT OF YOUR MISERY.

BE A MAN—DO YOURSELF IN.

HAVE A FATAL ACCIDENT TODAY.

He nodded. He was talking to himself. The posters did not really say that. Yes, he was talking to himself; and it was time that he listened. He could hear the rattling of a train, not far away, coming toward the station. Richard clenched his teeth, and swayed back and forth, as if he were still being buffeted by commuters, although he was alone on the platform.

The train was coming toward him; its headlights shining out from the tunnel like the eyes of a monstrous dragon in a childhood nightmare. And he understood then just how little effort it would take to make the pain stop—to take all the pain he ever had had, all the pain he ever would have, and make it all go away for ever and ever. He pushed his hands deep into his pockets, and took a deep breath. It would be so easy. A moment of pain, and then it would all be over and done. . .

There was something in his pocket. He felt it with his fingers: something smooth and hard and roughly spherical. He pulled it out of his pocket, and examined it: a quartz bead. He remembered picking it up, then. He had been on the far side of Night's Bridge.

The bead had been part of Anaesthesia's necklace.

And from somewhere, in his head or out of it, he thought he heard the rat-girl say,

" Richard. Hold on. " He did not know if there was anyone helping him at that moment.

He suspected that he was, truly, talking to himself. That this was the real him speaking, and he was, finally, listening.

He nodded and put the bead back into his pocket. And he stood on the platform and waited for the train to come in. It arrived at the platform, slowed, came to a full stop.

The train doors hissed open. The carriage was filled with every manner and kind of people, all of whom were, unmistakably, quite dead. There were fresh corpses, with ragged cuts in their throats or bullet holes in their temples. There were old, desiccated bodies. There were strap-hanging cadavers, covered with cobwebs, and cancerous things lolling in their seats. Each corpse seemed, as much as one could tell, to have died by its own hand. Some were male, and some were female. Richard thought he had seen some of those faces, pinned to a long wall; but he could no longer remember where he had seen them, could not remember when. The carriage smelled like a morgue might at the end of a long, hot summer during the course of which the refrigeration equipment had failed for good.

Richard had no idea who he was, anymore; no idea what was or what was not true; nor whether he was brave or cowardly, mad or sane, but he knew the next thing he had to do. He stepped onto the train, and all the lights went out.

The bolts were drawn back. Two loud bangs echoed through the room. The door to the tiny shrine was pushed open, letting in lamplight from the hall outside.

It was a small room with a high arched ceiling. A silver key hung from a thread, attached to the highest point of the ceiling. The wind caused by the opening of the door made the key swing back and forth, and then spin slowly, first one way, and then the other. The abbot held Brother Fuliginous's arm, and the two men walked into the shrine, side by side. Then the abbot let go of the brother's arm, and said, " Take the body, Brother Fuliginous. "

" But. But Father. . . "

" What is it? "

Brother Fuliginous went down on one knee. The abbot could hear fingers against cloth and skin. " He's not dead. "

The abbot sighed. It was an evil thing to think, he knew, but he honestly felt it was so much kinder if they died outright. This was so much worse. " One of those, eh? " he said. " Ah well, we will look after the poor creature until it passes on to its ultimate reward. Lead it to the infirmary. "

And a weak voice said, quietly, but firmly, " I am not a poor creature. " The abbot heard someone stand up; heard Brother Fuliginous's sharp intake of breath. " I. . . I think I got through it, " said Richard Mayhew's voice, suddenly uncertain. " Unless this is more of the ordeal. "

" No, my son, " said the abbot. There was something in his voice that might have been awe, and might have been regret.

There was silence. " I. . . I think I will have that cup of tea now, if you don't mind, " said Richard.

" Of course, " said the abbot. " This way. " Richard stared at the old man. The glaucous eyes gazed out at nothing at all. He seemed pleased that Richard was alive, but. . .

" Excuse me? " said Brother Fuliginous, respectfully, to Richard, breaking his train of thought. " Don't forget your key. "

" Oh. Yes. Thanks. " He had forgotten about the key. He reached out and closed his hand upon the cold silver key, rotating slowly on its thread. He tugged, and the thread snapped easily.

Richard opened his hand, and the key stared up at him from his palm. " By my crooked teeth, " asked Richard, remembering, " who am I? "

He put it into his pocket, next to the small quartz bead, and together they left that place.

The fog had begun to thin. Hunter was pleased. She was confident now that, should it become necessary, she could get the Lady Door away from the friars entirely unharmed and get herself away with only minor flesh wounds.

There was a flurry of movement on the far side of the bridge. " Something's happening, " said Hunter to Door, under her breath. " Get ready to make a run for it. "

The friars drew back. Richard Mayhew, the Upworlder, came toward them through the fog, walking beside the abbot. Richard looked different, somehow. . .

Hunter scrutinized him, trying to work out what had changed. His center of balance had moved lower, become more centered. No. . . it was more than that. He looked less boyish. He looked as if he had begun to grow up.

" Still alive then? " said Hunter. He nodded; put his hand into his pocket, and pulled out a silver key. He tossed it to Door, who caught it, then flung herself at him, wrapping her arms around him, squeezing him as tightly as she could.

Then Door let go of Richard and ran to the abbot. " I can't tell you how much this means to us, " she said to him.

He smiled, weakly but graciously. " May the Temple and the Arch be with you all, on your journey through the Underside, " he said.

Door curtseyed, and then, clutching the key tightly in her hand, she went back to Richard, and to Hunter. The three travelers walked down the bridge, and away. The friars stood on the bridge until they were out of sight, lost in the old fog of the world beneath the world.

" We have lost the key, " said the abbot to himself, as much as to any of them. " God help us all. "

THIRTEEN

The Angel Islington was dreaming A dark and rushing dream.

Huge waves were rising and crashing over the city; the night sky was rent with forks of white lightning from horizon to horizon; the rain fell in sheets, the city trembled; fires started near the great amphitheater and spread, quickly, through the city, defying the storm. Islington was looking down on everything from far above, hovering in the air, as one hovers in dreams, as it had hovered in those long-ago times. There were buildings in that city that were many hundreds of feet high, but they were dwarfed by the gray-green Atlantic waves. And then it heard the people scream. There were four million people in Atlantis, and, in its dream, Islington heard each and every one of their voices, clearly and distinctly, as, one by one, they screamed, and choked, and burned, and drowned, and died. The waves swallowed the city, and, at length, the storm subsided.

When dawn broke, there was nothing to indicate there had ever been a city there at all, let alone an island twice the size of Greece. Nothing of Atlantis remained but the water-bloated bodies of children, of women and of men, floating on the cold morning waves; bodies the seagulls, gray and white, were already beginning to pick with their cruel beaks.

And Islington woke. It was standing in the octagon of iron pillars, beside the great black door, made of flint and tarnished silver. It touched the cold smoothness of the flint, the chill of the metal. It touched the table. It ran its finger lightly along the walls.

Then it walked through chambers of its hall, one after another, touching things, as if to reassure itself of their existence, to convince itself it was here, and now. It followed patterns, as it walked, smooth channels its bare feet had worn, over the centuries, in the rock. It stopped when it reached the rock-pool, kneeling down and letting its fingers touch the cold water.

There was a ripple in the water, which began with its fingertips and echoed out to the edges. The reflections in the pool, of the angel itself and the candle flames that framed it, shimmered and transformed. It was looking into a cellar. The angel concentrated for a moment; it could hear a telephone ring, somewhere in the distance.

Mr. Croup walked over to the telephone and picked up the receiver. He looked rather pleased with himself. " Croup and Vandemar, " he barked. " Eyes gouged, noses twisted, tongues pierced, chins cleft, throats slit. "

" Mister Croup, " said the angel. " They now have the key. I want the girl called Door kept safe on her journey back to me. "

" Safe, " repeated Mr. Croup, unimpressed. " Right. We'll keep her safe. What a marvelous idea—such originality. Positively astounding. Most people would be content with hiring assassins for executions, sly killings, vile murders even. Only you, sir, would hire the two finest cutthroats in the whole of space and time, and then ask them to ensure a little girl remains unharmed. "

" See that she is, Mister Croup. Nothing is to hurt her. Permit her to be harmed in any way and you will displease me deeply. Do you understand? "

" Yes. " Croup shifted uncomfortably.

" Is there anything else? " asked Islington.

" Yes, sir. " Croup coughed into his hand. " Do you remember the marquis de Carabas? "

" Of course. "

" I take it that there is no such similar prohibition on extirpating the marquis. . . ? "

" Not any longer, " said the angel. " Just protect the girl. "

It removed its hand from the water. The reflection was now merely candle flames and an angel of astonishing, perfectly androgynous, beauty. The Angel Islington stood up and returned to its inner chambers to await its eventual visitors.

" What did he say? " asked Mr. Vandemar.

" He said, Mister Vandemar, that we should feel free to do whatsoever we wished to the marquis. "

Vandemar nodded. " Did that include killing him painfully? " he asked, a little pedantically.

" Yes, Mister Vandemar, I would say, on reflection, it did. "

" That's good, Mister Croup. Wouldn't like another telling-off. " He looked up at the bloody thing hanging above them. " Better get rid of the body, then. "

One of the front wheels on the supermarket shopping cart squeaked, and it had a pronounced tendency to pull to the left. Mr. Vandemar had found the metal cart on a grassed-in traffic island, near the hospital. It was, he had realized on seeing it, just the right size for moving a body. He could have carried the body, of course; but then it could have bled on him, or dripped other fluids. And he only had the one suit. So he pushed the shopping cart with the body of the marquis de Carabas in it through the storm drain, and the cart went squee, squee and pulled to the left. He wished that Mr.

Croup would push the shopping cart, for a change. But Mr. Croup was talking. " You know, Mister Vandemar, " he was saying, " I am currently too overjoyed, too delighted, not to mention too utterly and illimitably ecstatic, to grouse, gripe or grumble—having finally been permitted to do what we do best—'"

Mr. Vandemar negotiated a particularly awkward corner. " Kill someone, you mean? " he asked.

Mr. Croup beamed. " Kill someone I mean indeed, Mister Vandemar, brave soul, glittering, noble fellow. However, by now you must have sensed a lurking 'but' skulking beneath my happy, blithe, and chipper exterior. A minuscule vexation, like the teeniest lump of raw liver sticking to the inside of my boot. You must, I have no doubt, be saying to yourself, 'All is not well in Mister Croup's breast. I shall induce him to unburden himself to me. ' "

Mr. Vandemar pondered this while he forced open the round iron door between the storm drain and the sewer and clambered through. Then he manhandled the wire cart with the marquis de Carabas's body through the doorway. And then, more or less certain that he had been thinking nothing of the sort, he said, " No. "

Mr. Croup ignored this, and continued, " . . . And, were I then, in response to your pleadings, to divulge to you what vexes me, I would confess that my soul is irked by the necessity to hide our light under a bushel. We should be hanging the former marquis's sad remains from the highest gibbet in London Below. Not tossing it away, like a used. . . " He paused, searching for the exact simile.

" Rat? " suggested Mr. Vandemar. " Thumbscrew? Spleen? " Squee, squee went the wheels of the shopping cart.

" Ah well, " said Mr. Croup. In front of them was a deep channel of brown water.

Drifting on the water's surface were off-white suds of foam, used condoms, and occasional fragments of toilet paper. Mr. Vandemar stopped the shopping cart. Mr.

Croup leaned down and picked up the marquis's head by the hair, hissing into its dead ear, " The sooner this business is over and done with, the happier I'll be. There's other times and other places that would properly appreciate two pair of dab hands with the garrotting wire and the boning knife. "

Then he stood up. " Goodnight, good marquis. Don't forget to write. "

Mr. Vandemar tipped over the cart, and the marquis's corpse tumbled out and splashed into the brown water below them. And then, because he had come to dislike it intensely, Mr. Vandemar pushed the shopping cart into the sewer as well, and watched the current carry it away.

Then Mr. Croup held his lamp up high, and he stared out at the place in which they stood. " It is saddening to reflect, " said Mr. Croup, " that there are folk walking the streets above who will never know the beauty of these sewers, Mister Vandemar. These red-brick cathedrals beneath their feet. "

" Craftsmanship, " agreed Mr. Vandemar.

They turned their backs on the brown water and made their way back into the tunnels. " With cities, as with people, Mister Vandemar, " said Mr. Croup, fastidiously,

" the condition of the bowels is all-important. "

Door tied the key around her neck with a piece of string that she found in one of the pockets of her leather jacket. " That's not going to be safe, " said Richard. The girl made a face at him. " Well, " he said. " It's not. "

She shrugged. " Okay, " she said. " I'll get a chain for it when we get to the market. "

They were walking through a maze of caves, deep tunnels hacked from the limestone that seemed almost prehistoric.

Richard chuckled. " What's so funny? " Door asked.

He grinned. " I was just thinking of the expression on the marquis's face when we tell him we got the key from the friars without his help. "

" I'm sure he'll have something sardonic to say about it, " she said. " And then, back to the angel. By the 'long and dangerous way. ' Whatever that is. "

Richard admired the paintings on the cave walls. Russets and ochres and siennas outlined charging boars and fleeing gazelles, woolly mastodons and giant sloths: he imagined that the paintings had to be thousands of years old, but then they turned a corner, and he noticed that, in the same style, there were lorries, house cats, cars, and—

markedly inferior to the other images, as if only glimpsed infrequently, and from a long way away—airplanes.

None of the paintings were very high off the ground. He wondered if the painters were a race of subterranean Neanderthal pygmies. It was as likely as anything else in this strange world. " So where is the next market? " he asked.

" No idea, " said Door. " Hunter? "

Hunter slipped out of the shadows. " I don't know. "

A small figure dashed past them, going back the way they had come. A few moments later another couple of tiny figures came toward them in fell pursuit. Hunter whipped out a hand as they passed, snagging a small boy by the ear. " Ow, " he said, in the manner of small boys. " Let me go! She stole my paintbrush. "

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