OLD BAILEY'S BIRDS AND INFORMATION 2 page

Richard was not dead. He was sitting in the dark, on a ledge, on the side of a storm drain, wondering what to do, wondering how much further out of his league he could possibly get. His life so far, he decided, had prepared him perfectly for a job in Securities, for shopping at the supermarket, for watching soccer on the television on the weekends, for turning up the thermostat if he got cold. It had magnificently failed to prepare him for a life as an un-person on the roofs and in the sewers of London, for a life in the cold and the wet and the dark.

A light glimmered. Footsteps came toward him. If, he decided, it was a bunch of murderers, cannibals, or monsters, he would not even put up a fight. Let them end it all for him; he'd had enough. He stared down into the dark, to the place where his feet should be. The footsteps came closer.

"Richard?" The voice was Door's. He jumped. Then he studiously ignored her. If it weren't for you, he thought… "Richard?"

He didn't look up. "What?" he said.

"Look," she said. "You really wouldn't be in this mess if it weren't for me," You can say that again, he thought. "And I don't think you'll be any safer with us. But. Well." She stopped. A deep breath. "I'm sorry. I really am. Are you coining?"

He looked at her then: a small creature with huge eyes staring at him urgently from a heart-shaped, pale face. Okay, he said to himself. I guess I'm not quite ready to just give up and die. "Well, I don't have anywhere else to be right now," he said, with a studied unconcern that bordered on hysteria. "Why not?"

Her face changed. She threw her arms around his chest and hugged him, tightly. "And we will try to get you back home again," she said. "Promise. Once we've found what I'm looking for." He wondered if she meant it, suspected, for the first time, that what she was offering might be impossible. But he pushed that thought out of his head. They began to walk down the tunnel. Richard could see Hunter and the marquis waiting for them at the tunnel's mouth. The marquis looked as if he had been forced to swallow a pulped lemon.

"What are you looking for, anyway?", asked Richard, cheering up a little.

Door took a deep breath, and answered after a long pause. "It's a long story," she said, solemnly. "Right now we're looking for an angel named Islington." It was then that Richard began to laugh; he couldn't help himself. There was hysteria in there, certainly, but there was also the exhaustion of someone who had managed, somehow, to believe several dozen impossible things in the last twenty-four hours, without ever getting a proper breakfast. His laughter echoed down the tunnels.

"An angel?" he said, giggling helplessly. "Called Islington?"

"We've got a long way to go," said Door.

And Richard shook his head, and felt wrung out, and emptied, and flayed. "An angel," he whispered, hysterically, to the tunnels and the dark. "An angel."

There were candles all over the Great Hall: candles stood by the iron pillars that held the roof up; candles waited by the waterfall that ran down one wall and into the small rock-pool below; candles clustered on the sides of the rock wall; candles huddled on the floor; candles were set into candlesticks by the huge door that stood between two dark iron pillars. The door was built of polished black flint set into a silver base that had tarnished, over the centuries, almost to black. The candles were unlit; but as the tall form walked past, they flickered into flame. No hand touched them; no fires touched their wicks.

The figure's robe was simple, and white; or more than white. A color, or an absence of all colors, so bright as to be startling. Its feet were bare on the cold rock floor of the Great Hall. Its face was pale and wise, and gentle; and, perhaps, a little lonely.

It was very beautiful.

Soon every candle in the Hall was burning. It paused by the rock-pool; knelt beside the water, cupped its hands, lowered them into the clear water, raised them, and drank. The water was cold, but very pure. When it had finished drinking the water it closed its eyes for a moment, as if in benediction. Then it stood up, and walked away, back through the Hall, the way it had come; and the candles went out as it passed, as they had done for tens of thousands of years. It had no wings; but still, it was, unmistakably, an angel.

Islington left the Great Hall; and the last of the candles went out, and the darkness returned.

SIX

Richard wrote a diary entry in his head.

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."

"That's right," said Door. "You got it. Angels." They went through the door. Richard shut his eyes, involuntarily, at the sudden flood of light: it stabbed into his head like a migraine. As his eyes became used to the light, Richard found, to his surprise, that he knew where he was: they were in the long pedestrian tunnel that links Monument and Bank Tube stations. There were commuters wandering through the tunnels, none of whom gave the four of them even a first look. The perky wail of a saxophone echoed along the tunnel: Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "I'll Never Fall In Love Again," being played more or less competently. They walked toward Bank Station.

"Who are we looking for again, then?" he asked, more or less innocently. "The Angel Gabriel? Raphael? Michael?"

They were passing a Tube map. The marquis tapped Angel Station with one long dark finger: Islington.

Richard had passed through Angel Station hundreds of times. It was in trendy Islington, a district filled with antique shops and places to eat. He knew very little about angels, but he was almost certain that Islington's tube stop was named after a pub, or a landmark. He changed the subject. "You know, when I tried to get on a Tube train a couple of days ago, it wouldn't let me."

"You just have to let them know who's boss, that's all," said Hunter, softly, from behind him.

Door chewed her lower lip. "This train we're looking for will let us on," she said. "If we can find it." Her words were almost drowned out by music coming from somewhere nearby. They went down a handful of steps and turned a corner.

The saxophone player had his coat in front of him, on the floor of the tunnel. On the coat were a few coins, which looked as if the man had placed them there himself to persuade passersby that everyone was doing it. Nobody was fooled.

The saxophone player was extremely tall; he had shoulder-length dark hair and a long, forked dark beard, which framed deep-set eyes and a serious nose. He wore a ragged T-shirt and oil-stained blue jeans. As the travelers reached him, he stopped playing, shook the spit from the saxophone mouthpiece, replaced it, and sounded the first notes the old Julie London song, "Cry Me A River." Now, you say you're sorry…

Richard realized, with surprise, that the man could see them-and also that he was doing his best to pretend that he couldn't. The marquis stopped in front of him. The wail of the saxophone trailed off in a nervous squeak. The marquis flashed a cold grin. "It's Lear, isn't it?" he asked.

The man nodded, warily. His fingers stroked the keys of his saxophone. "We're looking for Earl's Court," continued the marquis. "Would you happen to have such a thing as a train schedule about your person?"

Richard was beginning to catch on. He assumed that the Earl's Court he referred to wasn't the familiar Tube station he had waited in innumerable times, reading a paper, or just daydreaming. The man named Lear moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. " 'S not impossible. What'd be in it for me, if I did?"

The marquis thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. Then he smiled, like a cat who had just been entrusted with the keys to a home for wayward but plump canaries. "They say," he said, idly, as if he were simply passing the time, "that Merlin's master Blaise once wrote a reel so beguiling that it would charm the coins from the pockets of anyone who heard it."

Lear's eyes narrowed. "That'd be worth more than just a train schedule," he said. "If you actually had it."

The marquis did a perfectly good impression of someone realizing, my, it would, wouldn't it? "Well, then," he said, magnanimously, "I suppose you would have to owe me, wouldn't you?"

Lear nodded, reluctantly. He fumbled in his back pocket, pulled out a much-folded scrap of paper, and held it up. The marquis reached for it. Lear moved his hand away. "Let me hear the reel first, you old trickster," he said. "And it had better work."

The marquis raised an eyebrow. He darted a hand into, one of the inside pockets of his coat; when he pulled it out again it was holding a pennywhistle and a small crystal ball. He looked at the crystal ball, made the kind of "hmmm" noise that means, "ah, so that's where that went," and he put it away again. Then he flexed his fingers, put the pennywhistle to his lips, and began to play an odd, rollicking tune that leapt and twisted and sang. It made Richard feel as if he were thirteen years old again, listening to the Top Twenty on his best friend's transistor radio at school during lunch hour, back when pop music had mattered as it only can in your early teenage years: the marquis's reel was everything he had ever wanted to hear in a song…

A handful of coins chinked onto Lear's coat, thrown by passers-by, who walked on with a smile on their faces and a spring in their step. The marquis lowered his pennywhistle. "I owe you, then, you old rascal," said Lear, nodding.

"Yes. You do." The marquis took the paper-the train schedule-from Lear, and scanned it, and nodded. "But a word to the wise. Don't overuse it. A little goes a very long way."

And the four of them walked away, down the long corridor, surrounded by posters advertising films and underwear, and the occasional official-looking notices warning musicians playing for coins to move away from the station, listening to the sob of the saxophone, and to the sound of money landing on a coat.

The marquis led them to a Central Line platform. Richard walked over to the edge of the platform and looked down. He wondered, as he always did, which one the live rail was; and decided, as he always did, that it was the one farthest from the platform, with the large whitish porcelain insulators, between it and the ground; and then he found himself smiling, involuntarily, at a tiny dark gray mouse who was bravely prowling the tracks, three feet below him, in a mousy, quest for abandoned sandwiches and dropped potato chips.

A voice came over the loudspeaker, that formal, disembodied male voice that warned "Mind the Gap." It was intended to keep unwary passengers from stepping into the space between the train and the platform. Richard, like most Londoners, barely heard it anymore-it was like aural wallpaper. But suddenly, Hunter's hand was on his arm. "Mind the Gap," she said urgently, to Richard. "Stand back over there. By the wall."

"What?" said Richard.

"I said," said Hunter, "mind the-"

And then it erupted over the side of the platform. It was diaphanous, dreamlike, a ghost-thing, the color of black smoke, and it welled up like silk under water, and, moving astonishingly fast while still seeming to drift almost in slow motion, it wrapped itself tightly around Richard's ankle. It stung, even through the fabric of his Levi's. The thing pulled him toward the edge of the platform, and he staggered.

He realized, as if from a distance, that Hunter had pulled out her staff and was smacking the tentacle of smoke with it, hard, repeatedly.

There was a faraway screaming noise, thin and mindless, like an idiot child deprived of its toy. The smoke-tentacle let go of Richard's ankle and slid back over the edge of the platform, and it was gone. Hunter took Richard by the scruff of the neck and pulled him toward the back wall, where Richard slumped against it. He was trembling, and the world seemed suddenly utterly unreal. The color had been sucked from his jeans wherever the thing had touched him, making them look as if they'd been ineptly bleached. He pulled up the trouser leg: tiny purple welts were coming up on the skin of his ankle and calf. "What… " he tried to say, but nothing came out. He swallowed, and tried again. "What was that?"

Hunter looked down at him impassively. Her face could have been carved from brown wood. "I don't think it has a name," she said. "They live in the gaps. I did warn you."

"I've… never seen one before."

"You weren't part of the Underside before," said Hunter. "Just wait by the wall. It's safer."

The marquis was checking the time on a large gold pocket-watch. He returned it to his waistcoat pocket, consulted the paper Lear had given him, and nodded, satisfied. "We're in luck," he pronounced. "The Earl's Court train should be coming through here in about half an hour."

"Earl's Court Station isn't on the Central Line," pointed out Richard.

The marquis stared at Richard, openly amused. "What a refreshing mind you have, young man," he said. "There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?"

The warm wind began to blow. An Underground train pulled up at the station. People got off and other people got on, going about the business of their lives, and Richard watched them with envy. "Mind the Gap," intoned the recorded voice. "Stand clear of the doors. Mind the Gap." Door took one look at Richard. Then, apparently worried about what she was seeing, she walked over to him, and she took his hand. He was very pale, and his breath was coming shallow and fast. "Mind the Gap," boomed the recorded voice again. "I'm fine," lied Richard bravely, to no one in particular.

The central courtyard of Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar's hospital was a dank and cheerless place. Ragged grass grew up through the abandoned desks, rubber tires, and bits of office furniture. The overall impression given by the area was that a decade before (perhaps out of boredom, perhaps out of frustration, perhaps even as a statement, or as performance art) a number of people had thrown the contents of their offices out of their windows, high above, and had left them there on the ground to rot.

There was broken glass there, as well, broken glass in abundance. There were also several mattresses, some of which looked like they had at some point been set on fire. Grass grew up through the springs. An entire ecology had evolved around the ornamental fountain in the center of the well, which had for a long time been neither particularly ornamental nor a fountain. A cracked and leaking water pipe nearby had, with the aid of some rainwater, transformed it into a breeding ground for a number of little frogs who plopped about cheerfully, rejoicing in their freedom from any non-airborne natural predators. Crows and blackbirds and even occasional seagulls, however, regarded the place as a cat-free delicatessen, specializing in frogs.

Slugs sprawled indolently under the springs of the burnt mattresses; snails left slime trails across the broken glass; large black beetles scuttled industriously over smashed gray plastic telephones and mysteriously mutilated Barbie dolls.

Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar had come up for a change of air. They were walking slowly around the perimeter of the central yard, broken glass crunching beneath their feet; they looked like shadows in their frayed black suits. Mr. Croup was in a cold fury. He was walking twice as fast as Mr. Vandemar, circling him, and almost dancing in his anger. At times, as if unable to contain the rage inside, Mr. Croup would fling himself at the hospital wall, physically attack it with his fists and feet, as if it were a poor substitute for a real person. Mr. Vandemar, on the other hand, simply walked. It was too consistent, too steady and inexorable a walk to be described as a stroll: Death walked like Mr. Vandemar. Mr. Vandemar watched Mr. Croup, impassively, as Mr. Croup kicked a sheet of glass that had been leaning against a wall. It shattered with a satisfying crash.

"I, Mister Vandemar," said Mr. Croup, surveying the wreckage, "I, for one, have had almost as much as I'm willing to take. Almost. Pussyfooting, trifling, lollygagging, shilly-shallying… whey-faced toad-I could pop out his eyes with my thumbs… "

Mr. Vandemar shook his head. "Not yet," he said. "He's our boss. For this job. After we've been paid, maybe we could have some fun on our own time." Mr. Croup spat on the ground. "He's a worthless, conniving dunderhead… We should butcher the bitch. Annul, cancel, inhume, and amortize her."

A telephone began to ring, loudly. Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar looked around, puzzled. Eventually Mr. Vandemar found the telephone, halfway down a pile of rubble on top of a scree of water-stained medical records. Broken wires trailed from the back of it. He picked it up and passed it to Mr. Croup. "For you," he said. Mr. Vandemar did not like telephones.

"Mister Croup here," said Croup. Then, obsequiously, "Oh. It's you, sir… " A pause. "At present, as you requested, she is walking around, free as a daisy. I'm afraid your bodyguard idea went down like a dead baboon… Varney? Yes, he's quite dead." Another pause.

"Sir, I am commencing to have certain conceptual problems with the role of myself and my partner in these shenanigans." There was a third pause, and Mr. Croup went paler than pale. "Unprofessional?" he asked, mildly. "Us?" He curled his hand into a fist, which he slammed, hard, into the side of a brick wall. There was no change, however, in his tone of voice as he said, "Sir. Might I with due respect remind you that Mister Vandemar and myself burned down the City of Troy? We brought the Black Plague to Flanders. We have assassinated a dozen kings, five popes, half a hundred heroes and two accredited gods. Our last commission before this was the torturing to death of an entire monastery in sixteenth-century Tuscany. We are utterly professional."

Mr. Vandemar, who had been amusing himself by catching little frogs and seeing how many he could stuff into his mouth at a time, said, with his mouth full, "I liked doing that… "

"My point?" asked Mr. Croup, and he flicked some imaginary dust from his threadbare black suit, ignoring the real dust as he did so. "My point is that we are assassins. We are cutthroats. We kill." He listened to something, then said, "Well, what about the Upworlder? Why can't we kill him?" Mr. Croup twitched, spat once more, and kicked the wall, as he stood there holding the rust-stained, half-broken telephone.

"Scare her? We're cutthroats, not scarecrows." A pause. He took a deep breath. "Yes, I understand, but I don't like it." The person at the other end of the phone had hung up. Mr. Croup looked down at the telephone. Then he hefted it in one hand and proceeded methodically to smash it into shards of plastic and metal by banging it against the wall.

Mr. Vandemar walked over. He had found a large black slug with a bright orange underbelly, and he was chewing it, like a fat cigar. The slug was trying to crawl away down Mr. Vandemar's chin. "Who was that?" asked Mr. Vandemar.

"Who the hell do you think it was?"

Mr. Vandemar chewed, thoughtfully, then sucked the slug into his mouth. "A scarecrow man?" he ventured.

"Our employer."

"That was going to be my next guess."

"Scarecrows," spat Mr. Croup, disgusted. He was moving from a red rage to an oily gray sulk.

Mr. Vandemar swallowed the contents of his mouth and wiped his lips on his sleeve. "Best way to scare crows," said Mr. Vandemar, "you just creep up behind them and put your hand round their little crow necks and squeeze until they don't move anymore. That scares the stuffing out of them."

And then he was silent; and from far above they heard the sound of crows flying, cawing angrily.

"Crows. Family Corvidae. Collective noun," intoned Mr. Croup, relishing the sound of the word, "a murder."

Richard waited against the wall, next to Door. She said very little; she chewed her fingernails, ran her hands through her reddish hair until it was sticking up in all directions, then tried to push it back down again. She was certainly unlike anyone he had ever known. When she noticed him looking at her, she shrugged and shimmied down further into her layers of clothes, deeper into her leather jacket. Her face looked out at the world from inside the jacket. The expression on her face made Richard think of a beautiful homeless child he had seen, the previous winter, behind Covent Garden: he had not been certain whether it was a girl or a boy. Its mother was begging, pleading with the passers-by for coins to feed the child and the infant that she carried in her arms. But the child stared out at the world and said nothing, although it must have been cold and hungry. It just stared.

Hunter stood by Door, looking back and forth down the platform. The marquis had told them where to wait, and then he had slipped away. From somewhere, Richard heard a baby begin to cry. The marquis slipped out of an exit-only door and walked toward them. He was chewing on a piece of candy.

"Having fun?" asked Richard. A train was coming toward them, its approach heralded by a gust of warm wind.

"Just taking care of business," said the marquis. He consulted the piece of paper and his watch. He pointed to a place on the platform. "This should be the Earl's Court train. Stand behind me here, you three." Then, as the Underground train-a rather boring-looking, normal train, Richard was disappointed to observe-rumbled and rattled its way into the station, the marquis leaned across Richard and said to Door, "My lady? There is something that perhaps I should have mentioned earlier."

She turned her odd-colored eyes on him. "Yes?"

"Well," he said, "the earl might not be entirely pleased to see me."

The train slowed down and stopped. The car that had pulled up in front of Richard was quite empty: its lights were turned off, it was bleak and empty and dark. From time to time Richard had noticed cars like this one, locked and shadowy, on Tube trains, and he had wondered what purpose they served. The other doors on the train hissed open, and passengers got on and got off. The doors of the darkened car remained closed. The marquis drummed on the door with his fist, an intricate rhythmic rap. Nothing happened. Richard was just wondering if the train would now pull out without them on it, when the door of the dark car was pushed open from the inside. It opened about six inches, and an elderly, bespectacled face peered out at them.

"Who knocks?" he said.

Through the opening, Richard could see flames burning, and people, and smoke inside the car. Through the glass in the doors, however, he still saw a dark and empty carriage. "The Lady Door," announced the marquis, smoothly, "and her companions."

The door slid open all the way, and they were inside Earl's Court.

SEVEN

There was straw scattered on the floor, over a layer of rushes. There was an open log fire, sputtering and blazing in a large fireplace. There were a few chickens, strutting and pecking on the floor. There were seats with hand-embroidered cushions on them, and there were tapestries covering the windows and the doors.

Richard stumbled forward as the train lurched out of the station. He reached out, grabbed hold of the nearest person, and regained his balance. The nearest person happened to be a short, gray, elderly man-at-arms, who would have looked, Richard decided, exactly like a recently retired minor official were it not for the tin hat, the surcoat, the rather clumsily knitted chain mail, and the spear; instead he looked like a recently retired minor official who had, somewhat against his will, been dragooned into his local amateur dramatic society, where he had been forced to play a man-at-arms.

The little gray man blinked shortsightedly at Richard as Richard grabbed him, and then he said, lugubriously, "Sorry about that."

"My fault," said Richard.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 678