Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman Page B

that?”
    He grinned, without humor. “Certainly. I’m a very busy man. Things to see. People to do.”
    “Look, hold on.” She let go of his sleeve, bit her lower lip. “The last time I was here . . .” she trailed off.
    “The last time you were here, you found your family dead. Well, there you are. You don’t have to explain it anymore. If we aren’t going in, then our business relationship is at an end.”
    She looked up at him, her elfin face pale in the pre-dawn light. “And that’s all?”
    “I could wish you the best of luck in your future career, but I’m afraid I rather doubt you’ll live long enough to have one.”
    “You’re a piece of work, aren’t you?”
    He said nothing. She walked back toward the door. “Well,” she said. “Come on. I’ll take us in.” Door put her left hand on the boarded-up door, and with her right hand she took the marquis’s huge brown hand. Her tiny fingers twined into his larger ones. She closed her eyes.
       . . . something whispered and shivered and changed . . .
       . . . and the door collapsed into darkness.
     
    The memory was fresh, only a few days old: Door moved through the House Without Doors calling “I’m home,” and “Hello?” She slipped from the anteroom to the dining room, to the library, to the drawing room; no one answered. She moved to another room.
    The swimming pool was an indoor Victorian structure, constructed of marble and of cast iron. Her father had found it when he was younger, abandoned and about to be demolished, and he had woven it into the fabric of the House Without Doors. Perhaps in the world outside, in London Above, the room had long been destroyed and forgotten. Door had no idea where any of the rooms of her house were, physically. Her grandfather had constructed the house, taking a room from here, a room from there, all through London, discrete and doorless; her father had added to it.
    She walked along the side of the old swimming pool, pleased to be home, puzzled by the absence of her family. And then she looked down.
    There was someone floating in the water, trailing twin clouds of blood behind him, one from the throat, one from the groin. It was her brother, Arch. His eyes were open wide and sightless. She realized that her mouth was open. She could hear herself screaming.
     
    “That hurt,” said the marquis. He rubbed his forehead, hard, twisted his head around on his neck, as if he were trying to ease a sudden, painful crick.
    “Memories,” she explained. “They’re imprinted in the walls.”
    He raised an eyebrow. “You could have warned me.”
    They were in a huge white room. Every wall was covered with pictures. Each picture was of a different room. The white room contained no doors: no openings of any kind. “Interesting décor,” acknowledged the marquis.
    “This is the entrance hall. We can go from here to any room in the House. They are all linked.”
    “Where are the other rooms located?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know. Miles away, probably. They’re scattered all over the Underside.”
    The marquis had managed to cover the whole room in a series of impatient strides. “Quite remarkable. An associative house, every room of which is located somewhere else. So imaginative. Your grandfather was a man of vision, Door.”
    “I never knew him.” She swallowed, then continued, talking to herself as much as to him. “We should have been safe here. Nobody should have been able to hurt us. Only my family could move around it.”
    “Let’s hope your father’s journal gives us some clues,” he said. “Where do we start looking?” Door shrugged. “You’re certain he kept a journal?” he pressed.
    She nodded. “He used to go into his study, and private the links until he’d finished dictating.”
    “We’ll start in the study, then.”
    “But I looked there. I did. I looked there. When I was cleaning up the body . . .” And she began to cry, in low, raging sobs, that sounded like