Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman Read Free Book Online Page B

and I’ll probably have to get a new telephone—”
    “Temple and Arch. A telephone is the least of your troubles.” De Carabas put the flare down on the ground, resting it against the wall, where it continued to sputter and flame, and he began to climb up some metal rungs set into the wall. Richard hesitated, and then followed him. The rungs were cold and rusted; he could feel them crumbling roughly against his hands as he climbed, fragments of rust getting in his eyes and mouth. The scarlet light from below was flickering, and then it went out. They climbed in total darkness.
    “So, are we going back to Door?” Richard asked.
    “Eventually. There’s a little something I need to organize first. Insurance. And when we get into daylight, don’t look down.”
    “Why not?” asked Richard. And then daylight hit his face, and he looked down.
     
    It was daylight ( how was it daylight? a tiny voice asked, in the back of his head. It had been almost night when he entered the alley, what, an hour ago? ), and he was holding onto a metal ladder that ran up the outside of a very high building ( but a few seconds ago he was climbing up the same ladder, and he had been inside, hadn’t he? ), and below him, he could see . . .
    London.
    Tiny cars. Tiny buses and taxis. Tiny buildings. Trees. Miniature trucks. Tiny, tiny people. They swam in and out of focus beneath him.
    To say that Richard Mayhew was not very good at heights would be perfectly accurate, but it would fail to give the full picture. Richard hated clifftops, and high buildings: somewhere not far inside him was the fear—the stark, utter, silently screaming terror—that if he got too close to the edge, then something would take over and he would find himself walking to the edge of a clifftop and stepping off into space. It was as if he could not entirely trust himself, and that scared Richard more than the simple fear of falling ever could. So he called it vertigo, and hated it and himself, and kept away from high places.
    Richard froze on the ladder. His hands clamped tightly to the rungs. His eyes hurt, somewhere behind the eyeballs. He started breathing too fast, too deeply. “Somebody,” said an amused voice above him, “wasn’t listening, was he?”
    “I . . .” Richard’s throat didn’t work. He swallowed, moistening it. “I can’t move.” His hands were sweating. What if they sweated so much that he simply slipped off into the void . . . ?
    “Of course you can move. Or, if you don’t you can stay here, hanging onto the side of the wall until your hands freeze and your legs buckle and you tumble to a messy death a thousand feet below.” Richard looked up at the marquis. He was looking down at Richard, and still smiling; when he saw that Richard was watching him, he let go of the rungs with both his hands, and waggled his fingers at him.
    Richard felt a wave of sympathetic vertigo run through him. “Bastard,” he said, under his breath, and he let go of the rung with his right hand and moved it up eight inches, until it found the next rung. Then he moved his right leg up one rung. Then he did it again, with his left hand. After a while he found himself at the edge of a flat roof, and he stepped over it and collapsed.
    He was aware that the marquis was striding along the roof, away from him. Richard felt the rooftop with his hands, and felt the solid structure beneath him. His heart was pounding in his chest.
    A gruff voice some distance away shouted, “You’re not wanted here, de Carabas. Get away. Clear off.”
    “Old Bailey,” he heard de Carabas say. “You’re looking wonderfully healthy.”
    And then footsteps shuffled toward him, and a finger prodded him gently in the ribs. “You all right, laddie? I’ve got some stew cookin’ back there. You want some? It’s starling.”
    Richard opened his eyes. “No thank you,” he said.
    He saw the feathers, first. He wasn’t sure if it was a coat, or a cape, or some kind of strange