Neverwhere

She began to shout. "Hey! Beast! Here!" Mr. Vandemar cuffed her head and knocked her against the wall. "Said to be quiet," he told her, calmly. She tasted blood in her mouth and spat scarlet on the mud. Then she parted her lips to begin shouting once more. Mr. Vandemar, anticipating this, had taken a handkerchief from his pocket, and he forced it into her mouth. She tried to bite his thumb as he did so, but it made no appreciable impression on him.

"Now you'll be quiet," he told her. Mr. Vandemar was very proud of his handkerchief, which was spattered with green and brown and black and had originally belonged to an overweight snuff dealer in the 1820s, who had died of apoplexy and been buried with his handkerchief in his pocket. Mr. Vandemar still occasionally found fragments of snuff merchant in it, but it was, he felt, a fine handkerchief for all that. They continued in silence.

Richard made another entry in his mental diary. Today, he thought, I've survived walking the plank, the kiss of death, and a lecture on inflicting pain. Right now, I'm on my way through a labyrinth with a mad bastard who came back from the dead and a bodyguard who turned out to be a . . . whatever the opposite of a bodyguard is. I am so far out of my depth that . . . Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.

They were wading through a narrow passage of wet, marshy ground, between dark stone walls. The marquis held both the token and the crossbow, and he took care to walk, at all times, about ten feet behind Hunter. Richard, in the lead, was carrying Hunter's Beast spear and a yellow flare the marquis had produced from beneath his blanket, which illuminated the stone walls and the mud, and he walked well in front of Hunter. The marshland stank, and huge mosquitoes had begun to settle upon Richard's arms and legs and face, biting him painfully and raising huge, itching welts. Neither Hunter nor the marquis so much as mentioned the mosquitoes.

Richard was beginning to suspect that they were quite lost. It did not help his mood any that there were a large number of dead people in the marsh: leathery preserved bodies, discolored skeletal bones, and pallid, water-swollen corpses. He wondered how long the corpses had been there, and whether they had been killed by the Beast or by the mosquitoes. He said nothing as they walked on for another five minutes and eleven mosquito bites, and then he called out, "I think we're lost. We've been through this way before."

The marquis held up the token. "No. We're fine," he said. "The token is leading us straight. Clever little thing."

"Yeah," said Richard, who was not impressed. "Very clever."

It was then that the marquis stepped, barefoot, on the shattered rib cage of a half-buried corpse, puncturing his heel, and causing him to stumble. The little black statue went flying through the air and tumbled into the black marsh with the satisfied plop of a leaping fish returning to the water. The marquis righted himself and pointed the crossbow at Hunter's back.

"Richard," he called. "I dropped it. Can you come back here?" Richard walked back, holding the flare high, hoping for the glint of flame on obsidian, seeing nothing but wet mud. "Get down into the mud and look," said the marquis.

Richard groaned.

"You've dreamed of the Beast, Richard," said the marquis. "Do you really want to encounter it?"

Richard thought about this for not very long, then he pushed the haft of the bronze spear into the surface of the marsh and stood the flare up into the mud beside it, illuminating the surface of the marsh with a fitful amber light. He got down on his hands and knees in the bog, searching for the statue. He ran his hands over the surface of the marsh, hoping not to encounter any dead faces or hands. "It's hopeless. It could be anywhere."

"Keep looking," said the marquis.

Richard tried to remember how he usually found things. First he let his mind go as blank as he could, then he let his gaze wander over the surface of the marsh, purposelessly, idly. Something glittered on the boggy surface, five feet to his left. It was the Beast statue. "I can see it," called Richard.