Neverwhere
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Richard Mayhew is a plain man with a good heart -- and an ordinary life that is
changed forever on a day he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a
London sidewalk. From that moment forward he is propelled into a world
he never dreamed existed -- and the life he knows vanishes in an instant.
Several hours later, the girl is gone, too. And by the following morning, Richard
Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers
won't stop for him, his fiancee doesn't recongnize him, and his landlord rents his
apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible and inexplicably consigned to a
London of shadows and darkness -- to a city of monsters and saints, assassins and
angels -- that exists entierly in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and
abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has
landed somewhere different, this somewhere is London below.
London below is the home of the Lady Door, the mysterious girl whom Richard rescued in
London above. A pesonage of great power and nobility in this murky, candlelit
realm, she is on a mission to discover the persons responsible for the murder
of her family and, in doing so, preserve this strange underworld kingdom from those
who mean to destroy it. And, with nowhere else to turn, Richard Mayhew
must now join the Lady Door's entourage in their determined and possibly fatal quest.
For the dreaded journey ever downward -- through bizarre anachronisms and
dangerous incongruities, and into dusty corners of stalled time -- is Richard's final
hope, his last road back to a "real world" that is growing disturbingly less real by the
minute.
Excerpt
Chapter One
She had been running for days now, a harum-scarum tumbling flight through passages
and tunnels. She was hungry, and exhausted, and more tired than a body could stand,
and each successive door was proving harder to open. After four days of flight, she
had found a hiding place, a tiny stone burrow, under the world, where she would be
safe, or so she prayed, and at last she slept.
Mr. Croup had hired Ross at the last Floating Market, which had been held in
Westminster Abbey. "Think of him," he told Mr. Vandemar, "as a canary."
"Sings?" asked Mr. Vandemar.
"I doubt it; I sincerely and utterly doubt it." Mr. Croup ran a hand through his lank
orange hair. "No, my friend, I was thinking metaphorically -- more along the lines
of the birds they take down in mines." Mr. Vandemar nodded, comprehension dawning
slowly: yes, a canary. Mr. Ross had no other resemblance to a canary. He was huge --
almost as big as Mr. Vandemar -- and extremely grubby, and quite hairless, and he
said very little, although he had made a point of telling each of them that he like to
kill things, and he was good at it; and this amused Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar. But
he was a canary, and he never knew it. So Mr. Ross went first, in his filthy T-shirt and
his crusted blue-jeans, and Croup and Vandemar walked behind him, in their elegant
black suits.
There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar
apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr.
Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar's eyes are brown; third,
while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of
four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelery; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while
Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing alike.
A rustle in the tunnel darkness; Mr. Vandemar's knife was in his hand, and then it was
no longer in his hand, and it was quivering gently almost thirty feet away. He walked
over to his knife and picked it up by the hilt. There was a gray rat impaled on the
blade, it's mouth opening and closing impotently as the life fled. He crushed its skull
between finger and thumb.
"Now, there's one rat that won't be telling anymore tales," said Mr. Croup. He
chuckled at his own joke. Mr. Vandemar did not respond. "Rat. Tales. Get it?"
Mr. Vandemar pulled the rat from the blade and began to munch on it, thoughtfully,
head first. Mr. Croup slapped it out of his hands. "Stop that," he said. Mr. Vandemar
put his knife away, a little sullenly. "Buck up," hissed Mr. Croup, encouragingly.
"There will always be another rat. Now: onward. Things to do. People to damage."
About the Author
Neil Gaiman is the critically acclaimed author of the novels American Gods (winner of the
2002 Hugo Award for Best Novel), Stardust (winner of the American Library
Association's Alex Award), and the award-winning Sandman series of graphic novels,
as well as Smoke and Mirrors, a collection of short fiction, and Coraline (winner of the
2003 Hugo Award for Best Novella), a tale for readers of all ages. His first book for
children, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, illustrated by Dave McKean, was
one of Newsweek's Best Children's Books of 1997. In 2003, Gaiman and McKean
teamed up again to produce another illustrated children's book, The Wolves in the
Walls. His small press story collection, Angels & Visitations, was nominated for a World
Fantasy Award and won the International Horror Critics Guild Award for Best
Collection. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.
