He picked up his toasting fork and waved it threateningly at the chimney stack. “Who’s there?”
The marquis de Carabas stepped out of the shadows, bowed perfunctorily, and smiled gloriously. Old Bailey lowered his toasting fork. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you. Well, what do you want? Knowledge? Or birds?”
The marquis walked over, picked a slice of raw carrot from Old Bailey’s stew, and munched it. “Information, actually,” he said.
Old Bailey chortled. “Hah,” he said. “There’s a first. Ehh?” Then he leaned toward the marquis. “What’ll you trade for it?”
“What do you need?”
“Maybe I should do what you do. I should ask for another favor. An investment for one day down the road.” Old Bailey grinned.
“Much too expensive, in the long run,” said the marquis, without humor.
Old Bailey nodded. Now the sun had gone down, it was getting very cold, very fast. “Shoes, then,” he said. “And a balaclava hat.” He inspected his fingerless gloves: they were more hole than glove. “And new gloveses. It’s going to be a bastard winter.”
“Very well. I’ll bring them to you.” The marquis de Carabas put his hand into an inside pocket and produced, like a magician producing a rose from thin air, the black animal figure he had taken from Portico’s study. “Now. What can you tell me about this?”
Old Bailey pulled on his glasses. He took the object from de Carabas. It was cold to the touch. He sat down on an air-conditioning unit, then, turning the black obsidian statue over and over in his hand, he announced: “It’s the Great Beast of London.” The marquis said nothing. His eyes flickered from the statue to Old Bailey, impatiently. Old Bailey, enjoying the marquis’s minor discomfort, continued at his own pace. “Now, they say that back in first King Charlie’s day—him ‘as got his head all chopped off, silly bugger—before the fire and the plague, this was, there was a butcher lived down by the Fleet Ditch, had some poor creature he was going to fatten up for Christmas. Some says it was a piglet, and some says it wusn’t, and there’s some—and I list meself as one of them—that wusn’t never properly certain. One night in December the beast runned away, ran into the Fleet Ditch, and vanished into the sewers. And it fed on the sewage, and it grew, and it grew. And it got meaner, and nastier. They’d send in hunting parties after it, from time to time.”
The marquis pursed his lips. “It must have died three hundred years ago.”
Old Bailey shook his head. “Things like that, they’re too vicious to die. Too old and big and nasty.”
The marquis sighed. “I thought it was just a legend,” he said. “Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City.”
Old Bailey nodded, sagely. “What, the big white buggers? They’re down there. I had a friend lost a head to one of them.” A moment of silence. Old Bailey handed the statue back to the marquis. Then he raised his hand and snapped it, like a crocodile head, at de Carabas. “It was okay,” gurned Old Bailey with a grin that was most terrible to behold. “He had another.”
The marquis sniffed, uncertain whether or not Old Bailey was pulling his leg. He made the statue of the Beast vanish inside his coat once more.
“Hang on,” said Old Bailey. He went back inside his brown tent and returned holding the ornate silver box the marquis had given him on their previous meeting. He held it out to the marquis. “How about this then?” he asked. “Are you ready to take it back? It fair gives me the creepy shivers, having it around.”
The marquis walked to the edge of the roof, dropped the eight feet to the next building. “I’ll take it back, when all this is over,” he called. “Let us hope that you don’t have to use it.”
Old Bailey leaned over. “How will I know if I do?”
“You’ll know,” called the marquis. “And the rats will tell you what to do with it.” And with that he was over the side of the building, slipping down, using drainpipes and ledges as handholds.
“Hope I never finds out, that’s all I can say,” said Old Bailey to himself. Then a thought struck him. “Hoy,” he called out to the night and the City. “Don’t forget the shoeses and the gloveses!”
The advertisements on the walls were for refreshing and health-giving malted drinks, for two-shilling day excursions by train to the seaside, for kippered herrings, moustache wax and bootblack. They were smoke-blackened relics of the late twenties or the early thirties. Richard stared at them in disbelief. It seemed completely abandoned: a forgotten place. “It is British Museum Station,” admitted Richard. “But . . . but there never was a British Museum Station. This is all wrong.”
“It was closed down in about 1933, and sealed off,” said Door.
“How bizarre,” said Richard. It was like walking through history. He could hear trains echoing through tunnels nearby, felt the push of air as they passed. “Are there many stations like this?”
“About fifty,” said Hunter. “They aren’t all accessible, though. Not even to us.”
There was a movement in the shadows at the edge of the platform. “Hello,” said Door. “How are you?” She went down into a crouch. A brown rat stepped out into the light. It sniffed at Door’s hand.
“Thank you!” said Door, cheerfully. “I’m glad you aren’t dead, too.”
Richard edged over. “Um, Door. Could you tell the rat something for me?”
The rat turned its head toward him. “Miss Whiskers says that if there’s anything you’ve got to say to her, you can tell it to her yourself,” said Door.
“Miss Whiskers?”
Door shrugged. “It’s a literal translation,” she said. “It sounds better in rat.”
Richard did not doubt it. “Um. Hello . . . Miss Whiskers . . . Look, there was one of your rat-speaker people, a girl named Anaesthesia. She was taking me to the market. We were crossing this bridge in the dark, and she just never made it across.”
The rat interrupted him, with a sharp squee. Door began to talk, hesitantly, like a simultaneous translator. “She says . . . that the rats do not blame you for the loss. Your guide was . . . mm . . . taken by the night . . . as tribute.”
“But—“
The rat squeaked again. “Sometimes they come back . . . ” said Door. “She has taken note of your concern . . . and thanks you for it.” The rat nodded to Richard, blinked her bead-black eyes, then leapt to the floor and scurried back into the dark. “Nice rat,” said Door. Her disposition seemed to have improved remarkably, now that she had the scroll. “Up there,” she said, indicating an archway effectively blocked by an iron door.