Neverwhere Read Online Free PDF

her arm. She examined the cut and made a face. “We’re going to have to do something about this,” she said. “Do you want to give me a hand?”
    Richard was beginning to feel a little out of his depth. “I don’t really know too much about first aid,” he said.
    “Well,” she said, “if you’re really squeamish you only have to hold the bandages and tie the ends where I can’t reach. You do have bandages, don’t you?”
    Richard nodded. “Oh yes,” he said. “In the first aid kit. In the bathroom. Under the sink.” And then he went into his bedroom and changed his clothes, wondering whether the mess on his shirt (his best shirt, bought for him by, oh God, Jessica, she would have a fit ) would ever come off.
     
    The bloody water reminded him of something, some kind of dream he had once had, perhaps, but he could no longer, for the life of him, remember exactly what. He pulled the plug, let the water out of the sink, and filled it with clean water again, to which he added a cloudy splash of liquid disinfectant: the sharp antiseptic smell seemed so utterly sensible and medicinal, a remedy for the oddness of his situation, and his visitor. The girl leaned over the sink, and he splashed warm water over her arm and shoulder.
    Richard was never as squeamish as he thought he was. Or rather, he was squeamish when it came to blood on screen: a good zombie movie or even an explicit medical drama would leave him huddled in a corner, hyperventilating, with his hands over his eyes, muttering things like “Just tell me when it’s over.” But when it came to real blood, real pain, he simply did something about it. They cleaned out the cut—which was much less severe than Richard remembered it from the night before—and bandaged it up, and the girl did her very best not to wince in the process. And Richard found himself wondering how old she was, and what she looked like under the grime, and why she was living on the streets and—
    “What’s your name?” she asked.
    “Richard. Richard Mayhew. Dick.” She nodded, as if she were committing it to memory. The doorbell rang. Richard looked at the mess in the bathroom, and the girl, and wondered how it would look to an outside observer. Such as, for example . . . “Oh Lord,” he said, realizing the worst. “I bet it’s Jess. She’s going to kill me.” Damage control. Damage control. “Look,” he told the girl. “You wait in here.”
    He shut the door of the bathroom behind him and walked down the hall. He opened the front door, and breathed a huge and quite heartfelt sigh of relief. It wasn’t Jessica. It was—what? Mormons? Jehovah’s Witnesses? The police? He couldn’t tell. There were two of them, at any rate.
    They wore black suits, which were slightly greasy, slightly frayed, and even Richard, who counted himself among the sartorially dyslexic, felt there was something odd about the cut of the coats. They were the kind of suits that might have been made by a tailor two hundred years ago who had had a modern suit described to him but had never actually seen one. The lines were wrong, and so were the grace notes.
    A fox and a wolf , thought Richard, involuntarily. The man in front, the fox, was a little shorter than Richard. He had lank, greasy hair, of an unlikely orange color, and a pallid complexion; as Richard opened the door, he smiled, widely, and just a fraction too late, with teeth that looked like an accident in a graveyard. “A good morrow to you, good sir,” he said, “on this fine and beautiful day.”
    “Ah. Hello,” said Richard.
    “We are conducting a personal enquiry of a delicate nature as it were, door to door. Do you mind if we come in?”
    “Well, it’s not very convenient right now,” said Richard. Then he asked, “Are you with the police?” The second of the visitors, a tall man, the one he had thought of as a wolf, his gray and black hair cut bristle-short, stood a little behind his friend, holding a stack of