Free Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

zipped it up and walked out onto the darkened street.
     
    The ATM took his card with a whirr. PLEASE ENTER YOUR PIN NUMBER , it said. Richard typed in his secret pin number (D-I-C-K). The screen went blank. PLEASE WAIT , it said, and the screen went blank. Somewhere in the depths of the machine something grumbled and growled.
    THIS CARD IS NOT VALID. PLEASE CONTACT CARD ISSUER. There was a chunking noise, and the card slid out again.
    “Spare any change?” said a tired voice from behind him. Richard turned: the man was short and old and balding, his scraggly beard a matted tangle of yellow and gray. The lines of his face were etched deeply in black dirt. He wore a filthy coat over the ruin of a dark gray sweater. His eyes were gray as well, and rheumy.
    Richard handed the man his card. “Here,” he said. “Keep it. There’s about fifteen hundred pounds in there, if you can get to it.”
    The man took the card in his street-blackened hands, looked at it, turned it over, and said, flatly, “Thanks a bunch. That and sixty pence’ll get me a nice cup of coffee.” He gave Richard his card back, and began to walk down the street.
    Richard picked up his bag. Then he went after the man and said, “Hey. Hang on. You can see me.”
    “Nothing wrong with my eyes,” said the man.
    “Listen,” said Richard, “have you ever heard of a place called ‘The Floating Market’? I need to get there. There’s a girl called Door . . .” But the man had begun, nervously, to back away from Richard. “Look, I really need help,” said Richard. “Please?”
    The man stared at him, without pity. Richard sighed. “Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry I troubled you.” He turned away, and, clenching the handle of his bag in both hands so that they hardly shook at all, he began to walk down the High Street.
    “Oy,” hissed the man. Richard looked back at him. He was beckoning. “Come on, down here, quickly man.” The man hurried down some steps on the derelict houses at the side of the road—garbage-strewn steps, leading down to abandoned basement apartments. Richard stumbled after him. At the bottom of the steps was a door, which the man pushed open. He waited for Richard to go through, and shut the door behind them. Through the door, they were in darkness. There was a scratch, and the noise of a match flaring into life: the man touched the match to the wick of an old railwayman’s lamp, which caught, casting slightly less light than the match had, and they walked together through a dark place.
    It smelled musty, of damp and old brick, of rot and the dark. “Where are we?” Richard whispered. His guide shushed him to silence. They reached another door set in a wall. The man rapped on it rhythmically. There was a pause, and then the door swung open.
    For a moment, Richard was blinded by the sudden light. He was standing in a huge, vaulted room, an underground hall, filled with firelight and smoke. Small fires burned around the room. Shadowy people stood by the flames, roasting small animals on spits. People scurried from fire to fire. It reminded him of Hell—or rather, the way that he had thought of Hell, as a schoolboy. The smoke irritated his lungs, and he coughed. A hundred eyes turned, then, and stared at him: a hundred eyes, unblinking and unfriendly.
    A man scuttled toward them. He had long hair, a patchy brown beard, and his ragged clothes were trimmed with fur—orange-and-white-and-black fur, like the coat of a calico cat. He would have been taller than Richard, but he walked with a pronounced stoop, his hands held up at his chest, fingers pressed together. “What? What is it? What is this?” he asked Richard’s guide. “Who’ve you brought us, Iliaster? Talk-talk-talk.”
    “He’s from the Upside,” said the guide. ( Iliaster? thought Richard.) “Was asking about the Lady Door. And the Floating Market. Brought him to you, Lord Rat-speaker. Figured you’d know what to do with him.” There were now more than