When Richard has just entered the r

When Richard has just entered the reality of London Below and learned that his normal means of interacting with the world of London Above (such as using public transport, working at his job, or getting money from an ATM) no longer work, he offers his cash card to a homeless per- son in resigned exasperation. The reply to his offer is telling, as the homeless person quips: “thanks a bunch. That and sixty pence’ll get me a nice cup of coffee” (68). Little by little, Richard gets in- troduced to the idea that the objects and structures he knows from London Above simply do not apply to London Below. Not only does the Underground map not correspond to any idea he has of what his world look like, but even his means of payment simply does not match that of the world Below. At the start of the novel, however, these are still only small mentions that work to foreshad- ow the more massive transition to come.The move from London Above to Below is not only associated with loss, however, as the world of London Below offers its own attractions. When de Carabas examines the study of Door’s father in the House Without Doors he encounters a room with “maps on the walls, of lands and cit- ies de Carabas had never heard of” (89). While this may just be a sign of de Carabas’s ignorance, the mystical locations already hinted at in the novel up until then suggest a world which is still largely unsurveyed. Furthermore, the pockets of time that exist in London Below allow it to pre- serve sights that have long been lost to the world above. The Beast at the bottom of London Below is claimed to be “extinct in the world above” though, as typical of all descriptions in Neverwhere, its exact origin is left vague as it is described to bear “a similar relationship to the mink, and to the weasel, to that which a timber wolf bears to a Yorkshire Terrier” (214). Being only so vaguely de- scribed leaves the creature wholly open to the reader’s imagination, who has nothing more to go on than the knowledge that it “weighs almost three hundred pounds, and is a little over fifteen feet long, from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail” (214). The enormous creature, according to the tale of Old Bailey, was supposed to have grown from something escaped from a butchery, further adding to the impossibility of clearly identifying it. This leads to a sense that the world of London Below adds an unidentifiable “something” to the world—it is impossible to pin down exactly what it adds, but what it does add is mythical, alien, yet strangely alluring. Yet at the same time it also connects, as argued by Ingemark and discussed at the start of the previous chapter, to a larger tradi- tion of myths about creatures inhabiting the sewers stretching back through the Victorian and medi- eval eras into the Classical period.