Bent over in the field, working the soil, often alone, he would recite what he had read. He enacted learned discussions with phantom colleagues. He enacted the thought processes of this genius or that in the lead-up to their discoveries—monologues, diatribes, trains of thought…
“Tell him what we’re looking for,” Jukes said, sporting an unsettlingly wide smile.
“Shut up, Adam. Would you get the lights, Mr. Dysart?”
Henry barely noticed the gas flames lowering and dying, one by one. Propriety had fled and Henry was unable to take his eyes from her.
It was Dorian’s hand clapping him on the back that broke the spell. The Englishman gestured to the free space to the east of the sigil. The others were already in position. Dysart’s small little eyes glittered hard on Henry as if to say, Our methods and practices may be unusual, but we remain gentlemen. Henry felt heat rising to his neck and face, and took the position. A single lamp hung suspended above the table, all other lights removed, changing the atmosphere of the room dreadfully.
Dorian inhaled one deep breath through his nose—Henry suppressed the urge to run—and began by invoking what Henry later learned were six different names for God.
Six names.
Who knew God had a name?
“Have mercy upon me, and cast Thine eyes upon Thy Servant Dorian who invokes Thee most devoutly, and supplicates Thee by Thy Holy and tremendous name Tetragrammaton to be propitious, and to order Thine angels and Spirits to the stars, O all ye angels and elementary spirits, O all ye spirits present before the Face of God, I the Minister and faithful servant of the Most High conjure ye, let God Himself, the Existence of Existences, conjure ye to come and be present at this Operation, I, the Servant of God, most humbly entreat ye. Amen.”
Something more than dirt workers, born to live and die in their fear of the Lord…
The sound began distant and dry, like desert wind. It crept upward in volume. A tiny discord picked up within the sound. It became a rasp. It picked up further.
Every Sunday, all Sunday, in church. The priest couldn’t talk for ten seconds without someone shouting amen, without everyone else shouting it back, without that taking up a good hunk of a minute. The word amen still made his knees hurt.
Finella’s mouth dropped open, gasping, eyes shot wide, white stare fixed on the light of the lamp above her face like horrified denial. Her tongue edged out of her mouth as the sound grew louder and louder and
Finella sat bolt upright, the lamp bashing across her forehead. She stared at nothing, a punch-drunk marionette with her strings cut. The lamp swung in a wide and deliberate orbit around the periphery of her skull.
Six names.
The shadows of her face shifted and phased and cycled, a stray hand investigating her throat. Her pupils rolled down from inside her head and came to rest upon Henry. The white cloth slipped from her, fell from the table.
“You, boy…,” she said in an accent not her own, but familiar. “I cannot breathe…tell me why that is…”
Henry looked at her, numb and distant, pinned like a moth. He couldn’t swallow. The lamp kept circling.
“Tell me why I bleed!”
“Behave yourself!” It was Dorian. “I constrain and command ye with the utmost vehemence and power, by that most potent and powerful Name of God”—Finella quieted instantly—“and by the name Iah, which Moses heard, and spoke with God; and by the name Agla, which Joseph invoked and was delivered out of the hands of his brethren; and by the name Vau, which Abraham heard, and knew God the Almighty One; and by the name of four letters, Tetragrammaton, which Joshua named and invoked and was rendered worthy and found deserving to lead the Army of Israel into the Promised Land. By these names I command ye to speak without noise or terror, and to answer truly all questions I shall ask ye.”
“Ask,” Finella breathed, exhaustedly. “Ask and be done.”
“What is your name?”
“Bernard Sumner.”
“Do you know some of us, Bernard?”
Finella nodded. “Aye.”
“Who of us do you know, Bernard?”
Finella looked to Henry, and her words moved like slow effluent. “Maggie’s boy.”
“Lighter matters, Bernard,” Dorian said. “How many years since you left this world?”
Finella’s head shifted slowly back to face Dorian. “Less than a year.”
“Where have you been?”
“Awaiting the Grace of my Lord.”
“I seek a being that can provide answers, Bernard.”
“Let me go.”
“In a minute. Its name is Voso. Do you know of it?”
“Let me go.”
“It sometimes appears as a great cat.”
Finella’s head was beginning to loll. “Send me back.”
“In the Name of God…”
“It fell with the Dark One.”
“That much I know. How many fell with the Dark One?”
“Seventy-two. That much is common knowledge.”
“No more?”
“No more. Send me back.”
“Voso.”
“It prefers woodland. Night. Send me back.”
“Because ye have been obedient, depart ye unto your abode, and be there peace between us and you.”
Finella crumpled across Voso’s sigil, her hair spilling over the edge of the table.
She did not move.
It was only then Henry became aware just how heavily everyone was breathing. “My my my…,” Dorian sighed. Jukes was silent.
“Is…”
“Well, that was most productive,” Dorian said.
“Is she all right?”
Dorian knocked a cigarette from its case. “Hmm? Oh yes, she’s quite all right. She’s an old hand at being ridden, our Finella. Oh don’t be such a prig, Henry, it was a turn of phrase.”
The words didn’t really penetrate. Henry felt cold, and his heart palpitated like a small bird knocked from its nest. Dorian, Dysart, and Jukes were conversing among themselves. No one was looking at him, not even out of the corner of an eye.
Henry removed his coat and draped it across Finella, replacing her hands by her sides. His own vibrated. He clenched his fists, placed them in his pockets. Thoughts would come in time, and a plan, but not now. For now he had to…
Dorian lit himself a cigarette and Dysart said with a voice all proscenium theater and brandy, “The woods by Harvard should be ideal.”
“For the summoning?” Dorian picked a piece of tobacco from between his lips, spat tightly. “Yes, I expect it will do at that. No one really ventures there at night, once it gets cold.”
Jukes stepped forward, keen-eyed. “So what do we do next?”
“Give me a few days, gents, and I’ll let you know.”
“Right, right.”
Henry grabbed Dorian’s arm, desperate to evoke clearheadedness. “What about Finella? She’s out cold.”
Dorian pleasantly raised an eyebrow, ignoring the hand on his arm, as though a concierge had just approached with a telegram. “She’ll be fine, old man. Go fetch yourself a brandy. She may be awake by the time you return.”
Henry released him contemptuously and turned back to the table. Dorian and Dysart resumed their discussion.
Henry thought twice, then gathered Finella’s hair and arranged it around her shoulders. Her eyes opened and looked into his.
“It’ll be dicey,” Dorian was saying. “The group will have to be purified impeccably.”
“Hello,” Henry said softly, trying to smile.
“Tricky for you, perhaps,” Dysart said. “My vices do not tax the soul.”
“One benefit of your not having one,” Dorian responded cheerfully.
Finella looked into his eyes.
“Get away from me.”
Autumn came that night. The dogs left the streets and the cats were quiet. The clouds fled the sky and the moon took her throne. Henry sat on the edge of his bed and looked up through his narr
ow window, through the thin steam of his mouth, through the certain feeling that, somehow, this was now about more than murder.
He sat, and watched the moon, and wished the human soul to be a myth, fearing he may well have lost his.
There’s no regret on Earth its equal.
Tell me why I bleed.
The Mason Street lecture theater was filled with young people the following morning; an air of fresh cologne, the sigh and rustle of papers, the rumble of feet. The lesson fee was collected at the door, as it was every morning. Idle talk quieted by half as their professor entered and arranged his belongings upon the table at the front of the class. This snowy gentleman grasped his waistcoat in each hand and proceeded to the podium.
“Good morning.”
The class responded in kind.
After a thoughtful pause, the professor began. “We have examined a selection of common morbid processes met with in bone. Periostitis. Osteomyelitis. Epiphysitis. In the course of doing so we have examined two of the three bacterial disease types related to such afflictions: the tuberculous and the pyogenic.” After a thoughtful pause: “As your professor it is my duty to your future patients to prepare you as best I can for any malady you may likely encounter in the course of your careers as physicians. I therefore apologize to the lady in the class if the subject we are about to discuss should offend her sensibilities.”
The fellow beside Henry whispered to his friend: “I wouldn’t say that’s too likely.”
Henry glanced across the room. Finella remained as unfazed as one sitting by a sunny window. The professor had turned and was writing upon the blackboard. His scritch-and-tap spelled out the word syphilitic. A few sniggered before they could stop themselves. A few had eyes on Finella. Finella jotted the word down as a heading.
“I say again…,” Henry’s neighbor whispered, and his fellow stifled a laugh.
Henry leaned sideways. “I expected today to be an examination of a standard clavicle fracture.”
“It’s been bone disease for the last fortnight,” his neighbor said before muttering something else to his friend, which got another laugh. Henry tapped his neighbor again. “Yes?” he said, vaguely irritated.
“I still expect today to be an examination of a standard clavicle fracture.”
His neighbor took a moment, seeing in Henry’s countenance a seriousness he had never before encountered, and quietly returned to his papers.
The lesson continued for a couple of hours, in notable silence, and primarily concerned itself with the graver afflictions that emerge in the tertiary stages of both acquired and inherited syphilis. Talk of ulcers and the shortening of bones, skin eruptions and bone marrow. When the professor ended his talk and wiped the board down, Henry’s neighbor turned to him, face flushed, and said: “You are no better than a thug.” Evidently he’d spent the last two hours debating whether or not to pursue the issue.
Henry said, not gracing him with a second glance, “In my experience thugs have no respect for a woman’s virtue.” He gathered his things and stood. “Let’s leave it at that.”
The class milled around on the narrow street outside, discussing what they had learned, trading notes. The sunlight was clear and cold. In a crowd of hats and coats against the school’s white walls and delicately latticed window frames, Finella’s bonnet stood out like a dark flower. Adrenaline poured into Henry from the head down. He wanted to let her go. He wanted to walk her home. He didn’t have time for this confusion. He strode down the steps, through the press of his classmates, and caught up with her as she pulled on her calfskin gloves. “Miss Riley?”
If he was anxious upon seeing her, her look of indifference as she addressed him, under any other circumstance, would have sent him into retreat. “Mr. Lockrose.” There were only two possible explanations for last night: either Finella was part of some deception, or what he had witnessed was utterly genuine. His very life might depend on which it was. If she traded in blackmail, or was with the law, then he was in a great deal of trouble.
“Miss Riley, how are you, look, about last night…”
Someone nearby scoffed, “Well, that explains it, doesn’t it?”
Henry’s neighbor from the lecture stood ten feet away, his friend by his shoulder. As tight-lipped as when Henry had left him in the lecture hall. “Will you be threatening me again, then, sir?” he said, loudly, for everyone’s benefit.
His friend placed a hand on his arm. “Leonard, let this rest.”
“I will not,” Leonard exclaimed, taking three steps forward and adopting a wide-stance pugilist position, his fists raised before him.
Murmurs all around. One yelled, “Have at him, Leonard!”
“Leonard,” Henry said. “You’re in the wrong.”
Leonard punched Henry in the cheek. It wasn’t much compared with the beatings Henry’s father had once doled out.
“Leonard.”
“You will not address me by my given name, you bloody snipe.”
“I don’t know your last name, pal.”
Leonard pursed his lips and lunged. Henry moved his head. In doing so he caught sight of Finella, who was beside herself, surrounded by men and acutely embarrassed. His heart went out to her despite himself. This would be talked about for months.
“This woman…!” Leonard gave up on Henry, dropped his guard, and actually lunged at Finella. Grabbing her arm, he dragged her a step into the circle. Her books hit the street, and no one intervened. “Does anyone here not know where she spends her nights?”
Henry punched Leonard squarely in the teeth. Leonard paused, like something had occurred to him, and sat down heavily in the street. Leonard’s friend exclaimed “Sir!” and ran to assist him.
Henry bent, gathered Finella’s books, and handed them back to her. Gingerly, she accepted them.
“I’m sorry,” Henry said. “I was raised on a farm.”
Dorian laughed fit to burst. “You were expelled?” They sat on the front porch of Mrs. Brown’s, nursing a cigarette each.
“Yeah, Leonard’s people are rich. School patrons.” Dorian kept laughing. “Athelstane, today’s been one of those days so bad it changes a person’s life and if you don’t shut up I’m going to change yours.”
The Englishman wound down, surveyed him, took a drag. “You’ve got a genuine passion for the work, I can tell.”
“Don’t patronize me. I’m only out here because I’ve been sitting in my goddamn room all day.”
Dorian took another pull on his cigarette, squinted through the smoke, gestured with the lambent end. “We could get you back in, you know.” Henry turned and looked him in the eye. He had a face that forecast the man he would grow into. His face was narrow and his eyes were caves.
“I would urge you to not go down this road.”
“I’m serious, chum. We perform a working, you get back to school, and we prove we’re not frauds. That is why you approached Finella today, isn’t it? Hoping to work out what, if anything, was real and what, if anything, was part of some plot against your liberty?”
Miss Riley had been quietly appalled—at least, that’s how she appeared—after Henry had hit Leonard; doubly mortified when all realized the professor had been standing in the doorway and had witnessed the entire thing. Henry had never been yelled at so politely in his entire life. A cat tripped out of the alley opposite, looked around, disappeared back in. “How is Miss Riley?”
“How does she feel about what you did? The feminine is charmed, while the firebrand is rankled.”
The thought of Finella thinking poorly of him undid something in Henry’s chest.
Henry sighed, and sucked a crackling breath from his smoke.
Finally Dorian flicked his stub into the street, an amber starburst off the cobbles. He checked his pocket watch and said: “I’m off to the pub. Will you be coming?”
Henry stared at his shoes and thought about tomorrow, and Finella. It seemed to him that life was a game he may have lost. Like it or not he had
business to finish. No getting away from it.
He sighed again, ground the last of his smoke into the step, and fetched his hat from beside him.
“Let’s go.”
“I grew up in Vermont,” Henry told them. “Nothing special. My folks weren’t anyone that people such as yourselves would speak to. I’m an impostor, myself, sitting here among you like this. If it weren’t for my reading from a young age and studying an etiquette primer while hopping boxcars all the way down here I doubt you would have kept my company for this long.
“My name isn’t Lockrose, but I do want to be a surgeon. I don’t just want to mend bones, I want to understand how it all works, how it all fits, and how everything we are intersects with everything we aren’t. I want to know us so well that every other thing about the whole of Creation spells itself out.
“See, I kept my reading hidden, as a boy. Pretty sure Ma knew about it. Don’t think Pap really knew until a coupla years before I left for good. He got mad. Always knew it was coming. Knocked me around, took the few books I had in the house at the time and stepped them into the mud. Never did find the other stashes around the place.
“Pap had a son for a reason, and that was to work dirt.
“If I was ever gonna make good on getting out before I turned into the same beaten man my pappy was, living that same shitty life he had in mind for me, I needed an education. So. Money.
“Few years before I left the farm I started taking the money I didn’t have from those who did, little by little. Not enough to be noticed. I did the arithmetic, measured what I took, took it at the right time, and kept the whole lot buried deep down and far away.
“Wasn’t smart enough, though. After a time the thefts started to get noticed, but by then I’d squirreled away enough for a ticket to Boston through New York, and a few months’ worth of lectures here, but I needed more, and I needed it before someone knocked on Pap’s door. That happened, it’d all be over for me.
“So. Bernie Sumner. Wide-bodied fellow, bear of a man, served his time as a sergeant. He’d dipped his toes into the waters of the cotton industry in the South, people said, then sold up and left. No one talked about it. He lived well, had a nice place.
The Music of Razors Page 4
