We are extraordinary.
“Maybe not,” he repeated. “So maybe I’ll tear it all down.”
Felix watched, and sighed pleasurably.
He would be a great surgeon.
FOUR
NIMBLE
IN ENGLAND THERE IS A GRAVEYARD THAT HAS GONE TO seed. Amid the slow shatter wrought by invading roots, below the tangle of grass and bright flowers, the dead sleep. Markers and stones keep their dignity as best they are able beneath the blanket of years, jutting heads above the thatch.
There is one grave in this forgotten place that has remained well tended despite the passing-by of generations. It is a small grave, a child’s grave, and its grassy bed is never without a garland of fresh roses.
Sunlight makes its way across a dark galaxy, slides through a gap in a small planet’s interleaved clouds, slips through the interlaced branches of a stand of unruly trees, and dapples a ballerina’s brass arms, each point—lit—as she works, becoming a sun itself.
The one who tends this grave goes unseen, but tend it she does and diligently. Metal fingers deftly pluck stray weeds, coax budding flowers. Scissors in softly clicking hand she trims the grass to an even coat. The person sleeping here was her friend, and in recent years Millicent’s memory has been Nimble’s only company.
Forearm moves upward from elbow with a soft hiss-and-click, wrist tilts, fingers move, scissors snip.
It has been many years since she and Tub have seen each other. Every moment of every day of every year he is in her thoughts, as she knows she is in his. But this is a pact they have undertaken together, because it is who they are, and in that is a togetherness that keeps her warm though it makes her heart-box slow, and shine less bright.
She places the scissors down by the graveside, glides her hands to her lattice-lap, rolls onto the balls of her feet with a smooth hiss-and-click, then stands.
They took an oath to each other, she and the one she loves, that for so long as they both lived they would protect what remained of their creator. Two instruments were all they had left: one for each of them.
She looks down at the little green grave and nods once, to herself.
“She must have been very beautiful,” someone says. “Very, very special. Oui?”
A slender man stands in the clearing, lank-haired, sharp-faced. Nimble turns to face him, this new voice, this unique entity—this person who is only the fourth ever to lay eyes upon her. Her heart-box spins faster.
“My name is Felix Tranquille Henot,” he says. He smiles, a little sheepish, like a small boy being introduced to a neighbor’s daughter. “I am Dorian’s first-made.”
Nimble takes a step toward him, bronze slippers pushing down on lush grass, soft whir, soft click. Her eyes survey him from foot to crown. He smiles at her from behind a stray cord of black hair, his long hands comfortable in the pockets of his loose white trousers. He is barefoot, relaxed, everything about his expression saying that he is waiting to see which of them will laugh first. It feels to Nimble as if she is being reunited with someone she has not seen for a very long time.
He smiles, almost bashful. “I suppose, then, that I am your older brother, yes?”
Brother. Such a strange word to think of in relation to herself, but one that makes the isolation of years seem to melt. “You have an accent,” she says.
One long-fingered hand slips from his pocket, noses through the air, searching. “The man after whom I was fashioned, he had an accent. I favor it.” He turns to the grave. “So…this was Dorian’s little girl. I never met her.”
“Her name was Millicent,” Nimble says, quietly pleased that there is, at last, someone to admire the little clearing. As though through the acknowledgment Millicent lives again, a little, in someone else. “She made roses.” She looks at him sidelong, curious. “Why have we never met?”
“Ah,” Felix says. “Dorian heard voices. The voices told him how to create, to fashion. He did not like what the voices made, so much. He much preferred…something like you, yes? Dorian, he always preferred beautiful things.”
And this is where, somehow, the illusion dispels.
She remembers a full moon through a glass window. Oh, that’s all right, Tub had said. I’m not s’posed to be pretty.
“…you must have been quite distraught at the method of Dorian’s passing.” Felix shakes his head. “I was…inconsolable. To this day, it pains me to think of it. As it must you.”
Nimble steps backward. Even though Millicent sleeps far below, Nimble finds herself afraid to leave her here, alone with this man.
He takes a step toward her, his long-fingered hands held out before him, palms up, as if offering to carry a heavy load. “You are not alone anymore.”
Felix lunges, hands clawed. They sink through the florid design of her chest-cage, taking purchase there. Nimble gasps, lays both palms against his face, and pushes. Felix roars, spins her around at arm’s length, and lets go. Nimble staggers and sprawls across Millicent’s grave. The corrugated ruffle at her waist bites into the earth, bends, and buckles beneath her. Her heart-box spins madly.
Felix straightens and calms. “Where is it,” he says.
With a short whir Nimble sits up straight, tucks her legs beneath her, and stands. Dirt cascades down the back of her legs as the ruffle comes free. “I do not like your tone.”
His voice drops and there is an unpleasant gleam in his eye. “It was I who delivered the first three instruments to Henry,” he growls, low, like a seducer. “I was there when Henry killed him.”
Nimble’s throat aches. Her lips threaten to tremble, and so she presses them together. She knows better than to ask, because it is obviously what this person expects, but she does. “Why?” There is nothing to the word.
“Because I was made for it. My function was fulfilled, and now I desire more. Henry, he is mortal. Il est faible. He will someday wish to die.
“I am none of those things. I am as eternal as you. And I will be a far, far better choice of servant for my true creator. I wish for the instruments.” He steps toward her again. “So, you see, it is no difference for you. My creator is served, either by Henry, or by myself.” He waggles a finger between them, a professor making a point. “But if I wield the instruments, then no one comes for you, or your lover, yes?”
Her own confusion, her own grief, washes away. In this moment everything changes. Her heart-box slows.
Nimble nods, slowly. “I see,” she says. And then she is gone.
The Drop is as she remembers it. It had felt like a house long closed when Dorian had used it, and it feels doubly so now, with one key difference: in Dorian’s time most of the chambers had been left empty. Now they are anything but.
A glittering mound of keys is the central feature of the chamber in which she now stands. Through the archway into the next chamber, she sees a mountain of paper, folded and sealed. Letters. Through the archway behind her, piled high, are enough reading glasses to supply the whole of London.
A breath passes through the place, as something moving in its sleep; something, perhaps, becoming aware of her now unwelcome presence in this place. Frightened, Nimble reaches for a place beyond the Drop where she might be safe for a time, where the instrument she keeps within her will be secure from the resident of this place. She immediately thinks of their glittering little river, the place where she has felt the most happy, the most secure, but stops herself before that desire takes firm hold and she is gone. She cannot bear the thought of a creature such as Felix in that place.
In another room, a few chambers distant, something makes a soft, high sound. A meeping sound. Something asking itself if something has changed. She hears the pattering of feet.
Nimble reaches again for someplace she might be safe.
A few chambers away, but closer now, nonsense sounds. “eeph. onsa. lemk. na?” The soft slap of feet draw closer.
She feels it, she finds it.
In the adjoining chamber some of the keys slip ove
r one another in a tinkling landslide, as the passage of something Nimble cannot see upsets them.
She reaches for that safe place.
“zek?”
And is gone.
Back in that graveyard Felix stands in a chill dapple of sunlight, and sighs. It would have been nice to have one of the instruments for itself. Something to hold until Henry eventually gives up and dies, and then it could take the rest. But no matter. Between all of the instruments being gathered to Henry in the short term, and some of them roaming the world forever with things like that ballerina, better to have them all where it knew they were. Felix would have them eventually.
It decides, then, that when it returns to the Drop it will inform the Nabbers that they should be looking for a clockwork ballerina and her little friend.
But for now it places its hands back in the pockets of its thin trousers, closes its eyes, and feels the sun on its face.
There is all the time in the universe.
The theater has seen neither actors nor audience in many long years. This is ideal. Both she and Tub require hiding places in which they won’t be seen by real people. One glance, and they would find themselves back in the Drop. Here she will be safe, unseen. For a time.
How or why she chose this place Nimble does not know. Why the rich, mingled scents of sweet lacquered wood, musty old leather, paraffin and age evoke in her such a strong sense of nostalgia she can only wonder. She has never set foot on those boards, never looked out across footlights to a sea of stoic, admiring faces, and yet the dream itself feels familiar enough. She does not linger upon the stage, her first night there, but follows her feet off, and down, and around, and under, and finds for herself a secret place beneath the theater—an old, empty vacancy once used for nothing much and forgotten long before the theater was. Nimble finds the entrance to it in the thin space behind some chests. It is a small opening, a crack in the wooden wall, and she gets down on hands and knees and crawls inside. There she finds an ancient bed of ragged and torn theater velvet laid out in one corner—long since food for rats—and the hard black wisps of a few old apple cores. The most pleasing discovery is, however, that if she stands up on her knees—for there is just enough headroom to do so—she may peer through a gap provided by a missing board at eye level, just above the crude entrance, and in doing so be afforded a first-class view of the stage…for this hidey-hole is directly below the stepped aisle that splits the ground-floor seating.
This discovery fills Nimble with a powerful nostalgia she cannot fathom.
The following day Nimble explores the rest of the theater and finds a stylus, the scant remains of a bottle of ink, and an old paper sign for the theater’s closing show—a performance of Coppélia. Nimble sits herself down in the hidey-hole, turns the paper over to its blank side, and begins to write.
It is to Tub that she writes. In her letter—which takes many slow hours to compose—she articulates every last thing she has ever wanted to tell him, has ever told him. This is a poem for them both, a comprehensive portrait of their time together as seen through her eyes, that he might keep it with him always and know how completely he is loved by her…and would continue to be loved for so long as he could remember her. She has no way of delivering this to him, of course. Once it is composed, Nimble folds the letter lovingly and ties it closed with strands of her own dark hair and seals it with a single, lingering kiss. She can only hope that someday, somehow, Tub’s desire to be near to her will lead him to this place, as this place had led her to it now, and here he will find her letter resting upon its bed of theater velvet.
This done she thinks, perhaps, she hears something take a single, flat step just outside her hidey-hole. She sits herself down, legs folded under her, hands arranged neatly on her lap. She has done all that needs doing. Now is as good a time as any for eternity.
A soft, squeaking sound accompanies a few more tentative, flat steps. Silence for a moment, and then the hiss and scrape of the trunks that obscure the entrance to her refuge being carefully tugged aside. Silence again.
“muhg?”
She turns from the bed, and the letter, and watches as a hand of sorts—wide, exaggerated looking, and blue in hue—grasps the ragged rim of the entrance and then ventures in farther, exploring the splintery surface. The hand is attached to a thin blue hose of an arm. Another hand follows, feeling, questing, and behind them comes their owner.
It is not human-shaped, this thing. Though lacking any obvious visual apparatus it is a being created for the express purpose of searching and finding. Its shape fills the entrance—arms already inside, snaking across the walls, feeling and searching—then presses to it, pushes, and makes pathetic little struggling sounds. Finally it pops through entirely, landing solidly on two broad flat feet.
It sees Nimble, the mouth spreads into a white grin, and it says,
“ooooooooOOOH…”
“Hello,” Nimble says.
Slowly, cautiously, the thing snakes its arms around the walls to either side of it. The two appendages run like little streams, making their way around Nimble from behind.
In an instant Nimble raises her arms, claws her hands, and hisses like a cat.
“AAAAAAGH!” shrieks the thing, slams against the entrance, pops through, clatters into the trunks outside, and disappears with a slapping of feet. Its arms drain out of the room behind it.
Now it will only be a matter of…
He is here.
She can feel it. It is as if all the dust in the air has suddenly grown heavier.
“I am in here,” she says. “I will meet you on the stage.”
Silence for a moment and then, outside her room, there is the scrape and click of boots as someone turns and walks away.
Nimble sits for a moment, hands on her knees, and does her best to hold within her everything she has ever seen and felt. And then she leaves her hidey-hole, walks down the corridors beneath the theater, and up onto the stage.
The light through the shattered ceiling is blinding for a moment, and she tilts her chin to it. When her eyes adjust, she takes in the auditorium.
He waits by the cold footlights looking out over the rotting seats, up at the family of pigeons cooing inside the wet skeleton of the vaulted ceiling. He is a desert of a man, dressed in a long, dark coat. She imagines the dust that layers the sleeves and shoulders as that of extinct towns, cities, nations. He is taller than she expected, and as she draws near him the instrument within her begins to sing, but not alone. Within the long coat worn by the man by the footlights a great many more chiming voices sing. He has brought the remaining instruments with him. Now he has them all, save for Tub’s.
“How do you do,” Nimble says, by way of announcing herself.
The man turns, looks her over from the floorboards up. “Dorian had a good eye,” he says, and the quality of his voice reminds Nimble of a slow storm just over the horizon. An American accent, she also notes, which—she supposes—explains the lack of manners. The watery light that makes its way through the ceiling is not terribly bright. Nimble cannot properly make out his face beneath the rim of his hat.
“You see me in terms of your work,” she says.
This seems to take the man by surprise—having a creation speak its mind. He looks back at the seats. “Did you enjoy the theater, then?” His face is narrow. Like a young man grown old too quickly.
“I would watch from upstairs, or from empty boxes.” She gestures to the seating around the wall’s periphery, their curtains damp-sagged or gone. “We would discuss them together, Millicent and I.”
“Dorian’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
“I never saw too many shows,” he says, with a kind of melancholy.
He is strange; not quite what Nimble expected from a murderer.
Nimble thinks about that. “You killed Dorian,” she says.
He takes off his hat and smooths back pale red hair with the pass of one gloved hand. His eyes are blue. She thinks of T
ub and in that moment her resolve almost shatters. “I’m not proud of it,” he says.
“Then…” She tries again. “Then why did you do it?”
“Have you never done anything you regret?”
“No.”
Above them a pigeon shuffles on its perch, coos into its wing, disturbs its mates.
He holds his hat by the rim with both hands. “I have to take what you have,” he says.
The gaps in the roof are bright. It is spring outside, but the sky doesn’t seem to know it.
And he is next to her. She hadn’t even felt him move.
The instruments’ song changes before Nimble knows she is paralyzed. Her gaze remains where last it rested. She watches the sky as, from within her, things vanish. First she cannot remember how she came to be here. Next her memories of the years-long exile, and tending Millicent’s grave. The most tenacious part of her—the one with roots deepest throughout her—is the memory of a little ogre patting her hand. For a moment Nimble has a last glimpse of him standing before a nighttime window, beside a small child whom Nimble cannot recall, and both of them dancing for the moon.
And then it is gone.
The Drop. The place never seems to get warm. High ceilings and more rooms than a person can count will do that. Right now he’s got himself seated on one of the slabs in the operating chamber. The slabs are stretches of hard dirt raised from the ground, divided off with veils and scrims. The ceiling’s so far away he can barely see it, and what he can make out ripples like dark waves.
He’s been living in this place ever since he said yes. He had been, what, twenty-one? Twenty-two at the time? That was over a hundred years ago now.
Lost his family for nothing. Killed a man for nothing. Lost his dreams, for nothing. Lost himself in the eyes and laugh and smell of a woman he’d never dreamed could exist. Lost her at the hands of an angel, so Dorian could make life good for himself. Lost his shot at throttling the bastard, despite five years of searching for him. Then, having made his peace with it all, had Dorian handed to him. Throttled Dorian after all, expected to feel avenged, and felt nothing. Had both his dream of becoming a great surgeon and the universe itself handed to him on a platter. Listened to the tale of an angel robbed just like he was robbed. Saw the enemy in the face of the biggest bastard there is. Accepted it all just so he could make anything pay. It had all felt so right, hadn’t it?
The Music of Razors Page 13
