Kristian put his hands up. “No way. I can hear it now. I gave it to my dad and he left it at work. Forget it.”
“Then I won’t give it to my dad. I’ll puh-put it inside one of my textbooks where it wont get bent, and only t…t…take it out when I need it. I’ll return it on Monday! You’re not even going to use it over the wuh-weekend. You’re going away.”
“Yeah. To work on my two-hundred-word essay on comedy.”
“Oh, and you buh-buh-blame me for that.”
“Look—”
“Come on, Kris. I’m not gonna lose it.”
Kristian stared at him. Then, with a suffering breath he reached into his shirt pocket and handed it over. Sunlight flashed off gold trim as he extended the card to Suni. “You better not,” he said. “Or I’ll never forgive you.”
Suni didn’t begin work on his assignment that night. Instead he cleared his desk, got a clean sheet of paper, propped the card up against the lamp, and began to draw. The assignment could wait until tomorrow.
He drew until about ten, when he clicked the lamp off and climbed into bed. Lying there, he noticed that the moonlight through the window cast strange patterns on the far wall as it bounced off the gold and silver foil of the card. His room felt like a grotto.
He wouldn’t lose the card. He would give it back to Kristian on Monday. Maybe then people would stop saying he lost things.
In the middle of the night something happened that didn’t usually happen. Suni woke up. Wide awake. Just like that.
He thought this was pretty odd, and kind of annoying. Still, if he was wide awake now he supposed he could get up and do some more drawing while everyone else was asleep. Tomorrow was Saturday, he could sleep in.
So he reached over and turned on the lamp.
In the flash of blindness accompanying the burst of light, something with a squeaky voice said:
“Uh-oh.”
Suni blinked, squinting, looking around his bedroom. He couldn’t see anything other than white light, but he heard the pat-pat-pat of feet on the carpet, and curious noises like “murglefurg? bump-fog…hehn.” Pat-pat-pat. “zyxl? neh?” pat-pat-pat. Then a captivated “OOO-ooooh…”
As the world cleared up, Suni saw something with long rubbery arms standing beside his bed. It had a big ball of a body and ridiculous-looking, oversized feet. Its arms were long and grabby. It had no eyes, nose, or ears, but it did have a big expressive mouth with big flat, white teeth. It held Kristian’s card. “OOO-oooooh…,” it said, mesmerized by the shiny thing in its big blue hands.
Suni blinked. He looked at the clock. It was 12:01. He looked at the thing. It was like a fat blue basketball with feet. He rubbed his face. He was definitely awake.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!” said Suni.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!” said the thing, and flop-flopped its feet across the room. It held Kristian’s card over its head with long, dangly arms.
Kristian’s card.
Kristian Lose-This-And-I’ll-Never-Trust-You-With-Anything-Again’s card.
Suni threw off the covers and dove at the thing. The thing waved its arms above its head and squealed as Suni came flying at it. His hands locked around one elastic blue wrist and engaged in a furious tug-of-war.
“Guh-guh-guh give it back!” shouted Suni.
It felt kind of mushy under his hands. Its arms were thin and ropy and weak feeling, but it held on to the card with a grip that wouldn’t budge. Suni still wasn’t entirely convinced this wasn’t all some dream he was having.
The thing squealed, pulling against Suni, twisting toward something in the corner, like it was looking at something with those eyes it didn’t have.
“Eeeeergh!” it cried out, tugging, turning. “Eeeeeeergh!”
“Just give it back!”
“Eeeeeeergh!”
“Let go!”
“Eeeeeyyaaagh!”
The thing gave one last, mighty pull and yanked Suni toward it. Suni cried out, fixed on those big flashing white teeth. But the thing had no plan to bite him. Instead, with Suni so close, its long arms gained a lot of slack. This allowed it to hold on to the card and dive into the shadows gathered in the corner.
It seemed like it disappeared, or fell down a hole, its arms unspooling quickly, following its flight, until they snapped taut and almost pulled free of Suni’s grasp.
Instead it sucked Suni into the shadow right along behind it.
He fell, hands still locked around the blue thing’s boneless wrists, sailing down down down toward an ever-expanding point of dirty light. It was like he watched the point of light for almost a minute, sailing behind the blue thing. Then, in an instant, the light blew out to an enormous size, swallowing him, and he was cannoning headfirst into a huge room.
The stench was the first thing he noticed. Then he crashed into a mass of something soft that smelled really, really bad.
“Yippeeee!” the blue thing yelled, and Suni realized he no longer held on to the card, or the thing. He flailed around, hemmed in on all sides by the thick, reeking mass of whatever it was that covered him, almost panicking in an effort to work out which way was up, to find a pocket of air, to claw his way out. The smell was awful, suffocating. He rolled around, kicking and gasping, when he felt one bare foot burst free and poke out into clean air. Thrashing around he righted himself, rammed both hands out, and pulled himself upward like someone bursting from a grave.
He gasped, long and loud, fresh air filling his lungs as he hauled himself up from the stinking mass that held him. Standing half submerged, but thankfully free of its putrid, airless grasp, he saw what he was standing in. They were green, and gray, and brown. Some stood out in hues of blue and bright red. Some were a mix of other colors, while others were dead black.
And there were millions of them …millions… And Suni was up to his armpits in them. And God, how they stank.
Socks.
Dirty socks.
“Now there’s something you don’t see every day,” he said, and his voice echoed lightly around the cavern.
Suni extricated himself from the smelly, cottony mass that had caught his fall. He tumbled down a mountainside of stale, odorous stockings, socks, and leggings to wind up on a floor of rough-hewn rock. There was but one way out of this chamber, and that was through the jagged arch before him, which led to an equally large chamber, this one filled not with a mountain of socks, but a giant mound of pens…
Through the arch he could see another arch leading to yet another chamber. Standing there on its two giant, bunioned feet was the thing. It still held Kristian’s glittering card in both hands, looking right to left and right again, as if deciding where to go, or where in this massive complex of caves and caverns its new prize belonged.
“Hey!” Suni called out, running after it.
The thing spun around, saw Suni and Eeeeeked! Then it took off at high speed, absurd feet pattering away, arms dangling over its head.
Suni lost sight of it. He looked through a multitude of chambers, all piled high with items of one description or another. One was filled with golf balls; another, keys. There was one chamber stocked with a gigantic store of dice of all shapes, sizes, and colors.
This was all starting to make some kind of sense. Then Suni came across a cavern that was home to an accumulation of old schoolbooks. He had a feeling he knew what this was all about, but he had to know for sure. He began by hunting around at the base of the heap, where the books looked newest. Sure enough, after half an hour, he found it.
His homework. The thing had stolen his homework! Suni took the red-covered notepad from the heap, grateful that at least he wouldn’t have to do his assignment again.
He made his way into the next chamber, which was home to what looked like all the luggage that ever got lost at airports, and found himself a black backpack that, according to the tag, belonged to someone in Vancouver, British Columbia. There was nothing in it, so Suni put his notebook inside, zipped the bag, and shrugged it onto his back.
Now all he had to do was find Kristian’s card and get back home. Somehow.
Past another archway, into another chamber, the thing tootled along, burbling to itself, still looking for someplace to put the card.
Suni saw it.
It saw Suni.
“Aaaaagh!” shrieked the thing.
“Raaaargh!” went Suni.
And the chase was back on.
He lost it again. It was a fast little bugger.
Suni found himself wandering through chamber after chamber. Before long he began thinking that if he found a way out he would just take it, glad to be home, forget about the stupid card, and let Kristian call him what he liked. If Kristian was any kind of friend he’d understand. If he believed any of it at all. Which, Suni knew, he never would.
Suni was starting to get hungry, and it felt like he was just wandering in circles with no way out. A few times he wandered back through the pen room, or the dice room. He held his breath and checked out the sock room one more time. It was where he had landed, so he had to have fallen from somewhere, right? Only there was no opening in the ceiling. Nothing. He may as well have tumbled out of thin air, which he could well have done. It made about as much sense as anything else he had seen tonight.
It was becoming obvious that the only way out of here, if there was a way out, lay with that blue thing. Which doubled his need to find it again.
He found a cavern filled to overflowing with wallets and purses of every description. He blinked. Then he ran in and started opening them.
“Don’t bother,” someone said. “They’re all empty.”
Suni dropped the wallet and looked around.
“The Nabbers put the loose change and driver’s licenses in other chambers.”
Suni looked up. Sitting on top of the mound was a small boy with neat, pale hair.
“I’m Walter,” the boy said. “They call this place the Drop.”
Suni nodded. “Dddd…duh-do you know a way out of here?” This boy seemed really familiar, somehow, yet for the life of him Suni couldn’t work out why. Each time he tried to hold it the association slipped and slid from his grasp.
“I know someone who can get you out of here,” Walter said. “But I don’t think he will.”
Suni didn’t like the sound of that. “Why not?”
“It’s complicated. I might be able to get you out, though. In exchange for a small favor.”
Suni rubbed his hands nervously on his pajama pants, looking around. “Ddd…ddd…duh-do you want to come down from there?” he said. “You’re making me nervous.”
“Okay.” Walter slid down on a small avalanche of leather and vinyl. He really was a lot smaller than Suni.
“Wh…what kind of f-fff-favor?”
“We’ll get to that,” said Walter.
“So that blue thing’s called a Nabber?” Suni asked, searching for something to say.
“That’s what the person who made them calls them,” Walter said.
“Then there’s more than one?”
“Oh yes.”
Suni nervously rubbed his palms on his pajama legs again. “So how long have you been here anyway?”
“Right now? Half an hour. Before that? Ten years,” Walter said.
“Ten years?” The boy—Walter—didn’t look ten; more like five. Suni was liking this less and less. “Why?”
“Like I said, Suni: it’s complicated.”
“You know my name?”
There was the pat-pat-pat of oversized feet, and Suni spotted—a few chambers away—the blue thing waddling past an archway at high speed, prize held high. Without thinking, he took off after it.
“Suni,” Walter hissed, urgently. “Stop!”
But Suni didn’t. He ran through three more chambers—scattered with mounds of remote controls—and turned right, bare feet slapping on cold dirt. He could hear the pat-pat-pat of the thing’s feet echoing in distant chambers and used that to follow.
He jogged to a stop in one chamber (filled with little green plastic army men), looking back and forth among three possible exits. Listening to the thing’s pat-pat-patting feet receding…
He wandered for what seemed like hours from cavern to cavern, his stomach growling. Sometimes he would hear the far-off chatter of what he thought was the thing, only to lose it again, to be surrounded by the echo of his own soft footfalls.
Then he came to a larger cavern, and this one smelled far, far worse than the mountain of socks he had first plunged into hours before. It smelled wrong.
Last year Suni’s father had taken him camping and they had come across a half-eaten possum that had been dead for days. There were clouds of flies. One crawled across its dark open eye, and the thing that had made him want to be sick was the way the possum hadn’t blinked, only stared, as the insect crept across. He remembered how the taste of the stench had tickled the backmost point of his throat, thick and invisible clouds of rot-scent filling his mouth.
The smell of this cavern was unbelievably worse.
Suni approached the archway, feet crunching and sinking partway into a thick mat of glass marbles that covered the floor and spilled into adjoining rooms. Through the archway he saw piles and piles and piles of bones. Piles of bodies. There were no flies, but fluid was seeping from the massive mound, translucent and dark and absolutely vomitous. Suni was sucking air through the flannel of his pajama sleeve, trying to keep his gorge down, feeling it rise nonetheless, buoyant and acidic.
In the space between the four largest body piles was a square wooden table, around which sat four dead people with no heads. They were playing cards.
“You know how sometimes they never find the body?”
Suni shrieked and spun around, stumbling on uncertain footing into the body room, bare feet smacking and sticking on the dried residue that coated the floor. It was Walter. The words caught in his throat, ran into the tails of one another, stole his breath, made it hard to think. He pushed, gagged, squinting with the effort it took to speak. “Hhhh…hhhh…huh-huh-huh-how’d you get behind me? Www…www…wuh-what is this?” And Suni tasted the room again. He coughed, and his last meal splashed heavily to the already sticky floor, rising in thick waves from the very depths of him, his entire body now a massive reflex action that clenched every muscle until he thought they’d burst and tear, coughing and retching until there was nothing left. When he was finally done, one hand on his bent knee, the other wrapped across his drum-tight and convulsing stomach, Walter offered him a handkerchief. Shakily, like an old man, Suni took it, wiped the sick from his mouth and the tears from his eyes.
“When they never find the body, this is where those bodies go,” Walter said, stepping into the room. Dozens of marbles rolled lazily across the hard dirt floor. The sound of Walter’s tightly laced shoes smack-smacking across the sticky floor made Suni want to gag again. “Well, most of them. You might want to stand back.”
Suni was about to ask why when the room filled with a cacophony of meeping and murbling and a dozen or more Nabbers materialized out of nowhere, streaming from shadows and dark nooks, bumping and jostling Suni as he stood amid their traffic. Without hesitation, fumbling and climbing over one another—ignoring Walter and Suni completely—they each homed in on specific marbles, clutching them in their rubbery blue hands, and scuttled them back to their proper room. The last of them stopped in the archway to look Suni up and down with what he took for disdain, hmphed, and disappeared into the marble room. When quiet was restored not a marble remained.
Suni gestured feebly to the quartet of corpses seated at the table. One of them slapped down a card from its hand. Another drew from the pile. Their skin was gray, the stumps of their necks bloodless. “What…,” he began. “What…?”
“When I was still living with Henry, he wanted me to practice,” Walter said. “Get a feel for the business. This was homework,” he said solemnly. “Guess he never got around to clearing them away.”
Suni thought of the notep
ad in his backpack, and suddenly a two-hundred-word essay didn’t seem so bad.
“How…how do you know him, then?”
“He took me from my family when I was very small. He stepped out of the darkness and I wasn’t even scared…all starlight and assurances. That was when I first saw the instruments, and heard how strongly they sang to me.” Walter’s eyes shone at the memory, and Suni saw him smiling nostalgically. And then, abruptly, “He told me he could make my bad dreams go away…and all the while he was nothing but a bad dream himself.” Walter sniffed and shook his head a little, as if dispelling a fog.
“He…he’s the guy that could get me out of here?”
Walter nodded. “This whole place is his. He took it from a man named Dorian. They had a falling-out. A lot of bad blood. You know how it is.” Suni didn’t, actually, but he felt it wiser to just nod as if he knew all too well. “That’s how he wound up doing what he’s doing now.”
“Which is?”
“It’s a long story.” Walter straightened, and got that distracted, faraway look again. “He’s coming.”
Through the silence of the body chamber came the distant burble and meep of the Nabber, the patter of its feet getting closer. Suni would have run had Walter not placed a hand on his arm.
“There’s no point,” he said. “This network of caverns and chambers…it’s all circular.”
Suni swallowed and looked to the far arch. With mounds of corpses, bodies, and refuse piled around him he had no trouble believing he would be added to the stockpile within the hour. Just another missing body.
The Music of Razors Page 16
