Hope woke, silver claws inches from her eyes. It was back on her hand.
The ’scope surged as she woke, desperate to drive home before she could stop it. Disoriented, terrified, she grabbed her own wrist and battered her clawed hand against the side table, over and over and over. Her brother leapt onto her, grabbing her wrist also, his little hands closing over her hand.
She turned her head away from the claws. “Help me.”
Walter pressed down, pushing the Anxietoscope toward her face. “Let it do it, Hope, let it…”
“Get off!” Walter blew backward and Hope tore the ’scope free, tossing it across the room.
Glancing around the room, she found herself completely alone. Chest heaving, she allowed herself one deep breath, and surprised herself by beginning to cry.
Wally was out in the yard, pounding his fists against the side of the house.
“You didn’t tell her,” Henry said.
“I’m an idiot.”
The doctor looked up at Hope’s window. “No telling how she would have taken it, I suppose.”
“Yeah. Everyone’s so sure she won’t take weird news well. Maybe someone should have just trusted her.” Walter’s hands slid to his face. He wanted to sleep for a very long time.
“I’m sorry about your eyes, Wally. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. S’posed to be cleaner.”
“How can you do this?”
“I have to do this.”
“Bullshit.”
“Come the end of war at the End of Days the army we’re building here will emerge from the Drop and clean up whatever’s left. It’ll allow humanity to determine its own destiny.”
“It’ll destroy both Heaven and Hell and release an abomination that was rightly stricken!”
“It doesn’t—”
“IT MURDERED ME!” The voice was a thousand saws being drawn across a thousand throats. “…AND I WANT MY BONES BACK!”
The doctor remained very still as Walter’s every breath touched his face, reeking of old flesh and sounding like the sickest, most hunger-mad dog that ever lived.
“When…” The doctor swallowed. “When I first found you, and then your sister…I thought you were perfect. Everything about you fit so well with what the instruments needed from a guiding mind…”
“You’re an idiot, Henry. A small, stupid thing…”
Henry smiled tightly. “You’re fading. Have been for a long time.” The doctor took his hat off, wiped some speck from the rim. “I’m sorry Wally, I truly am…” Walter snorted. “But she didn’t come to when she touched the ’scope, not the way you did, and I think I can work with that. Once I get the ’scope back…I’ll be able to make the change a little easier for her. She’ll be happy. I’ll see to it.”
Walter looked at him. “You’re going to use the ’scope on her?”
“Don’t do this to yourself, Wally. You lost. It’s over. Rest.”
Wally stood there, hands by his sides, chest heaving with each miserable breath, and then it was as if it all went away. He sighed. His shoulders dropped. He stuffed his hands into his pockets.
“Yeah…,” he said, Wally’s voice again. “Yeah…”
“I’m sorry, Wally.”
“She’s my soul, Henry. Do you know how long we worked to have our two halves born here at the same time? Since the dawn of time we’ve wanted this. To be whole again. Henry, we’re so close…”
“I’m…”
“Yeah,” Walter said. “You’re sorry.”
And then the doctor was gone. Walter stood like that for some time, his chin on his chest.
Henry was going to use the ’scope on her. It was all he could do to keep from laughing. What do you know, he thought. Maybe there is a God.
NINETEEN
COMPLEMENTARY PROCEDURES
WHEN HOPE AWOKE IT WAS STILL DARK, AND HE WAS STANDING by her window.
“Got it done?” he asked.
He must have been kind-of-handsome, at one point. In a weird sort of way. A blade-thin poet maybe, with a wry smile and a scalpel in his hand.
“Feel better?”
She hitched a corner of her mouth, and left it at that.
“Wally told you ’bout me.”
“Yes.”
He was still for a moment, standing by the window.
“You’re not running,” the doctor said.
She slowly shook her head.
“You’re strong,” he said. “You spent your life looking after a dead kid ’cos your mama needed it. You saved your friend tonight even though he was messed up enough to have killed you. You got imagination, I saw that when you were young. You go lateral when you need to—and you will need to. I don’t think you’d abuse the instruments if I passed them on to you, and taught you how to use them.”
Hope blinked. “You what?”
“This isn’t precisely what I had in mind when I asked the Seventy-third Fallen to make me a great surgeon. It’s important, what I’ve done, but I’ve had enough. I got other places to be, people waiting for me.” The doctor extended a gloved hand. “What do you say?”
She thought about her father. About who he had been. He’d deteriorated over the years, become a shade of the man he had been before she was born. A simulacrum of the doting father that had splashed with his new son in a wading pool and built magic paper birds. Fifteen years of hopelessness, court cases, working two jobs, and finally alcohol was what it took to erode David Witherspoon to the point that attacking his daughter on a kitchen bench didn’t seem so wrong. She’d killed him. She’d lived. She was, all things considered, fine. But the thought of her father’s face and collapsing mind, of what she did to him, destroyed her every morning, and every day she rebuilt herself by evening. But she could do that. Because she was a tiger.
It’d be easy to say the doctor was responsible for all that, that he’d made them what they were. And she supposed he had. But so what? What was the alternative? A happy family life, a mediocre middle age, and a comfortable death? Really, how was one scenario any better or worse than the other? You live, you learn, you die. Once you accept that, she supposed, you could live through anything.
The doctor’s hand was still extended. “My name’s Henry,” he whispered.
She smiled sleepily, blinked slow.
“You look lonely, Henry.”
Maybe everyone’s born for a reason.
Hope slept, and Henry took her in his arms. He took her away from that room; away from that town; away from this world.
And in a dark place, a nowhere place that shared a wall with Hell, where slabs grew from cave dirt and the ceiling roiled, he brushed pink hair from her eyes. Still she slept and would continue to sleep until it was no longer necessary.
The procedure is painless, and when such an examination is being undertaken it is essential that a Maker plan his approach in order to coincide with a period of subject unconsciousness.
He took the instrument from her pack, unwrapped the faux-fur jacket from around it, placed it beside her on the cold slab, and opened it. The Anxietoscope rose and drifted gracefully toward its glittering kin within the folds of his coat. One thin hand closed gently around it, possessing it.
Should a Maker deem that permanent and selective fear removal is appropriate…
It slipped over his finger and hand as though it were nothing. His own desiccated face looked back at him from the mounds and ridges, the face of who he had been for 150 years too long.
He opened his coat and chose what he would need.
…it is recommended that such action be compensated for…
“If this world was perfect,” he said to her. “We’d never want to leave. That’s why it is the way it is, I think. But that’s a poor excuse.” He laid the instruments on the slab, one by one. “It doesn’t have to be this way. You could change the world in ways I’d never be able to. You’ve got the universe in you.”
as much as is possible…
Henry felt ageless eye
s on him, watching from some elsewhere place.
…via complementary procedures.
“I’m sorry,” he said, brushing back that persistent lock of hair from her pale forehead. But she said nothing. He had rarely felt the Drop this still. Nothing moved, no sound, hardly a breath.
This, then, would be the beginning of the end.
“Tear it all down.”
And he began.
In another world, in a vacant lot that once held a silver miracle, a boy with wolf-teeth sat on the lip of a freshly dug hole, and howled.
TWENTY
CHANGES
DREAMS CAME AND WENT. AS THE PROCEDURE PROGRESSED, certain things fell into Hope to let her know how the operation was going. Henry put them there to make her feel safe, to reassure. That was their function.
She drifted in a cool sand pool beneath a peach-colored sky. Beneath her lazily kicking legs she felt the passing dance of water sprites. They buoyed her up, sang softly into her ears. One opened a panel at the base of her neck, and gently slid one of its children inside. Once this was done, what the child knew Hope knew, and Hope now knew what it was to be Henry: what he had done, what he had to do, what she had to do, how tired he was. Why she had to take over.
“We’re building an army,” she breathed. “And no one can know.”
She floated, taking this in, making this new knowledge a part of her.
She could feel the sprite-child wriggling inside her head. Feel it insinuating itself. It felt too much like violation, and she had had enough violation for one lifetime. Hands on her body she could retreat from (she thought of tigers), but fingers in her mind gave her nowhere to retreat to. She didn’t like it. She felt echoes of no no no building in tempo within her skull, felt something lovely instinctively answering the call, felt the sprite-child with its payload of instructions screaming in terror as icy-blue eyes found it, as impossibly heavy paws pinned it, and relentless jaws tore it apart.
Hope began to sink back into peace.
The water of the pool bubbled, and from some unfathomable depth something erupted. Something massive rose beneath her, lifting her from the once-still waters as enormous fingers closed over her. She could move nothing save her head, jutting between second and third digits, and soon that was held in place by something she could not see. Something cold and hard. Zero movement, utter entrapment, mounting claustrophobia, a blinding fear that stripped her back to an animal state.
An object alien to herself came in through the back of her head, grasping and tentacular, metallic and glistening, searching. An appendage for something outside herself looking to remove something inconvenient within. She told herself to run, and sensed something white and four-legged do just that, retreating as far back as it could, to her innermost place. The place was an amalgam of memory. Of her childhood bedroom—all stuffed toys and posters of perfect boys—of the specter of her father, and the hallway light upon the face of her dead brother standing by her bed as she slept.
The white tiger loped into that bedroom, looking behind itself for what it knew was coming, moved past her memory of her father at the door, of Walter by the bedside, crawled under the bed, and waited for the inevitable.
The thing came for it, all hands and fingers, snaking down the hall, in through the door, past Walter, and—without hesitation—under the bed.
Her head filled with the cries of animal pain. It was more than she could contain. She couldn’t stop the screaming. The appendage jerked and jostled, tugging stubbornly at something that refused to give way. She heard wet sounds. She felt something dislodge, painfully, from the center of all she was. The violation was total.
She couldn’t stop the screaming.
She had been sobbing in her sleep for about five minutes when Henry finally extracted the blockage, whatever it was that had been preventing him from changing things about her that needed changing.
The blockage was very small, and very pale. Like a stillborn kitten.
He’d never seen anything like it.
With that in mind, his first instinct was to replace it. But he never had the chance.
Already, it had begun to decay.
Setting it aside, he persevered.
TWENTY-ONE
END
THE PARAMEDICS HAD FOUND SUNI AT THE TOP OF THE hill. He was lying on his back, on the lip of the quarry, bloodied and stargazing. He had wanted to lash out when they touched him, but found that he couldn’t. Instead, he’d taken himself away as they handled his body and put it into the back of the van and brought him here, to this ward, where policemen had tried asking questions and failed to get any answers.
It was dark now, with only the ambient light from the nurses’ station down the hall, the weak warm glow of sodium-orange clouds beyond the window, and the white glare of a television someone had remembered to turn down but not off.
As he lay there, on his stiff white bed beneath stiff white sheets, he’d listened to the police talking among themselves. They’d had words with the man who lived next door, and his wife, Joan. The girl had done that to him, the neighbor had said. Threw him through the window. Naked. It seemed they’d had a fight. Something about AIDS.
But the girl—Hope Witherspoon—wasn’t at her home address, and her mother hadn’t seen her in over twenty-four hours.
The police knew about Hope. About her record. Killed her old man with a steak knife.
Suni’s stitches hurt.
“We need strong people,” Henry was telling her.
“People like me.”
“You’re not people. You and these instruments…”
“We’re the same person.”
“Yes.”
“Thrown to Earth, my essence became bones, and what was left…what was left tried for so long to put itself back together.”
“But now you have power and purpose.”
“We’re building a body. An army.”
“Come the End, the two sides will face each other. Once that’s over we come out, clean up whatever’s left…”
“And take over.”
“No. The Angel only wants out.”
“It wants to be real. It wants to be acknowledged.”
“Once the balance has shifted, God won’t be able to look away. It’ll have to remember.”
“And once God remembers the Angel…”
“It’ll exist.”
“I don’t think the Angel will stop there. There’s so much rage…”
“Once the power that locked it away is gone, it’ll be free.”
Hope thought about this. She remembered some things Henry had dropped into her head. “Won’t we all die if that happens? Aren’t we all part of the Godhead? If that goes…”
“Yes, but there are factions now. Authorities. The Angel needs to remove the Authority that bound it.”
“God.”
“I never figured that one out. Call it God if you like. I use names I know for the sake of convenience.”
While Suni slept his mother came to visit. She had returned from business to find a calling card from the police wedged into the jamb of her front door, requesting that she call them as soon as possible. They had asked if she had a son, about so high, long hair. The police explained they had followed the blood trail back to the driveway of her address. They informed her that last night paramedics had received a call from a person identifying herself as Hope Witherspoon and that a person was injured atop the quarry nearby. They had found Suni (how do you spell that?), bloody, naked, and unconscious in the company of a girl with pink hair. The girl did not stay to answer questions. Neighbors report that this girl had thrown Suni through his bedroom window, resulting in lacerations to his body. It appears Suni then fled for his life. The police were currently seeking Hope Witherspoon for questioning. Not to worry, doctors say he’ll be fine. Maybe a little scarring though.
Suni had woken in time to see his mother leaving the room.
“Remember,” Henry said. “It’s better if they want
it.”
She looked up at him. “Did you?”
His eyes were on Suni, sleeping. “We all did.”
He had torn up all his art, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he done that? Or had he just wanted to? Did he really? How was he going to get anywhere now? College dropped out from beneath him. He’d had it so good for so long: a roof over his head and food in his stomach, a life of his own with his mother always out of town. All taken for granted. He couldn’t do anything else! He was going to wind up living the things he had always dreaded, the bland eternal scenarios that existed just beyond the happy lie of high school’s end; the horrible, mediocre things that happened to everyone else. They’d cut his hair, give him his glasses back, put him in a starched shirt, and file him within some anonymous concrete block for the rest of his life. People would see him there, doing the same things over and over again, slowly going gray under the lighting. The memory of what he had once been now nothing more than a shriveled sliver lying cold in the most undistinguished crevice of the emptied cavern of his mind.
Somewhere else he was vigorously marbling a white wall with his own red heart, laughing and crying out; each leap a bloody sweep, each thrust a burgundy explosion. He could hear violins. He could hear cannons.
Someone pulled the drapes against the glare of the rising sun. They turned off the TV.
“Don’t let that happen…”
Someone stroked his head, quietly shushing him.
“Please…Don’t let that happen to me…”
Whoever it was whispered close to his sleeping ear. “You understand what that means. What it involves?”
“Yuh…yes.”
“Then say it again so that I know you mean it.”
“Don’t let that happen to me.”
And suddenly he was awake, standing in a black chamber, a cavern, the ceiling of which roiled in the darkness like a carpet of cockroaches. There were things up there, but he couldn’t tell what.
The Music of Razors Page 27
