The Music of Razors

by Cameron Rogers

  Perhaps, then, they were not so different, mother and daughter. The good seed of Hope’s memories had gotten her through the occasional waking nightmare and the long haul of adolescence: the court case, the daily grind, and the forever knowledge of what she had done.

  Meeting Walter, his circus, Mike…it had told her from a very young age to believe in something greater than herself. Greater than the everyday. Greater than the death-and-taxes hallucination most people chose over all the others.

  You’re in pieces, the imposter-cat had said. In pieces for the loss of me.

  And despite the pantomime she knew it to be true. There was a vasty vacuum within her now where once was a stone she could cling to, a library of self-written truth to guide her, and an arsenal with which to forge her way forward. The totem of that place had been a white tiger…and now library, land, and totem were all gone. She could remember them as one remembers childhood—almost as someone else’s memories—but they had no strength.

  They were just shapes where things should be.

  Not so different, mother and daughter. Her fate was Hope’s, one generation to the next. No getting away from it. Henry hadn’t preserved what he had pulled from her. There was no trace of it within the tool used for the long-term storage of such things—a nubbled silver ring—that she could find. It was gone now, as dead as dust. She was undone, incomplete, the end foregone.

  She had killed her father, she had killed the man who would replace her father, and she had killed Walter. That’s what she’d done. She knew it just as certainly as she knew she had always been more than Hope Witherspoon.

  She would return to her brother’s room, for one last long look at her other half, and that would be that. Come what may. If there was a next life to be had, perhaps they would have more luck there. She turned away from her mother and found someone standing in the doorway.

  “Excuse me,” he said with a voice as ponderous as a deep river. “We’ve never met, but…um…I was wondering if you could help me.”

  “So she’s got no brakes,” Henry said. “I shouldn’t have been so itchy. I never did to any recruit, anything I ever made, what I did to her: just dump it all into her head like that, take out the stuff didn’t suit. Reason for that. Stupid.”

  Walter wasn’t really listening. The world was narrowing to a point, and the strongest thing he felt was frustration. Before the world was new he had been torn apart—every piece of him, flesh and bone and spirit—and subverted or discarded. His spirit had been split and scattered just as his bones had been divided and repurposed.

  An angel does not die. Sundered and confined to Creation, subject to its laws, all of his parts had worked over innumerable lifetimes to be reunited. The bone instruments, they were by nature of their redesign collected together by others; but his soul…both pieces of his spirit, subject to natural law, found refuge time and again in flesh, in life after life. Each time, at each death, these people whom Walter and Hope had been gained some inkling of what they truly were. With each rebirth they tried again and again to rejoin, to become whole, and failed.

  This, now, was as complete as they had ever been: every piece of him collected in the same place, in the same lifetime. So close, and now it was all over.

  Again, failure. But this time for the last time. Hope was undone, pieces of her missing. Lifetimes of slow awakening all for naught. The world would burn before they ever had another chance like this.

  The slow-voiced little thing led her by the hand, out of the room, toward her brother’s. “I’ve heard of you. You’re old, like Wally is.”

  Hope nodded. “Yes.”

  In the room lay a thin boy, old in frame and face, pale hair almost wet with lifelessness. He seemed to have sunken into the bed, become part of it. A ballerina stood awkwardly in the corner, head angled, looking at the ground. She shook mechanically, chin and face vibrating back and forth like a machine with stuck gears, or an old person in her final days. Three great slashes divided her chest-cage diagonally. Her box heart spun, gave a little light.

  “This is Nimble,” Tub said. “She means everything to me. I…I think she’s broken inside.” The little thing looked up into her face. “She doesn’t know me. Would you fix her? I’ll do anything if you’ll please just fix her.”

  The ballerina heard them. The jittering stopped and her head lifted.

  Hope detached the ring from her vest, slipped it over her finger, felt its feelers slide pleasantly through her flesh and coil around her bones en route to the base of her spine. Her mind lit up with an inventory spanning a century of collection; the discarded sections of hundreds of lives made themselves known to her. Memories, hopes, agonies, associations, aversions, contextual matrices, ghosts, loves. Everything Dorian and Henry had ever saved from every person they had ever changed.

  The image of Nimble’s face went in through Hope’s eyes, met up with her name inside Hope’s head, and the ring retrieved all Hope needed to know. In an instant she knew Nimble for the creation she now was, the companion Dorian had remade her as, and the human being she had once been.

  With the information and material she now had Hope could give that all back to her, unmake Nimble the ballerina and do a decent approximation of re-creating the original, flesh-and-blood person. But after sifting through the memories and material Hope figured there wasn’t much there that any human being would want back. In her mind everything lived: a child’s bed covered with roses, a small girl dancing for the moon, Tub floating lazily in his river, and the moment when Nimble learned she had so much to understand about being alive.

  “I can fix her,” Hope said, waking up. “I can fix everything.”

  Suni had heard her sobbing as she worked on him. He thought that sometimes she had stopped and held him, hugged him from behind, wept against his back, but he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t move, couldn’t feel a thing.

  She had clamped something to his skull and he had been filled with a sudden claustrophobia. He had thought about his life and all that he was losing. He had thought about never seeing his mother again, that he’d never tell her he loved her despite everything; he thought about never again tasting cheesecake, about never ever seeing the Louvre. He wondered what university would have been like, had he made it. And just before he had heard the sound of blood splashing as his body began disappearing from the outside in, he wondered what he might have been if he had only survived a little longer.

  The very last time Suni had seen Hope she had moved before him, blocking out the city, and did something to the silver thing that hugged the curve of his skull. She had kissed him—one last time—and removed the instrument. And then she had left him there, to watch the lights as her work took hold.

  He realized he would never own a dog.

  He thought of riding a bike, climbing a mountain, swimming an ocean, giving birth, killing a man, saving a life. He thought of destroying a star, eating a world, the taste of a color and the smell of a sound. He knew the addresses of eons and the road map of the universe.

  He knew, suddenly, how easy it was to be somewhere.

  He grasped, in its entirety, what it meant to be a part of everything.

  He knew, completely and precisely, the purpose for which he had been born.

  He was a creator. He was, and had always been, a slave to that drive. A scryer viewing life through the facets of diamond water. A thrall to Muse.

  Thrall no more. Master and slave were to become one.

  His body fell away.

  “I knew it from the instruments,” Henry said. “Told me as much, in how they felt, how hot they got, the way they sang. Never felt anger that strong in anything. Knew if you laid a finger on ’em before I made you mine, I’d be dirt. That you’d know what I’d been up to, what I’d been keeping you from.”

  Walter placed broad, thin hands on the ground by his long head, palms down. “You…” He pushed, hard as he could, forearms trembling. “Really thought the day would come…when I’d touch my own bones
and not know what they were?” He lifted his head enough to look Henry in the eye.

  “Hope didn’t, did she now? All grown up, possibilities winnowed away, conforming to the laws of the world as she has. Given time I could have turned her around. I could have gotten away from all this. She could have torn everything down. Everything. In a way I’d never be able to.”

  Walter, lying in the dust, stared at Henry through eyes growing dim. “What about…everything you said…‘freeing us,’ all that…” Words became infant storms in the dust. “You wanted to see Heaven torn down? Everything else was just an excuse? That’s it?”

  Henry didn’t react, his voice flat as three AM. “Heaven never did me any favors.”

  “Fascinating,” Felix said, man-formed. He placed a foot between Wally’s shoulder blades and the wolfhound collapsed back into the dirt. “But now it is time to give up the goods, yes? Time to give them up to someone who knows how best to use them.” Booted foot still pushing down on Wally, pressing the air from his frail lungs, he angled forward, arm extended to withdraw the moonshine blade from Henry’s dry old heart.

  Delicate fingers—cold and filigreed—took Felix by the wrist of that hand, and someone else told him gently, “Um…that’s not yours.” A short, stubby little thing…Felix didn’t recognize it. One of Dorian’s surviving monstrosities, no doubt. Speaking of which, he recognized the hand that held him as belonging to the ballerina. He looked up, and it was her all right, only with a little too much intelligence behind the eyes.

  Ah yes. Things had changed.

  Oh dear.

  Behind him a third individual wove delicate fingers through Felix’s dark hair, tracing pleasurably along his scalp. And then they found purchase.

  His head angled back, not too hard, Felix beheld young eyes lit old as its master. Hope leaned a fraction closer, sniffed a morsel of air, leaned back a fraction, and told him: “I know what you’re made of.”

  Her one hand was silver, the other ringed with mercury; her hair as fire of unnatural hue. Eyes beheld him like stars, wet and dark and mythological.

  Felix took one last look at the instrument at his fingertips, and smiled apologetically. “I am what I am.”

  “You are undone.”

  Walter was flat and dry as paper. His bones were dust and honeycomb. What came next lay waiting.

  Hands gently turned him over, feeling like a memory of feeling. Fingers smoothed the hairless skin of his long brow. His head was a roadkill skull. He was close to home now.

  “Wake up for me, Walter.”

  There was music: singing, high and soft.

  Wally opened his eyes, beheld her face through a cataract fog. The hand with which she stroked his head was cool and shining. It sang. Her chest was a mass of starlight.

  “It’s us…,” he said. “Look at us.”

  Hope nodded. “It’s us, Walter. We’re almost done.”

  “Good.”

  “Tub is here. He will tend to you. You need to remain with us just a little while longer.”

  “All right.”

  Hope gently lowered Walter’s head to the ground, a torn-down veil for a pillow. She got to her feet and walked over to where Henry sat, the Unblade protruding downward from just beneath his sternum, where she had left it.

  She got down on her haunches and said his name. Henry lifted his chin from his shoulder and looked her in the eye. “You’re here,” he murmured. “Wally’s not looking so good.”

  “We’ll be fine.” As she spoke she could see Henry’s condition improving. Being close to the tools again breathed life into him. “I need to take this,” she said.

  Henry nodded. “Yeah. I guess you do.” He took the Unblade in hand, and swiftly pulled—said “ah” like a man settling into a soft bed—and handed it to her. As he did his gloved hand trembled a little.

  Hope curled her fingers about the instrument, held it, and settled it among its kin.

  Henry looked about the cold, airy place he had called home for so long. “Can I ask you something? I figure you’re in a position to know.”

  “Yes?”

  “All that stuff I was told, about God and Samael and all of that. What’s the truth of it?”

  “Well,” Hope began…and then thought better of it. Instead she leaned in and said, “Here.” Hope raised her silver-taloned hand and made a pistolfinger between them, with the barrel pointed at Henry’s head. She lowered her forehead onto the thumb-spike and gently slid her finger in between Henry’s eyes. “See for yourself.”

  Henry didn’t struggle or flinch, only closed his eyes.

  And all his answers came at once.

  The doctor gasped a lifetime’s worth, eyes wide—blue—mouth agog. Breath coming in hard little gasps; tiny, shocked sips. Hands were claws, digging ten trenches to twin points.

  Eyes wide on Hope’s knuckles before his face, but seeing somewhere else entirely, he slowly relaxed. Shoulders lowered. Breathing resumed.

  Hope opened her eyes, slid her forehead from atop her thumb, and removed the ’scope from Henry’s mind.

  She lowered her hand to her lap and looked at his face.

  Henry’s mind and sight were still in that other place. Seeing him like this, Hope could almost see the man he must have once been: lean-faced, hard-eyed, and passionate to distraction. This was a good way to leave him. He closed his eyes, held it all for a moment, like praying, then opened them.

  “That’s pretty good,” he said, and left it at that.

  “Will you be all right?” Hope said. “You can’t go until we do, and Walter doesn’t have long.”

  Henry hitched one corner of his mouth. “You go on now.”

  Hope said yes with her eyes and got to her feet.

  She turned back to Walter and Nimble and Tub. In a minute or two her brother would be nothing but bones. She crouched and lifted him effortlessly. The wolf was gone. She was holding a child. “Tub…”

  The little ogre flexed his fingers around Nimble’s.

  “It’s all right,” the ballerina said. “You’d best hurry up.”

  “It was nice to meet you,” Tub said. “Tell Wally I said good luck.”

  Hope nodded, held her brother tight. So long for this.

  And they were gone.

  In the moments before Hope left, Henry closed his coat about his legs, got to his feet, and sat himself down on the slab. For the first time in a century he wished he had a drink.

  Nimble was there, holding hands with a squat little guy. Henry remembered him from the contexts and imprints and loves he had taken from her decades ago. Couldn’t remember his name.

  Hope disappeared, carrying her brother, and the speed of Henry’s own vanishing surprised even him.

  “Hey,” he said, barely loud enough to get their attention. Nimble and her friend turned their faces to him. “Listen…” The world was fading. His soul rushed to catch its closing eye. “You see her again…”

  “Yes…?” the little guy said.

  “Tell her to shut this place down.”

  Hope stood in a vaulted circular chamber, beneath a dome of green glass, between wide rows of high bookshelves. It was night. She held Walter close in the seconds he had left, and breathed her last.

  The Anxietoscope lunged through her forehead up to the wrist and kept on going. Hope told it to feed on everything, everything it could get, and to not stop. It took her entire being into itself in a second…until all that remained was Hope’s experience of being consumed, and the ’scope consumed that, until all that remained was Hope’s experience of being consumed, and the ’scope consumed that, until all that remained…

  She and it became both the trawler and the trawled, drawing from her own mind and feeding it back in a never-ending cycle spiraling inward, self-consuming, imploding.

  Her body buckled abruptly in on itself, enclosing Walter as she held him close, devouring, twisting like a plastic doll in a bonfire. Hope crashed and spun in on herself, an envelope for her brother and the
instruments of angel bone, and in a split moment they had—sister, brother, bones—coiled away to absolutely nothing.

  They were gone.

  The process didn’t stop there.

  The dome blows out as books turn to birds, and every moment collides at once.

  Tomorrow morning a young man wakes with a sore jaw and finds a limited-edition trading card propped on his bedside table.

  Victoria Witherspoon wakes beneath a black-and-silver print of a leopard. Somehow she knows that, in the next room, her son has died. She lies there, pressed down by an impossible weight of grief…but feeling it.

  Across the world a ballerina sits by a brown river, hands clasped at her waist. In the water a rotund little ogre blows fountains as he drifts slowly counterclockwise downstream.

  Lost somewhere in a London cemetery is the grave of a small girl. For the first time in a century and a half, fresh roses have been laid upon it.

  There is a many-roomed place that shares a wall with yours. A thin man sits slumped upon a slab of earth, palms up, chin on his chest. He is veiled by slow gossamer. Within his coat, stars no longer shine.

  In 1840 a redheaded man and a beautiful woman share an apple on Boston’s Smoker’s Common.

  When no one is looking, they kiss.

  Somewhere beyond time a creature of impossible beauty stands, watching, stroking a glass-eyed leopard upon a bed of tulips.

  Through it all she hears the Angel.

  She is all that remains in the world that knows of its existence. Without her, it does not.

  She ensures it sees all she has just seen.

  She ensures it feels all that she has just felt.

  She ensures it knows this has been the last meal it will ever receive.

  Without her it will never be free.

  The flesh of her fingers tapers to silver.

  Every sound in her new ears forms but one word. The Angel’s voice says,