The Music of Razors (10 page)

“It was,” she says. “You are a remarkable person, Tub.”

And then his face feels the same way. “I…I have to get something. For Dorian.” He waddles over to one of the cold torches and lifts it from its bracket. He lights it on one of the burning ones. The pitch catches with a plume and crackle.

“Where are you off to now,” she asks, delicately.

“China,” Tub tells her. “But first I have to go to New York.”

“Millicent is at work now,” Nimble says. “But perhaps you would like to visit her with me? Later on?”

Tub smiles and looks down. “I would.”

“I look forward to it then,” Nimble says.

“All right,” Tub says. “’Bye, Nimble.”

“Good-bye, Tub.”

And then he is somewhere else.

The bank vault is very dark, and far colder than the Drop or Manaus. The walls and floor are chilly, and painted thickly with white. The torch blinds Tub to everything beyond the light it gives off. He raises it as high as he can, gets close to all the bags stored on all the steel and wire shelves.

“Mexican Eagles…,” he says to himself. “Mexican Eagles…”

After a few minutes he finds a white sack with the right symbol, and pulls the drawstring open. Inside are fat silver coins. Tub takes a handful, and then he is back in the Drop. He enters elsewhere, away from Nimble. He doesn’t know what he would say to her a second time.

“Tonight, though.” He nods to himself, resolute.

And then he is somewhere else.

The rain is coming down hard, clattering off the roof, sounding like an army beating bamboo; like an ocean’s worth is battering the small U-shaped house Tub has found himself in. No one is in the room. There is a little wooden table here that only comes up to Tub’s knees. On the table is a heavy bell with a leaden knocker resting beside it. Outside, the ground is being churned to dancing mud. The trees bow and bob under the weight of the downpour. Tub can feel the rain misting in through the open door, the slatted windows. Tub takes Dorian’s note, and the handful of Mexican Eagles, and places them on the little table. Then he picks up the bell and bangs it as hard as he can. There is an exclamation from another part of the house. Tub hears footsteps, and then someone must have looked into the room because suddenly he is back in the Drop.

“Hello again, Tub. That was quick.” Nimble has put her book aside. She stands primly, feet together, hands clasped at her waist. Her head seems to float there, in space, atop the ornate scaffolding of her body, and again Tub feels himself suffuse with her presence. He burns up from within, brain split into fourths and each quarter arguing with the others about what to say to this vision before him.

“It wasn’t a big job,” he says. “I’ll have to go back in a minute.” He realizes he is still holding the bell and knocker.

“An arrangement of Mr. Athelstane’s?”

Tub nods. “China,” he says. “It’s very pretty. You might like it there.”

“I’m sure I would.”

“It’s very pretty. But I spend more time in my river.”

“You live in a river?”

Tub nods. “I’m not so heavy there. And everyone knows me.”

“Other people live in your river?”

Tub nods. “Otters, birds, turtles…they all know me.”

Nimble’s head inclines curiously, and she steps toward him. “I would very much like to see your river. And China.”

Tub looks up at her, and his tiny eyes widen. They are blue.

Tub returns to Dorian. The Englishman is seated at the table against the stained wall, one hand propping his head, the other around a grimy little glass of something brown.

“You’re late,” he says.

“Sorry,” Tub says, fidgeting nervously. “But I couldn’t get back into Lei’s.”

Dorian sighs and downs the last dregs of his glass. “So he tried watching the room, then. Nosy bugger wants to know how I do it.”

“I got your things, though,” Tub says, and puts a little sack onto the table.

Dorian opens it, looks inside, licks his pinkie finger, and dips it in. He sucks the off-yellow powder from it, smacks his lips, and draws the bag shut again. “Too late,” he says, and gestures to the mattress in the far corner. Dorian’s lady friend is laid out there, face to the wall, snoring loudly. Dorian sighs again, and despondently waggles the empty bottle. There’s something left in there, so he necks it. “No noise at least.” He goes still now, and then eyes the bag. He undoes it and has another taste.

Tub wants to make Dorian smile, but is afraid that if he speaks Dorian will hear the other words among his own. So he keeps it short.

“I met Millicent, Dorian. Nimble took me with her. She’s very nice.”

Dorian sighs to himself and very slowly and deliberately presses his hands to his ears.

“Sorry,” Tub says. “Sorry.”

“Tub,” his creator says amicably, through clenched teeth. “Be a sport and get a few things for me, would you?”

Nimble has ventured to some green part of the world, and fetched for Millicent a basket of wildflowers. She sits upon the ground, arranging them, awaiting Millicent’s return from work, when Tub appears before her. The smile upon her face evaporates like mist on a bright morning.

“Oh, Tub, whatever’s wrong?”

Tub cannot look her in the face. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I…I told Dorian that we visited Millicent.”

Nimble stands and bends over him, placing her hands upon his heavy shoulders. The poor little thing is shaking. “Oh, Tub, can that be so very bad?”

Tub nods. “Dorian made me bring him some instruments…”

Nimble’s heart-box begins spinning faster. “Instruments?”

Tub nods. “He…he made sure I couldn’t ever speak of her to him again.” He jabs a thick finger against the side of his head, over and over again. “He made sure.”

Nimble says nothing, but seizes him in an instant, holds him close. “It’s all right,” she coos. “It’s all right now.” The top of his head is prickly against her cheek, and still Tub’s shoulders shudder.

“No,” he says. “No. It’s not all right. I’m sorry, Nimble. I’m sorry.”

Nimble raises her head.

Against the far wall, one shadow amid the stalactites’ shadows, Mr. Athelstane beckons to her with a curved finger. In his other hand is a piece of singing moonlight.

Clear water nudges the rushes. Tub is up to his broad waist in it, his jaw outthrust. A heron perches on his lower lip, dips its beak into his mouth, plucks out a struggling fish, and flaps away. Tub spits water sideways. “Do you think birds get cold,” Tub asks.

Nimble sits in the grass, beneath the broad shade of an old tree. Sunlight gleams amber upon her, here and there, as it falls through the branches.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I wouldn’t think so. They’re covered in feathers.”

“But birds are always covered in feathers.”

Nimble had knelt before Mister Athelstane, facing away, and felt dizzy as her creator mixed and messed within her head. When it was done there was no place in the same thought for Mr. Athelstane and talk of his daughter. She could no more grasp that notion than imagine an undiscovered color. And so it was with Tub, also.

Who is, at the moment, floating on his back and making quacking noises at a duck, turning clockwise as he slowly floats downstream.

It is at this moment that Nimble suspects she has a great deal more to learn about being alive.

Millicent stands alone in the sitting room, wearing a bonnet of black silk and a dress of black silk crêpe. Crêpe lisle—black—adorns her wrists. The leather furniture has been taken out and stored higgledy-piggledy in the kitchen. The sitting room is now packed with thick explosions of lilies and marigolds, stacked one atop the other, and multitudinous wreaths of the same. Atop those lies Papa’s coffin. On a small table by his head Mama has placed his wood plane and paint-brush. His shovel stands propped against the coffin at his feet.

Millicent sighs and fiddles with the crêpe at her wrists. “He was the only friend I had in this world,” she says. Mama is upstairs, and there is—can be—no one else in the house. Millicent feels Nimble take her hand, to a soft tune of hiss-and-click. Tub takes her other.

The years have seen Millicent grow, and she is almost a young lady. They still talk fancifully with one another, but lately Millicent has wanted to know more about the world beyond London. Nimble is resolved to show it to her, taking Millicent through the Drop if need be. In a year or two, she realizes, they will be looking at each other eye-to-eye.

“So this was Papa,” the ballerina says. “You were right, Millie. He has a lovely face.”

Millicent squeezes both their hands, draws them to her. “After the upset my growing up with two imaginary playmates has caused,” she confides. “If he is with us, then at this very moment Papa must be having the greatest laugh of his life.”

Silence. And then Tub sniggers and slaps a meaty hand over his mouth, and Nimble giggles and it’s on for young and old.

Millicent needs no encouragement. It is a fine farewell.

Words hide everywhere. Like battalions they arrange themselves into configurations of power and purpose. Cloaked in the world’s glossolalia they appear, only to you, and deliver their message.

Ceaselessly.

The sun rises, you obliterate your senses as best you are able, the sun sets, and you don’t stop.

This is life on the run from everything you’ve built.

Your compatriots are all dead. One by one they were felled; here by a bullet, there by a crust of bread, and another by an ill-timed streetcar. The finest willworkers you’ve ever known, comparable indeed to yourself, reduced to meat and mud and memory by the whim of the hidden, banished, monstrous Aeon to whom you provided context.

You are such a fool.

Its instruments are yours, or so you believed. Unlike anything you’ve ever known they embody a beauty so profound it renders you morose. And what they have gifted you with…oh. Built from the bones of a murdered angel they veritably tremble and scream with what they have been robbed of, and what they have been so forcibly granted. Even now, walking north, the few you have chosen to carry with you sing to one another, to themselves, to Itself…a mad, butchered thing gifted with only slightly less power than God and too will-stripped to use it. Broken into pieces, the unifying aspect of their—Its—power is you. And what a life you thought you would be leading as a result.

Raised in a stone room, lightless and locked, brought out only to be smoked and gassed and prodded to provide prophecy for an endless parade of bankers and fishmongers and hags by a loveless mother with eyes of stone and breath that filtered through the shattered rubble of her mouth…you were one day given an inkling intended for you and you alone.

Something needed help. Something so very much stronger than Mother.

So one day you told her where fortune lay, and that special lie set you free…just as surely as it led her to a man with broken hands and the bottom of a very, very deep river.

It took four days for someone to find you. Mother kept you half starved at all times—it made the visions come stronger—and so by the time the cellar door unlocked you were all but dead.

But never once did you doubt that it would unlock.

A day of bed and broth and you were off. A mix of feral cunning and foreknowledge kept you safe and fed…but only just. In time, as you grew and your body changed, the visions faded and fled…but not what you had learned about people and their needs.

Living wasn’t high, but it was easy. You worked and buggered and stole, you wove lies as gifts for the moneyed in need, and every remaining hour was spent in the company of cracked souls as deviant as you but far less gifted. You never stopped searching, never stopped looking, never stopped feeling for pieces of life that felt right.

Something was lost though it stood right there…before you…a part of all things…but no one could see it. Not even you.

How was that possible?

From groups to covens to frauds and back you ricocheted, looking not for truth but for a small piece of it. A hint, a flavor, an intuition.

Doors were opened, chances made available, words whispered to you, and you traveled to America.