The Music of Razors (26 page)

SEVENTEEN

WALLY

S
UNI LIVED AT THE BASE OF A LARGE HILL, ATOP WHICH
was a rock quarry. Some nights, when he really wanted to be alone, he would climb out the window and walk through empty lamplit streets, past green lawns and fragrant trees. He’d jump the padlocked boom gate that stood in the thin, dark space between two regal-looking homes—an obstacle ineffectual against anything on two legs—and follow the twin runnels of the truck track up to the quarry. Grass, tall and colorless, stood between the dry brown trenches dug by the daily armies of rolling tires. It rasped uncomfortably against exposed skin and left seeds in any material it touched, so Suni habitually kept his feet to the brown gutters of the tracks on the nights he walked up here. Mosquitoes liked it up here, too. They buzzed his head, whining and spanging close to his ear. The trilling of frogs and toads rose from the taller grass that sprouted beside the wide track, taller than he was, and the sky lay dead clear between drifting archipelagoes of sodium-orange cloud, colored by the light of the city below. On the watery black horizon, marker buoys blinked slowly, endlessly, red and white and blue, while tall concrete pillars topped with bright spots of white light marked the safe corridor between submerged obstructions, out to deeper water less brown than what it was closer to shore.

Suni claimed his usual perch on a large boulder at the lip of the quarry, looking down the hillside and out over the city, watching the black and blinking horizon. On the Esplanade the rats would be out, perched on picnic tables, burrowing through bins overflowing with the bright dross and sodden crud from the strip of primary-colored franchise eateries that ran parallel to it. Big rats.

At this altitude there was a good breeze, and it felt vital and alive against his face. Something massive and hairy grabbed his face in one taloned paw and yanked him around. Suni stared at the thing, his eyes an inch from its hitch-lipped snout, his mouth and nostrils thick with the taste of its shag and the smell of its milk breath. It dragged Suni off the boulder, pulled him to his feet, and lifted him close so that all Suni saw were the two raw sockets where Walter once had eyes.

Daytime heat emanated from the road. The weight of the box pulled on Hope’s shoulders, making her uncomfortably aware that this is what the dark man would be coming for. She imagined the box radiating a heat of its own, a hot beacon that called to the man—the same man who asked for her at home, and who stood waiting outside her house as she left tonight.

The neighborhood was quiet, just like every night past ten. The time she usually loved—because it made her the sole occupant of a quiet and moodily lit world—had been turned against her. The night and the quiet isolated her now, separated her from the herd. She felt the presence of a new occupant in that world now, one she couldn’t see but one that could see
her.
Anyone else would have been torn between running home—because home was safe—or sleeping on the streets for fear of what might still be waiting
outside
that safe and familiar home. But home hadn’t been safe, or familiar, for a long time.

“I’ll save you the suspense.”

Hope stopped.

“Your friend not there?”

She turned around, shoe rubber crunching loose gravel. He was a good six feet and thin enough to be dead, long black coat hanging like a drape. Sparkles within, like the glimmer of the ’scope. More of them. More tools. More instruments.

He was so fucking close.

The sheer weight of his presence…the way she felt some magnetic core within herself drawn to him…to the glimmering shards within his coat. She felt as the ’scope felt, wanting to be with the rest of them there, in the dark. It was an intimacy, a yearning as if this were the only thing she had ever wanted.

The word caught in her throat, choking her, making her want to be sick. It struggled out, a wounded word. “Daddy?”

He shook his head, slow.

She nodded, stiffly. “Just checking.” Swallowed, thickly. “You’re that guy…in Suni’s painting.” She needed to be with those other points of light more than she needed a home, or a family, or a life. If she had them she wouldn’t need a life.

Wait.

Breath.

Tiger.

“He’s getting sick for what you took away,” the dark man said.

“Suni?”

It infiltrated her, this being’s presence; strength fled her and thoughts never lingered, only flashed. She stood immobile and voiceless, drinking in every detail of the figure before her so that in the years to come she could tell herself this hadn’t been a dream. If there were years to come.

“You want to hand it over?”

She wanted to reach out and take everything he had. As though from a faraway place, she heard herself say, “No.” Her hands left her pockets, one of them sheathed in silver. The dark man sighed, and his coat tinkled ever so slightly. A pretty sound that promised horror. If the Anxietoscope was one such tool, what must the others be like? What might they unleash?

“You don’t want to fight for it,” he said. “You don’t.”

“Because you’d kill me…” Her voice came out toneless. “I guess?” Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. No more dreams. No more living with the knowledge of what it was like to drive a knife into her father—the brief resistance of skin and rubbery organs. So easy. But then…no. There was more to life now. A reason to remain. The ’scope wanted to reach to its brothers and sisters.

“It’s not something you want. Your friend’s gonna die because of it.”

“Suni told me about Walter. About you, about how he wound up in Vancouver. I know my brother gave me this. You can have it once I get him back.”

Her silver hand itched.

“What you took from Suni doesn’t have a hold over him anymore. He’ll start finding other things don’t have a hold, either. When that happens things’ll start disappearing inside him. People’ll become less real to him, and before too long he’ll go crazy as a bug. Your friend’ll drive himself into the ground trying to find something to make himself feel again. Sooner or later they all do, and they all come to the same idea—that the only thing that might wake them up, the only thing they haven’t tried, is dying. If someone or something doesn’t kill them first.”

A snail of sweat inched its way down the ruckled furrow of Hope’s spine.

“Give me my brother and it’s yours.”

She could smell roses in her neighbors’ yard, lush and sweet.

“I can’t do that,” he said.

“Then we both go home disappointed.”

There was a thing—clawed, silver thing—on her hand.

She wanted to—it wanted to—reach into her head and reef out everything that was in there.

The dark man began moving forward.

The hand shot up, claws out. “Back off,” she stammered, blinking something from her eyes. Maybe she never would speak to Wally. Maybe she’d killed Suni, too…

“I got to take that back.” He kept coming, faster-paced now.

She dropped the claw-hand and brought up her other to fend him off. He swept it aside with one gloved fist, and as he did the ’scope hand shot up and out, straight for the dark man’s face, starving for whatever someone like that feared.

He blocked it with a smoothly countercycled forearm. A well-placed palm to the center of her chest sent Hope sprawling. The box punched painfully into her back. She yelped as she hit the gravel.

The execution of his defense concluded with his hands at his sides, coat swept back—starlight interior equally concealed and revealed. It was an automatic stance, and one he quickly relaxed from.

But she was on her back now, trapped awkwardly on her pack like an overturned tortoise, staring up at him.

His face was that of a young man grown impossibly old impossibly fast. Pale parchment skin sucked tight to the architecture of his skull, lips wasted to almost nothing, eyes lost in the shadows of sockets and hat. She felt a gentle magnetism in the ’scope, as if it found family in the things that hung, delicately chiming, within that black coat.

He had her now. She could roll, get to her feet and run, provided she got that far. But there was no point. He would take what he wanted, and Hope wondered if she would die. The song in the coat crescendoed—terrified, protesting—and the man hesitated. Stopped.

He was still looking down at her—a solid piece of shadow with an old and tragic face—when he slowly turned and walked away.

Inside his coat the little pieces of starlight sang as he went, a song of parting to the thing on her hand.

Walter had dragged Suni back home and Suni didn’t like it, but as long as no one was watching to disbelieve it, there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

Wally would still see Suni occasionally, but had given up trying to coerce Suni into babbling the truth to Hope. The world had names for people who talked to things other people couldn’t see, and Suni had enough problems without being locked up for his own good.

Wally had never physically threatened Suni into just telling Hope. Maybe that’s where he drew the line, Suni didn’t know.

When his mother appeared at the top of the steps and Wally’s hold had gone insubstantial, Suni had dropped like a rock and his mother had accused him of being drunk.

He went and took a shower. Wally was standing outside the curtain, eyeless and insistent.

“I stopped doing favors for you a long time ago,” Suni said, scrubbing his armpits.

“Look…”

“I lost my mother because of you, you know that?”

“Of course I know that, you never stop bringing it up. I’m sorry your mother is a superstitious woman, I’m sorry she thinks you’re some kind of aberration, and I’m sorry you wound up in fucking Vancouver. Now get out of the shower.”

“What happened to your eyes, anyway?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I already told Hope, you know. She knows.”

“You didn’t tell her much of anything, and certainly not enough to help her, and what you did say came about five years too late. I need to talk to her.”

“She’ll be fine.”

“She will not be fine. Get downstairs or I’ll break your hands.”

Crouching in the middle of the empty street, Hope plucked the ’scope from her hand by taking the forefinger barb between opposite thumb and finger, and drawing the whole thing off like a silk glove. It contracted back to a single mercurial thimble, and she replaced it inside the box. The insinuating voice began as soon as her hands made contact with the silver surface of the box, and this time she listened.

Anxietoscope. To be used in the direct examination of a subject’s fears. Investigative procedures supplement the fright evaluation of the subject, which is made from subject history and behavioral observation. The Anxietoscope allows core fears to be localized with exactitude and removed for closer study in order that a terror or ecstatic manifestation may be customized for maximum effect. This is extremely useful when a given subject appears resistant to the incredible through lack of belief. 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. It must be realized that some investigations, particularly those involving the temporary extraction of core fears, carry an intrinsic risk that must be balanced against the value of the information that can be obtained from them. For this reason it is vital that all subjects be placid and docile during the investigation and that all fears be returned to the subjects on completion of the investigation. The release of a subject, sans fears, instigates a degenerative cascade throughout the subject personality that will quickly foster sociopathic, suicidal, and potentially homicidal traits. No longer fearing one thing, subjects will quickly discover they lack aversions to related concerns, and so on. Subjects develop an intense craving for contrast that cannot be assuaged. This is a craving motivated not by fear, but by emotions such as boredom and apathy for everything thus far encountered. This condition engenders in subjects certain traits of the sociopath. Exhaustion of all possible routes for stimuli and contrast engenders the suicidal urge. Should a Maker deem that permanent and selective fear removal is appropriate, it is recommended that such action be compensated for—as much as is possible—via complementary procedures. As always, the Maker must undertake these procedures with a clear mind, the better to exert his will over that of the instruments.

And the box was quiet, the dying voice fading to a worming tickle in her ear. Weighing what she would do next, Hope opened the box, retrieved the ’scope, and slipped it into a side pocket on her puffer vest. She put the box into the pack minus its contents, and slung it onto her back.

For a moment she crouched there, listening to the night bugs. Then, seeing no alternative, Hope moved off at a steady jog toward Suni’s house.

“You know, I’m sorry if you feel I somehow betrayed you…”

“Please.”

“…but she was the best thing I had. A sister seemed a fair trade for a mother. If I’d told her…”

“Open the door.”

The thing with Wally was that as long as you could see him and accept his existence, you also gave him permission to interact with you. But even then he still couldn’t move anything for himself.

Suni pushed the door aside, one hand on the towel around his waist. Oolric watched Walter as he crossed the room, long since used to his presence. “If I’d told her I was in contact with her comatose brother, that the one thing that truly freaked her was standing right beside me…do you
really
think she’d have anything to do with me? I loved her.”

“This was never about
you.
There’s more at stake here than Suni crying for Mother. Get dressed.”

“She’s seen me naked before…”

“Get
dressed.
”

“…but you know that.” Suni took the towel off and finished drying his hair. “Did I also mention you’re the reason I’ve got no friends?”

Walter stood by the window, waiting.