Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Apocrypha
Prologue: My First Monster
1. Boston, 1840
2. London, 1847
3. Nowhere, 1850
THE MUSIC OF RAZORS
4. Nimble
5. Home
6. Stars
7. Lovely
8. Nabber
9. Waking
10. Anxietoscope
11. Bed
12. The Scheme of Things
13. Candlelight
14. Hungry
15. Better
16. Encounters
17. Wally
18. Tiger
19. Complementary Procedures
20. Changes
21. End
Epilogue: Later
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Advance Praise for the Music of Razors
Copyright
For Dmetri Kakmi and Barbara Welton, the godparents of this book, for Ronald Jones, and for Sarah Graves, who makes everything possible
Anyone alive is bait for demons.
—TERRY DOWLING
APOCRYPHA
SEVENTY-TWO ANGELS FELL WITH SAMAEL.
As an angel is created it is gifted a function, portfolio, responsibilities. The angel charged with assigning power and function was a powerful angel indeed. Now that it grasped the concept of “rebellion” it truly understood how much power it held. The Power to assign Power. In the wake of this revelation other ideas followed, other realizations. This angel was staggered by the sheer enormity of what it might possess and achieve.
Thus the angel sinned.
An angel does not die. Anticipating what might occur should its audience with the Fallen One go badly, the angel seized upon another of its kind, sundered it, and stole the silver of its bones.
From those bones the angel fashioned instruments approximating its own power. As the angel named them, they existed. Mercurial and undying, the living bone was bestowed with aspects of the angel’s own function. The function of assigning Form and Power. It then scattered these instruments across the Earth, a safeguard against the possibility of its own failure, and departed the presence of the God that had Created it.
The angel found Samael in His new Kingdom, and made the Fallen One an offer of allegiance. An offer to create an army more powerful than that of Heaven, to seize what they had lost.
Samael was Beauty. The angel could not look upon it. It was all it could do to remain upright and not fall to its knees, as did the seventy-two Fallen gathered around their Lord.
The angel remembered the time of Samael’s birth. A thousand others had been created to sing His hosannas. “It was your touch that awoke me. That awoke all of us,” the Fallen Prince said. The crouched and bowed murmured anew. “It was you who assigned me Lordship over the Earth. You who granted me each and every attribute that I possess. You who seated me at the left hand of Our Father.” The Son of Morning’s countenance was beatific, inscrutable, unbearably perfect. “Do you recall the circumstance of our Casting Down?” Around Him, the Fallen softly moaned.
The angel dared not speak.
“Earth was to be a Paradise, our Father had said. A perfect place for the continued evolution of Itself. As Lord of the Hierarchy, as Lord of the Earth, as the very extension of the Godhead that had created that planet as a growing place for Itself, it was I who contended that a Paradise would be anathema to Growth. Nothing would come from comfort, from bliss. There must be conflict, there must be combat, there must be contrast.
“I—Created for the voicing of just such an opinion—was denied. And that denial came in the form of our Casting Down.”
Again, the seventy-two assembled moaned. A sound mournful and strange, each utterance different from the others, born of the forms they had been cursed with.
“But there will be conflict. There will be combat. There will be growth. The time must come when the part of Godhead—the part of Ourself—that denied Myself is forced to reckon with that hypocrisy. It must see that hypocrisy has been Its undoing. That is the sole condition of victory I will accept. Triumph under any other circumstance is meaningless.
“And so to you. You who have turned away from the Force that created you, not by virtue of your function, as did I, but out of avarice. An infant would recognize within you a desire to do so again, to any Master who offered you succor. You have no place here.
“Begone.”
The angel found itself exiled from Heaven and exiled from Hell. It found itself in the Presence of God.
It looked into the Face of God, and was stripped.
It lost its name.
It lost its sigil.
It lost its rituals, its summonings.
It could no longer be spoken of within Heaven, nor within Hell, nor upon the Earth.
An angel does not die.
It simply would not Be.
This done, it was Forgotten.
It would spend eternity as unlimited potentiality without possibility of use.
While, outside its nowhere prison, the instruments it had fashioned from the living bone of its murdered sibling waited to be found. To be used. To unlock that cage.
PROLOGUE
MY FIRST MONSTER
WHILE RIDING HIS BIKE THAT AFTERNOON, WALTER HAD turned a corner very fast, and almost slid beneath the wheels of a passing milk truck. That was the moment Walter first realized that he could die. And this was the night the closet door first opened.
That’s not to say the closet door had never been opened before, but it is to say that it was the first time it had opened by itself.
Walter’s mother had tucked him into his great bed, for he was only four and a half years old, rubbed his chafed hands and skinned knees, and put his tiny hand on her swollen tummy. She told Walter he had to stay alive and out of trouble if he was going to be a big brother to his baby sister (who was arriving any day now). Then she had kissed his forehead and said good night, and walked to the door and turned off the light and said good night again. And then she shut the door behind her.
Walter was warm in his bed, piled high with goosedown comforters. Pale moonlight touched the room with silver. Silver on everything—on the books and the fire truck on the shelf, on the powder-white cotton of his comforters, on the shiny gilding of the white-and-blue wallpaper, on the model plane suspended from fishing line above his bed.
He was just beginning to slide into a dream about airplanes when he heard a snick. Opening his eyes, wondering what it could be, wondering if it was part of the dream, he looked down, down, down, over his comforter-covered toes to the closet next to the bedroom door. The closet was taller than his father—who was big and built houses and had taught Walter how to fold birds from pieces of paper—and wider than the toy chest at the foot of Walter’s bed. The closet door was slightly ajar, even though Walter’s mother had put his shoes away and closed it before she had said good night.
And there came a creak, as these things do, as the door slowly, slowly crept open. A black mouth. Walter imagined that if it opened too far it would suck him right in, right off his bed and into the blackness inside.
With equal parts panic and courage he threw off his comforters, scrambled over the end of his bed, almost tripping on the rail, stumbled across the room, and slammed the door shut with a bang! His little heart fluttered madly in his chest.
The house seemed so empty and so quiet as the sound faded from his ringing ears.
He crept back to bed, hoping the noise had not woken his parents (which it hadn’t), and he slept.
That night he dreamed of things that lived in the blackness and giggled. He was
staring down over his comforter-covered toes at the opening closet door, at the thousand thousand black tittering things that lived there.
“I’m afraid,” he said, because he was.
“You don’t have to be afraid, Walter,” said a dry voice he didn’t recognize. Walter saw that a tall man with hair of pale red stood between him and the closet. He was a strange-looking man with a wide hat and a dark coat that stretched down to the floor. His coat made a tinkling noise that Walter liked. Inside the dark coat Walter could see stars, blinking and shifting.
“But why?” Walter said in a tiny voice. “There’s one of me and a thousand thousand of them.” The gigglers kept giggling.
“This is only a bad dream,” said the man, “and in the morning you will awaken as you have done every morning for four and a half years.”
“A bad dream?” said Walter. “There are bad dreams?”
“Yes,” said the man. “And this is your first. But there are ways out of them, Walter.”
Then the gigglers crept forward, spreading from the closet like chuckling and guffawing black syrup.
Morning came and Walter woke from a dream in which his parents had become red worms and were trying to eat him, and then were torn to pieces by a monstrous thing with hot eyes and gleaming claws. Walter climbed out of his great bed, stepped into his slippers, and went downstairs. And oh, he was greatly relieved to find his mother making French toast in the morning light, and his father reading the paper, just as they had always done for the last four and a half years. Which for Walter was forever.
The next night Walter stared once more down to his comforter-covered toes, at the shut closet door, and waited for what lived inside. And sure enough, there came a snick. And, sure enough, the door began to creep wide open. But this time Walter could not move. This time he thought about the gigglers and how many thousand thousand of them there were, and about a room full of cold red wriggling things, each with the face of his mother or father, and he couldn’t move.
Walter saw two red eyes reading him from the closet.
But they’re not eyes, Walter thought, desperately. They’re just the sparkly things on the back of my bicycle helmet, hung in the closet and catching the moonlight.
Then, as if they had heard the thought, the eyes blinked. And Walter heard breathing. Slow, deep breathing. He pulled the comforter higher—too high—until his little feet poked out from beneath, cold and vulnerable and inviting.
The thing inside the closet reached out into Walter’s bedroom with one huge, shaggy paw. Peeking over his little hands, Walter saw that the paw was tipped with claws that glowed pale in the moonlight. The thing pulled itself a little farther into the light and Walter saw a great fanged snout beneath two burning eyes. He could hear the thing’s panting breath. He could smell its shaggy fur.
A monster, thought Walter, wide-eyed. My first monster.
“Let me tell you something about monsters…” It was the man again, in his long coat—maybe like a wise Chinese man, only Walter didn’t think he was Chinese. He stood beside the open door, leaning against the closet. He had dark eyes and looked like he knew a lot of things that Walter didn’t. “There’s nothing to it. Tell it to go away and it will.”
Walter never liked dogs. They were always so much bigger than him, so careless, so loud, with such big, wet mouths. Secretly he had been glad when their dog had died. It could have fit Walter’s entire head inside its jaws.
The boy pulled the comforter over his head as the thing in the closet took one heavy step into the room. From beneath his comforter, he saw his cold and bare little feet, and could see the thing’s shadow creep over them.
“Tell it to go away,” the man said again. “And it will…”
The thing’s breathing quickened. Walter wanted to tell it to go away, but all he could do was squeak.
“Tell it…”
The thing at the end of the bed roared so loudly Walter thought he would go deaf, and he decided that he must have fainted instead, because the next thing he knew it was morning.
At least, he thought—trying to look on the bright side—I didn’t have any bad dreams.
Walter didn’t see the man after that. He supposed the thing from the closet must have gotten him. But every night after that the closet still opened. And every night the thing would step out and stand at the foot of Walter’s bed. And every night Walter would hide beneath his comforter, his feet pulled to his chest, and shake till he slid into sleep.
With that monstrous thing standing, and standing, and staring.
Walter’s mother chided him for staying awake so late, for never wanting to go to bed when he was told. He would plead with his mother and father, tell them of the thing that stood at the foot of his bed every night—the thing with shaggy fur and red eyes and moonlight claws—and they would laugh and tell Walter how they both had a closet monster when they were his age. It happens to all boys and girls, they said. Four and a half years from now we’ll all be standing here listening to your baby sister saying exactly the same thing.
As always, they would send him to bed. His father made a bird out of orange paper and put it on the little bedside table where a glass of water sat, in case Walter got thirsty during the night. “This is a magic bird,” Walter’s father said. “And it will protect you during the night.” Walter said thank you, but he knew the paper bird was just a paper bird.
And as always, after they had tucked him in and wished him good dreams and turned out the light and closed the bedroom door, the closet would snick, and the door would open, and the shaggy paw would wrap around it. And the monster would step into the room on heavy feet and stand…and stand…and stand…and watch Walter all night long.
One night, after many nights had gone by like this, Walter thought of the old man and wondered about what he had said.
Could Walter really just tell the thing from the closet to go away and it would?
It took him many nights to raise the courage to lower the comforter and look at the thing. When he did, it was every bit as fierce and horrible as it ever was. It was so big that it stooped beneath the ceiling. The hair on its back and mane brushed against the plaster. Its wet snout bumped the model airplane that hung over Walter’s bed. The beast filled the room with a sodden musk like damp dogs. Its eyes were every bit as deep and red as Walter remembered. Its paws were half as large as all of Walter, and its claws were that size again.
And it was looking at him.
“G…,” said Walter, trembling. The thing’s brow creased.
“Go…,” said Walter. The thing made a hrrmph? sound, the way Walter’s old dog used to when it was confused.
“Go away,” Walter said, sitting up now. “Go away.”
The thing at the end of the bed did nothing for a long time but look down at Walter lying small in his great bed. Its great claws could have my head off in a second, Walter guessed. But then, as he looked up at it towering above him, its eyes no longer seemed quite so fierce, and its claws no longer seemed quite so long. If anything, Walter thought, it looked sad.
“Go away,” he shouted again. “Go away, go away, go away!”
The thing whined, just the way Walter’s horrible old dog used to, and opened its jaws (which no longer seemed quite so fanged), and it began to fade away. And as the thing at the end of the bed faded away, it spoke the way Walter imagined his old dog would have, if it could have spoken when it was sad…
“Love you…,” it said. And then it was gone.
And Walter wondered what he had done.
“Thank you, son,” said the man, suddenly back inside Walter’s room, standing before the opened closet door. The man’s coat tinkled delicately as he shifted, and Walter caught glimpses of something like starlight from within. “Nothing gets in my way more than a closet monster.”
And Walter saw the thousand thousand gigglers and heard their sniggering as the old man spread his arms, and they swarmed around him like a wall of wobbly black.
His father’s magic paper bird just sat there as the bad dreams began.
Little Walter didn’t wake up the next day, no matter how much his mother shook him. They took his temperature—he didn’t have a fever. They tested his pulse—nothing was wrong. They pried open his eyelids—his eyes stared. They shone a light into his pupils and nothing happened. Then Walter stopped breathing and they raced him to hospital.
Doctors came and went. No one knew how to wake him, not even doctors from America and England. No one could explain what had taken him. So they attached a bottle with a tube to Walter’s arm so he wouldn’t have to eat, and put another tube in through his nose to help him breathe, and they left him. And he stayed in that strange new bed, beneath thin, rough, white sheets, without his comforter, a long way from home. And his parents were very sad.
And Walter did not wake up.
He ran through a field of snapping flowers that bit at his ankles, taunted by a thousand thousand voices, all daring him to fall and be eaten.
“No!” Walter cried, tears threatening to spill out from behind his eyes. “I won’t fall! You won’t eat me!” Ahead, standing tall in the middle of the field that clacked with teeth, was the closet door. He raced toward it, wet choppers nipping at his heels. He flung the door open and heard the man calling his name from somewhere behind, but Walter could not see him.
Walter jumped inside and slammed the door shut.
The inside of the closet wasn’t dark, as Walter had expected. It was hung with his school uniforms, his shoes resting beneath them, all polished and waiting. His soccer jersey was here, and his bicycle helmet with the red shiny things on it. Piles of old Spider-Man comic books were stacked against the wooden wall, gone tumble-down from where he’d tossed them. Above his head was the shelf that held shoe boxes filled with plastic action men and aliens. But the closet was much deeper than it was supposed to be. He pushed aside the musty old jacket that he never wore—shirts and coats he didn’t recognize, and beyond them more. He moved farther inside, and the farther he went the fewer clothes there were. Finally he stepped into a room made of the same wood as his closet, with clothes for curtains hanging over windows that looked onto a forest of giant clothes racks and hat stands, all hung with every imaginable kind of garment. It seemed to stretch forever into an endless black. Inside the room there was a fireplace fueled with burning dresses and socks. Before the fireplace was a rug of fur coats. Little Walter laughed to see an old sofa upholstered in brightly striped and dotted boxer shorts.
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