The Music of Razors

by Cameron Rogers

  “I have never heard you laugh,” said a voice. It was then that Walter noticed the thing standing tall and monstrous in the shadows, away from the firelight. “I have only seen you tremble.”

  It was as tall and wide and as fierce as Walter remembered, but there was nothing so scary about it now.

  “Are you a monster?” Walter asked.

  “I am a monster,” it said, voice like grumbling thunder. “The monster that keeps the other monsters at bay. I am your first monster. And you sent me away.”

  “I did not mean to,” pleaded Walter, trying hard to see the thing inside the shadows. “The man told me…”

  “And you listened.” The monster’s voice was sad. It gave a great breath, stooped to walk on all fours like a man with very long arms, and loped into the light, claws clacking against the wooden floor, to be nearer the warmth of the burning dresses and socks. “He told you what he told you for his own gain.”

  “I’m sorry,” Walter said. “I did not know.”

  The thing gave out another long, sad breath. It made Walter think of a horse. Only, horses always seemed happy, but the thing looked at the fire and Walter saw tears had dampened down the gray-black fur beneath its burning eyes.

  “You want to go home,” it said.

  Walter nodded desperately. “I want to go home.”

  “Do you know what happens to someone who has no monster?” the monster asked.

  Walter shook his little head.

  “They fall asleep,” the monster said, “and they can’t get home. And sometimes the bad dreams get them.”

  “But you are my monster,” Walter said.

  The thing gave a slow shake of its great head. “No more.”

  Walter could see how sick it looked. How its great slabs of muscle had thinned, how its fur hung limply on its loosening skin, how its eyes did not gleam as ferociously as they once had.

  The thing’s elbow buckled, and it lurched. Walter rushed to its aid, little hands closing around its arm, trying to keep its great weight from crashing over.

  Close now, close enough for its great red eyes to fill Walter’s vision, the monster said, “All I have ever wanted was to guard you all of your life.”

  “Then guard me,” Walter pleaded. “Be my monster.”

  But its fur was falling away, and soon the floor of the room was like the floor of a barber’s—layered thick with gray-black fur. More of its muscle was slipping away. With a clatter the thing’s claws fell off entirely.

  “Who decides these things I do not know,” said the monster. “But I am not your monster anymore. It is not my place to protect you from the things outside the door.” And Walter could hear the things outside, leaping and laughing and—most of all—waiting. They would always wait, always wait for Walter.

  The monster was now only half the size it had been. “Only two things will save you.”

  “What are they?” Walter asked, all the time thinking, What will save you?

  It did not look quite so wolfish now, but it was still large. Its hands were long and thin, and its eyes were turning from red to deep yellow. “Always remember who you are…,” said the wolf-thing.

  “Goodness,” said Walter, with wonder. “You look just like…”

  “…and this.”

  With the last of its strength and a sudden sweeping-up the thing swallowed Walter whole.

  The man came into the closet a long time after the monster had swallowed Walter. None of the black giggling things came with him; he came alone. He had looked down at what was left of Walter and his monster, small and blond and shaking, and said:

  “I don’t wish you any harm.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am a doctor.”

  “I don’t understand what is happening,” the Walter-monster said, not entirely feeling as he used to. There were two parts to him now, trying to fit in with each other. Something older than recorded time. Something four and a half years old. Something precisely as old as human fear. Something small and confused. There was something he had to be. Something enormous inside his little chest was telling him things, telling him to shift the weight to the balls of his feet, to swing upward and bring three claws to rest inside the doctor’s heart. But the Walter-monster didn’t know why. He didn’t even have claws, he just wanted to go home…

  “I can help,” the doctor said. “I can teach you things.” He crouched and extended a hand. “If you like.”

  Walter had taken the proffered hand, because he couldn’t quite sort out who he was from who he had been, because he was afraid, and because he didn’t know what else to do.

  The doctor’s hand was thin inside the stiff leather of his glove, and his voice had the comforting rumble of something distant and massive and watchful.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Did you know only seventy-two angels fell with Samael?”

  “Per-kew-tay-nee-uss Fee-ding Gas-tross-toe-me…”

  Hope Witherspoon, age four and a half, had spent a lot of time remembering it right and learning to say it. It made her mother smile, sort of, only she just called it a PEG.

  “Why do we call it a PEG if the middle letter is really F?”

  Her mother told her it was just easier to remember that way.

  “Okay.”

  The PEG was a hole in Walter’s tummy. It was just above the…sigh-lass-tic bag his Number Twos went into. The PEG had a…a…sigh-lass-tic tube for squirting food into. Hope’s mother had to buy it from the hospital. They also got special medicine from the hospital, which stopped Walter getting sick from the tube his Number Ones came out of.

  While Hope’s mother fed Walter, she would softly sing a song to herself.

  You’ve got everything you want

  You don’t know what to keep

  The dreams you abuse

  As they rock you to sleep

  Swallowing the sense

  Just to stay here with me

  And knowing it’s you

  Patiently watching…

  It was a pretty song. Hope didn’t think Walter could hear it, though.

  The Number Two bag looked weird. Hope’s mother said that it was attached to a bit of Walter’s insides. That’s what that pale lump was—part of his insides poking out.

  And then she told Hope that it was time she learned how to do it herself, and unclipped the Number Two bag. It smelled bad. Her brother’s tummy reminded Hope of wobbly sausage.

  Hope screwed up her face and shook her head.

  Hope’s mother explained that both Mummy and Daddy worked very hard to keep Walter alive, and that they all had to do their part. So Hope said okay. But she didn’t really want to because Walter scared her, and her parents loved him more, and she wanted him to go away. And her mother said thank you, sweetie. From then on Hope would take the Number Two bag (trying not to breathe while she did it), seal it, and replace it with a fresh one. Every two days she would rub creams into Walter’s cool skin to stop him from getting sores. And every day she would walk past all those pictures of Walter hung in the hallway and every night she would sit at dinner and listen to her mother and her father talk about Walter, and nod as they told her what a perfect little boy he had been.

  Everyone gets a monster. Sometimes they are big, sometimes they are ugly, and sometimes they are nothing like that. But they all look like the one thing that scares you the most. And that is how it keeps your other nightmares away: it scares them, too.

  Everyone gets a monster.

  “The man told me to wish you away,” said Hope Witherspoon, trembling in her great wide bed, her thick blankets bunched in her little hands.

  “I know,” said the perfect little boy, smiling gently with bright wolf-teeth. “And that is why you mustn’t.”

  ONE

  BOSTON, 1840

  HENRY ROSE. THROUGH A THIN WINDOW THE DAY’S LAST light lit his face. Pale walls, too cold, strip of a bed. The framed needlepoint on the wall hand-stitched by the widow who ran the house was from the sec
ond book of Corinthians, chapter five, verse one: WE KNOW THAT IF OUR EARTHLY HOUSE OF THIS TABERNACLE WERE DISSOLVED, WE HAVE A BUILDING OF GOD, A HOUSE NOT MADE WITH HANDS, ETERNAL IN THE HEAVENS.

  Down the street a workhorse clipped its slow way home, hauling a canvas-sheeted wagon. Autumn had already dragged down summer. Three young boys smoked as they passed a rifle around, walking to some vacant lot. Shooting cats was big around here.

  Leaning upon the sill, Henry drew a deep breath from the Boston bay he could almost see, from the rank tide smell that drilled up between his eyes, from the cigarette between his hard lips. Sunlight glanced hot amber from the tiles on the roof opposite. In the street below a policeman walked along, twirling his truncheon like a caricature, and Henry took a slow step backward out of the light.

  It ages a man to live with the feeling of other people’s eyes at his back. No one’s a friend; everyone’s dangerous. A hall, an examination room, a coffeehouse is never entered without thinking about what to do should every exit be quietly barred by lawmen. This was the atmosphere in which Henry Lockrose—redheaded son of redheaded parents—undertook his studies at the Massachusetts Medical College of Harvard University in the year of 1840.

  A year, he told himself. Two semesters, three at the most. Then I’ll get apprenticed out to a practicing physician…someplace quiet where a reserved demeanor will be considered a good bedside manner. I will be completely goddamn unremarkable.

  Standing a head taller than most men and with hair of pale red, to never be remarked upon was all he could hope for.

  He remembered the night he had told his father his intentions. Silence had reigned at the dinner table. It was well made, sturdy, that table. Henry had helped build it when he was five or six, at his father’s workbench. The same place they repaired their tools, the same place they stored all they needed when they put the barn together, made harnesses or built wheelbarrows.

  The sun had set, and his mother had just lit the lamp. She was still standing there, bent over it, match extinguished, eyes flitting from father to son, waiting to see—afraid of—what the old man’s reaction would be. Old man hadn’t seen it coming, not in eighteen years.

  He had sunk his teeth into his pale corn, paused, spat out a small worm.

  Most nights Henry had looked to the mountains from their bare porch and smoked his clay pipe. That night his father had cuffed him across the back of the head, pitching him through the open door without breaking stride, and headed to his bed.

  And yet three years later here was Henry. An ugly world away, a beautiful world away. No dirt to work here, no long silences, just conversation between people unafraid to question and an odor that imposed itself like an unwashed drunk. At least, there certainly was this close to the river.

  He ground his cigarette on the sill. No more pipes for him, not here. Not till he could afford a real one. Besides, smoking was illegal in Boston ever since the fires, so everyone smoked cigarettes. Easier to hide.

  Downstairs, the porcelain clank of plates. Mrs. Brown would be ladling gravy over potatoes tumbled into an oven-warm bowl, and one of the other residents—a man Henry thought of as Newspaper Jack—would be dutifully ferrying them to a table set for seven people and one ghost.

  Henry blew smoke into the street, put on his coat, and left the room.

  The transient population of Mrs. Brown’s boardinghouse consisted mainly of wifeless amateur philosophers and worried artists. The building itself was as much an old woman as Mrs. Brown who ran it, full of creaks and stories and quiet music. The table was a portrait gallery. The tan-clad compulsive arranger was Newspaper Jack, while the damp-skinned aesthete to Henry’s right fiddled endlessly with cramped fingers and an air of ambient shame. These were the stalwarts, the ones who had resided beneath Mrs. Brown’s roof for more than a fortnight or two. The others were a hodgepodge of faces drawn and smiling, knuckles bony, and eyes dry with hope.

  Mrs. Brown herself radiated from the head of the table. She was a widow, her husband having been taken by tuberculosis some years earlier. It did not matter who you were: if you lived under her roof you were her responsibility. She had a range of opinions on a variety of subjects, and declared that if any lad under her roof wanted to smoke he could very well go ahead and do so, and any local ban on such a thing could go to blazes.

  The shameful aesthete received a late-night bowl of soup and a ready ear, the latter of which he never took advantage of. Newspaper Jack, well, he had become the measure of the day’s cycle at the boardinghouse. Mrs. Brown rose to let him from the house to collect his paper at precisely five thirty AM. She then assembled breakfast for her lodgers, and let Jack back in at precisely five fifty AM. So his habits—his midmorning stroll, his writing hour, his reading by the sun window, his disappearing for a few hours in the afternoon, his return for dinner—organized the flow by which the house operated. During it all he would meticulously, compulsively, and exhaustively regale anyone hapless enough to cross his path with every last detail of his day, down to their very reasons. The only person capable of getting Jack to put a sock in it was Mrs. Brown. Her oft-used delivery of “Jack…” routinely saved dinnertime for Henry.

  He wondered what would happen to the rhythm of the place once Jack got around to leaving. Possibly he never would of his own accord.

  Henry’s life had but one focus: school. Until a year ago life had been the field, family, and faith. He didn’t know the first thing about having friends the way people on the street had friends, the way people in clubs had friends…at most he had only ever nodded at the sons of other families. He knew even less about the opposite sex. The thought alone made him fold inward. Once their children had come of age, marriage was an arrangement negotiated between families. Thoughts of the flesh were a torturous disappointment at best, damnation at worst. No, if Henry wasn’t in class noting down a dissertation on one ailment or another he was in his room entering those notes cleanly into a separate journal or reading up on whatever topic was expected to come next. He retired after dinner for a single smoke at his window and to read five more pages before extinguishing the gas lamp. On occasions when he felt stretched with fatigue he would take himself out for a quick stroll by the Tremont Theatre, down Beacon Street, past the fine houses being built there and toward the water. He would keep his eyes on the pavement as he walked, hat low, thinking, alert for a discreet lane or doorway where he might be able to have a quick smoke. Partly Henry enjoyed the idea of getting away with it, and partly he resented being made to feel like a criminal for enjoying what had always been a right. And then he would remember that he was a criminal, and that strictly speaking he had no rights, and he would turn his thoughts to other matters.

  Most often he walked and thought through things medical, much as he’d done as a boy working the field. Sometimes he thought about the future. More often he thought about the past. Quite often, for this reason, Henry didn’t walk at all. In this way his days bled into one another.

  There was one among the residents of that place, a chestnut-haired Englishman—older or younger than himself, Henry could not say—always nattering to somebody. In the beginning the Englishman was just another face whom Henry made a point of ignoring, of brushing past on an almost daily basis in order to get to his room. Another set of eyes he steadfastly refused to make contact with.

  As the weeks passed, the Englishman gathered about him a cadre of friends. They would wait for him in the street: a keen young natterer, sharp and pale, often talking the ear off a ruddy-faced fobwatch of a man who bore it all with quiet sufferance. There was also a woman whom Henry assumed to be the fobwatch’s wife. She certainly seemed to have little time for the talker.

  “You don’t say much,” the Englishman commented across the emptying table one evening. “I find that fascinating. What’s your name?”

  Newspaper Jack leapt in. “His name’s Henry Lockrose and he’s from Vermont. He reads a great deal of medical texts, I’ve found, and…”

  In th
e kitchen Mrs. Brown pointedly cleared her throat. Jack fell silent, his chin hitting his chest.

  “Would you be good enough to help me with the dishes, Jack?”

  Jack’s chair squeaked and he was off.

  Henry stood from the table. “I apologize. I must return to my studies.”

  The Englishman remained seated. “Without discipline one is the prisoner of desire. Power to you, sir.”

  Henry nodded and took his plate to the kitchen.

  “One thing, if you have a moment.” The Englishman stood at the kitchen door, his empty plate still on the table. “My friends and I gather of an evening in a private room at the Coat and Arms on Franklin Street. One of us knows you from your classes, in fact. Perhaps you could find the time to join us one evening? You’ll find us erudite conversationalists, I’m sure.”

  Henry deposited his washed plate onto the steaming stack and slid past the Englishman.

  “Thanks,” he said. “But no thanks.”

  “I am Dorian Athelstane. Ask for me when you get there.”

  As a boy, Henry had never gotten enough from whatever homespun wisdom or sketchy history his mother could impart. His closest association with any kind of formalized instruction had been Sunday school. But not anymore. No more blue jean trousers for him. No more woolen broadcloth. Here men dressed like smokestacks, straight and dark and proud. This was the life for him. Attending the Massachusetts Medical College was the deepest drink of his life, and today their professor was well warmed to his subject.