The Music of Razors

by Cameron Rogers

  “What. Did you do. With her.”

  Dorian wasn’t saying anything. He was looking into Henry’s rheumy eyes knowing that there was no way Henry could win this, and it was amusing him, despite the pain. He started using sign language and mouthing words, but the faltering smile and the need to laugh kept interfering. He was making slashing motions across his throat. Henry held on for another few seconds, then let go.

  Henry stood back, feeling equal parts foolish and furious. It amounted to powerlessness. It felt like old times.

  Dorian gasped and dry-retched. It wasn’t an entirely human sound. Henry felt nothing for his discomfort, watching Dorian lurch purple-faced over the end of the bed, as if the solution to his breathing problem were somewhere on the floor and he needed to find it fast.

  It took a minute, then Dorian rolled onto his back, head off the edge of the bed, face to the ceiling. He laughed a little, eyes streaming. “Been…waiting ten years for that…I’ll bet.”

  “What did you do with her?”

  Dorian sat up, coughing still, holding his throat. “I liked Finella,” he rasped. “I really did. More spine than Dysart and Jukes put together. He’s the one who spoke to the authorities in the end, you know. Jukes.”

  Henry moved toward him.

  “Yes, yes.” The Englishman sat up impatiently, ran a hand through his tousled hair. “Sit down.” He coughed a few times.

  Henry remained standing.

  “Sit. It’ll take some explaining.”

  Slowly, patiently, Henry took his seat.

  Dorian sighed, heavily. “This…this has weighed on me for some time, my friend. I’m…I’m glad we’ve got this chance to—”

  “Get to it.”

  “It always bothered me that you never knew we were fucking.”

  Henry had decided on this before entering the room. He produced it, placed it on the table. A scalpel of polished surgical steel.

  Dorian considered it for a moment, feeling his pocket for another cigarillo—apparently weighing his limited options—and found his pocket empty. Dorian took his eyes from the instrument, raising his hands resignedly. “We weren’t fucking.”

  Caramel hair came to him. The paleness of her forehead, the shape of an ear…and then…nothing. She left. Retreated once more. Henry smiled at the vanishing, felt his eyes burn.

  “I know,” he murmured, but not to the man across from him.

  It didn’t matter. There were only a few moves waiting to be played out, and the ending was a foregone conclusion. But he needed to hear Dorian say it. There were words without which he could do nothing.

  Henry stood and, in passing, took the scalpel from the desk.

  Dorian sighed sadly, his eyes back to the ceiling. “I found it, you know.” His gaze lolled over. “What I was looking for. If you knew what it was you’d see it was all worth it. That a hundred times what we paid was worth it.”

  There was something to Dorian then. The mask, the costume, the perfume of the character he played were gone. Henry had never seen that before.

  “What did you find?”

  Dorian shook his head. “Not after all I’ve done. I’m not giving it away. It’s mine.” He looked at Henry without turning his head. “I was a fool to continue traveling alone. You’d never have been able to do this otherwise.” He swallowed. “You can’t kill me here. You’ll destroy far more than the man sitting before you.”

  Henry closed his eyes. Opened them. “What did you do with her.”

  “I’ve a daughter, you know.”

  “What…”

  Dorian struggled forward, stood up, red-faced. The smallness of the room, the proximity of bed and desk, brought them toe-to-toe. “To hell with Finella! This is more important than bloody fucking Finella!”

  Henry pushed gently, and Dorian sat back on the bed. “Does it have a name, this thing you found?”

  Dorian surprised Henry by suddenly laughing, loud and shrill. And then, just as quickly, “No! It has nothing! That’s why it was so bloody hard to find, Henry!”

  “That’s why she died.”

  Dorian shook his head. “The redheaded farm boy I knew in Boston wouldn’t have done this. Where’s the quiet old Henry I used to know, eh?” Dorian closed his eyes then, slumped into himself. Let out one heavy breath as if realizing a sudden truth. Looked as if he might weep with exhaustion. “God’s wounds…this is why it stopped speaking to me. You were coming.”

  “Open your suitcase.”

  Dorian balked. “Look—”

  “Open your suitcase, Dorian.”

  Dorian would have felt something, slight impact perhaps. Blood was in his eyes before he felt the sting. The scalpel opened a gash just above his left eyebrow. He shouted, recoiled, palming his face, hands coming away bloody. Henry had a knee on his chest before Dorian could call for help, pinning the Englishman to the bed, helpless as a moth.

  Henry’s tone was matter-of-fact. “This is a small town, Dorian. There’s no sheriff, no marshal, no judge, and we’re all friends.”

  Dorian looked up, wet red hands gripping Henry’s knee, blinking furiously as blood sheeted relentlessly into his left eye. He nodded.

  Henry stood back. Dorian took a second to wipe his face and eyes, put a hand to the cut, then reached down to retrieve the case. He paused, meeting Henry’s eye, an appeal to reason.

  “Look…”

  “Open it.”

  It was held together by a great leather belt. Unfastening the brass buckle, Dorian slid it off, lifted the lid. Inside was a change of clothes, a book, shaving kit, drawstring bag.

  “Satisfied?”

  “Take out the shirts.”

  Reluctantly, and with new heaviness, Dorian reached over and removed the clothes. Lying beneath was a wide leather-bound journal. Fastened to it in leather slips lay what Henry had expected, yet somehow couldn’t accept. There lay three artifacts, radiating more light than they received. Like the one inside Felix. Dorian took a handkerchief from the top of the pile, pressed it to his forehead. Henry noticed a little blood had fallen to the sheets. That would have to be taken care of.

  He put the scalpel back inside his coat. “What did you do with her?”

  “We had to get away. We wouldn’t be here now if it hadn’t been done.”

  Henry waited.

  “It bought us time!”

  Henry delivered his final line. “What did?”

  The Englishman looked to the ceiling. It seemed to open the passage of his throat, let out all the air he contained. His voice was distant, tired, sad.

  Dorian swallowed, voice damp. “I took her head. You know that.”

  To Henry it felt as if he were inside his own chest, looking up at the vaulted proscenium of ribs and sternum, and—as though breath were leaving him forever—watching it all collapse.

  Dorian raised his eyes, closed them, and lowered his face into his hands.

  And there she was, standing amid it all, clear as the day they had first met.

  Felix stood by the desk, looking at the body. Henry had closed the eyes, cleaned the blood from Dorian’s face, arranged him with a little dignity.

  “How did you do it?”

  “Strangled him. I think.”

  “You saw the instruments?”

  Henry nodded.

  “He was a bad man, Doctor.”

  “I’m going to read his journals.”

  Felix surveyed the contents of the suitcase, licked his lips. “I do not advise it.”

  Henry smiled, half to himself. “Figure there’s nothing to lose.”

  “You have your life.”

  “Like I said.” Outside the window the sky was lightening. “Everything that’s gone before ties up here. It isn’t much of a life as it is. The least I can do is find out what it was traded for.”

  Again Felix looked at the three instruments. “There are more,” he said. “More tools. Not here. He…kept them elsewhere. He had servants to retrieve them, as needed.”

  H
enry plucked what associations he could from memory. He remembered a leopard asleep on a circle of fresh green grass. The stench of tulips and roses. He remembered Dorian crying out the six names of God. “The Fallen?”

  Felix shook his head. “No. He was never that strong. These are servants he made himself—” I was a fool to continue traveling alone, he’d said. “—with those instruments, and others like them.” Their light was mesmerizing.

  Henry considered his options. Then: “We need to get him out of here.”

  “The owner is downstairs.”

  With the coming of dawn the night remained still. Henry watched a stray coyote trip curiously down the center of the street, lean and grayish and canny. It looked back over its shoulder once, and was gone. Disappeared beyond the open window.

  As would Dorian.

  Dorian had been raised as a child-medium by a very traditional Polish mother. His birth name had been Johannes Paole. He had never known childhood. He had remained within the four walls of the family home until he had reached puberty, and become valueless as an oracle. The manner of Dorian’s death filled Henry with sadness.

  The one inescapable impression Dorian had formed during a childhood of constant isolation and fractured schooling had been this: that something was wrong. That there was an indefinable gap in the weave of history and theology. Something was missing.

  Years later in Mexico he had formed a new cabal and perceived that absence, that tear in theology, provided context for the nonexistent and pulled something into being.

  Seventy-two angels fell with Samael…

  As an angel is created it is gifted a function, portfolio, responsibilities. The angel charged with the assigning of power and function was a powerful angel indeed…

  Henry stopped reading. Dawn was approaching. The cabin was filled with the reek of burning lantern oil. Felix was on his bunk, as usual, watching him over hugged knees, waiting for him to finish. His angular face and hawkish eyes gave him an eternal air of pensiveness, of waiting for something to happen.

  “You were part of this cadre?” Henry asked.

  Felix nodded.

  “Yes.”

  Henry swallowed. “Get me some water, would you?”

  Felix got up and retrieved the pitcher from near the potbellied stove. He filled a steel tankard and brought it to Henry’s desk.

  “Thank you.” Henry drank quietly. When he stopped he pursed his lips, licked them. “What did it look like, the angel?”

  “It has no appearance,” the Frenchman said. “An angel does not die, oui? It is eternal, an aspect of Godhead. But this angel, you see, was very, very close to killed, yes? As it is possible to make. Everything was taken from it: name, sigil, responsibilities, power, form…even the knowing of its existence was taken away. It had not been thought of since before the Earth was new.”

  Henry held up a cautious hand. “Then how did Dorian find this thing?”

  “The journal tells you, Docteur. The angel is all but destroyed, but it is not destroyed, yes? It has almost no ability, yet some ability remains. It could not make itself known or remembered. But it did so. Very slowly, over years, it nurtures a small suspicion in the mind of one boy, a boy used as an oracle, yes? By his mother and her clients. A boy who has no contact with other people; a boy whose mind had been turned inside out, to things abstract, intuitive…occult. All this and nothing else.”

  “Dorian.”

  “Of course.”

  “How did he manage it?”

  “He was mad. He followed trails that do not exist, still do not exist, but exist for him. In much the same way as he heard the angel’s voice from the moment of his discovering it to you squeezing the last breath from him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Dorian heard the angel’s voice in many things. As you hear my voice now, telling you this, the rise and fall of my words, pauses, rhythm, you yourself pluck meaning from this stream of sound according to what you have been taught as language. You decide where each word begins and ends and what those words mean.”

  “And Dorian no longer did?”

  “Of course he did, but the angel taught him a different understanding also. As a child sees shapes in clouds the angel made Dorian hear words in sounds, yes? All sound. Where you hear a bird, Dorian would notice a single note above all others, as he would with a stone tossed into the brook, or new shoes clicking as you walk. And many notes make words, sentences, orders.”

  “Christ Almighty.”

  “Where you, Docteur, are entranced by an orchestra in flight, Dorian heard only panic. Imploration. Rage. Madness.”

  Far beyond the propped-open windows of Henry’s crude, functional little habitation, the dogs had begun to sing.

  “So that’s how he knew where to find those tools.”

  “The angel led him to them. He was to use them to help the angel escape its sentence. To become whole, to become real… They are very powerful, these things. They change life, souls.”

  “Did Dorian ever…?”

  “Oh yes. Oh yes, m’sieur. Dorian changed lives…and souls. At the angel’s instruction.”

  “Can they create life?”

  “Non. Only change it. Life is not created, life simply is.”

  “So he never…saved the angel.”

  “No. He listened to it, learned from it. And then, after a time, ignored it. And then his friends began to die.”

  “How?”

  Felix shrugged. “The last one fell under a streetcar in San Francisco. One before that was shot by a jealous lover. One before that choked on a crust.”

  Henry considered that.

  “They were not accidents, m’sieur.”

  “You told me the angel was powerless.”

  “And then Dorian discovered the angel. Acknowledged it, yes? As did those friends who survived the learning of it. For each person who knew of it, the angel gained a tiny bit of power. Très petit, yes? Very small. It could affect only the smallest of small things. But it is crafty. Perhaps your killing Dorian was what the angel desired.”

  “I killed him because he needed killing.”

  “As you say. And yet, perhaps it is you the instruments are intended for, non? You, who desired greatness so much you killed for it.”

  Outside the cabin the sound of coyotes was distant and shrill. The lamp was sputtering, dying, and would need a refill. Henry’s vision was beginning to slide out of track with his head. He needed sleep. The glassless windows had swing-down shutters held up with a plank, and through them the first weak glow of sunrise was filtering over the hills.

  The cry of the song dogs, as always, gave Henry the impression of a warning cried in an unknowable language to the whole of the world. Of a vital knowledge every animal had been born with, and spent every night of its life trying vainly to communicate.

  Looking to his left, at what sat on the floor, Henry thought he might finally have understood what it was they were trying to say.

  In the failing lamplight, peering through lidless eyes, Felix shifted on its myriad hands and feet.

  Henry snatched the revolver from under the table and swung the barrel toward the staring face.

  “You’re perfect,” it said.

  “I am the first thing he made,” Felix said. Henry aimed his pistol toward the sound, targeted a shelf, cans. A sound of feet like rainfall. From somewhere else: “According to the angel’s instructions.” The lamp had died; everything was darkness hinted with rose. The coyotes still sang. “He made me from one of his own. Body and thought all changed to make me.” Feet, like five dogs scratching. The pistol swept, stared at corners, the ceiling. Henry got tired of playing the patsy. Lowered it altogether. “His friend was re-formed into a new mental, physical, and spiritual configuration…”

  Scuttling, scuttling. Silence.

  “To the angel’s specifications, that is how he made me.”

  “And you turned on him.”

  Felix crouched on the dirt floor, the r
ising sun lighting its bald, white head with a bloody corona. Eyes like oysters, mouth like a doll’s. “I never side with him. Never. I am my maker’s creation. The angel…it knew Dorian’s allegiance was only to himself. It is not stupid. The angel knows that outlook only too well, oui?” A crown of hands toyed with itself about that pallid head. An inverted crown of feet shuffled. “And while we are speaking of allegiances, I wish to secure yours.”

  It is endings that are remembered. Beginnings, not so much. Endings are the thing: Romeo dies. Rome burns. The Devil falls.

  “Who are you, Felix?”

  “You are strong, and yet you are weak. You drink. You have allowed yourself to become trapped and complacent. You require direction. I am a finder of the required. My creator requires a mind that is strong with a will that is broken. My name is not Felix, and you are appropriate.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to listen as Dorian listened. Be silent, and hear.”

  This was the thing for which Finella had died.

  Henry looked over his shoulder, at the table, to the papers and the journal and the dead candle.

  In the brightening room those instruments glowed.

  Those who should be dead will walk on my account.

  The song dogs howled.

  “These don’t give life,” Henry said.

  “Non, m’sieur. Only alter it.”

  And then he was in the presence of the angel. And the angel wove words from the dogs’ song, the walls’ creak, and Henry’s breath…and it offered.

  In the brightening room those instruments glowed like only hope and moonlight can.

  Choose, the angel howled, creaked, breathed.

  Henry turned away from Felix, carefully lowered a loving finger, and traced a delicate line down the nubbled, twisted length of a piece of shining angel bone. It sang faintly at his touch. Like happiness, almost. Like a loved one.

  “You cannot bring her back, my friend.”

  Henry let the touch linger for a moment, then withdrew and placed his hands into his pockets. He nodded to himself. “Maybe not,” he softly said. “Maybe not.”

  He stood like that for a long time.

  Her face came to him, laughing through a memory of candlelight.