The Music of Razors (17 page)

EIGHT

NABBER

O
H, HE WAS REALLY GOING TO GET IT THIS TIME.

“What do you mean you ‘lost your homework’?”

Suni’s teacher never liked him anyway. It wasn’t his fault his things kept disappearing. “It’s true,” he said. “I d…d…duh-did it l…luh-luh-last night, l…luh-luh-left it on my desk, woke up this muh-morning and it was gone.”

The class laughed, and Suni didn’t blame them. He lost things all the time, and his excuses sounded stupid even to his own ears. It was what he was best known for, aside from the stutter—but that only came out when he got excited or nervous. It was like a blockage in his throat he had to push and push past to get the words out.

His teacher looked down her nose at him. Suni was a small black-haired, half-Japanese boy, and he hated wearing his glasses. “You will do the assigned work over the weekend,” she said. “As well as a two-hundred-word explanation of just where it is you think these missing things of yours
go
when you’re not looking. Perhaps that will teach you to be more careful—or perhaps
do
the work in future.”

Two hundred words?
Was she
serious
?

Suni shuffled. “B-b-buh-but—”

“Sit down.”

“Yes, miss.”

The class was still getting a grin out of the show—except that Hope girl. She just looked at the rest of them and frowned to herself. Somehow it made him feel better. Behind Suni, his friend Kristian bopped him on the back of the head and chuckled, “Good one.”

Suni turned around. “It’s tuh-true. I did do the work. I put it on my desk last night.” Kristian didn’t believe him, either. “I’m
sure
I did,” Suni mumbled to himself.

“Sure, sure.”

“
Mister
Buckingham!” That was the teacher’s name for Kristian. “Would you be so kind as to stand up and tell the rest of the class what was so important that you couldn’t wait until after class?”

Suni watched Kristian stand and face the room. He cleared his throat, placed one hand on his chest as if about to recite Shakespeare, and said: “
What…
was
soooo
important…that
you
could
not
wait…”

Teacher folded her arms, unimpressed. “Yes, thank you, Mr. Buckingham.”

“Until!”

The class was laughing, and Suni knew there was no stopping him now.

“Kristian, that is enough!”

“…after class,” Kristian said quickly and sat down.

Quiet returned, and the class waited expectantly to see what would happen next.

“You may join your friend, Mr. Buckingham, in penning for me a two-hundred-word opus on the nature of comedy.” She returned to the blackboard, satisfied. “Enlighten me.”

“So can I borrow it?”

Suni knew what the answer was going to be. “You’ll lose it,” Kristian said.

“No I won’t. Honest.”

“Remember those shin pads I loaned you?”

Suni shifted a little. He knew Kristian was going to bring those up. “It wuh-wasn’t my fault,” Suni said. “I brought them home from the game. I duh-did. I put them in the closet.”

Kristian leaned back against the wall. They had about five minutes left before lunch was over. Then it was Maths. “Suni, you lose things. That’s just the way it is.”

Suni folded his arms. “I’m not going to lose your puh-precious card. I just want to draw the guy off it.”

“It’s a rare card,” Kristian said. “I might want to sell it someday.”

Kristian had a gold-embossed platinum-foil limited-edition trading card that did something in a game he collected. Suni didn’t know anything about the game, only that the card had a really cool picture of a guy in armor with a cannon for a hand. Suni drew all the time. It was what he did. Right now his biggest project was working on a picture of a little boy, sort of like him only blond, with red eyes and sharp teeth. And a clockwork ballerina. Suni didn’t know where he got the idea from, he had just woken one morning and the picture was right there in his head. It must have been something he had dreamed. But he was having real trouble getting the boy’s hands right, and the delicate designs that made up the ballerina’s hollow legs. At least the guy with the gun-arm looked cool. “I juh-just want to duh-draw it,” Suni pleaded again. “I muh-muh-might even be able to get my dad to scan it at work, then I wouldn’t even nuh-nuh-need to use it.”

Kristian put his hands up. “No way. I can hear it now.
I gave it to my dad and he left it at work.
Forget it.”

“Then I won’t give it to my dad. I’ll puh-put it inside one of my textbooks where it wont get bent, and only t…t…take it out when I need it. I’ll return it on Monday! You’re not even going to use it over the wuh-weekend. You’re going away.”

“Yeah. To work on my two-hundred-word essay on comedy.”

“Oh, and you buh-buh-blame me for that.”

“Look—”

“Come on, Kris. I’m not gonna lose it.”

Kristian stared at him. Then, with a suffering breath he reached into his shirt pocket and handed it over. Sunlight flashed off gold trim as he extended the card to Suni. “You better not,” he said. “Or I’ll never forgive you.”

Suni didn’t begin work on his assignment that night. Instead he cleared his desk, got a clean sheet of paper, propped the card up against the lamp, and began to draw. The assignment could wait until tomorrow.

He drew until about ten, when he clicked the lamp off and climbed into bed. Lying there, he noticed that the moonlight through the window cast strange patterns on the far wall as it bounced off the gold and silver foil of the card. His room felt like a grotto.

He wouldn’t lose the card. He would give it back to Kristian on Monday. Maybe then people would stop saying he lost things.

In the middle of the night something happened that didn’t usually happen. Suni woke up. Wide awake. Just like that.

He thought this was pretty odd, and kind of annoying. Still, if he was wide awake now he supposed he could get up and do some more drawing while everyone else was asleep. Tomorrow was Saturday, he could sleep in.

So he reached over and turned on the lamp.

In the flash of blindness accompanying the burst of light, something with a squeaky voice said:

“Uh-oh.”

Suni blinked, squinting, looking around his bedroom. He couldn’t see anything other than white light, but he heard the pat-pat-pat of feet on the carpet, and curious noises like “
murglefurg? bump-fog…hehn.
” Pat-pat-pat. “
zyxl? neh?
” pat-pat-pat. Then a captivated “
OOO-ooooh…
”

As the world cleared up, Suni saw something with long rubbery arms standing beside his bed. It had a big ball of a body and ridiculous-looking, oversized feet. Its arms were long and grabby. It had no eyes, nose, or ears, but it did have a big expressive mouth with big flat, white teeth. It held Kristian’s card. “
OOO-oooooh…,
” it said, mesmerized by the shiny thing in its big blue hands.

Suni blinked. He looked at the clock. It was 12:01. He looked at the thing. It was like a fat blue basketball with feet. He rubbed his face. He was definitely awake.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!” said Suni.

“
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!
” said the thing, and flop-flopped its feet across the room. It held Kristian’s card over its head with long, dangly arms.

Kristian’s card.

Kristian Lose-This-And-I’ll-Never-Trust-You-With-Anything-Again’s card.

Suni threw off the covers and dove at the thing. The thing waved its arms above its head and squealed as Suni came flying at it. His hands locked around one elastic blue wrist and engaged in a furious tug-of-war.

“Guh-guh-guh give it back!” shouted Suni.

It felt kind of mushy under his hands. Its arms were thin and ropy and weak feeling, but it held on to the card with a grip that wouldn’t budge. Suni still wasn’t entirely convinced this wasn’t all some dream he was having.

The thing squealed, pulling against Suni, twisting toward something in the corner, like it was looking at something with those eyes it didn’t have.

“
Eeeeergh!
” it cried out, tugging, turning.
“Eeeeeeergh!”

“Just give it
back
!”

“Eeeeeeergh!”

“Let go!”

“Eeeeeyyaaagh!”

The thing gave one last, mighty pull and yanked Suni toward it. Suni cried out, fixed on those big flashing white teeth. But the thing had no plan to bite him. Instead, with Suni so close, its long arms gained a lot of slack. This allowed it to hold on to the card and dive into the shadows gathered in the corner.

It seemed like it disappeared, or fell down a hole, its arms unspooling quickly, following its flight, until they snapped taut and almost pulled free of Suni’s grasp.

Instead it sucked Suni into the shadow right along behind it.

He fell, hands still locked around the blue thing’s boneless wrists, sailing down down down toward an ever-expanding point of dirty light. It was like he watched the point of light for almost a minute, sailing behind the blue thing. Then, in an instant, the light blew out to an enormous size, swallowing him, and he was cannoning headfirst into a huge room.

The stench was the first thing he noticed. Then he crashed into a mass of something soft that smelled really, really bad.

“
Yippeeee!
” the blue thing yelled, and Suni realized he no longer held on to the card, or the thing. He flailed around, hemmed in on all sides by the thick, reeking mass of whatever it was that covered him, almost panicking in an effort to work out which way was up, to find a pocket of air, to claw his way out. The smell was awful, suffocating. He rolled around, kicking and gasping, when he felt one bare foot burst free and poke out into clean air. Thrashing around he righted himself, rammed both hands out, and pulled himself upward like someone bursting from a grave.

He gasped, long and loud, fresh air filling his lungs as he hauled himself up from the stinking mass that held him. Standing half submerged, but thankfully free of its putrid, airless grasp, he saw what he was standing in. They were green, and gray, and brown. Some stood out in hues of blue and bright red. Some were a mix of other colors, while others were dead black.

And there were millions of them
…millions…
And Suni was up to his armpits in them. And God, how they
stank.

Socks.

Dirty socks.

“Now there’s something you don’t see every day,” he said, and his voice echoed lightly around the cavern.

Suni extricated himself from the smelly, cottony mass that had caught his fall. He tumbled down a mountainside of stale, odorous stockings, socks, and leggings to wind up on a floor of rough-hewn rock. There was but one way out of this chamber, and that was through the jagged arch before him, which led to an equally large chamber, this one filled not with a mountain of socks, but a giant mound of pens…

Through the arch he could see another arch leading to yet another chamber. Standing there on its two giant, bunioned feet was the thing. It still held Kristian’s glittering card in both hands, looking right to left and right again, as if deciding where to go, or where in this massive complex of caves and caverns its new prize belonged.

“Hey!” Suni called out, running after it.

The thing spun around, saw Suni and
Eeeeeked!
Then it took off at high speed, absurd feet pattering away, arms dangling over its head.

Suni lost sight of it. He looked through a multitude of chambers, all piled high with items of one description or another. One was filled with golf balls; another, keys. There was one chamber stocked with a gigantic store of dice of all shapes, sizes, and colors.

This was all starting to make some kind of sense. Then Suni came across a cavern that was home to an accumulation of old schoolbooks. He had a feeling he knew what this was all about, but he had to know for sure. He began by hunting around at the base of the heap, where the books looked newest. Sure enough, after half an hour, he found it.

His homework. The thing had stolen his homework! Suni took the red-covered notepad from the heap, grateful that at least he wouldn’t have to do his assignment again.

He made his way into the next chamber, which was home to what looked like all the luggage that ever got lost at airports, and found himself a black backpack that, according to the tag, belonged to someone in Vancouver, British Columbia. There was nothing in it, so Suni put his notebook inside, zipped the bag, and shrugged it onto his back.

Now all he had to do was find Kristian’s card and get back home. Somehow.

Past another archway, into another chamber, the thing tootled along, burbling to itself, still looking for someplace to put the card.

Suni saw it.

It saw Suni.

“
Aaaaagh!
” shrieked the thing.

“Raaaargh!” went Suni.

And the chase was back on.

He lost it again. It was a fast little bugger.

Suni found himself wandering through chamber after chamber. Before long he began thinking that if he found a way out he would just take it, glad to be home, forget about the stupid card, and let Kristian call him what he liked. If Kristian was any kind of friend he’d understand. If he believed any of it at all. Which, Suni knew, he never would.

Suni was starting to get hungry, and it felt like he was just wandering in circles with no way out. A few times he wandered back through the pen room, or the dice room. He held his breath and checked out the sock room one more time. It was where he had landed, so he had to have
fallen
from somewhere, right? Only there was no opening in the ceiling. Nothing. He may as well have tumbled out of thin air, which he could well have done. It made about as much sense as anything else he had seen tonight.

It was becoming obvious that the only way out of here, if there was a way out, lay with that blue thing. Which doubled his need to find it again.