The Music of Razors (33 page)

Victoria Witherspoon wakes beneath a black-and-silver print of a leopard. Somehow she knows that, in the next room, her son has died. She lies there, pressed down by an impossible weight of grief…but feeling it.

Across the world a ballerina sits by a brown river, hands clasped at her waist. In the water a rotund little ogre blows fountains as he drifts slowly counterclockwise downstream.

Lost somewhere in a London cemetery is the grave of a small girl. For the first time in a century and a half, fresh roses have been laid upon it.

There is a many-roomed place that shares a wall with yours. A thin man sits slumped upon a slab of earth, palms up, chin on his chest. He is veiled by slow gossamer. Within his coat, stars no longer shine.

In 1840 a redheaded man and a beautiful woman share an apple on Boston’s Smoker’s Common.

When no one is looking, they kiss.

Somewhere beyond time a creature of impossible beauty stands, watching, stroking a glass-eyed leopard upon a bed of tulips.

Through it all she hears the Angel.

She is all that remains in the world that knows of its existence. Without her, it does not.

She ensures it sees all she has just seen.

She ensures it feels all that she has just felt.

She ensures it knows this has been the last meal it will ever receive.

Without her it will never be free.

The flesh of her fingers tapers to silver.

Every sound in her new ears forms but one word. The Angel’s voice says,

No…

She reaches into her own mind and plucks out a single piece of knowledge.

The knowledge that the Angel exists.

Silence.

P
EOPLE CHANGE. THE INTERESTING ONES, AT LEAST. YOU
start life as one thing, and become something else. Upgrade or downgrade, it’s all change—it’s all
vital
—and besides…up and down is all relative to the angle at which your head’s been twisted.

Girls want to be cats, usually. It was when she didn’t that she first thought something was different, something had changed. She wants to be something else. Something big, panting, weight on the balls of her feet. Strong enough to penetrate a sternum.

She doesn’t want to be a cat. Her coat is empty of starlight and no longer sings. She has silver bones.

She finds a litter of pups in an alleyway. One survivor, lost, pink, blind, and lonely. She feels pity. She takes it and strokes it. Words of comfort, but it mews at her touch. She puts it back amid the cold coils of its siblings, but what she leaves behind has sight and wings and will be able to take care of itself.

Standing here, dressed as she is (with her ragged coat and tangled hair), she is the embodiment of this forgotten, rain-slick laneway. She would appear to any passerby as would the equivalent spirit of any wood, as any sprite, as the embodiment of that place.

In this moment she has the power of immediacy.

In this moment she is God of this one-lane world.

In this moment she is perfect.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dmetri Kakmi, editor and champion, without whom none of this would have ever been possible.

Sarah Graves, my best friend, my most brilliant critic, and my life’s love, for falling to Earth with me and dusting me off afterward. I love you massively.

My parents, Doug and Nardine Rogers, with love.

My fantastic agent, Howard Morhaim, for taking me on.

Tim Mak, editor of the American edition. Thanks for all your work, and for believing in the manuscript.

K. J. Bishop, with much thanks.

Holly Ball, for allowing me to use her song “Playground” in the book.

Patrick O’Duffy, Kate Devitt, Andrew Serong, Jon Swabey, Damien Wise, Haydn Black, and Annette Mattes for invaluable feedback.

Barbara “Barbarella” Welton, for friendship, for the hours of drunken conversation in the gutters and alleys outside Revelations, for the mention that changed everything, for all the feedback, and for being there in more ways than I can list.

Ronald Jones, for never failing to pick up the things I miss or offer something brilliant, and never shying away from reading yet another draft. Thank you.

The other two members of The Basement—Andy MacLean and Peter Noonan—for years of abusive therapy administered in the firm belief that subtlety subx.

Gary Crew, for the First Break.

Suzanne Smith and Erin O’Hara for The Favor.

The Rev. Richard Gracia, for historical advice and mailing me all that coffee.

Rebecca Kearney for kindly taking all those photos at mates rates.

The Drunk Poets Society, Melbourne, for giving me a chance to read some of this stuff to a crowd.
Carpe Vino.

Brandy Leonard, who’s been around from the start and probably knows where all this comes from.

Special thanks to Associate Professor Peter F. J. Ryan, head of rheumatology, Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, for the very kind help regarding coma patients. I hope I’ve used your information accurately. Any errors are entirely my own.

And—last but definitely not least—Sian Softly, stalwart friend, for loaning me her couch and timesharing her computer while I was in Brisbane, and for always being there when it counts. You’re a saint.

C
AMERON
R
OGERS
lives in Melbourne.
The Music of Razors
is his first novel.

He’s been an itinerant theater student, a stage director, a stand-up comic, a motion-capture model for an elf who needed food badly, and had a question mark instead of a photo in his high school yearbook. He spent three months cutting up vegetables in a stainless-steel cubicle beneath a shopping mall in the company of a defecting Soviet weightlifter, and almost got suckered into working at what turned out to be a yakuza-run all-gay bowling alley in Kyoto. His last Real Job was with the crime management unit of the Queensland Police Service.

He also writes books for children under the penname Rowley Monkfish.

He can be contacted via his official website at
www.cameron-rogers.com
.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
THE MUSIC OF RAZORS

“An exceedingly fine novel…You feel this book is true and the characters are real.
The Music of Razors
tells a beautiful and deeply affecting story, full of wonder, strangeness, pain, and love.”

—K. J. B
ISHOP
, author of
The Etched City

“This was an impressive first novel. In
The Music of Razors,
Cameron Rogers weaves a thought-provoking and compelling dark fantasy from the mythology of religion.”

—J
EFF
F
ORD
, author of
The Girl in the Glass

“Slippery and quick with a bite that won’t let go long after you turn the final page.”

—S
EAN
W
ILLIAMS
, author of
The Crooked Letter

“Jam-packed with enough extraordinary ideas to fill a dozen novels. Never was fantasy darker or more disturbing. The novelistic equivalent of
Twin Peaks
.”

—R
ICHARD
H
ARLAND
, author of
Ferren and the Angel

“This is a great book. Alice meets Freddy Krueger in Wonderland!”

—P
AUL
C
OLLINS
, author of
Cyberskin

The Music of Razors
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original

Copyright © 2001, 2007 by Cameron Rogers

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

D
EL
R
EY
is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in different form in trade paperback by
Penguin Books Australia Ltd., Victoria, in 2001.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Holly Ball for permission to reprint “Playground,” copyright © 2000 by Holly Ball.
Reprinted by permission of Holly Ball.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rogers, Cameron.
The music of razors / Cameron Rogers.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PR9619.4.R647M87 2007                                                      823'.92—dc22                                             2006036418

www.delreybooks.com

eISBN: 978-0-345-50044-1

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