Screams. Terrified screams of pain. Agony, even.
Throwing someone into a fire was such a loud, messy way to murder said someone. Slitting a throat was cleaner, simpler, and much preferred by the modern demon barber.
But was slitting the throat all that cleaner, all that nicer, when it was your wife's throat slit with your own razor? When her crimson blood ran in a solid sheet down her neck? When she didn't even have time to fall down, or even blink, before she was sent down a trapdoor to be made into a meat pie? No. It was, in fact, much worse.
Sweeney Todd dropped his razor and fell to his knees before the body of Lucy Barker, feeling numb. He was barely aware that he had taken her up into his arms until he was clutching her corpse tight, wishing never to let go. He ignored Nellie Lovett's screams of anguish as she was baked alive in her own oven. They died away soon enough.
But the sudden silence was even more painful. It rang in Mr. Todd's ears, whispering what he had done over and over – taunting him for it. 'You killed her,' they jeered, 'She wasn't doing you any harm. But you were in such a rush to get to the judge, you didn't recognize your own wife standing right in front of you.'
But Mr. Todd knew the voice was wrong. This woman, this lovely woman, was not, could not possibly be, his wife. She had been Benjamin Barker's wife. But Barker was dead, so it shouldn't matter if she was dead, too, should it? Was Barker truly dead, though?
It pained him to think these thoughts, so Mr. Todd tried to fill the silence, maybe the voices would stop if he murdered the silence as well. "There was a barber and his wife," he sang softly, in a voice that was weak and sad and saturated with innocent blood, "And she was beautiful."
There had been a barber and his wife. What was there now? A man alone? No, he didn't even dare call himself a man anymore. Something less than a monster. Even the name 'demon' seemed above him. So what was left? A shell. A living corpse. A body with no soul.
Mr. Todd heard the scraping of metal on stone, the sewer grate being moved aside. Toby must have slipped down into the sewer to evade their searching.
"A foolish barber and his wife," he continued, ignoring the boy climbing out, only staring at Lucy's beautiful face. No matter how much he hated seeing her in such an awful state, all beggar clothes and blood, he couldn't tear his eyes away from the beauty that had dulled over time, but remained hidden just below the surface, "She was his reason and his life."
Barker had been a foolish man. His main, perhaps only, reason for living had been his wife. His loving, beautiful, perfect wife. Something stirred in Mr. Todd's chest, cringing and hurting. So Barker hadn't died after all, merely been buried away through many years hard labor, and replaced by the abomination that was Sweeney Todd.
"And she was beautiful," he went on, seeming to take no notice as Toby picked up the fallen razor and advanced upon him from behind, "And she was virtuous."
Though Mr. Todd could not see it, the young boy and something fierce in his eyes. Whether by order from God above or Satan below, it will never be known, but Toby knew what he to do and he intended to do it. He had to avenge Mrs. Lovett, the only woman who'd ever even come close to being his mother. The repulsive creature before him had murdered her in cold-blood, as well as countless other people, he more than deserved a taste of his own medicine.
"And he was-" Mr. Todd cut off mid-sentence, as Toby stood just behind him. He didn't even need to say it, he knew how naïve he had been. He had taken his unfairly beautiful life for granted, only to have it wrenched away from him. How foolish he had been to expect that he could back to it fifteen years later, as though nothing had changed. How stupid, how idiotic. The world was never kind, why couldn't he have learned that sooner?
He tilted his head back, baring his neck so Toby, and the razor, could get at it easily. After he had, however, he felt something even more odd than the grief that had stirred in his long-since hardened heart – fear. Nature's most basic emotion, meant to keep one alive. A tiny voice inside him spoke up, with the simplest of words conveying its message, 'I don't want to die.'
But what reason had he, 'the demon barber of Fleet Street', for living? He had no hope of ever having a family, or even an honest, respectable life, ever again. He had gotten his revenge on the judge, so there wasn't even that to keep him going. Revenge. A wild-fire that destroyed all in its path. A deadly serpent that devoured all around it, then latched onto its own tail and ate and ate of itself until there was nothing left to feed of. Nothing good ever came of it.
This primal fear properly quashed, Mr. Todd braced himself for what he knew was about to happen. Even so, Toby wielded the razor so suddenly, that the cold, heartless bite of silver was a dreadful shock. His dearest friend had brought about his demise. Of course, the irony was lost on Mr. Todd, as his head lolled forward.
Half-clinging to life, he imagined Lucy, an angel, sitting elegantly on a cloud, silently watching him traverse a path lead straight to, and only to, Hell. Would she weep for him as he burned in a black pit of fire, or would she think it a fitting punishment for his foolishness? In his last second of life, Mr. Todd longed for the hands of time to turn backward, to bring back the happy things that once had been. He longed for forgiveness, redemption, a second chance he didn't deserve.
Toby left. Numb with what had just happened, he ascended to stone stairs without a single glance back. Had he looked back, a tragic death scene indeed would have met his young, though no-longer-so-innocent, eyes.
For, haloed by the smoke produced by a charred human body, Benjamin Barker's wife Lucy, liquid scarlet wings spread beneath her, wept gruesome, silent tears of blood, as Sweeney Todd's throat dripped rubies, precious rubies.