It's... alive? First let me say I am so, so sorry I took so long in updating this. There are a lot of reasons I could go into, but I won't because they're boring. But now, having found myself momentarily inspired again, I decided I owed it to you guys to give this story another go. (Not that I imagine anyone is still waiting for it.) Anyway, you've probably realized by now that I am very bad at sticking with things, so I wouldn't expect another chapter anytime soon (though that's not to say there won't be one. ) So sorry again for keeping you waiting, and enjoye the fabled chapter six!
Toby's hand had been holding the door open, and when he fell to the floor, blood filling his mouth and flooding down from his throat, it swung back again on its hinges. It would have creaked all the way shut, but it was stopped by the boy's body, which, sprawled across the threshold, propped it open even in death.
Jerkily, Mr Todd turned back to the mechanical chair, in which his last customer was still seated, claret blood soaking his shirt front, and pressed the pedal with his scuffed right shoe. The chair yawned and stretched, tilting the dead man backwards and dumping him onto the bake house floor like a pile of dirty laundry. Todd watched the trapdoor close again, slowly wiping his stained razor on the white cloth at his waist, before turning back to the boy sprawled on the floor, his blood soaking into the old boards, dark and wet.
He moved to hover by the body, somehow reluctant to touch it. It didn't seem right, he reasoned, to throw Toby down into the cellar with everyone else, though a part of the barber would dearly like to do just that. The body made Sweeney Todd uncomfortable; he felt awkward, as though the two of them together—a boy and his murderer—were too big to both fit in the same sparsely furnished room. They defied the laws of physics with their existence.
But Mr Todd suppressed his urge to fly—out the door, down the stairs, and away from the little grey room that he himself had suffused with so much death. Instead, he knelt down to take the boy's lapels and drag him the rest of the way inside. The door banged shut behind them, and Toby's blood, impossibly red, smeared across the floor. His head tilted back, slashed throat gaping grotesquely. His eyes were still open, and Sweeney Todd closed them. In spite of this, Toby still didn't look peaceful. Was that how the barber had been trying to make him look?
Mr Todd shook his head and stood up, turning away from the dead boy. He was starting to move to his customary place by the window, his comfort zone, when the noise of footsteps startled him like a splash of cold water. Todd made a useless movement to try to cover the body, but the door was already swinging open again, and he let his hand fall back to his side.
Mrs Lovett stepped into the shop, her voice uncharacteristically quiet. "Did you finish him off, then? Mr T, I wanted to ask you"—her voice ended in a shriek when she saw Toby's body—crumpled and bloody on the floor—as Mr Todd had known it would. She rushed to the boy's side, but, like her neighbour, seemed unable to touch him. There is something terribly profane about a dead child.
So Mrs Lovett stood there, her hands half outstretched, floating a few feet above the boy, her breath coming in unsteady gasps. Eyes brimming, she turned to the barber, who stood impassively by his mechanical chair. "Mr Todd… why"—
"He saw me killing the last customer. Would've gone to the police." His voice softened, almost imperceptibly. "So, I had to, you see."
With eyes still mirrored with tears, Mrs Lovett stared at him. She gulped. Nodded. And then she collapsed, sobbing, into Sweeney Todd's arms.
The sky outside was the shatterglass blue that comes with a hard frost, pale clouds fluttering across its arch, trailing scraps behind them like tattered coattails. The white sun drew all color into it, bleaching the air with heatless light. Mrs Lovett tilted her head further back against the moldy headrest of the barber's chair, squinting red-rimmed eyes. Her voice sounded like rustling paper, and her hand quested for Mr Todd's, timid and small. "D'you think he's up there, Mr Todd?"
The barber, standing behind his occupied chair and following his landlady's gaze out the window and up at the sky, winced as her cold fingers found his, but he did not pull away. He glanced down at Mrs Lovett's upturned face. The sunken skin around her eyes was still damp with tears, and her hair, dusted with grey, he noticed, trailed its tangled ends across the back of the chair. Her gaze was not fixed on him, but on the window still, and the sky beyond, where she thought her adopted son must be frolicking in a wonderful place Sweeney Todd did not believe in.
He looked away from her, averting his eyes as if ashamed. "Of course he is," he said.
Mr Todd stood alone in his barbershop. It was midnight, the sky was pearly grey, and he knew this must be a dream. A whiteness was glowing faintly at the corner of his vision, emanating from edges of the wide window. Almost floating, the barber moved to stand by the milky glass, and peered warily outside. A sea of snow, blindingly white and sculpted into smooth waves by silent, ripping winds, stretched to a minute horizon.
As his wondering gaze traced the line where the snow and the pale sky brushed each other, Todd's eye was caught by a tiny dark figure, a woman, moving soundlessly at the far edge of this frozen world. She was coming closer to him, he saw, but struggling, her movements inhibited by the waist-deep drifts of snow.
Mr Todd watched her falter with something that, if he didn't know better, he would have called regret. He knew that he would wake very soon, and he wished vaguely that the snow would melt, so that the figure could come to him, and he could here what she had to say.