Zelqudreth, "The Barber," has worked for thirty years in the basement of a luxury hotel.
He is inseparable from a steel razor, its handle made of bison bone, worn along the edges.
He arranges the victim with the precision of a barber who can feel the direction of each hair and the vibration of every vein.
Next to the razor, a shaving brush made from wild boar bristles, dry and coarse, hangs from his belt like a trophy.
Zelqudreth does not kill at random.
He chooses only men whose beards carry secrets too heavy to bear, men who have shaved a lifetime without ever seeing their true face in the mirror.
And at the very last moment, when the razor reaches the throat, he whispers:
— From now on, you will be better.
It is said that if you enter a barbershop and the mirror in front of the chair has a flaw in the lower left corner, and the razor the barber uses has a handle slightly yellower than ivory, slightly rougher than wood, then you are in the basement of the Hotel Vermeil.
No one knows where the Hotel Vermeil is.
Some claim it once stood on a street in a city that changed its name three times in the last century, that it was demolished, burned, or buried under a highway.
Those who claim to have seen it describe its façade with a precision imagination cannot invent: dark stone, narrow windows with cast-iron frames, a main entrance with two columns, one slightly shorter than the other — a difference of six centimeters, visible only if you look from lying flat on the ground.
The basement of the Hotel Vermeil does not appear on the building's architectural plans.
It is not on any electrical schematic, any sewer map, any fire safety documentation.
The basement exists like an extra organ, grown by the building itself, without anyone's knowledge.
Zelqudreth works thirty years in that basement.
Clients descend directly there, without passing through reception.
Zelqudreth does not speak while working.
This is the first rule of the basement — unwritten but observed with a strictness clients instinctively adopt from the first moment:
In his presence, you are silent.
The razor is steel, with a bison bone handle.
The wild boar bristle shaving brush hangs from his belt like a trophy, proof of a hunt, a sign of ownership, a territorial mark.
After thirty years, Zelqudreth ascends from the basement with the razor in his right hand, pointing down.
He steps out through the main door of the Hotel Vermeil.
He does not return.
The hotel disappears at the same time.
If you find yourself in a barbershop and the mirror in front of your chair has a flaw in the lower left corner, you pay, thank them, and leave with your face untouched.
If you are in a luxury hotel and smell old shaving soap in the elevator, and the mirror in your room reflects an extra shadow, leave immediately.
Do not use the sink after three a.m.
And above all, if you hear a razor being honed, do not open the door.
It may be that Zelqudreth has found a new client — one who needs to be "better."