White and Other Tales of Ruin

feet, concentrating hard on each and every step. The lights were stuttering now, as if losing their will when they realised that their guests were leaving, and Tom was terrified that they’d fail before he and Honey reached the door. He’d find his way out, he knew that… but right now he wouldn’t welcome the dark.

The gophers had been inactive for hours. The cabinet was quiet too, but it was a loaded silence, like a pause between breaths or the stillness after a scream. Tom kept glancing at the cabinet as they approached, and again as they passed by, wondering what was in there and whether, by the Baker’s weird machinations, it was meant for him. The scanning he’d felt upon entering may have kick-started some long dormant programme in the laboratory’s terminal, a gift for message for him. A final testimony to the Baker’s genius.

They walked on, and Tom felt the cabinet standing behind him watching them go. It was the centre of the room, the heaviest point, a black hole drawing everything to it, including his thoughts. Good sense was sucked in too.

At the exit door, Tom paused and Honey rested against the wall. “I’ve got one thing to do before we go,” he said.

“You’re destroying the place, aren’t you,” she said.

He frowned at her. “No.”

“Oh…” She did not elaborate, and Tom did not push her. Not now. Later he may ask her what she thought the Baker really meant to him. But for now, he had scant minutes to snoop around. Perhaps, deep down, he didn’t want to leave this place of safety and nostalgia so soon.

The cabinet had the dimensions of an upright coffin, but it was made of metal and warm to the touch. Tom ran his fingers around its edges, wondering if there was some way to open it easily, and then he thought of the gophers. They’d been darting in and out beneath the benching next to the cabinet, so he knelt and peered into the shadows.

There was a hole through which a gopher could slip inside, but that was it. Nothing more. No way for him to get in, nor to see what was there.

Unless.

He scouted the lab quickly, feeling Honey’s gaze tracking him. “Not long,” he said.

“Don’t worry. I like watching you work.”

“I’m not working.”

“What’s your job if it isn’t to save me?”

Tom wondered again just how much Honey had changed during her shutdown, and then he spotted what he was after: a small mirror fixed to the wall above the wash basin in the corner. He tried to prise it from the concrete, failed, punched it instead. It shattered into the sink and he selected the largest shard. He grabbed a second piece as an afterthought — he’d need light — and then went back to the cabinet.

All done with mirrors, the Baker had often muttered as he performed some astonishing new scientific feat. Now Tom used mirrors as well. And for the briefest, darkest, almost human moment, the black magic he had never believed in faced him down.

He could see the pale hue of new skin even before he slipped the mirror into the hole. The leg was sheened with fine hairs, and they seemed to thicken and darken as he watched.

“What is it?” Honey asked.

Tom did not answer. He could not. Because he’d angled the second mirror to catch some light and bounce it up into the cabinet, giving brief illumination to what stood within, illuminating nothing… because Tom could not understand.

Why or how or when… he did not understand.

The naked man dipped its head and looked down at him.

He was looking at himself.

Paler, thinner, not quiet all there… but himself. There was no real expression on the face. That made it worse. The light was feeble, but Tom could see some details he’d rather not. Like the fact that the simulacrum had no real eyes, only milky white jelly balls in its sockets. Or the way its hair seemed to be forcing itself through the scalp, twisting and waving like a million baby snakes, hushing against the inside of the cabinet as if the splash of light had agitated it.

Tom dropped the mirror shards and scrambled back on his hands and heels, leaving bloody hand prints on the floor.

“What is it?” Honey asked again, concern tingeing her voice.

“It’s me,” Tom whispered very quietly. “It’s me…”

“What?” Honey hadn’t heard, and now she was walking unsteadily across the laboratory and reaching down, swapping roles as she helped Tom stand and lean against the oak desk. “Tom… if it’s that bad we can leave and shut it in.”

Tom looked Honey in the eyes — they were full of life again now and their golden hue had returned, as mysterious and bewitching as before — and he realised that he didn’t want to tell her. And he didn’t need to.

That one crazy glimpse had seemed to lessen his own existence. For a second he’d felt… insignificant.

He was an artificial, after all.

“Do you love me?” he said.

Honey frowned and looked up at the ceiling. “Well, you know, I’m a plastic bitch and I hear the word ‘love’ a lot… but then you did rescue me. And you have resurrected me. So yes, I suppose I do.”

Tom was crestfallen.

Then Honey laughed and kissed him, and she held his face in her hands so that he couldn’t look away. “Of course I do! Now, can we leave please? There’s a place I need to go.”

“Where?”

“The Slaughterhouse. Best club in town.”

He was dumbfounded. Didn’t she realise just how deep the shit was they were wallowing in? “Honey, we need to leave! Hot Chocolate Bob… we have to leave the city, get out, maybe up into the mountains — ”

“There’s a friend I have to say goodbye to. And it’s near the city walls.”

Tom looked around at the cabinet as it started to hiss. It was venting an opaque gas from a port in its head. He realised how this had been the first place he’d thought of bringing Honey for safety… and he wondered how much of that decision had been a subconscious wish to say a silent, final farewell to the Baker’s memory. Was Honey’s request so different?

“We have to be quick!” he said.

Honey kissed him once more, and then stepped back so that he could open the door.

The thing in the cabinet had shocked and disgusted him. Some of the Baker’s equipment must have corrupted and gone bad, kick-starting the creation of some meaningless experiment as soon as he’d entered the rooms. The instant he and Honey found themselves out in the open Tom uttered the locking phrase, praying that he, nor anyone else, would ever have to go in there again.

And he bid the long-dead Baker a fond, final goodbye.

They hurried away from the business estate. Tom thought of the simulacrum of him trapped down there forever, without benefit of memory or knowledge to keep it sane. He remembered the Baker saying that some things in those rooms were best forgotten. Now more than ever that was true. So he put a block on the image and memory, and he and Honey moved on.

The streets sang with the sounds of night. Sirens echoed between the tower-blocks like carrion cries in desert canyons. The flood of chopped humans turned the city into an extravagant nightmare, a place of evolution bastardised by enforced mutation. A thousand possible futures walked the pavements, waving their wings, whistling through gilled throats, scurrying spider-like or walking tall.

“He’ll look for us,” Honey said. “Hot Chocolate Bob won’t give in. He’d have spread the word.” She ducked into a boarded-up shop doorway as a feisty gang of teenagers ran by, trailing a sense of threat behind them.

“Going to a club is crazy!” Tom said. “Who is it you need to see?”

Honey turned to him and held his face. “You sound jealous,” she said, smiling.

“I would be if others like us could love,” he said.

“What?”