Tim Lebbon - White and Other Tales of Ruin

He wondered briefly if the Baker had been aware of her, but that was crazy. Tom would have known. And the Baker would never have been so cruel as to give him love, only for him to experience it with a sister.

No… plain crazy.

He surfaced from these sunken thoughts from time to time and found everything to be the same. The light had dimmed somewhat and Tom realised that it was night outside, but the gophers were still busying themselves, and Honey still sighed and bubbled behind him.

Maybe the familiarity was a product of the virus the Baker had programmed and injected into Tom mere days before dying. “I’m giving you love,” he’d said, “and one day I pray you may find it.”

For those long years it had always been inside him. And when he had set eyes on Honey, she was everything that love was meant to be.

“Tom?”

Tom drifted back to the surface of his mind. Someone was calling him. Perhaps it was the Baker, because the sounds had stopped from the laboratory, and something was ready.

“Tom… don’t say you’ve gone, not after all this.”

He stood from the chair and spun around, and there was Honey. She was curled into the chair, knees drawn up and feet tucked under her behind, as if hunkered down for an evening with a book and a bottle of wine. But she still looked… wrong. Her skin was tinged blue, her eyes dry and harsh-looking, her hair lank and greasy. She could not move, and her flesh lay in folds around her midriff, pooled on the armchair about her thighs. Her eyelids looked thick and heavy. Her breasts sagged down to her waist, nipples pointing earthward.

“You’re alive!” Tom said. She smiled weakly and he moved to her side, reaching out to touch her forehead. It was slick and too cool.

“I feel unfinished,” Honey said.

Tom made sure the lead still joined them to the buzz unit, closing his eyes to ensure that the net connection was still there. Then he sat on the arm of the chair and put one arm around her shoulders, drawing her to him like a doll, kissing the top of her head even though it dismayed him to do so. “But you’re awake now,” he said, “and I’ll stay here with you until you’re ready.”

“Where are we?” she asked weakly, and he told her.

“Stay quiet and get some rest,” Tom said, “you’ve got a way to go yet.”

“Fuck quiet!” Her voice was low, but full of life. “We’ve got a lot of getting-to-know-each-other to do, you and I. Tell me about you. Tell me… tell me what it’s going to be like for us, and where we’re going to go. Tell me how happy we’ll be when we get there.”

So Tom sat there, holding Honey’s shadow as her resurrection was completed, and he told her the things she wanted to hear. Curiously enough, they were all the things he wanted too.

They left at midnight. Honey held onto Tom’s arm as she walked across the laboratory, looking down at her 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.