Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1)

by Grist, Michael John

  "This is wonderful, Daddy."

  The memory of a memory. None of us saw this place alive.

  I walk up the steep wooden rollercoaster tracks to the apex of the dive, rising far above the land below. Here is my tower, standing at the turning point, complete and thick with bonds. No crows have dislodged its turrets or parapets. No shelving units have been hung up by the homeless.

  It is only my Tower. I am the only one who ever saw it, and built it with everything I had, bricks chipped away from other buildings, bits of rail-line gleaned rusting in the weeds, cement powder I scraped from the undersides of ceramic sinks. I bonded it with all my memories. It stands as tall as the Calico wall.

  I enter the Tower through the one entrance, and begin the slow ascent up the circling staircase. As I move up, I let the backs of my fingers trace the wall. The surface is rough, unpolished, like granular stucco. For a month I wattle-framed it, heaping on thick handfuls of liquid plaster, dusting in every memento I had.

  This Tower is made of memory. It is a cast of my life and the life of my family, of my children Art and Mem, of my wife Loralena. It is what remains, and the reason my mind is so clear.

  Because I'm going to take my family back.

  The hairs on the backs of my fingers tingle in the charged air. I have known this pain for so long. I feel it like static electricity, a wellspring of power, now focused.

  I arrive at the top, and look out over the park and the world. It is all in shadow. I look up to the sky and see the endless reams of satellites. I look across the land and see the twin cities I've forsaken, both Calico and the shadow sprawl of proto-Calico hugging the wall on barges in the bay. This is all our land, and our swollen seas, and the fragments of life we have left.

  I touch the wheel, by which I will steer myself home. It is as large as the wheel on a subglacic, connected to vents and flue shafts all throughout the Tower, and a rope hanging down the stairs. Everything is perfectly balanced.

  I am ready, just as I always was as a marine in the Arctic skirmishes, ready to fight for my right to exist. I lay my hands on the smooth wheel's handles and allow myself a brief moment to repeat the terms of the deal I made with Mr. Ruins all that time ago.

  If it doesn't work.

  That thought doesn't hold fear for me anymore. It is an answer either way. I can't be hurt anymore, and my family can't be hurt any worse if I am gone than if I am alive.

  I lift the wheel and it clicks to engage. I feel the wind about me rush to fill in the ventricles the Tower has opened. The cement beneath my feet vibrates. I turn the wheel, and the thumping begins.

  I feel the wave rise.

  It's beginning.

  And I dive.

  Down into my own outer cortex I plunge, buoyed by the strength of so many ragged bonds, so strong I don't need an EMR. Down I race through my glia and axons, down into the root and branch systems of my own dendritic tufts, blasting by pyramidal neurons both afferent and efferent, deep to Mountcastle's thalamic line and through, so deep I begin to lose all sense of my own body, plunging beyond the Mohorovic discontinuity and toward the mind's Molten Core.

  I hit hard, into bright-hot magma and churning lava flows, the heat and the violence all around. Consciousness sloughs off like ablative plating, and everything I am splits into the seven constituent tones of my mind's architecture, the primal memory, each one slotting into individual fire-forging pods within the sublavic bathyscaphe I have built for my own protection.

  Doe, Ray, Me, Far, So, La, Ti.

  They begin to rouse, and for one instant some sense of me is still with them, writing the mission folder they will soon read, because I know everything. I have seen what Far is planning, that child who saved me once, saved me twice, who built up a Solid Core so dense no mind could ever penetrate its depth.

  No mind but my own. I understand what is required, the sacrifices needed to breach the aetheric bridge and touch the face of eternal consciousness.

  It is terrifying. It is beautiful, beyond my comprehension.

  Then it is gone, as my last sense of self is swept away in the forging, and I come to in one mind only, Me, coughing up treacle-black smoke in the rusted corridors of the sublavic, with the fire-forge burning around me and the screw failing and the air filled with the stink of burning brick.

  CANDLEBOMB G

  Huddled by the blast-door, we're talking in low fast whispers. Doe is trimming the wicks of the candle-bomb, aligning the gamma-clamp to corrosion marks in the huge black blast-door. Ray is talking into his blood-mic, to So back at the outer orbit, his piercing blue eyes on me.

  "Anything you can give us, So, on what's on the other side, anything at all."

  As ever, no answer comes. I flip up the chronometer function on my HUD by rolling my eyes. Has it already been a week in this maze?

  Far calls us to hurry from the end of the corridor. He's speaking more now, where he used to only sound the tones of our chord. He can't be more than twelve years old. His shadows cast a long way down in the orange oxyfer flare lights.

  I gesture to him to be calm. I try to project my soothing vibes out to him, but it's hard when there's sweat beading down my face, pooling in the dead vacuum cups gathered under my eyes. I nod to Ray, who was always better at that, and he smiles to Far, which helps.

  "T-minus 3," says Doe, wiping her greasy hands on her black double-breasted flak jacket. I try to blink the panic-sweat out of my eyes but it won't dissipate. The HUD vacuum stopped working days ago. Everything here reeks of sweat.

  Ray claps a hand on my shoulder. I look through my visor and see his big black grin, bony white teeth inset with loop piercings like some ridiculous mesh of braces.

  "You crying, Me?" he asks.

  "It's the vacuums," I say. "They don't work."

  He taps me smartly on the head. The HUD warps with the movement, then the sweat wells under my eyes jostle, stream down my cheeks like tears.

  "Thank me later," he says.

  "T-minus 2," says Doe, and she turns to face me. Her white albino face stares like a ghost. Her fingers are covered in candle-wax. "Nearly there," she says.

  "What's the problem?"

  She points at one of the candles, a scented purple thing, probably lavender. It is squat and carved with glissades that make it look like a long unicorn's horn. I see the wick is already blackened, as though the fuse wouldn't take.

  "Dud," she says. "Like a dead ant."

  "So fire it remotely," says Ray, his sharp blue gaze meeting Doe's pink irises.

  "I don't have enough wick left to get us all out of range. We used most of it on the Solid Core wall."

  A beat passes.

  Down at the end of the corridor, Far whimpers something. He's been seeing monsters for the past three days, and I know he's seeing one now. They come big and small, they come with jaws and suckers, and they eat him every time. He lies screaming for hours as their absorptive cell walls digest the very bones out of him, turning his body to a mass of living jelly.

  I slap him awake, and each time he's a little bit less there. Only twelve years old. Still, he has to survive. We all have to survive, to the heart of the Solid Core.

  Ray's vibrant blue eyes jerk me back to the present. My HUD shows the determination in his adrenals marked out with angular squiggly lines.

  "So use my arm," he says. He doesn't need to think about it.

  Doe looks at me, I look at her.

  "Maybe just a few fingers," she says. "If I lay them end to end. They might just put us round the corner."

  Ray holds up his hand, plucks the black glove off it, grabs Doe's trimming wicks from her waxy grip.

  "Screw it," he says, and chops off his little finger.

  It drops to the floor. The floor is beveled with odd shapes, and the finger falls to lie betwixt them like some kind of meaningful augur. The shapes here seem to be initials, letters grouped and pounded up from the underground by chisel-stencils and hammers. Blood drops and pools about the initials R.G.,
raising them like little islands soon to be flooded.

  Doe looks up at Ray, and I know what she's thinking. One more. Ray lifts the clippers but before he can lay out the chop I've pulled out my hand and tugged off the glove. My fingers wriggle like toes out of shoes, white and strange, tuber-things I haven't seen for such a long time.

  How many weeks have we been in here?

  "You do it," I say, holding my hand out to him. He grins.

  "Yes sir," he says, then clamps the wick-trimmer around the base of my little finger, snips it off. The digit drops to lie next to his, and I wonder briefly what that could possibly mean. A few drops of blood leak out before my skin seals over the wound.

  Doe gathers up the digits and stabs one of them into the tip of the unicorn horn candle, sets the other one like a lintel-stone between it and the next candle over, a long graceful white cone. Everything else is wired with wire, and the candelabra looks like a spider's web.

  "Let's just hope this is the last door," grunts Ray, pushing himself to his feet and drawing his glove back on.

  I give a token dry laugh, rise, and Doe motions to us to get back. "Lead time of 15 seconds, then it'll blow."

  Ray whispers this into his blood-mic, and So comes back to him with a sing-songy snatch of lullaby, faint as the wind. We haven't really heard from her in days.

  "Far, we're coming," I call to the kid, "T-minus 1, around the corner."

  He shuffles out of sight, back to where the orange flower-flares are bursting. I clamp the blacks down on my HUD, then lay a hand on Doe's shoulder.

  "Let's go, Doe," I urge her. She spins a top at the apex of her Rube-improvised inflammatory, and as we watch, the first licks of electricity spark in the complex apparatus.

  Doe is a genius, even if she is an albino. Her mind works in logic circuits and keystrokes, like an algorithm. She can crack codes and innovate incendiaries all day long, but ask her to relate to Far's crying fits, and she'll reason herself to a standstill. Ray and I have to wind her back up when that happens, and steer her away from the kid.

  "T-minus 1," she says, then we're hauling her up and on the run. The initialed metal floor clangs beneath our booted feet, and the fritzing striplights overhead send paroxysms of color through the sheen of my HUD.

  We round the corner, and the orange flower-flares blind all of us momentarily. Far is huddled behind a mass stalagmite, and we roar to join him.

  "Goligh," says Doe, randomly, for no reason I can think of, then the candelabra makes a blinking sound, blink, blink, Ray holds onto my shoulder, and the incendiary erupts.

  BOOM

  I catch the B- of it before my HUD shuts down auditory. I feel Far trembling through the ground beside me. A second passes, smoke and light flaring out from the bang-point, then we're up and running. Metal turns to goo underfoot with the heat and I hold forth my bayoneted musket and run into the explosion's aftermath.

  We burst through into room that is not a room, in a space that is not a space, and I see it, the thing we've come all this way to find.

  The aetheric bridge. It is vast but infinitesimal, as small as the sun and as large as a pinhead speck of dust on the tail of a fractal arm. It is everything and nothing, a dimension overlaid and underwritten over and beneath everything that has ever existed, and within the holy eye of its splendor I feel myself begin to drift.

  I am Me, captain of the bathyscaphe, but I am also Doe, and Ray, and Far and So and La and Ti, and Ritry Goligh, and Ven and Ferrily and Tigrates and Heclan and Carrolla and my mother and father who I never met and Mr. Ruins too and Loralena and Mem and Art, all at once and all wrapped in the same blanket like one huge sausage sandwich.

  "Oh wow," says Ray by my side, and it is my mouth and my voice and my throat that breathes the words, and my ears that hear them, and my mind that made them.

  It is a star that never ends, a white field of plasmic force that coruscates and shimmers like a Quantum Confusion particle, streaming out a billion bonds that contain all the clustered tones of creation's pulse. It is a scream of all sounds and a chorus of all chords, raised in joy and fusion, because here everything can be, and will be, and is.

  "Oh god," says Doe, and I see she is weeping openly. The musket in her hands, in my hands, goes slack. We are hanging in space, and standing on the ceiling, swirling at light speed forward and backward at once and spaghettified by the black-hole mass of it. So is there, singing, and so are La and Ti. We are all there again.

  And I understand, something that Far always knew, that I knew when I wrote the mission folder long before I ever read it. This is the sacrifice, and this is the only way through.

  I turn to Far, and the boy smiles at me. In this place all his weals and wounds are gone, and he is smiling. He is the master of this world. I thought I was bringing him, but I see now that he has brought me.

  "I'll bring you back," he says to me, in my own voice. "I swear it."

  Then he plunges his musket bayonet into Ray's chest, and Ray bursts in a shower of fizzing white energy. Doe nods with understanding as he plunges the blade into her, erupting more force to coruscate around his young angelic face.

  I spread my arms too, like that ancient man on his cross, and smile at this child of mine, this part of me both innocent and utterly vicious.

  ONE OF YOUR CHORD WILL KILL YOU ALL.

  "Thank you," I say, and he nods, then spears the bayonet through my heart, through the center of the maze written in yellow across my chest, and I am gone, my matter converted to energy with all the fissile strength of a final broken bond.

  The boy Far stood in the center of consciousness and felt out to the world. He'd never come here before, though he'd come close once, driven by the tortures of his parents who held him down until he learned to breathe molten lava, until he learned to tame the Lag and make it part of what he was.

  He looked out over the dizzying array of threads arcing outward, a billion souls linked in to the flame of consciousness, and reached for one in particular, one that had haunted him since before he was born, had plagued him for so long, and plucked at it.

  Mr. Ruins, from within. In the apartment in Calico Reach with his blades in his hands, standing above the family of Ritry Goligh and waiting for his long-time victim's suicide to end, Mr. Ruins stood tuned to the outer bonds waiting for the moment he could reap these last, sweet connections.

  He couldn't see Far. No one could see Far, coming like an assassin through an inward bridge conceived but never experienced. Ruins didn't understand it when all the weight and frames for his memory of Ritry's family was sloughed away, though he felt it. It burned like a cauterized stump in his mind, though he no longer knew why he was standing over this terrified woman and these children, they were meaningless to him.

  But he knew something had happened, and he knew why. Far didn't have time to cut any more, before Mr. Ruins slammed in place locks and bars across his mind that couldn't be breached even from within. By dint of his own strength from a long lifetime of vampiric slaughter, Ruins shut himself down and started for the true culprit.

  Ritry Goligh.

  As the door shut down on him, Far reached through the crack and etched the name in burning bright letters in the magma of Mr. Ruins' Solid Core, that most simple of graffiti, only the name.

  Ritry Goligh.

  It enflamed Ruins, as the boy Far intended. Ruins would hunt until he found Ritry, then he would take it out on Ritry and Ritry alone, which was how it should be.

  When the door to Ruins' mind finally slammed shut, Far was left alone in the white space, surrounded by howling forces a million times stronger than the Lag, pushing him back. With the last strength of broken bonds he flung himself backward out of the blast-door, so hard he kept flying back down the flashing red trail they'd left and out through the outer orbit, past poor disembodied So surrounded by headless corpses of Napoleonic soldiers left as guards by Mr. Ruins, out of the corroded metal tunnel and into free-fall.

  He hit the Molten Core with
a joy he hadn't felt in years. This was his home, the amniotic womb he'd been forged within, and into it he breathed the seven primal tones of his own self's architecture: Doe, Ray, Me, Far, So, La, Ti.

  The faster he rushed, a thousand leagues ahead of the Lag and sloughing on flesh and plate-metal with every glial neuron and axon transfer passed in the magmic flow, the faster they grew out of him. Like seeds in his breast they sprouted, with Me at the bridge and Doe by his side, Ray manning the trim tanks, So and La mortaring in ablative paneling, Ti down at the engine screw and driving them, driving them, driving them forth.

  All together again. They would be all together again.

  MOVEMENT 3. THRENODY

  TONE CLUSTER A-G

  The world spits out Ritry Goligh, complete, and he sags to the floor of his memory-tower and shakes with sobs and happiness as the immense weight of terror lifts.

  They are safe.

  He can feel Mr. Ruins coming for him, but he doesn't care. He can feel his family coming back to themselves, their long life of torture and loss come to an end, and that is all that matters, because for now they are safe.

  He laughs and he cries at the same time, with his head against the raw wood he'd scavenged from a ghost house, scraping at the grain like it was the outer hull of a Solid Core and all he can do is scratch his initials into it, to leave some sign he exists.

  They are safe, and there is only the shark left, the man who stalked him all his life, Mr. Ruins, and even now he is coming.

  And Ritry Goligh is ready. He will be ready, because now he understands all the plans his own partitioned mind made behind the scarification wall, the plan to save them all.

  He lurches to his feet and begins the process of pulling out wooden pegs set into the tower's walls. The structure trembles as the lines of stress distribution shift, the great weight of so much wood and brick plaster shuddering under the changes.