The House That Jack Built

by Guy Adams

  There was an old man lying on the ground, a wheelchair on its side next to him.

  'Some old bloke's had an accident,' Joe told Martinette. 'Fallen out of his wheelchair or something... No, of course I'm not making it up!'

  He ran over to the man and turned him over. 'Bloody hell,' he whispered. 'I hope he's not...'

  'Freezing his ageing knackers off waiting for some sap to walk over and help?' Alexander moaned. 'Yes, I'm rather afraid he is.'

  He sprayed the contents of what looked like an inhaler into Joe's face, grabbing the mobile out of his hand before he dropped it. 'He'll call you later,' he said into the phone, cutting it off before the shouting on the other end got into full flow.

  'Now,' he said, yanking the battery out of the back of the phone to disable it, 'that surprisingly potent drug that's running through your system is a little something I knocked up myself. There shouldn't be any long-lasting effects – none that your girlfriend will complain about anyway – but you'll find that for the next few hours you'll be inclined to do whatever anyone tells you.' He pushed himself up on his elbows. 'So how about getting me back in my wheelchair and giving me a lift to Penylan?'

  'Why not?' said Joe with a doped grin that made it look like he had bad wind.

  'Some kind of spatial displacement?' asked Ianto.

  Julia groaned, 'I'm not up for much more of this.'

  'If this is like what happened to me,' Ianto said, 'vanishing from one place and appearing in another, how come we're not all a bunch of ice cubes?'

  'It's a question of energy,' Jack replied. 'The worse this situation gets, the less juice it takes to move a body from one place to another. Heat is the most readily available energy source in a human being. It took most of yours in the jump from outside to here. Now... well, things are becoming really disturbed, so moving between locations in space-time is becoming dangerously simple.'

  He grabbed Julia and Ianto's hands. 'It's OK, though, we'll be safe enough. Let's just...'

  They walked out of the room and reappeared in the kitchen.

  'Hmm. Let's just try and get back to where we want to be.'

  He kept talking as they walked through the kitchen door...

  'This kind of disturbance can't last long.'

  ... into the lounge. Out of the lounge...

  'Or if it does, the damage to the physical cohesion of this part of the universe will be so immense...'

  ... onto the upstairs landing.

  '... we'll be beyond caring.'

  They ran down the stairs, walked through the door to the dining room and were relieved to find themselves in it.

  Gwen looked up from unknotting cable and stared at the three of them.

  'Sweet,' she said, noticing that they were all holding hands. 'Glad you're all getting on so well.'

  ***

  'It's bloody freezing in here,' moaned Alexander, twisting and wrenching at the heating controls.

  'Heater doesn't work,' chuckled Joe.

  Alexander glanced at him. He had the feeling he'd miscalculated the dose – the young man seemed positively euphoric. 'You live in Wales,' he said. 'You need a heater in your car, you silly masochist.'

  'You try earning your living playing the guitar in pubs,' Joe replied. 'See how many luxuries you can afford.' He started to laugh uncontrollably.

  Alexander sighed, reaching out to steady the wheel as Joe's giggles made him swerve. 'Get us there in one piece, and I'll buy you a new car.'

  'Cool!'

  Joe put his foot down and began singing as they motored their way through the one-way system.

  'I need to find Rob,' Julia insisted. 'Has nobody seen him?'

  'Not for a while,' Gwen admitted, 'but I'm sure he's OK.'

  'In this place?' asked Julia, looking towards the dining room door. 'Do you think it's safe?'

  'As much as it'll ever be,' Jack replied. 'Ianto, would you...?'

  'Of course.' Ianto put his hand on Julia's arm. 'Let's go and find him.'

  Jack started wiring the loose video and microphone cables to the equipment on the dining room table.

  'I hope Rob's OK,' said Gwen. 'Things are getting pretty serious here.'

  'So what's new?' Jack replied. 'Rob's bound to be freaked out, but he was handling it better than a lot of people would.'

  'The first time we met him, he tried to bash your head in with a poker,' Gwen pointed out, 'and we're in a building that excels at sending people mad.'

  'There is that,' Jack admitted as he began tuning the monitors in to the video feeds.

  She turned her laptop screen towards him, the scan of an old newspaper on it, 'Recognise the face?'

  Jack glanced at the screen and stopped what he was doing. The grainy black-and-white image showed an exceedingly large man being led away from the front door of Jackson Leaves by two police constables.

  'I didn't see him,' he admitted. 'He attacked me from behind. Seems likely he's our man, though, doesn't it?'

  Gwen nodded. 'Rupert Locke, convicted of six violent rapes in 1951.'

  Jack shrugged. 'Don't remember him.'

  'I'm surprised. There looks to have been a lot of coverage about it. He was completely unrepentant. Told the police "the house made me do it".'

  Jack banged his hand against the table in frustration. 'That's the problem with all of this,' he said. 'It would have set alarm bells ringing at the time if I'd read it. It's hardly subtle, is it?'

  'How do you mean?'

  'All of these things happening around Jackson Leaves – a house I owned – you think I wouldn't have looked into it before now?'

  'Perhaps you were too busy to notice? Being in Torchwood, it's easy to miss some of the more... conventional stuff.'

  'I might have missed some of the news reports, sure, but all of them? No... there's something skewed about this. If it had been going on all these years, I would have known about it already. OK, so Torchwood wouldn't have looked into it, the incidents are all typical police business and they would have had no reason to spot the link, but I would. I'd have had every reason.'

  Ianto and Julia came back in.

  'He's not here!' Julia said. 'How is that possible? We've checked every room, and there's no sign of him.'

  Jack finished plugging in the video cables and turned on the bank of monitors. Each showed an empty room of the house. Flicking through the feeds it was plain that the only inhabited room was the one they were standing in.

  'He might have gone outside,' Gwen suggested.

  'Of course he hasn't!' Julia spat. 'Not after what we saw.'

  'There's only one explanation, then,' said Jack. 'He must have vanished through one of the rents in space-time.'

  'What?' Julia was incredulous.

  'We've got repeated bursts of temporal and spatial distortion,' Jack explained. 'Something is causing space to fluctuate – like when we left one room and found ourselves in another. Ianto "fell" into one of those fluctuations and ended up here. Rob must have done the same, ending up—'

  'Who knows where...' Julia bit her lip. 'Anything could have happened to him.'

  'I hate to say it,' Jack offered, 'but if he's out of this place he's probably a lot safer than the rest of us.'

  'Think how Ianto was,' Gwen added. 'I'm not saying it was pleasant—'

  'It certainly wasn't,' Ianto agreed.

  '— but you were OK in the end,' Gwen continued, giving him a slightly admonishing look.

  'Damn right.' Jack put his hands on Julia's shoulders. 'If he's got out of here, then he'll be fine, just like Ianto was.'

  'I don't know...' Julia looked at Jack, her body shaking. It was all finally getting on top of her.

  'Do you trust me?' he asked.

  Her eyes glanced around, her panic building, barely in check. 'I don't know...'

  'You need to trust me, Julia. I've seen us all right so far, haven't I?'

  She nodded. 'I suppose...'

  'Yes, I have, and I'll get us all out of here safely...'

>   'And Rob...'

  'And we'll find Rob, and everything will be just fine. Now listen, I need you to take this.' He handed her a pill and a half-full bottle of mineral water.

  'What...'

  'I need you to trust me, Julia, it's important. I wouldn't hurt you, now would I? Take this, and then we'll find Rob.'

  She stared at him for a moment, then her shoulders sagged and she gave in, tossing the pill to the back of her throat and washing it down with the water.

  'What are you giving her?' Gwen asked.

  'Retcon, of course,' Jack replied.

  'Oh Jack,' Gwen sighed. 'You didn't have to do that.'

  'What?' Julia asked. Her head was tingling, like pins and needles behind her eyes.

  'Sorry,' Jack said, 'but it's for the best.'

  The penny dropped and Julia tried to run, but the drug was quicker than she was. She stumbled in the hallway, falling against the under-stairs cupboard as her legs refused to support her.

  Gwen chased after her, holding up her arms to defend herself from Julia's weak blows. Slowly, the woman crumpled, the fight gone from her. Gwen looked up at Jack.

  'You can be a pretty heartless bastard sometimes, Jack, you know that?'

  'I just have a sense of priority,' he replied. 'We need to fix this, and she was going to be in the way. She'll be fine.'

  'She'd better be.'

  Jack rolled his eyes in exasperation. 'We have to see the bigger picture here, Gwen! Have you no idea how much trouble we're in? Right now, she is the least important problem we have – it's nothing personal, it's just fact – and I used the quickest and safest way of removing that problem.' He looked at Ianto. 'Right?'

  Ianto ignored him, helping Gwen to pick up Julia's body. 'We'll put her in the lounge,' he said. 'She'll be comfortable there.'

  Jack sighed. There were times when he wondered if they'd abolished pragmatism in this century.

  Beneath the stairs, Rob was barely even aware of what was going on outside any more. The noise of his wife falling against the door to his private little world didn't even register as he hugged the taped-up shaft of the croquet mallet, digging his teeth into the wood and listening to it whisper awesome potentials into his head.

  Some of the things it suggested in the dry creak of its wooden tongue were terrible, but he knew he would do them. And when they finally stopped him, put cuffs on his wrists and led him away, he'd tell them the truth knowing they wouldn't believe a word of it.

  'The house made me do it,' he'd say.

  SEVENTEEN

  'Right,' Alexander said, checking the coordinates on the PDA he had stolen from a desk in the Hub against the street map. 'It's that house over there.'

  He pointed at Jackson Leaves, just visible over its unruly privet hedge.

  'Brilliant!' Joe shouted. 'Does that mean I can start singing again?'

  'No it bloody doesn't,' Alexander replied. 'One more "Sweet Home Alabama" out of you, and I'll make you eat the steering wheel.'

  'Oh.'

  Alexander swore and whacked the edge of the PDA against the dashboard. 'Stupid thing's on the fritz, can't seem to make its mind up where we are. Let's get out and have a look.'

  'Great!' Joe grinned and started swaying as if he was in a nightclub.

  'I am definitely checking the dosage,' Alexander sighed.

  'Do you want me to get your wheelchair?'

  'No, I'm cured, it's a pissing miracle.'

  'Wow!'

  'Of course I want my wheelchair!' Alexander shouted.

  Joe chuckled and got out of the car. By the time he'd got the boot open he was singing again.

  'Right,' said Jack, as Gwen and Ianto came back into the dining room, 'we need to talk.' He kept flicking his way through the camera feeds, checking each room. 'You both think I'm heavy-handed. But the more I think about what's going on here, the more I think I need to be. How is she?'

  'Sleeping on the sofa,' said Gwen. 'She's fine.'

  Jack flicked a switch, and the lounge appeared on one of the four monitors. Julia was hunched, foetal, on the sofa.

  Jack nodded. 'Good.'

  He stretched in his chair, his lower back still hurting from where Locke had punched him. A purple and yellow bruise would certainly be blossoming there by now. 'This isn't investigation any more,' he continued, pointing at the monitors. 'This is surveillance. We need to know the minute something tries to get a jump on us. I'm starting to piece this together, and it's freaking me out.'

  'I was there from the word go, frankly,' Ianto said.

  'Something is causing major time disruption,' Jack continued. 'Think of the deaths: Danny Wilkinson drowns on dry land. But it wasn't always – go back a few centuries and that was marshland out there. You saw a woman killed by a tram that stopped running along that street years ago. Gloria Banks... I don't know, she sits down in her armchair and...'

  'Bursts into flames,' Gwen finished.

  'Yes! It could have been anything. Perhaps a bonfire was there once... or, I don't know, maybe it was a blacksmith's at some point?'

  Gwen had been tapping on her laptop and she turned it around to show them. 'Or, during the Blitz, a bomb went off a few hundred metres away and the house was caught in the blaze.'

  Jack glanced at the council report she had brought up. 'Exactly.'

  'Blacksmith's?' asked Ianto with a smile.

  'Whatever.' Jack rolled his eyes. 'The point is that something is causing temporal disruption on a massive scale. We're not just seeing things; these aren't after-echoes.' He turned to Gwen, thinking of their conversation earlier. 'This isn't residual haunting. The past has weight, it can interact with us, drown us, burn us...'

  'Stamp on our heads,' Ianto added.

  'Yes! Rupert Locke... he's certainly not floating around is he? When he appears, he's actually here. It's as if the two time periods are folding over one another, layered with each other, physically co-existing for a brief period. When the walls were pounding, maybe that was just the Jackson Leaves of fifty years ago trying to co-exist with the Jackson Leaves of today, the two slightly out of place over the years because of subsidence.'

  'Subsidence?' Ianto smiled at Gwen. 'Or maybe just the spatial disruption?'

  'Yes.' Jack nodded. 'Maybe. Because it isn't just time, is it? Something is distorting physical space.' He glanced back to the monitors, flicking through and making sure all was clear before turning back to them. 'I can't put into words how that scares me,' he said. 'You just don't start messing with existence like that. It's pretty elastic, but if you screw with it for long enough it'll snap.'

  There was a flash of movement on one of the screens.

  'Did you see that?' Ianto shouted.

  Jack and Gwen turned to the monitors.

  'It was one of the top rooms,' Ianto said. 'A woman...' He stared at the screens, infuriated at the lack of anything in them. 'I know I saw her... She moved across the room towards the door. A woman in a long white dress, maybe a wedding gown.'

  Jack felt his heart trip. 'You sure?'

  'Yes! A woman in a long white dress, she moved across the room towards the door.'

  They kept scrolling through the camera feeds.

  'She's not there now,' Gwen said.

  Jack got to his feet.

  'Where are you going?' Ianto asked. 'There's not much point in setting all this up if you're just going to leg it up there and have a look for yourself!'

  Jack closed the door behind him and began running up the stairs.

  Joe was wheeling Alexander along the pavement towards Jackson Leaves, Alexander keeping himself dry under an umbrella he'd found in the boot of the car. He didn't offer to share it, but Joe didn't care. He was singing 'My Generation' at the top of his voice and was quite happy, thank you very much.

  'Shut up,' Alexander ordered. Joe did. Alexander sighed and waited to have to tell him again; each command seemed to afford him about two minutes of silence. 'Stop here,' he said, a few metres from the house. He stared at the bui
lding and tried to decide what it was that disturbed him about it.

  'There's something not right about that house,' he said, thinking aloud.

  Joe looked at the building for a few moments before giving up and going to dance in the street.

  Alexander studied it for a while then wheeled himself to Gloria's front garden, where he selected a lapful of small stones. He returned to Jackson Leaves, parked a little way back from the drive and began to throw the stones.

  'Oh no!' Joe giggled. 'You can't do that, we'll get in trouble.'

  'Just watch me.' The stones flew towards the house but vanished long before they got anywhere near it.

  'Hmm,' Alexander said. 'What does that tell us, Joe?'

  Joe stopped dancing for a moment. 'Time for a pint?'

  'No. Unless there's some form of force-field technology screening the building – and there isn't because you can always tell, force fields give off static like it's going out of fashion, makes your hair follicles go tighter than a fly's arse – it tells us that Jackson Leaves isn't altogether there. Which is rather strange.'

  'Yeah!'

  'Wheel us next door, Joey my lad,' Alexander said, pointing to the house the opposite side to Gloria's. 'We need some equipment and a dry place to work.'

  'OK.' Joe pushed him along the pavement. 'How are we going to convince whoever lives there to help?'

  'My dear Joe, I could have you pushing this wheelchair along with your tongue if I wished, couldn't I?'

  'Yeah!'

  'Good. Then you just leave the convincing to me, all right?'

  Alexander chuckled. He could get used to field work, he was really rather enjoying himself.

  Hadn't Jack cautioned himself about getting caught up in his memories? Here was the result, chasing through the focal point of a space-time collapse with a head full of guilt and no clear plan of action. To think earlier he'd been preaching pragmatism.

  'Follow me on the camera feeds,' he shouted.

  ***

  In the dining room, Ianto jumped forward to turn the volume down as Jack's voice came through loud enough to make the speakers shake.

  'Oh, righty-ho, then,' he muttered sarcastically, shaking his head at Jack's comment. 'We'd never have thought of that.'