Something in the Water t-4

by Trevor Baxendale

  The picture changed back to a shot of a doctor’s surgery somewhere. ‘Nevertheless, many GPs are concerned at the sudden increase in respiratory problems, which, they said, cannot entirely be blamed on seasonal variations.’

  Cut to a GP in his surgery, an older guy, wearing heavy glasses. The caption said Dr Graham Walker. ‘I’ve seen nearly four to five times as many patients in the last week with what I would term serious respiratory conditions. It isn’t normal, and we should be on our guard. The problem is that Westminster is ignoring this simply because the epidemic is in Wales and not London.’

  ‘Some commentators feel that the concerns of GPs are being overlooked, and this may be putting the public’s health at risk,’ the reporter continued. ‘The Government has been quick to point out, however, that there is a widespread vaccination programme available for free for anyone over sixty-five to protect against flu. This is also true for vulnerable people below that age, such as those with chronic heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease or asthma sufferers. This is David Coulton, reporting for BBC News 24.’

  Bob muted the TV and coughed into his tissue again. A part of him felt just a little bit better knowing that he was not the only person suffering, but he did wonder what, if anything, the Government would do. Perhaps nothing until his blood sample had been checked.

  THIRTEEN

  Gwen eventually found Owen standing at the rail at Mermaid Quay. It was chilly so close to the water, and she had to pull her denim jacket tighter to ward off the hard south-easterly blowing in towards Cardiff. Owen was still in a T-shirt, looking out across the bay.

  ‘Hey,’ Gwen said as she joined him at the rail.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ muttered Owen, without taking his eyes off the horizon.

  ‘Don’t bother what?’

  ‘Don’t bother trying to sweet-talk me back into the Hub. I need a break.’

  ‘We’re all pretty tired,’ Gwen remarked evenly. ‘Jack says he needs you though.’

  That provoked a harsh laugh. ‘Sent you up after me, did he? Thought you could work your womanly wiles and get me to come running back? So I can go back in and say sorry I messed up, Jack. Again. Please let me prove myself to you by solving the problem in five minutes flat.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Gwen. ‘It’s not like that and you know it. Jack wanted to come after you himself.’

  ‘That would’ve been even worse.’

  ‘I said I’d come because I knew how you’d be feeling.’

  He looked at her for the first time. ‘Bet you don’t.’

  ‘Yeah, I do. You’re feeling pretty stupid and ashamed for reacting like that. Not only did you mess up and overreact, you shot our only chance of finding out what this is all about.’

  ‘It wasn’t human.’

  ‘Maybe not — but it was humanoid.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean it didn’t need shooting. I can think of quite a few humanoids and humans I know who could do with shooting.’

  ‘Says Dr Owen Harper.’

  A slight smirk. ‘You really want to know why I pulled the trigger?’

  She shrugged. ‘I think you just freaked because it looked like a tiny little person. A baby.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t me who freaked. I pulled the trigger ’cos I knew you lot wouldn’t.’ Owen turned around so his back was to the bay, folded his arms and leant against the rail. ‘Jack always holds back — he likes to give the benefit of the doubt and you wouldn’t shoot because … well, because it looked like an infant.’

  Gwen flinched. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It was small, newborn, looked a bit helpless,’ Owen said matter-of-factly. ‘Classic infant survival technique. The maternal instinct in you wouldn’t allow you to shoot.’

  ‘Is that so wrong?’

  Now Owen turned to look at her, staring straight into her eyes. ‘That wasn’t a baby, Gwen. It didn’t even look like a baby.’

  ‘OK. So what was it?’

  ‘I dunno, yet.’

  ‘So why’d you shoot it?’

  ‘Because I could tell — I could feel it — the way it looked, the way it sounded. It was all wrong. Unnatural.’

  Gwen took a deep breath, pulling her hair away from her face as the bay wind flapped it around her head. ‘Well, it’s dead now. So you can come back, take a proper look. Maybe come up with something a bit more useful than “unnatural”. That’s what we deal with every day, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. But this was … something else. I can’t explain it. It was just instinct.’

  ‘Well, now your instincts should tell you that we need to find out what it was, and try to explain it.’ She touched him on the arm. ‘What’s done is done, Owen. You shot it. It’s dead. Let’s move on.’

  ‘May as well,’ Owen grunted. He hunched up his shoulders. ‘Besides, it’s freezing out here.’

  Toshiko, wearing surgical gloves, placed what remained of the creature on a tray. The bullet had blown it into fragments, but, picking up what looked like pieces of hardened mucus she’d found on the floor of the Autopsy Room, she had been able to complete part of the jigsaw. She had a surgical mask over her nose and mouth to keep out the stench. Ianto had already complained that it had filled the room with a smell like a compost heap.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Jack asked as he watched Toshiko work, his face stony with distaste as the putrid smell reached his nose. ‘Sew the pieces back together and run a couple of thousand volts through it?’

  Toshiko gave him a cool look and then returned to her examination.

  The creature would have been about eighteen inches high when stretched out. It was humanoid, with a tough, fibrous green skin. The head had been completely disintegrated by Owen’s shot, so there was no way of seeing that properly again, but there had been scraps of the weed-like substance left. Toshiko put them on slides and checked them out under a microscope along with strips of flesh.

  ‘This is quite extraordinary,’ she said, looking up over the top of her glasses at Jack. ‘I’ve made a chemical analysis of the flesh. It’s actually a hardened slime made up from various inorganic salts, desquamated cells and leucocytes. In other words, it appears to be made primarily from mucus.’

  ‘S’not very nice.’

  ‘There are traces of vegetable matter here, too, though,’ Toshiko reported thoughtfully. ‘Actually part of the flesh.’

  ‘You mean it could be a vegetable life form?’ Jack didn’t seem amazed by this. It was a genuine query. Sometimes the depth of his knowledge about alien life still took Toshiko by surprise.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I’m not sure. It’s neither plant nor animal nor wholly mucoid; just a bit of everything. It would explain the smell, though — bacteria at work in rotting vegetation.’

  Jack was staring at the remains with a deep frown on his otherwise smooth features, and Toshiko noticed when she looked up. ‘It’s kind of familiar,’ he said quietly, in response to her quizzical look.

  ‘The smell?’

  ‘No. The look of it. Reminds me of something …’ Jack still seemed to be turning it over in his mind, as if he was sorting through a hundred thousand different experiences, searching for a tiny scrap of useful information. He approached the examination tray and reached out towards the remains, but he made sure he didn’t touch it. His lips parted slightly, and then he said, ‘Homunculus.’

  ‘Latin, meaning literally, “little man” or “manikin”,’ said Toshiko, nodding. ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘There’s something about it,’ mused Jack, as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘Something at the back of my mind. That word — homunculus — I dunno why, but it just fits. I know it does.’

  ‘Something you remember?’

  ‘Wish I could.’

  ‘Relax. It’ll come to you.’ Toshiko smiled at him. ‘You need a rest.’

  Jack ran a hand through his hair and said, ‘What I need is more coffee. Ianto!’

  ‘A man’s work is never done in Torchwood,’ said Ianto, peelin
g off his rubber gloves. ‘If you want coffee on demand, you’ll have to stop mucking the place up first.’

  ‘Get to it before I put you over my knee.’ Jack grinned at him and turned back to Toshiko. ‘Tosh, what was this thing doing inside that corpse? How’d it get in there?’

  ‘I think our original idea was close to the truth,’ she replied. ‘It had been growing in there. I don’t think it had reached full maturity, but it was clearly ready to emerge — I’m wondering if it may have been responsible for keeping the corpse in a state of suspended animation for the last forty years in the marsh.’

  ‘And that’s why it suddenly woke up?’

  ‘Well, there’s still plenty of chronon discharge registering, but it’s still a more likely explanation than some kind of fallout from the Rift.’

  ‘OK, I’ll buy that. Still don’t know what it is, though.’

  ‘Homunculus?’

  Jack shrugged. ‘I’m working on it.’

  There was a clatter of footsteps on the flooring, and they looked up to see Owen approaching. He was trying to conceal his sheepishness behind an arrogant façade, and almost — but not quite — failing.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘Don’t all rush to hug me, you’ll only embarrass me.’

  ‘Hug you?’ queried Jack. ‘Hey, even I have standards.’

  ‘Thank you, Captain.’ Owen raised both eyebrows in a look of pure innocence that almost — but not quite — succeeded. ‘Anyway, back now, sulk over. What’s next?’

  ‘Tosh has been examining what’s left of the …’

  ‘The …?’

  ‘The whatever-it-is.’

  ‘Ugly-looking thing, isn’t it?’ said Owen. ‘The whatever-itis ain’t much better either.’ He flashed a grin at Toshiko and winked. ‘You know I’m only joking.’

  ‘I think it’s some kind of infant,’ Toshiko said shortly.

  ‘I’ve already had this conversation. That’s no baby, Tosh.’ He leant over her to examine the readings on the monitor and raised his eyebrows. ‘For one thing it’s made out of snot, according to this.’

  ‘And by infant I mean it may not be fully grown.’ Toshiko indicated the series of computer analysis screens by her workstation. ‘Look at these molecular spectroscopy readings. The concentration levels are incredible. It’s like there’s so much energy contained within each cell, just waiting for a release.’

  ‘Any chance of that happening now?’ asked Jack warily.

  ‘No. It’s dead, not dormant.’

  ‘Good job I shot it, then,’ said Owen.

  Jack paced around the workstation thoughtfully. ‘So we have a dead body acting as an incubator for this thing, lying at the bottom of a peat bog for over forty years until Tosh found it.’

  ‘Lucky old me,’ said Toshiko.

  Gwen approached the huddle with a sheaf of paperwork in her hand. ‘I’ve done some research on water hags,’ she announced. ‘I did try phoning Professor Len, but he’s not picking up.’

  Toshiko smiled. ‘Pity. I liked him.’

  ‘Well, he did save your life.’

  ‘That always does it for me.’

  Owen looked up. ‘So you typed “water hag” into Google and pressed enter. I don’t know … With all your police training and dedication to duty I’d have expected more. Whatever happened to the plod’s meticulous fact-finding and slow-but-sure attitude? I think you could have gone that extra mile and tried Wikipedia.’

  ‘You’re so funny, Owen,’ Gwen said without a trace of a smile. She held up the hard copy for Jack and Toshiko to see. ‘Thought I’d print it off rather than send it across.’

  ‘Surprised you didn’t write it all down in your little notebook,’ muttered Owen.

  Gwen ignored him. ‘Water hags are basically lumps of marsh weed that look vaguely like an old woman lurking underwater,’ she said. ‘That’s the fact side of things, anyway. They were commonly sighted in medieval times in areas of marshland all over the country, but they sort of went out of superstition fashion a long time ago. There are some references in literature and folklore down through the ages, though, and famously there was a giant water hag in Beowulf. She was Grendel’s mother, and she used to live under a black lake and drag people down to their deaths with hooked talons.’

  ‘I think I went out with her once,’ said Owen.

  ‘Which is probably why Beowulf killed her with his magic sword,’ Gwen said. ‘Put the poor woman out of her misery.’

  ‘Ho, ho, ho.’

  ‘There was another well-known water hag in Cheshire called Jenny Greenteeth,’ Gwen continued. ‘She used to lurk in ditches and drag unwary travellers down to her underwater den.’

  ‘Jenny Greenteeth?’ repeated Owen. ‘Yep, definitely went out with her.’

  ‘Professor Len said that some of these water spirits could disguise themselves as normal women,’ Toshiko said.

  ‘There you are then.’

  ‘The point is,’ said Gwen, ‘it’s all the same kind of location and the same modus operandi.’

  ‘So Professor Len was right after all,’ said Toshiko.

  ‘You reckon our dead friend back there was an unwary traveller?’ wondered Jack, jabbing a thumb towards the Autopsy Room. ‘Walking across the Greendown Moss one night forty years back, and dragged down by one of these old witches?’

  ‘Sally Blackteeth, to be precise,’ said Toshiko. ‘That’s the name of the water hag Professor Len told us about.’

  ‘And there’s something else which may be relevant,’ said Gwen. ‘These witches or water hags couldn’t have children. They dragged men down into the swamp but it never worked out. So they used to make their own children out of dried snot and mud.’

  ‘The homunculus,’ said Toshiko quietly.

  There was silence for a moment before Owen said, ‘But if these water hag things went off the superstition radar like you say, what’s brought them back again now?’

  ‘Well, in the absence of Professor Len, I did go that extra mile,’ Gwen smiled sweetly, ‘and came up with this.’ She placed a sheet of paper on Toshiko’s desk. ‘Several more water hag sightings in modern times. They’re not as old-fashioned as you think.’

  Jack picked up the hard copy and scanned it. ‘Nine sightings in the last year alone. Why didn’t we spot this sooner?’

  ‘We’re on the lookout for all sorts of things,’ Toshiko argued. ‘We can’t follow up every single paranormal sighting or report.’

  ‘But look at the locations,’ said Jack, snapping his fingers against the paper. ‘Six of these were within a five-mile radius of here.’

  They all knew what he meant by that — the chromium tower rising through the centre of the Hub, trickling with water, the base practically covered in moss and algae.

  ‘The Rift,’ nodded Toshiko, moving around so that she could check the report herself. ‘We know these things have a special connection with space-time — and I’ve correlated chronon discharges with nearly all of these areas. If I made a closer comparison, I bet they’d be exact matches.’

  ‘Get on it — double-check. We need to know for sure.’ Jack tossed the papers towards Gwen and Owen, adding, ‘Look — there was even one sighted in the local canal! Right under our noses.’

  ‘Anywhere there are stagnant ponds or marshy areas,’ Gwen said, studying the map. ‘Even in city areas.’

  There was a polite cough from behind them. When they looked around, they saw Ianto standing a little off to the side. ‘I can only think it appropriate at this point to remind you about Saskia Harden,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’ Jack frowned.

  Owen straightened up, saying, ‘The girl I went to Trynsel to investigate …?’

  ‘The serial suicide?’

  Ianto nodded. ‘That’s right. If you recall, she had been found by the police floating in water, on a number of occasions. In a canal, in a pond, in a disused swimming pool …’

  ‘Stagnant water,’ said Toshiko. ‘Or as near
as she could find.’

  ‘Could she be a water hag?’ wondered Gwen.

  ‘Let’s ask her,’ said Jack. He turned to Owen, only to find him already heading for the exit.

  FOURTEEN

  Owen drove straight to Bob Strong’s house. He felt vaguely guilty for not having taken Ianto’s original request seriously enough, but Strong’s illness had seemed more important at the time and Owen had forgotten all about Saskia Harden.

  He was reminded of just how bad Bob Strong was as soon as the door opened. His skin was grey-green and his eyes, beneath the heavy, swollen lids, were veined with blood.

  Strong stood in the doorway for a moment, focusing. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said gruffly. He coughed and then stood back. ‘You’d better come in. Hope you’ve got some good news.’

  As he spoke, he started coughing again and his knees buckled. Instinctively, Owen caught him, took his weight and helped him back inside the house.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ Strong assured him, leaning on the furniture for support but making sure he took the shortest route back to the sofa. The room was a mess, full of half-drunk cups of coffee, medicine bottles, crumpled tissues and a terrible smell.

  Owen sniffed cautiously. He knew what the smell was — sickness, illness. And something else. It took him a moment to work it out: rotten cabbages. Maybe something in the kitchen was going off.

  Strong’s cough sounded ragged and guttural, and Owen heard him moan as the pain ripped through his chest.

  ‘Sit down,’ Owen said. ‘I’ll get you something.’

  ‘Feel … like … hell …’ groaned Strong, lowering himself into the cushions of the settee.

  ‘What have you taken?’

  Strong’s eyes were closing, as if he was too weak to reply.