Jack made a few more notes, sent a couple more emails, and made a secure phone call. While Gwen was still in the psychiatric ward, Jack had settled into relative domesticity with Mary, Rhys and Anwen. He knew it couldn’t last, but as long as he was trying to make sense of what had happened to Gwen and these other women, Wales was as good a place as any from which to investigate the phenomenon.
Mary had taken Anwen for a walk in town. The house was quiet. Jack scanned the reports he’d hacked into from the World Health Organization, which had become a clearing house of data from the various medical communities dealing with these afflicted women.
According to the recent reports, no two women reacted the same way when the madness descended upon them: some collapsed from an overwhelming sense of smell; others felt as if the volume in their surroundings had been cranked too high; a few tasted emotions so strongly they were physically ill; even more reported that they hallucinated realities they could never have experienced and heard imagined music and disembodied voices.
After three hours of reading, Jack closed the laptop, got up from the table and, lifting his coat and binoculars from behind the kitchen door, went out to stretch his legs and to think. Outside, he could smell the coming rain… and something else – wood smoke, sulphur and the stink of hot tar. It was mid-afternoon on a cold, dreary Wednesday. He was alone in the street.
He could sense a strange tang in the air. The vaguely ruddy scent of blood and rust drifted towards him, leading him south, towards the seafront. By the time he reached the Marina, the rain was falling in heavy, lashing drops and the smell was stronger, as pungent as perfume. It felt ominous. He turned up his collar and hooked his binoculars over his shoulder. While he walked, he became aware of the silence around him. He could hear the rush of the sea, the rain dripping from his upturned coat collar down onto his neck, but that was all.
Jack lifted his binoculars to the horizon, scanning the five or six miles of beach to his right. He held his gaze for one, two, three beats, and then he shifted his focus to the Maritime Quarter behind him.
No cormorants. No sandpipers. No gulls. No magpies. No birds of any species anywhere. Jack was not a suspicious man, but he couldn’t help thinking that this was not a good sign.
As Jack was walking across the soft sand, he felt the beach shift beneath him, throwing him off-balance. He recovered his footing and turned back the way he had come, the tremor worsening.
Suddenly, car sirens blasted from the street beyond the promenade, and he saw a small explosion from a passing car, an exhaust pipe popping. As the ground shook, the car shot off the road, somehow soaring over the low promenade wall, diving nose-first into the sand below.
The tremor stopped. But Jack was still reeling, his nostrils full of the stench of burning tyres and hot macadam. He took a couple of strides towards the car, knowing he should help, but the smell clogged his sinuses, and he retched, unable to clear it. He staggered back, breaking into a run, the smell clashing with a nightmarishly amplified ringing of alarms. For Jack Harkness, a man who had leapt into burning buildings and in front of alien war machines, it was all suddenly too much.
Jack ran away.
*
Breathless, bewildered and furious with himself, Jack took off his boots and hung his coat to dry in the kitchen. He put the kettle on, then went to the bathroom and found a towel to dry his hair, which was longer than it had ever been. For some reason, he had very little desire to cut it. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, aware, again, of that peripheral vision of yellow dots.
As he stared into the mirror, the dots slowly moved front and centre and began to coalesce. The face of a young woman appeared, floating in front of his own. She had black eyes and thick dark hair flooding over her shoulders.
Jack pressed his hand on the mirror, touching her image. He breathed out slowly.
What the hell was that?
Who the hell was that?
34
MINUTES LATER, JACK stood in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil and staring at a hurried drawing he’d made of the woman’s image.
He had no idea who she was. Not a clue. This ignorance, this lack of knowing, this gap in his understanding was as unsettling to Jack as any of the extraordinary and alien experiences he’d ever had. She’d felt real to him, not a hallucination. Setting the pad down on the table, he stared out into the eerily empty street, watching two local constables cycling down the road, presumably checking for casualties from the minor quake.
Flipping open his laptop, Jack checked the weather channel. The earthquake had been recorded at 3.4 on the Richter scale. BBC Wales was reporting most of the damage had been to the sea ports and villages on the south-eastern coast.
Jack noted the data scrolling across his computer and the pages and pages of information about the deranged women spread out across the table. He sighed, lamenting how much he missed his team, missed Owen and Tosh, missed the Hub and its battery of computers.
The kettle whistled on the counter behind him. He didn’t move, letting it build up its steam, missing Ianto most of all.
‘I hate doing this shit by myself.’
Coffee in hand, Jack sat down and carried on.
So far, Jack had found nothing of significance, other than the fact that the affected were all women. He was certain this was a critical point, but still couldn’t see an angle to pursue that might suggest a solution to diminish or stop the outbreaks, never mind understanding the cause.
Jack sat back in the kitchen chair, sipping his coffee. Ianto would have brought him a biscuit or two.
In his head, Jack flipped through the files of the local women who’d been affected at the same time as Gwen. These women were a good sample of all those who’d been struck. If he could understand the cause – because there was a cause, he thought. This was not random. This was not some kind of mass female hysteria. Jack had lived through far too much to believe for one second there wasn’t something or someone behind what was happening.
It wasn’t until day five that Jack witnessed something that was the breakthrough for which he’d been searching, the understanding that might help him bring Gwen home.
*
Jack was stretched across the couch in the living room reading to Anwen. Rhys had gone to fetch Mary from the hospital and bring her home for tea. Gwen and the other women remained sedated and mostly incoherent, their families taking turns sitting watch all day at their bedsides, vigils that were occurring all over the world where clusters of women had been afflicted.
‘No,’ said Anwen as Jack opened the colourful new alphabet book he’d bought for her. She turned to the bright red apple on the first page with a speckled worm crawling through its core carrying a bag of books.
‘A is for Apple,’ said Jack.
‘No,’ said Anwen, slapping the picture of the apple.
‘Oh, I’m pretty sure that A is for Apple,’ laughed Jack, ‘at least in this universe.’
Anwen grabbed the book from Jack and began to flip through the pages until she reached L where there was a picture of a large luscious lemon with striped straws sticking out all over it. She poked her finger at the lemon and said, ‘Apple.’
No matter how insistent Jack was, Anwen was unyielding.
He carried her into the kitchen and showed her the fruit bowl. ‘Anwen, show Uncle Jack the apple.’
He held her forward and she picked up the only apple left in the bowl. He peeled it and cut it into slices, and they shared the snack, while he thought things through.
Later at dinner, he told Rhys and Mary what had happened.
‘She recognises the shapes,’ he told them. ‘So what was confusing her? Do you think she might be colour blind?’
Mary was clearing the table, stacking the dishes in the sink. ‘I don’t think she is. She has no problem pointing out colours in her rainbow book.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Jack, filling the sink with water and suds to wash the dishes. ‘No
worries. Maybe she was just mixed up.’
When the house was quiet and everyone asleep, Jack tiptoed downstairs and sat at the dining room table. In the pale moonlight beaming through the windows, he sorted all the information he had gathered, including the image of the women in the mirror, into a narrative of sorts.
By the time the sun came up, Jack believed he had hit on something, and it unsettled him.
35
THE SECURITY GUARD on duty outside the locked ward had been eyeing Jack suspiciously since coming on duty at the shift change. He instinctively deferred to a senior officer, but this man’s uniform looked oddly old-fashioned – as if he’d stepped out of a vintage comic book. ‘You’re the kind of man me mam warned me of,’ the guard muttered to himself.
Now the man was violating the locked ward’s protocols. Looked like he was going to break into the ward with all those nutty women. Before the guard could call for assistance, Jack returned to the desk and handed over his belongings, including his coat, a leather wrist-strap, his passport, and his phone all of which the guard looked at quizzically before dropping into a Ziploc bag. Once Jack had signed the visitors’ log, the guard buzzed him into the ward.
‘Keep your voice low, your head high and your hands where I can see them at all times. D’ya hear?’
Jack saluted. ‘Loud and clear.’
Pausing at the door, Jack was overwhelmed with the sharp pine scent of antiseptic, the metallic odour of blood, the heavy breathing and the quiet moaning of the patients invading his senses at once. His fingertips began tingling. He stared down at his hands. He opened and closed his fists, but this served only to spread the stinging to his knuckles where he felt a dull throb.
When he looked up, three fiery interlocking red rings shimmered before his eyes. Jack stared over at Gwen quietly moaning in bed below a high barred window. The rings were identical to the image she’d carved on her arm. Jack exhaled slowly. The rings floated in front of his field of vision, bouncing like an animated 3D image on an invisible screen inches from his face. He glanced from Gwen to each of the other women in the ward. The rings followed his line of sight.
Jack took a deep breath, reaching his hand up to touch one of them. The image danced in front of his hand. No matter what Jack did, the rings remained between him and whatever he was looking at.
‘Oi. What’s going on in there?’ asked the guard, his voice crackling through the intercom.
Jack turned and waved at the guard. The rings disappeared.
Jack raked his hands through his hair, knowing that he had been lying to himself and he had been for weeks. Exhaustion, loneliness, blood-letting, the effects of nearly dying, all those were the lies he’d been using as excuses for this deepening emotional fragility he was experiencing, for it was a wave of fear, a tug of intensity and a strange email that had brought him back to Wales in time to stop Gwen hurting her family.
Jack couldn’t explain how his need to help her had been triggered by a scent on a distant world, the smell lingering from a dream he’d had or a memory that was seeping back into his consciousness from an age ago. Jack knew he could no longer ignore the rock-hard bad feeling lodged in his gut that something troubling was happening on Earth, and that Gwen and all these mad women were somehow part of it.
The only other visitor in the psychiatric ward was a stocky man in his thirties, leaning over the woman with one side of her face bandaged. He was gently brushing a section of his wife’s hair, an act so intimate and tender that Jack averted his eyes for a beat, but the man caught Jack’s stare.
‘At night when we watch the telly,’ he said, his voice heavy with sadness, ‘I always give ’er hair a brush, like. She says it makes her ’ave good dreams. Don’t know what else to do to make her be still.’ Every few beats his wife would jump, her arms and legs spasming against the blankets.
‘Name’s Phil Newman,’ he said when the spasm subsided. ‘This is my wife, Lizzie… Elizabeth.’
‘My sister,’ Jack said, nodding towards Gwen, who was mumbling in her partially conscious state, and still fighting against her restraints. ‘I’m hoping the sedative settles her soon. I’m afraid I don’t have her hairbrush with me.’
‘Well,’ the other man said, ‘she’s quietened down from when she first came in a few days ago.’ He set the brush on the bedside table. ‘Did your sister hurt herself too? My Lizzie tore off her own ear. Can you believe that?’
He slumped into the chair next to his wife’s bed, looking up at Jack with his eyes swollen and sad. ‘How does someone do that to themselves? What must be goin’ on in her head?’
Jack came over and stood at the bottom of Lizzie’s bed. ‘I’m sure the doctors here will figure out what happened to your wife and to these other women. This hospital has one of the best neurological and psychiatric teams in the British Isles.’
‘That’s grand,’ said the husband mournfully, ‘but they can’t heal her ear, can they?’
‘Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?’ asked Jack. ‘I’m trying to figure out what happened to my sister and I think it may be the same thing that happened to your wife.’
‘Really?’ said Phil, sceptically. ‘The doctor told me that whatever had happened to make her hurt herself had come from inside Lizzie’s head and the doctor said it weren’t contagious.’
‘I know, and she is the doctor, but I’m curious anyway.’
Across the room one of the other women began spasming. No sooner had she started than Gwen’s body began to jerk and then Lizzie’s, their legs and arms twitching beneath the blankets. As if their movements had been choreographed, each of the women were spasming in unison.
Lizzie’s husband jumped up and began to brush her hair again, believing his touch was making all the difference when his wife settled after a few strokes.
Jack held his hands on Gwen’s feet, keeping her movements limited. He was not so sure his touch or Phil’s had anything to do with what he was suddenly witnessing, as each of the women came out of the spasms at the same.
The rock-hard bad feeling yawned in Jack’s gut.
‘Did your wife have a history of taking drugs, Phil?’ asked Jack, coming back to Lizzie’s bedside while keeping his eye on Gwen. ‘Even if it was only at college or in her younger days?’
Phil stopped brushing for a second. ‘Nah. Lizzie was always the straight one, hardly even took a drink, did she. She was always the one who took the car keys when we were out with our friends. Always the mum of the group, making sure the rest of us were right as rain.’
‘What about an emotional trauma in childhood?’
Phil shook his head.
‘An accident of some kind?’
‘The doctor wondered ’bout that too. But my wife’s as healthy as an ox. Only time she’s ever been in hospital before now was to have the kids. When she’s feeling out of sorts, she goes for a night out wi’ her pals, shakes it off, like. She just got our youngest toilet trained and she were so happy not to be doin’ nappies any more.’
Phil’s voice caught in his throat. Jack poured him a glass of water from the pitcher on the bedside table. ‘Don’t know what I’m goin’ to tell the kids ’bout this.’
‘You’ll think of something, Phil,’ Jack handed him the water. ‘Do you know when her breakdown started exactly?’
‘Was right after lunch four days ago. I’m sure of it. My 9-year-old called me at work and said mum had run out of the house. By the time I got home, police were already there and said she was in emergency. Said that she’d had some kind of a fit in the shop.’
Across the room, Gwen let out a high-pitched moan. ‘Shewvee, Shewvee, Shewvee.’
Jack wanted to ask Phil more questions before the doctor returned and before Mary relieved him, but Gwen was becoming extremely agitated again.
Suddenly all the women were.
Jack wished Phil the best of luck and pulled a chair up to the right side of Gwen’s bed. He took her hand. The leather restraint on her wrist was
lined with cotton, but because Gwen had been fighting against it, her skin underneath the strap’s edge was rubbed raw.
Jack dug around in Gwen’s bedside locker and found some Vaseline. Scooping some out with a finger, he massaged the ointment into her wounds.
Slowly, she turned her head at his touch. Jack smiled and leaned closer. Gwen was crying.
‘Jack?’
He smiled, fighting back his own tears. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Jack?’
‘Yes. It’s me.’
She strained to lift herself up, but she couldn’t. Too much pain, too many monitors, too little strength, too tight restraints.
Jack put his hands on her shoulders, settling her gently against the pillows.
‘Shewvee,’ she slurred, adamantly.
‘Gwen, I’m so sorry. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.’
‘Esh,’ she said, her eyes blazing, her determination fighting against the deepening sedative.
‘S?’ asked Jack, taking her hand again. She squeezed.
‘Shoe. Shoe.’
‘U?’ Gwen squeezed his hand again, but her grip was weakening. The sedative pulling her under.
‘Gwen, that’s great. The letters S and U.’
‘Wee… wee,’ she whimpered, and then her eyes drooped closed, her mouth slackened, her grip on Jack’s hand loosened and Gwen was silent and still for the first time in days.
Jack finally understood what she’d been struggling to tell him. Kissing her lightly on the lips, he whispered, ‘Come back, Gwen. Please come back.’
36
JACK STOOD IN the hallway of the house, deep in thought. Gwen had spelled out ‘SUV’, but she had drifted into sleep before telling him where she had hidden the keys, never mind the vehicle itself.
She wouldn’t have been sloppy in her hiding place because she wouldn’t want Rhys to find them, to know that she had a way to get in touch with him. Hiding them in plain sight would not be an option. Besides all the household’s keys were on hooks in the kitchen, an extra set would be easily noticed.
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