SkyPoint

by Phil Ford

  The doorbell went.

  They looked at each other. They had agreed that Jack and the others should stay away while Owen and Toshiko got settled in at SkyPoint. No one else knew they were there.

  ‘Maybe it’s the milkman come to sign us up,’ Owen theorised with a frown. He headed for the door. ‘What do you like on your cornflakes in a morning?’

  He opened the door to a tall woman with cascading blonde hair in a white dress. If she’d had wings coming off her shoulder blades, he’d have believed in angels. Beside her stood an economy copy. Same golden hair, same finely sculpted cheekbones, same blue-green eyes. Just in jeans and a T-shirt with a kitten face on it.

  The little girl smiled up at Owen. ‘Hello, I’m Alison. What’s your name?’

  Kids were about as alien as it got for Owen. Some guys couldn’t talk to women. He never had a problem there. But kids…

  The mother spoke before he had to. ‘I’m Wendy, this is Alison. Sorry, my daughter always likes to get in first.’

  ‘What did you do to your hand?’

  Alison had noticed Owen’s bandaged fingers.

  ‘I had an accident,’ he told her.

  Behind him, he felt Toshiko come to the door. He felt her hand slip around his waist, the way a wife might squeeze her husband’s waist when she found him at the door talking to a cute blonde stranger.

  ‘Hello?’ she smiled.

  ‘Wendy Lloyd. This is my daughter Alison. We live just there,’ she said, indicating the half-open door across the passageway. Number forty-four.

  ‘Just wanted to welcome you to the block.’

  Toshiko leaned forward to shake Wendy’s hand. ‘Toshiko,’ she said. ‘And Owen.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Owen.

  Toshiko looked down at the little girl and tugged playfully on her kitten-face T-shirt. ‘I like your kitty cat.’

  ‘Mummy says I can have a real one when I’m six.’

  ‘And how old are you now?’ Toshiko asked.

  ‘Five and three-quarters.’

  ‘Not long to wait then,’ said Toshiko.

  See, thought Owen, that’s what he couldn’t do – find something to talk about with kids. Largely because all you could talk to them about was kitty cats and puppy dogs and dolls and toy cars. And, quite frankly, he didn’t give a shit.

  Toshiko straightened up and asked Wendy if she and Alison wanted to come in. Owen, she said, had just put some coffee on. Maybe Wendy caught the look of horror that flashed across Owen’s face.

  ‘No, it’s all right, you’re probably up to your necks in packing cases. I know what it’s like on moving-in day. But if you want, why not come over later for dinner? You’ll probably be too tired to cook, and we’re just sending out for an Indian. You can meet my husband, and I can bring you up to speed on all the SkyPoint gossip.’

  Owen was forming a polite decline when Toshiko said they would love to.

  Wendy’s smile shone, and Owen had another vision of angels.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘Come round about seven and we’ll dig out the take-away menu.’

  ‘See you then,’ said Toshiko.

  And Wendy led Alison away by the hand. The little girl was still watching them as Wendy closed the door of their apartment behind them.

  Toshiko slipped back through their door. ‘At least the neighbours seem nice.’

  Owen followed her back into the apartment and kicked the door shut with his heel. The Dave Brubeck Quartet had moved on to ‘Cassandra’. Maybe that would have chilled out his mum and dad, but right now it didn’t do anything for him.

  ‘What are you playing at, Tosh?’

  She looked back at him, genuinely puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Going around the neighbours for dinner. Look, this isn’t for real, you know. Whatever’s going on inside your head, Tosh, this isn’t us living happily ever after. I’m here to find out what’s making people disappear around here, not to fulfil some warped fantasy of yours.’

  Toshiko’s eyes burned with a moist rage. ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Tosh. This is your dream come true.’

  ‘Actually, Owen, no it isn’t! This is nothing like my dream come true!’

  She couldn’t look at him any more. She crossed to the window, stared out across the water and wished she could throw herself into it.

  Owen stood still, watching her. He could see her trembling with pent-up rage. He felt like an idiot. How the hell could this be anyone’s idea of a dream come true – pretending you were married to a bloody corpse!

  Still staring out of the window, determined to keep at least some control of her emotions, Toshiko said, ‘I know what we’re doing here, Owen. It’s my job, too. And that’s all I’ve got, my job.

  ‘But the instruments have drawn a blank. There’s not the first sign of Rift activity. And that means the only way we’re going to find anything out is from the people that live here. I’m sorry if that means we have to make it look like we love each other, but believe me, Owen, that is no dream-come-true for me. It doesn’t even come close.’

  Owen stood at the window and looked out over the Bay with her. He wanted to touch her, wanted to tell her that he was a prick, and that he was sorry. But he thought she would tell him to shove it, and he didn’t blame her.

  Instead he said, ‘I suppose we should count that as our first marital.’

  TEN

  Toshiko didn’t want Owen to think a joke was going to get him off the hook just like that.

  With barely a word she had gone into the bedroom and grabbed the messenger bag that carried her equipment then told him she was going to take a look around as she went through the front door.

  ‘I’m getting on with the job,’ she said as the door closed.

  It didn’t hit her until she got into the elevator that she was following the ritual of domestic politics she had grown up watching her mother employ on her dad.

  Never let a man know you’ve accepted his apology. Let him sweat a little more first.

  Her mother had never actually tutored her in the fine art of male-female power games, but it was the sort of thing she would have said. And the young Toshiko had seen her employ the gambit so many times, she had come to understand its mechanics the way a lion cub learns to hunt.

  The longer you leave it, the more opportunity he has to buy you something nice.

  Toshiko rode the elevator down to the basement. As long as she was playing sexual politics with Owen, she might as well get on with what she had told him she was doing, she thought. When she and Jack had snuck into SkyPoint before, she had been unable to pick up any Rift activity, but she had been wondering if it was possible that the building itself was somehow masking the energies that would normally mark its presence. She didn’t have the first idea how that could be the case, but she figured that the best place to look for a clear trace was at the building’s foundation.

  So, the basement.

  It wasn’t part of the regular itinerary for residents using the elevator – access to the basement was through a button with a key that Toshiko guessed would be carried by the building’s maintenance people. But it was going to be a pretty special key that stopped Toshiko Sato going where she wanted.

  A few seconds later, the elevator doors opened in the SkyPoint basement.

  She had pulled up the SkyPoint blueprints in the Hub before Jack and she had made that first visit. She now had them on the screen of her hand-held computer. The basement was below SkyPoint’s underground car park, and that put her now at twelve metres below the surface. She shivered. It was cold down here. Nothing all that strange about that, she thought, and the Rift didn’t work like so-called psychic activity – supposedly haunted locations were said universally to register markedly lower than ambient temperatures; Toshiko’s research had in fact shown that Rift activity often created a slight increase in temperature. Scientifically that made sense: the power involved in tearing a passageway between dimensions would in
evitably create an energy fallout that would most easily be manifest as a brief temperature boost. It was basic physics. That was why Toshiko didn’t believe in ghosts. Even if there were ghosts, they couldn’t hurt you – the things that came through the Cardiff Rift were something else, altogether.

  Light from the elevator fell across a board of switches on the wall, but Toshiko took a flashlight from her bag – the darkness of the subterranean level was comforting, it meant that no one else was already down here. If a janitor turned up before she completed her readings, she didn’t see why she should advertise her presence.

  The flashlight burned a hole in the darkness and picked out an expanse of piping and wiring beyond her. Holding the torch at shoulder height, she stepped into the darkness and the elevator doors hissed to behind her. The only light now was that of the torch beam and the glow of the hand-held. Moving further into the gloom, Toshiko switched screens on the hand-held with a practised movement of her thumb. The SkyPoint plans were replaced by a graphic that would pick up the slightest hint of Rift activity. She had taken four steps across the basement floor and so far the graphics were still. No activity.

  As she moved across the basement she swept the flashlight from side to side, and occasionally above her, lighting up the channels of steel ducting that ran across the roof. She had been in places like this before – dark, empty warehouses, derelict hospitals – and, after five years, they were places she knew she would never get used to. The darkness pressed close to you like a living thing and the tiniest sound was magnified inside your head by nervous tension into the most sinister portent of bloody destruction. She had learned to cope with such things, but it was dangerous to ignore them. If nothing else was down here, she knew that Weevils got everywhere. They reckoned that in the city you were never more than a couple of metres from a rat – you could probably say the same about Weevils. Somewhere down here in the vast darkness there would be a manhole cover and under that (and only under that, if she was lucky) somewhere there would be a Weevil.

  So Toshiko moved through the darkness, following the tunnel of light ahead of her, every sense testing for danger.

  The torch beam settled on a half-open door. What lay beyond it was cast into a darkness that seemed even deeper than that which pressed in around her. Curious, Toshiko moved towards the door. Subliminally, her mind noted the weight of the gun that nestled in the small of her back beneath her leather jacket. A part of her brain rehearsed the motion of dropping the hand-held computer module and yanking the gun from her belt if she needed it.

  Gently, she pushed the door open with the toe of her shoe, and she spread the flashlight beam across the room beyond.

  The first thing she saw was a half-naked woman.

  The brunette wore skin-tight leather trousers that shone like spilled oil, and they were unbuttoned at the waist – like she’d forgotten to do them up, the same way she had forgotten to put anything over her silicon-pumped boobs. She was spread over the bonnet of a sports car and at her feet it said SEPTEMBER. Someone – the janitor who used the office – was marking off each day of the month. There was a crude circle drawn around the last Friday of the month. Maybe that was pay day.

  Toshiko took in the rest of the room: there was an old table covered in paperwork and old newspapers; there was a kettle and a stained mug. There was a box of tools. And in one corner of the room there was a big, scratched metal cupboard. Toshiko opened the cupboard and saw bottles of what she took to be cleaning chemicals. She closed it again and got down on her hands and knees. The cupboard stood on four metal feet that raised it a little way off the concrete floor. This was what Toshiko was looking for.

  From the messenger bag over her shoulder she took a wafer-thin device that was about the size of a cigarette packet. She brought up another screen on the hand-held module and a couple of small diodes flashed into life on the device. She hid it under the cupboard. From there it would relay foundation-level readings to Toshiko’s hand-held. There might be no evidence of the Rift down there right now; it didn’t mean that was the way things were going to stay.

  As she got back to her feet, she heard the noise in the ducting.

  Nerves stretched to tripwires, she stood absolutely still, listening to the noise and trying to rationalise it. She found it hard to come up with something that it even sounded like.

  A little like wind rushing. A little like water spraying. And yet, unmistakeably and somehow horribly, solid.

  Something was moving through the ducting overhead.

  She glanced at her hand-held module: still no indication of Rift energies.

  But whatever was up there was no rat.

  And it wasn’t human.

  Toshiko moved out of the office, her torchlight following the ducting as she traced the progress of whatever was up there.

  And then it stopped.

  Toshiko stopped with it, her eyes on the metal ducting directly above her. Whatever she and Owen had come to SkyPoint to find, she knew it was just a few feet away, in the ducting above her head.

  Why has it stopped? What’s it doing?

  Suddenly she felt as if she was being watched. As if whatever was up there in the ducting was looking straight through the metal at her, waiting to see what she would do.

  Toshiko forced herself to shake off the notion. But she slipped the computer module into the messenger bag and drew the automatic from the small of her back. Then her ears strained for the slightest noise. She heard nothing. She counted the seconds with the beats of her heart. As a minute passed, there was still only silence, and it was as if she had imagined the whole thing.

  She ran the torch beam along the ducting. Three metres further on there was what looked like an inspection hatch. She had noticed a stepladder back in the janitor’s room. Her stomach turned over: the last thing that Toshiko wanted to do was climb into that steel tube with whatever was up there waiting for her. It wasn’t just the thought of something unknown, possibly alien and almost certainly dangerous up there. Toshiko wasn’t much good in confined spaces. UNIT had made sure of that when they cooped her up for six months in a cell that had been just 1.2 metres square. She knew without any doubt that if Jack hadn’t shown up when he did and made her that offer to join Torchwood, then one day the UNIT guard that brought her food would have found her dribbling and crazy in the corner.

  But that had been a while back now, and she had coped with a hell of a lot more than being shut in a box. She got the stepladder and set it up beneath the hatch, her ears still straining for the slightest noise from above. She climbed the ladder and wished to God that she had telekinetic powers or a third hand – she was going to need the torch to see by and that meant she had to put the gun away while she opened the catches to the duct. For a moment she thought about getting Owen. Sure, that would be the sensible thing – but she still had a point to make.

  She listened again, turning her head a little so that her ear was so close to the metal, so close to whatever was on the other side of it.

  She heard nothing.

  Quickly, she shoved the gun back into her waistband and snapped open the catches to the inspection hatch. She held the hatch in place against the body of the torch and listened some more as she retrieved the weapon. In her mind she rehearsed what she was going to do next.

  Duck. Drop the hatch. Go for it.

  Toshiko held her breath. There was still no sound from within the steel duct.

  Then she did it like she had rehearsed it.

  She moved fast, her muscles beating her synapses – getting it done before she had time to think twice.

  The stench hit her even before her head was through the hatch, and she knew what she was going to find in there ahead of the torchlight falling on it.

  It was, in fact, only the stench that told her.

  What lay along the narrow steel channel, illuminated by the flashlight beam, looked nothing like human remains, but that stink was unmistakeable. More than once she had come across what was lef
t of people that had been savaged by Weevils – they were messy killers but had the good sense to hide what they left behind. Generally, Weevils found a good hiding place and packed it with bodies until there was no room to pack any more. Torchwood would come across a mass grave of Weevil kills on average once every couple of months. But you only had to smell one to remember the stink.

  But this was no Weevil kill. Toshiko stood on the stepladder, the flashlight in one hand, her gun in the other and regarded the stinking mess a few feet away from her. She didn’t know what had killed this poor bastard – or bastards.

  What she saw was a shapeless gelatinous mess that looked mottled and grey in the light of the flashlight, streaked with veins and splotches of red-brown. Here and there, patches of hair clung to it like lichen.

  And there was an eye.

  Toshiko gasped and almost lost her footing on the stepladder.

  The eye stared at her, a large black pupil in a fading blue iris. It had been a beautiful eye once. It was hard to imagine that it had once gazed from anything other than a beautiful face. Now it glinted in her torchlight, set in a mass of decomposing cellular matter.

  Toshiko didn’t have the first idea what could have done this. She just thanked God that it didn’t seem to be around any more. It was time to get Owen. He was the medic; maybe he would have some clue as to what turned human beings into mush like that. She closed the hatch and put the ladder back where she had found it.

  She was almost at the elevator doors when Besnik Lucca stepped out of the darkness.

  ELEVEN

  Owen was angry with himself over what had happened with Toshiko. She was a good friend. When it came down to it she was in fact the only good-looking female he had ever been friends with that he hadn’t screwed.

  Maybe that was his problem. Owen had known for years that Toshiko wanted to go to bed with him, and for years he had taken an almost perverse delight in denying her. By the time he’d got over that he had actually started to feel too close to her – he hadn’t wanted to screw things up between them and almost inevitably that was what sex would have done. But things were different now with Toshiko, he knew.