Skypoint t-8

by Phil Ford

  ‘Do you play with the other kids up here?’ Owen asked, casting a glance around him, wondering where Alison’s mother was.

  ‘What other kids?’

  ‘There aren’t any other kids living here?’

  ‘Not yet. Mum says there will be one day.’

  ‘Must be a bit lonely.’

  Alison shrugged.

  ‘Did you have plenty of friends where you lived before?’

  Alison frowned. ‘Don’t remember.’

  See, this is why you don’t get on with kids. Always playing bloody games. And what the hell are you doing squatting on the floor with her like this? When her mum shows up what sort of a pervert is she going to take you for?

  Owen got to his feet, feeling the child’s eyes on him. He couldn’t make up his mind if they were suspicious – maybe she already had him down as a perv (kids these days grew up too quick; maybe they had to) – or somehow betrayed, like she didn’t want him to go.

  ‘What sort of accident did you have?’ she asked.

  She was looking at his hand again.

  ‘I shut it in a door,’ he lied.

  ‘That was stupid.’

  Not so stupid as breaking your own finger to prove a point. That was stupid when you were alive, when a walking corpse did it and the damage was never going to get fixed – now that was really stupid!

  ‘Yeah,’ he admitted.

  ‘I had an accident,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘A car hit me and Mummy, and I died.’

  Owen felt oddly like the world had just shifted around him. Not by much, just a couple of disorienting degrees. Just for a moment. He knew the feeling, it had happened to him before. The first time had been when he saw the thing that had been living in his fiancée’s head: the alien parasite that had killed her, the thing that had led him to Torchwood. The last time he had felt it had been when Jack had brought him back from the dead and he had realised what he was. It was the feeling that the world was never going to be the same again.

  She wasn’t dead like him, he understood that. She had been hit by a car and either paramedics had got her heart going again at the scene or she had died for a few seconds later in the operating theatre. Either way, she had been to the same place he had. She had seen the same thing he had, she had felt it. And if his tear ducts had worked he would have wept for her. Inside, he cried anyway.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked, his voice little more than a whisper, and he found that he was crouched down with her again.

  Alison looked at him, and it didn’t feel like he was looking into the eyes of a child, yet her voice was without drama, matter-of-fact: ‘Do you mean the accident, or after?’

  ‘Oh, there you are! Alison, I’ve been looking all over the place for you!’

  It was her mother. She was crossing the strange twenty-fourth-floor indoor park towards them.

  Owen automatically got to his feet and smiled at Wendy Lloyd.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Hello again,’ she said.

  She smiled, but it wasn’t quite the same as before, when she had turned up on the doorstep. The smile was pulling against tension. Nothing strange in that, Owen thought: you find your daughter in a lonely park talking to a stranger (and some of the worst strangers can live just over the road from you). What mother wouldn’t be a little tense?

  ‘How many times have I told you to stay out of the tunnels, Alison. They’re not safe.’

  Alison held up the pixie doll like it was his fault. ‘Mr Pickle says they’re pixie tunnels, and I’ll be safe with him.’

  Owen was confused. ‘Tunnels?’

  Wendy shook her head, despairing with her daughter. ‘The ventilation ducts. She just loves playing in them. I mean, it’s not like they’re that big or anything.’

  She shifted her look from Owen to Alison as a warning. ‘I swear she’ll get stuck in there one day, and we’ll never get her out.’

  She looked back at Owen, annoyed with her daughter but managing a smile. Compared to the dangers out in the big wide world, this they could really handle. ‘We keep taping the duct covers up, but she just peels it off and gets through.’

  Owen smiled, and looked at Alison. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much, another six months or so and it probably won’t be a problem.’

  Alison was going to grow out of her fascination pretty fast.

  ‘If I haven’t turned grey by then,’ Wendy said.

  Alison folded her book under her arm and took her mother’s hand. ‘I was telling Owen about my accident.’

  Owen saw the smile on Wendy’s face falter and die and she swung the child up into her arms. It was a protective motion, but Owen wasn’t sure that she was protecting Alison from him.

  ‘You know we don’t talk about that, Alison,’ she said to the child. Then she looked at Owen. ‘It’s a time in our lives we’d rather forget about.’

  She and her husband had nearly lost their little girl – had lost her for however short a period – who wouldn’t want to put it behind them? Owen nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘One reason we moved to SkyPoint,’ Wendy said. ‘No cars running past the front door.’

  ‘Guess not,’ he agreed and looked around him at the area that had been designed for the SkyPoint community to relax in without fear. ‘It certainly is quiet.’

  ‘That’s the way we like it,’ said Wendy, and carried Alison away to the elevator with her.

  Owen watched them go, and thought about Rapunzel.

  TWELVE

  Toshiko had slipped the gun back into her belt just before she reached the elevator in the basement. When Lucca moved out of the darkness there like a phantom she wasn’t sure if he had seen it, or if perhaps she should show it to him anyway – business-end first.

  She knew who Lucca was; Gwen had pulled the villain’s files up in the Hub Boardroom and given them all a run-down on the guy who lived at the top of SkyPoint. There wasn’t much likelihood that he had anything to do with what had brought Torchwood to the apartment tower, but he was a nasty complication that Gwen believed Toshiko and Owen would do well to avoid.

  So much for that.

  Toshiko jumped as Lucca materialised out of the dark, his face lit up like a Halloween mask by her flashlight. He had been lucky, she realised, that she hadn’t pulled the gun on instinct and blown his head off there and then. From what Gwen had told her, he wouldn’t have been missed.

  ‘You made me jump!’ she gasped, at once recognising Lucca and making ready with some kind of story to cover being down there.

  Lucca’s eyes glittered like diamonds in the torchlight. When he smiled his teeth shone, white and sharp.

  The smile didn’t make Toshiko feel any more comfortable.

  ‘You’re not supposed to be down here,’ he said.

  ‘I was just looking for somewhere to smoke,’ she said, hoping she got the mix of apology, embarrassment and what’s-it-got-to-do-with-you just right. ‘My husband doesn’t like me lighting up in the apartment.’

  ‘You could have gone outside.’

  ‘And look like one of those sad people that they make hang around doorways these days? No thanks.’

  She just hoped he didn’t get too close to her. She wouldn’t smell of tobacco.

  Lucca pulled a pack from his leather jacket and flipped it open with his thumb, then took an unfiltered cigarette from it with his lips the way they did it in old movies. Maybe he thought it would impress her – he looked the type. They were foreign cigarettes – Toshiko thought she could relax on him sniffing out her lie; those things would have destroyed his nasal receptors.

  ‘We’re like a couple of kids behind the bike sheds, yes?’ he said, and lit the cigarette with a lighter. There was an accent, but it wasn’t strong. ‘I see you came prepared.’

  He was talking about the flashlight.

  ‘Basements are the only place you can go these days. It was the same at our last building. And the locks to keep us out are never really a
ny good. I work in security.’ She extended her hand. ‘Toshiko Harper.’

  Lucca’s hand closed around hers like a rattlesnake.

  ‘Besnik Lucca. Your secret is safe with me, Toshiko.’

  ‘If you won’t tell anyone, neither will I,’ she said and turned towards the elevator, hoping that would signal an end to the conversation. The elevator doors parted at her touch of the button and she stepped into the light of the cabin.

  But Lucca came after her, carelessly tossing his cigarette onto the concrete basement floor. His movement was quick and predatory. Toshiko instinctively pressed herself against the elevator’s mirrored wall. The doors closed behind him, and Toshiko felt trapped and more frightened than she had been by whatever was in the ducting. She slid one hand behind her back and felt it rest on the grip of the automatic under her jacket.

  ‘Which floor?’ he asked.

  ‘Thirteen. Thank you.’

  Instead he hit the button for the twenty-fifth. His floor.

  ‘I said thirteen,’ Toshiko said, trying to keep the tension out of her voice as she felt the elevator start to climb.

  Lucca flashed Toshiko a smile that made her stomach quake. It wasn’t some kind of sinister Bond-style villain smile. It was quite the opposite. She had heard Gwen list the crimes that the police had tried but failed to pin on Lucca; he was the kind of man you didn’t want to share a lift with. But he was a good-looking man and that smile could make you forget all the bad stuff. That kind of smile could seduce a nun.

  ‘I know,’ he said, casually. ‘But that was the basement. I thought now you might like to see the view from the roof.’

  ‘The roof?’

  ‘I have the penthouse. There’s a roof garden.’

  Well, it beat etchings.

  ‘Owen,’ she said, apologetically. ‘He’ll wonder where I am.’

  ‘Your husband.’

  ‘That’s – that’s right,’ she said.

  Lucca touched the button for the thirteenth floor, and Toshiko felt the elevator begin to slow. At the same time, she felt his eyes on her. He made sure that she felt them.

  ‘So be it,’ he said. ‘But you must come. I promise you – up there – it will take your breath away.’

  The elevator doors opened on to the thirteenth floor. Lucca moved aside and motioned with an open hand for her to step out. Toshiko released her hold on the pistol behind her back and stepped out into the corridor.

  ‘I’ll see you soon, Toshiko,’ he said.

  The elevator doors closed on him, but somehow it was as if she could still feel him watching her. It felt uncomfortably like the sensation she had experienced in the basement, that the thing in the ducting was watching her. The thought disturbed her.

  What disturbed her more was that for a moment – just a moment, she told herself – she had nearly gone with him to the twenty-fifth floor.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Basically,’ Owen told them, ‘it’s shit.’

  They were in the medical centre of the Hub, Owen’s Autopsy Room: Toshiko, Jack, Gwen, Ianto and Owen, looking at a piece of shit.

  It was a sample from the SkyPoint ducting.

  When Toshiko had returned to the apartment, Owen hadn’t been there. He’d turned up a couple of minutes later and said he’d been looking for her.

  Toshiko told him about what she had found in the SkyPoint ducting and took him there immediately. She didn’t tell him about meeting Besnik Lucca, and she didn’t know why. Owen had climbed into the ducting and taken a sample of the foul mess that she had found in there. He had said he could take a fairly educated guess as to what it was, just as Toshiko already had, but he wanted to get back to the Hub to do a proper analysis.

  So two hours later they were standing around Owen’s sample in the Autopsy Room.

  ‘Something is shitting in the ducting?’ said Gwen, raising a single unimpressed eyebrow.

  ‘But not mice,’ said Ianto.

  Owen had chosen the most stomach-churning sample he could find. It was, after all, Owen. Death had done nothing to leaven his schoolboy delight in putting the others off their dinners. The eyeball stared at them out of the gelatinous chunk Owen had collected in one of the plastic kitchen storage boxes Ianto had included among their moving-in props.

  ‘So spell it out for me, Owen,’ Jack said. ‘What are we talking about here?’

  ‘It’s human cellular matter. It’s been broken down. Digested, if you like. If you ask me, whatever did this, this is what it didn’t need. The waste product.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Ianto, horrified.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Owen.

  ‘No. I meant, shit.’

  ‘The poor bastard,’ said Gwen.

  ‘Bastards,’ Owen told her. ‘According to my scans there are at least three distinct DNA markers. Three people. Oh. And I found this.’

  He produced a small plastic bag. There was something square and metallic inside.

  Gwen reached for it and saw that it was a cufflink bearing the picture of a clown.

  ‘Brian Shaw,’ she said, flatly.

  Jack started to move around the autopsy room. ‘OK. So now we know what happens to the people that get taken. What we don’t know is, what’s doing this and why.’

  ‘Food,’ suggested Toshiko. It seemed like the obvious answer.

  ‘I guess,’ said Jack. Though there were creatures in the universe that would kill you for other reasons – even procreation. It wasn’t too much of a leap to think that there might be things around that would turn a person into a pile of crap for reasons other than eating.

  ‘So, we know it’s some sort of creature. These people aren’t being torn away by some sort of force created by the Rift. There’s something living in SkyPoint and feeding off the residents,’ said Gwen.

  ‘SkyPoint is a big place. And it’s still largely empty. This creature could be anywhere,’ said Toshiko.

  ‘Or anyone,’ Ianto reminded them. ‘I’m sure we all remember how much fun a shapeshifter can be.’

  He was looking at Gwen. Now that had been the Wedding from Hell. Gwen got bitten by a shapeshifter that passed on its unborn young in its bite. Next morning – the morning of her wedding to Rhys – she was fully pregnant with a baby alien. And then it’s shapeshifting mum showed up to rip it out of Gwen – that was Nostrovite childbirth; gas and air wasn’t an option.

  ‘This isn’t a Nostrovite,’ said Jack.

  ‘Thank God,’ said Gwen.

  ‘But there are all sorts of shapeshifters,’ Owen told them, ‘and they’re all tricky bastards.’

  Jack was musing. ‘A shapeshifter that can move through walls and pull people out with them…’

  ‘That’s not just shapeshifting, Jack. That’s atomic realignment,’ Owen told him. ‘Changing shape is one trick. There are all sorts of ways different creatures pull that off, but moving a solid body through brick-’

  ‘You’re not telling me it’s impossible, Owen. I mean something got at those people and it took them with it the same way it got in. And those apartments may be fitted with every mod-con, but they don’t have trap doors.’

  ‘No, Jack. I’m not saying it’s impossible. When you get down to an atomic level nothing is solid. Everything is built up of energy particles. Theoretically, it should be possible for other energy particles to pass through. Trouble is, passing the energy particles of a living creature through the energy particles of a brick wall would make driving round Marble Arch blindfold look like a piece of cake. If just one particle touched another, your whole living being would be trapped in the wall.’

  ‘So not impossible, just not very possible?’ observed Ianto.

  ‘On top of that,’ Owen continued, ‘you’ve got your wall-walking predator that then alters the sub-atomic structure of its victim to get it back through the wall. I said shapeshifters were tricky, but if we’ve got some sort of wall-walker prowling SkyPoint, then it makes David Copperfield look like my Uncle Bob pulling pennies out of my ears when I was six.
’

  Jack had listened patiently to Owen’s lecture. Now he asked, ‘Have you got a better idea?’

  Owen shook his head. ‘A shapeshifting wall-walker. Shit.’

  ‘Sounds like that’s where we came in.’ Jack grinned.

  ‘Shapeshifting wall-walker shit.’

  But Toshiko wasn’t in the mood for jokes. ‘That means it could be anyone living at SkyPoint.’

  ‘It also means we can’t evacuate the building to deal with this,’ said Gwen. ‘If what we’re after really is one of the residents, then we’d be just letting them out through the front door.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Owen. ‘And the neighbours have invited us round for dinner. Better just hope we’re not it.’

  FOURTEEN

  Mr and Mrs Harper went out for dinner that night at just after seven, as they had arranged.

  They had got back from the Hub around six-thirty. Owen said he needed a shower. His ability to smell things had been lessened by his no longer being able to breathe, but the receptors in his nose still worked, and his brain was still analysing the signals they picked up, so he was still vaguely aware of the stink of the duct clinging to him. Toshiko said she needed one, too. She took the en suite off the bedroom and Owen made use of the shower in the guest bedroom, warning her not to be long. It had been a long time since Owen had shared an apartment with another woman – not since Katie, the woman he had wanted to marry – but he remembered how long they could take to get ready.

  Although they had two bedrooms, they had decided to keep all their clothes in the master bedroom’s walk-in closet. A cleaning service for the apartment came as part of the SkyPoint deal and their clothes hanging in separate rooms might have raised eyebrows and possibly suspicions elsewhere in the building. The bed itself was not an issue as Owen wouldn’t be sleeping anywhere.

  Five minutes later, Owen was showered. Then he remembered that his clothes were across the apartment in the other room. He considered putting on the clothes he had shed onto the bathroom floor – his body no longer sweated and the clothes would have been fine, had he not been crawling around in the building’s ducting system a couple of hours earlier. Cursing, he wrapped a towel around his middle and padded towards the master bedroom.