by Phil Ford
Wendy had always believed in God. Her parents were Methodist, from somewhere out in the Valleys where Sunday mornings were still reserved for threats of Hell and Damnation. She had moved to work at the university in Cardiff and Ewan had met her in a sandwich shop one lunchtime. They started seeing each other, but it took him six months of bloody hard work to get her into bed, and afterwards she had cried because she had sinned. Ewan had held her then, and told her that he loved her and known that this time he meant it. They had married in a Cardiff church – Ewan always suspected that she felt too sullied by premarital sex to return to her home chapel – but Wendy never lost her commitment to God. Ewan never understood it – his family were nothing more than Christmas Christians. But for seven days, as he watched his little girl battle death, Wendy’s faith kept him going.
But Alison came out of the coma. She survived. He didn’t know if it was a miracle, medical science, or if his daughter simply had one kick-ass will to live. As she had lain in the coma, Wendy had told him that Alison had died at the scene of the crash for five minutes, but that the paramedics had brought her back. She had told him this to reassure him that their daughter was a fighter and that, if she had beaten death once, then she could survive the coma and would come back to them.
Ewan didn’t care what had brought his daughter back from death – whether it had been God, science or voodoo – he just had his little girl back, and nothing else in the world mattered.
If this had been a show on TV, the tearful mum and dad that had watched over their still daughter for so long would have gone home with their miracle child as the credits rolled, and the audience would go put the kettle on with a warm glow in their stomach and maybe a little moisture in their eye. They would never stop to think about how things could turn to shit.
It started a couple of weeks later, when Wendy asked her daughter what she remembered about the crash. That wasn’t what she really wanted to know, of course. Wendy had talked to Ewan late at night after Alison had gone to sleep, cuddled up to Mr Pickle in bed. Her daughter had died and now to Wendy – who had her daughter safe in bed upstairs and not in an undersized coffin beneath the ground – that was no longer something horrific, but a marvel. Alison had died and come back, and Wendy had read stories of the things that people had seen on the Other Side. It wasn’t that her faith in the Afterlife needed confirmation, but her daughter had been in the presence of the Divine – who wouldn’t want to know what that was like?
But Wendy hadn’t liked what she heard.
That there was nothing beyond death but cold darkness. Ewan understood the devastation of Wendy’s world-view – more than that, her view of creation, of everything – and he tried to comfort her. He tried to tell her that maybe Alison was wrong. She was just a small child, after all. And she had gone through such a lot. Wendy couldn’t expect her to really remember what happened to her being – her soul, whatever she wanted to call it – as the medics had worked on getting her heart to work again next to the car wreck. And at first he had thought that Wendy had understood that, and had accepted his logical reasoning. But then he had come to realise that that wasn’t the case at all. He caught it in his wife’s eyes sometimes when she didn’t think he was looking, when she was watching Alison play with Mr Pickle.
Wendy hated their daughter.
More than that, she didn’t believe that it was their daughter. What had come back in Alison’s body was an agent of Satan, a demon that had come to destroy her faith by spreading lies about the end of hope.
The realisation that his wife was going mad and – more than that – that he couldn’t cope, was what led Ewan Lloyd to the bottle and, ultimately, to the edge of what was to become Besnik Lucca’s roof garden.
By that time Wendy was in hospital. It was a good place that had patience and cared. It was also costing Ewan a fortune that he couldn’t afford. Things had got completely out of control – his drinking had put his business into a spiral that was accelerated by the cost of helping his wife, which made him drink more… He was a drunk drowning in a whirlpool. And, just then, the sooner it sucked him into oblivion, the better. Wendy was getting better, and Alison didn’t seem to suspect anything of the truth about her mother’s absence, but his family was shattered beyond repair all the same – because he hadn’t been able to cope.
He knew they would all be better off without him. Wendy would land some good-looking bloke with a full head of hair and no beer belly – the kind of man she always should have been with – and Alison would get a stepfather who would be able to look after her properly. A real man who wouldn’t just try to drink himself out of any problem that reared its head.
At around seventy metres off the ground, the wind whipped at you even on a calm day, and Ewan had been standing on the edge of the construction for quite a while, summoning up the last pulse of courage to take that final step. As he had edged towards the ledge, he had actually hoped that the force of the wind and the bottle and a half of scotch that had got him up there in the first place would combine to remove that final difficult step from his plan. Typical of the loser that he was, he thought, he even wanted the wind to do the tough part. He had kind of hoped that a good gust of wind would just unbalance him and a couple of seconds later he’d be on the pavement below, splattered like a lost ice cream. He supposed that it would be a strawberry or a raspberry ice cream. Something with a lot of red in it, anyway.
But the wind hadn’t taken him to his death. Instead Besnik Lucca had stood at his side and offered him a second chance.
Ewan had never laid eyes on Lucca until that moment, but of course he had heard the name; he knew that he was the major individual investor in the SkyPoint project and that it was his money that had been giving him a headache on the day that had set his life on course for the wastepipe. In between the time Alison had come out of her coma and the beginning of his realisation that his wife was going crazy, Ewan had started to ask questions about that money, and about Lucca. The fact that he hadn’t found any satisfactory answers had, in its way, told him all he needed to know. The money was dirty; Lucca was a crook. Then his life had started to fall apart. And if the financial foundations of the SkyPoint job had also started to flake and crumble, everyone would have been buried in the rubble. So he had turned a blind eye to the financial irregularities, but he knew that Lucca had caught wind of his interest.
There had been a phone call.
It hadn’t come to the office, and it hadn’t been on his mobile. It had been at night, just after he had made sure Alison was OK in bed, as he did every night an hour or so after she had gone up. So it was around eight o’clock, and the phone in the hallway of his home started to ring.
None of his clients had his home number. If they needed to get him urgently outside of office hours then they had his mobile number, and he never turned that off. But Lucca had been sending him a message, and it wasn’t contained in the words he spoke down the phone.
Lucca had identified himself and had said he wanted to congratulate Ewan on the excellent work he was doing on the SkyPoint project. He was impressed by his diligence, he said. And also by his professional discretion. He hoped, he said, that Ewan would allow them both the opportunity to work together again in the future.
Ewan had understood every word that Lucca had not said.
I know where you live.
And when Lucca spoke into his ear as they stood together on the edge of oblivion above Cardiff Bay, Ewan recognised the accent immediately, and he felt the pressure of his hand on his shoulder.
He told Ewan that he could help him.
If he could not summon the courage to take his own life, Lucca would help him with the hand that he had placed on his shoulder.
Ewan looked down and saw that Lucca’s gleaming black shoes were even closer than his own were to the edge and the fall into the old docklands below. He also saw that Lucca’s other hand was extended towards him, as if he wanted Ewan to shake it.
Lucca told him that
if he cared more for his family than he did for himself he would take the offered hand and he would work for him, and life would be good once again.
Ewan looked into Lucca’s black eyes and shook his hand, and knew that he was more truly lost than ever.
And now, a year later, he sat on a whore’s toilet seat with a broken ankle and his mobile phone in his hand, trying to reach the Devil.
Lucca picked up just as Ewan was about to give up, ready to smash the phone against the bathroom’s granite flooring.
‘Hello, Ewan. Where are you?’
‘What?’ Ewan snarled. He was hurting and he was angry. Angrier with Lucca than he knew he had any sense to be. ‘Don’t tell me you can’t bloody see me!’
Ewan knew all of Lucca’s secrets. Not just the financial ones. He also knew about the cameras, even the one that watched his wife undress. When the Devil took your soul, he took everything else, too. And Lucca knew those secrets were safe with Ewan Lloyd. Weak men knew who their friends were and, if they forgot, their disposal was easy. A weak man who was also wise knew that, which was why he trusted Ewan Lloyd.
Lucca didn’t respond to Ewan’s anger, he said nothing and waited for the injured man to gather his wits.
‘I’m on the eleventh floor,’ he said in the end, trying to keep his voice low – the last thing he needed was that Torchwood guy catching him on the phone to Lucca. ‘The whore’s flat.’ Ewan knew all about Marion Blake. He knew a lot of things about everyone that moved in to SkyPoint. Accountancy for Besnik Lucca covered a wide range of fields.
‘Who is with you?’ Lucca asked.
‘Wendy and Alison. Marion. And the man with the Jap wife. Only I think that was some sort of cover.’
‘Ewan, you are so perceptive,’ Lucca taunted down the phone line.
‘What the hell is going on, Besnik? Who are these people and what the hell is this talk about something being on the loose here? Ryan Freeman says something came through the wall and took his wife!’
‘Everything is under control,’ Lucca purred.
‘Listen, Besnik, if there’s anything dangerous up here, I want to get my wife and daughter out of here. You owe me that much.’
‘I owe you?’ Lucca said it slowly, disbelieving, without humour.
Ewan pushed a hand over his head, it came away wet with sweat and, for the first time in months, he needed a drink. ‘I just want my little girl safe,’ he said.
It went quiet on the other end of the line. For a long time Ewan thought he had pushed it too far. And Besnik Lucca wasn’t the kind of man that you pushed at all.
Screw it, he thought. He didn’t care, didn’t care about anything except making sure Alison was safe. That was why he had refused to use the lifts. When the trouble had kicked off, he had known exactly what Lucca would do.
He knew all his secrets.
And Lucca knew him.
When he came back on the line, Lucca told Ewan exactly what he had to do if he wanted his help in getting Alison to safety.
And finally, though he had never meant to, Ewan threw up.
TWENTY-ONE
‘Get behind me!’ Ianto shouted. ‘Get behind me, now!’
As he spoke, he pulled his automatic and wondered what the hell he was going to do with it. The thing that was coming through the roof of the elevator looked like slime, a glittering slime that undulated and glowed and spread across the ceiling.
It didn’t look like bullets would do anything but slip through it. But he fired anyway.
The bang of the gun was deafening in the confinement of the elevator cabin. The sound waves slammed off the mirrored walls and hit him in the ears like hammer blows.
As he’d expected, the four bullets he fired punched holes in the ceiling, but did nothing to the creature that clung to it.
It did encourage Andrew and Simon to do what he’d told them, however, and they crowded behind him in a corner of the elevator – not that it was going to do any of them any good, and they all knew it.
Ryan had stayed where he was, crumpled on the floor, the slightest inclination of his head was the only suggestion that he was aware that anything at all had changed – never mind the cabin being invaded by some oozing alien.
‘Jesus Christ! What is it?’ Andrew gasped behind Ianto.
‘What does it matter?’ came pragmatic Simon. ‘We’re dead.’
Ianto stared at the thing that clung to the ceiling. It had no eyes, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were watching each other. His mind raced, trying to think of something he could do. He knew there was nothing. Instead, he tried to think of something that would make the last moments more bearable. He thought of Jack.
The creature began to slide down the far corner of the cabin, collecting there.
Ianto wondered how death would feel, if it was as bad as Owen said it was. It hadn’t only been Owen, of course. Before him they had brought people back with the first resurrection glove. Only ever for two minutes. But they never said anything about angels and harps or pearly gates. And as Ianto had watched their time run out on his pocket watch, they had never wanted to go back there.
He watched the creature slide down the wall of the elevator and thought that there wouldn’t be much left of him to resurrect, even if they still had one of the gloves.
He kind of wished he’d had time for one more cup of coffee.
Then Ryan pulled his shivering body off the floor and threw himself at the creature, screaming his wife’s name.
There wasn’t time to pull him back. And what would have been the point?
Ryan seemed to sink into the creature and as Ianto watched they could see him screaming, but heard nothing – he got the impression that he wasn’t even there with them any more, but that what they were seeing was some sort of image being transmitted from another place. And then the whole thing drew back out through the wall leaving no trace of itself, or the man that it had taken.
For a moment, Ianto and the other two men didn’t move. When they found that they could, they still couldn’t speak.
Ianto had seen strange, strange things. But somehow this was stranger than any. His mind felt momentarily overloaded.
It was Simon that spoke first. ‘Am I going mad?’
Andrew wrapped his arms around him and kissed him hard. ‘I don’t care. As long as I’m alive, I don’t care.’
Simon touched Ianto’s sleeve. ‘Do you think he did that for us? Ryan. Did he save us?’
Ianto didn’t know if Ryan had been a hero, or had just thrown himself after his wife, but he nodded.
‘He saved us,’ he said. ‘For now.’
He looked at the ceiling and let that sink in with his two companions. It didn’t take long.
‘It’s going to come back, isn’t it?’ said Andrew.
Ianto was matter-of-fact. ‘Probably. It knows we’re here.’
‘Canned meat,’ Simon observed.
It made Ianto smile. ‘That’s right. We have to get out. Now, one of you give me a leg up.’
There was a hatch in the roof. From his jacket, Ianto took a small torch and, stowing the automatic in his belt, he slid his foot into the stirrup of Simon’s interlocked hands and boosted himself through the inspection cover, and into the elevator shaft.
He got himself up onto the elevator roof and turned on the torch. He’d never been on top of an elevator before and wasn’t sure of what he’d find. He wasn’t sure if he might find the wall-walker up there chowing down on Ryan Freeman. All he did find was an unimpressive and dirty lift shaft.
He had hoped there might have been some sort of ladder on the wall. He had presumed that someone had to make inspections sometimes, but maybe they just rode the roof of the lift, or they abseiled down from the top of the shaft. Or maybe they just didn’t bother. Anyway, there was no ladder.
‘What can you see?’ Simon called from below.
‘Nothing encouraging,’ Ianto told him.
That wasn’t entirely true: he could see a se
t of doors that would lead onto the next floor up. The problem was going to be how they got to them. He was pretty sure that he’d be able to prise them open, but the prospect of standing on thin air while he did that was the disheartening part.
Ianto looked at his watch and wondered how long it would take the creature to digest Ryan, and then come back for more.
And then he saw something to really worry him. The elevator was suspended on a cable. It was thick and would take a lot of weight and a lot of wear. But it looked like when Ianto had fired through the roof of the cabin a couple of his bullets had shorn through the cable.
He could see it shredding slowly.
If he needed confirmation, a dozen metal strands suddenly gave way and the elevator car lurched.
He heard the men inside scream, and Ianto held on for grim life.
‘What the hell was that?’ he heard a terrified Simon yell.
The car had fallen half a metre at most, but that only meant that there was another thirty or more metres yet for it to fall. And the cable was stretching and straining.
The good news was that the fall had dropped the elevator alongside a set of doors that Ianto could reach from the roof. But the guys inside were going to have to climb up here to use them – and that meant a lot of clambering about. He wasn’t sure if the damaged, straining cable was going to be able to take it. But the only alternative was a long drop.
Ianto looked at the slowly shearing cable and moved carefully, stretching down into the cabin to reach for Andrew’s hand while he told the two men what they were up against.
‘Sod it,’ said Simon. ‘Sometimes you just wish you’d stayed in bed.’
Ianto hauled Andrew up first, and listened to the sound of the stretching metal fibres in the elevator cable as Andrew helped Simon. If the whole thing went, Ianto thought, it was going to be a toss-up which happened first – the car dropped and smashed them to bits eight or nine floors below; or the flying metal cable decapitated them.
