by Phil Ford
TWENTY-EIGHT
Fifteen centimetres, Jack had always insisted, was not nearly enough, not even when it had been six inches. He had, however, found on numerous occasions that you could work with what you were given.
Right now, it was all that was keeping him from falling over sixty metres to what, for him, would still be a pretty messy and uncomfortable resurrection. For Gwen, who moved slowly alongside him on the slender concrete ledge that skirted the circumference of SkyPoint, it would be certain death.
They had come maybe six metres, and it had taken them the best part of fifteen minutes. At this rate, they were going to reach Lucca in time to catch him eating breakfast on the terrace.
The night wind tore at his hair as he stood with his back to the SkyPoint wall, his arms spread, hands plastered against the concrete, feeling for the slightest grip. He could sense the toes of his boots sticking over the edge of the ledge and, immortal or not, it wasn’t a comfortable place to be. He turned his head towards Gwen. She was half a metre away from him, stuck to the wall as he was by sheer will and the sweat of her palms.
‘You doing OK?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yeah. Brilliant. You can see my house from here.’
Jack smiled, and moved his left foot a little further along the ledge, edging his shoulder along as he did so, then gently brought his right foot after him, keeping his centre of gravity as close to the wall behind him as possible. Then he watched as Gwen repeated the same action.
He tried to bring to mind the schematics of the building, tried to remember just how far they had said it was from the SkyPark window to the lightning conductor.
Twenty-four metres?
They weren’t even halfway yet, and moving so slowly had never seemed so exhausting.
Distantly, he heard the sounds of cars in the city below. Night owls heading home, and shift workers making for the plant. He had travelled to a lot of worlds in his time, but that one seemed stranger than most, and so much more than just sixty metres away. A world of mortgage repayments, office jobs, pension plans and family. Not his world, and never would be.
He moved along the ledge a little more.
At least the air was good up here. It was coming straight in off the Bristol Channel and, beyond that, the Atlantic. There was no air on any planet quite as good as the air that came in off the Atlantic.
‘You keeping up?’ he called to Gwen.
He saw her nod. But she didn’t look at him now, she was keeping her eyes dead ahead. Concentrating. Feeling her way along the side of the building. Shifting sideways, moving one foot slowly along after the other.
Jack worried about her, but there was nothing he could do now. She had been determined to join him, and arguing with her would just have used up more time. Besides, she was right, six shells wasn’t a lot to take out a man like Lucca and however many heavies he might have shoring up his fortress defences. In his experience, guns were like heads, two were always better than one. Unless they were pointing your way, of course.
He continued to move along the ledge and found he was getting into a rhythm now; everything starting to fit into a pattern, his movement and his breathing – even the gusts of Atlantic air were coming at the right time. He felt that he was moving faster.
Then he saw the gulls.
There were six of them – big, grey-backed herring gulls-roosting on the ledge. As Jack inched ever closer, the first bird turned and looked at him, then looked away as if it thought it was seeing things, or maybe that the humans would fall off before they got much closer. Either way, the bird didn’t move.
‘Looks like we got company up here,’ Jack said to Gwen.
‘What?’ she demanded, as in, what the hell are you talking about?
‘You don’t have any mackerel or anything on you, do you?’
‘Jack, what is going on?’
From her position, she couldn’t see the gulls. Jack decided it wouldn’t be a problem, the birds would move. After all, people were bigger than birds, right?
But as Jack drew closer, the birds didn’t move. The closest one looked over at him again and stretched, beat its wings, and cried out into the night. That set off its companions, who took up the chorus. But they didn’t take off, as he’d expected.
‘Come on, guys, move along,’ Jack said, as he got within half a metre of the gulls.
Instead, the first gull edged towards him and stabbed at his boot with its beak.
‘Hey! You little freak!’
Jack kicked out at the bird and it hopped back in retreat, but as Jack took his next step the bird darted forward again and attacked his boot.
Jack lashed out with his foot. ‘Get out of it!’
And this time, the bird leaped into the night, and took its friends with it. Suddenly the air around Jack and Gwen was filled with the thunder of beating wings and crying gulls.
‘Oh my God, Jack!’
Jack reached out and grabbed Gwen’s hand.
‘Just stay calm,’ he said.
Right now the birds were just showboating, making a lot of noise, warning off the invaders to their territory, maybe still a little intimidated by their size. But these weren’t sparrows, and if they decided to swing in for an attack they were in trouble. Gulls had big, sharp beaks, and they were also the only ones up here that could fly.
It didn’t take much working out.
‘Hey, you lot, shut up!’
The voice came from above them. It was a thin voice, like it had come out of some sort of woodwind instrument played badly.
‘Noisy buggers, piss off!’
This second voice was deeper, more brass section.
Two men right above them in Besnik Lucca’s garden had been attracted by the commotion of the gulls. Jack and Gwen stopped breathing.
‘Here, now get off!’
It was Brass again, and as he spoke Jack saw a chunk of what looked like burger roll fly over the side of the building. As one, the gulls dived after it into the night below.
Jack felt himself take another breath.
Above him Woodwind was telling Brass how he hated those bloody things; one had swept down on him in Tenby when he was a kid and stolen his ice cream right out of his hand.
Maybe that was where his life had all gone wrong, thought Jack. An incident like that was going to screw a kid up – ice cream robbery: it was the kind of thing that would make a sociopath out of anybody.
He heard the voices of Lucca’s two men move away, and glanced back at Gwen. She looked exhausted, but he knew she was tough. She would make it.
Fifteen minutes later, Jack found the lightning conductor.
Turning around to climb up the conductor was always going to be tricky, and he had been rehearsing the move in his head as he edged towards it. With his back to the wall, he wrapped the fingers of his left hand around the rod and used them to brace himself as he reached over his shoulder with his other hand. With a little quick footwork he found himself facing the right way round and hauled himself nimbly up the wall, knowing that Gwen would work out the move for herself and follow him up.
After the age it had taken them to edge around the outside of SkyPoint, Jack found himself rolling over the balcony wall into Lucca’s verdant roof garden only ten seconds later. He dropped to the floor in a crouch and Gwen was beside him a moment later.
Jack drew the Webley from its holster.
TWENTY-NINE
The goons that had burst into the photographer’s flat – the men that Jack would soon after think of as Woodwind and Brass – had left Alun and Julie behind. The young couple were stoned out of their heads and probably wouldn’t remember the visit if they survived the night. The only people that the thugs were interested in were Wendy and Owen, and Owen didn’t put up a fight.
When he heard them crash through the apartment door, he had finished what he had gone to do in the bathroom, and stepped out.
His only words were to Wendy: ‘Just do as they say.’
There was no
real option for them. The men weren’t waving guns around, but they didn’t need to. Even a living, breathing Owen whose bones would fix wouldn’t have been much of a match for Lucca’s slabs of muscle.
Woodwind and Brass shoved Owen and Wendy out of the flat, and ushered them towards the steps. Before they reached them, Owen heard Evanescence pouring out of the flat once again.
Owen and Wendy were taken up to the twenty-first floor and led along the corridor to what looked like a broom cupboard. It proved to be a secret lift hidden behind a panel. Thirty seconds later, he and Wendy were led into Lucca’s apartment. Woodwind and Brass left them there.
Owen saw Toshiko, still secured to the chair, and went to her, filled with a mix of relief and rage.
‘Tosh, are you all right?’
‘I’m fine, Owen. I’m sorry, I messed up, didn’t I?’
‘No, course you didn’t,’ he said. Lucca stood watching, amused.
‘You two make such a beautiful couple,’ he said. ‘You should really get together.’
‘Screw you, Lucca,’ Owen snarled. ‘What do you want?’ Lucca spread his arms, took in the apartment. ‘Look about you, Owen. I am a successful man.’
Owen took in the money that hung on the walls at a glance. ‘You’re a bloody crook.’
Neither Lucca’s smile nor his pride faltered. ‘I have many interests. I am a man of culture. Success brings with it the opportunity to better oneself, to learn. To study.’
‘What are you, an advert for the Open University?’
Lucca was patient. ‘When this mysterious thing started to take people here at SkyPoint the average man’s reaction would have been fear, would have been to run. But I am very far from average.’
‘Yeah, well you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ Owen taunted.
‘My reaction, Owen, was to study, and learn.’
Lucca had taken the TV remote in his other hand, and he aimed it at the big set. On screen, Owen saw Gwen and Rhys being led into the show apartment by a man he guessed to be Brian Shaw. The camera cut to a new location – a bathroom: as Brian Shaw walked in and was consumed by the amorphous thing that came out of the wall. He felt Wendy stiffen next to him as she watched. The scene switched to another room and someone that Owen didn’t recognise being swallowed by the thing. In another room, another victim…
‘You recorded all of this?’ Owen gasped.
‘I have cameras everywhere. I see everything.’
‘And exactly what have you learned?’ asked Toshiko.
‘How sick you are?’ suggested Owen.
Sticks and stones didn’t even leave a mark on Besnik Lucca. He played something else on the television. It was the Lloyds’ apartment an hour ago. Owen covering Wendy with his body, saving her from the mass of rippling, glowing matter that enveloped them.
‘The man who sees everything, knows everything,’ said Lucca, and he took a couple of steps towards Owen. ‘Now I want to know about you.’
Owen felt Lucca’s eyes boring into him. ‘Yeah, well I like to preserve an air of mystery. Makes me more attractive to women.’
Lucca put the gun against Owen’s temple. ‘How about if I put a hole in your head. How attractive do you think that will make you?’
‘Leave him alone!’
Lucca swung around as Toshiko cried out. He slipped behind the steel chair and pressed the gun against her neck. Owen saw her eyes swell with fear.
‘Get away from her,’ Owen said.
‘Then tell me what you are,’ Lucca said. ‘Why did it refuse you? Twice?’
Owen looked from him to Toshiko and shrugged.
‘Because I’m dead.’
‘Don’t you play with me!’
Owen could see his finger tightening on the trigger.
‘It’s true!’ And Owen ripped apart his shirt, revealing the bullet hole. ‘I got shot through the heart. But I’m still alive. That’s why the thing – whatever it is – won’t take me, it needs living cellular matter to survive. And I’m not alive.’
He glanced towards Wendy. She looked like she was going to be sick.
Lucca stared at Owen. ‘You’re undead.’
‘I don’t sleep in a coffin or anything. In fact, I don’t sleep.’
Lucca was closing on him again, walking around him.
‘Fascinating. Fascinating. The living dead. Tell me, do you feel pain?’
‘Not pain, as such.’
Lucca kicked him in the shin.
‘All the same, I’d rather you didn’t do that.’
Lucca laughed, a great booming laugh. Like he’d heard the funniest joke in the world. Like he was mad.
Suddenly he pushed the gun up under Owen’s head. ‘If I blow your head off, will you run around like something off a cartoon?’
Owen could see Toshiko. She was crying.
And he thought maybe Lucca would do it. Maybe he would pull the trigger and end this cruel, sick joke his life had turned into.
But the last thing he would see, the thing he would take into the darkness with him, would be Toshiko crying.
Behind his back, Owen pulled Ewan’s phone from his pocket. He knew where the call button was. He pushed it.
And Lucca’s phone started to ring. Lucca glanced away – just for a second.
Owen brought his knee up hard into Lucca’s crotch. As Lucca doubled over, Owen kicked the gun from his hand, and went for him again – but Lucca came up with the switchblade in his hand, and lurched towards Toshiko.
‘Maybe I can’t kill you. But there are worse things than death.’ He had the knife at Toshiko’s throat.
‘Maybe you’d like to put that to the test!’
It was Jack. He was standing just inside the garden doors, the Webley aimed straight at Lucca.
As Lucca turned to look at Jack, Gwen pressed her automatic behind his ear and took the knife out of his hand. She used to it cut Toshiko free.
‘I have men. You’ll never get out alive,’ he said.
‘You mean Mr Woodwind and Mr Brass?’ said Jack. ‘They went to feed the birds.’
Lucca smiled. ‘You’ll never get out alive,’ he said again.
Gwen followed his eyes. He was looking across the apartment to where a little girl with golden hair stood. She looked sleepy, as if she had just woken up. She held a strange rag doll in her arms with candy-striped trousers and turned-up shoes.
‘What’s going on?’ she said.
Wendy saw her. ‘Alison!’
She lurched towards her, but Owen caught her wrist.
‘No, don’t go near her.’
Wendy looked at him, her eyes full of rage and confusion. ‘What the hell do you mean?’
‘Why are you aiming guns at Mr Lucca?’ she asked. ‘Mr Lucca is my friend.’
‘It’s OK, little girl,’ said Jack. ‘Just go back to your room. Everything is going to be fine.’
‘Alison!’ cried Wendy.
‘It’s all right, Mummy. But Mr Pickle says we have to help Mr Lucca. Mr Lucca is our friend.’
‘Alison, Mr Lucca is a bad man. You shouldn’t be friends with him,’ said Gwen.
‘But I understand you, don’t I?’ said Lucca, looking at the child. ‘I know who you are, don’t I?’
‘She’s my daughter!’ Wendy shouted.
Owen said, ‘He’s not talking to Wendy. He’s talking to Mr Pickle.’
Wendy snarled like an animal. ‘What? You’re mad! You’re mad! Let me go!’ She started to rain blows on Owen.
Toshiko went to him. Held Wendy. ‘Please, Mrs Lloyd, be calm.’
Jack had moved in closer to Lucca now, still had him covered by the Webley. Alison stood in the middle of the room, holding Mr Pickle in her arms.
‘OK, Owen,’ Jack said calmly, keeping an eye on the girl as much as Lucca, ‘do you want to tell me that Mr Pickle isn’t the sad-looking pixie doll she’s holding.’
Alison turned to look at him as Owen spoke. ‘Mr Pickle is a thought-form. You know, like some yogis in the Hi
malayas are supposed to be able to create after years of concentration.’
‘What?’ said Gwen. ‘They can just think a creature into existence?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lucca. ‘A servant to do their bidding. There are many stories.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Wendy. ‘She’s just a little girl.’
Owen addressed Jack and Gwen. ‘Alison had a car crash. She died at the scene for five minutes. She brought something back with her. Something that in hospital became manifested by her as a doll, Mr Pickle.’
‘But the thought-form couldn’t maintain its physical form indefinitely without cellular matter,’ Jack guessed.
He looked across at Lucca. ‘And you worked all that out?’
‘I saw it. And I made friends with Alison and Mr Pickle.’
‘In the name of learning?’ Owen asked, his voice dry with sarcasm.
‘And survival,’ he said. ‘When Torchwood showed up, it sensed that it was under threat. That was why its attacks increased.’
Toshiko looked at the girl. If she understood any of this she gave no sign. The doll remained cradled in her arms, and looked like nothing but a doll.
‘That is why,’ Lucca said. ‘You won’t get out of this room alive. The thought-form knows who its friends are, and who are its enemies.’
And that was when Mr Pickle started to shimmer in Alison’s arms. As they watched, the doll transformed into a cloud of rippling light and slime, and Alison fell to the floor, unconscious.
Wendy screamed and tried to run to her daughter, but Toshiko held her tight, and the thought-form swept across the room towards Toshiko.
Owen leaped between them.
‘You want her? You’re going to have to take a bit of me first!’
And from his pocket he drew the hypodermic that he had snatched from Julie in the flat. It was filled with a dark, almost black substance. Owen raised his fist and pushed home the needle. The black liquid sprayed across the inside of the thought-form, attaching itself to the strange sunburst lights within it.
As they watched the lights began to dim, and the thought-form began to writhe, sweeping this way and that, rippling and sagging.
And then it was gone.
