Torchwood Long Time Dead (18 page)

'Excuse the mess,' he muttered, shoving

abandoned shirts and trousers to one side so
they could fall onto the unmade bed. She giggled
as his knee caught awkwardly on her skirt and
he laughed back before kissing her some more.

A rush of warmth overwhelmed her. This wasn't
like it had been the night before with the stranger
whose dead mess now littered her own apartment.

This was
normal.
She liked him. She really did.

She hadn't felt like this in such a long time, even
before she'd spent such a long time dead. This was
old Suzie back, girly and soft and just wanting him
to sweep her up in his arms and make everything
OK.

Their breathing got heavier and she felt the
yawning space inside her opening up. The shadows
that surrounded her were reaching for him but
she pulled them back, containing it all inside. The
darkness couldn't leak out; not here, not now.
No,

she thought.
No, you can't have him.
She closed
her eyes.
Not yet. Not ever.

His mouth was warm on her neck. She had to
kill him, she knew that, and she would, she really
would, when this was done, but she wouldn't give
him to the place on the other side of the gateway
she had become. She wouldn't let the darkness
have him. She closed herself off to everything but
his touch.

Afterwards, when they were finished, she

dozed off, content on his chest. Killing could wait.

Everything could wait. Just for a little while.

Sirens wailed through the Cardiff night as the
shadows stretched across the city. The black
patches left in the woman's wake expanded
hungrily. She was distracted and it could play. It
needed MORE. There was so much pain to explore.

It was becoming impatient with her containing it.

Soon it would be too strong for her and it would
pour out through her eyes and consume them all,
but for now it stretched as far as it could in the
patches that had leaked from her.

On his way home from the theatre, Colin

Friend was wondering at the unfairness of his life.

He was a good actor, but never quite good enough
it would seem. Slightly too short for this role, not
quite handsome enough for that and not quite
ugly enough for the staple diet of 'character' parts.

He was nearly 40 and living in a studio flat in
bloody Wales for the duration of the run - which
after tonight's poor audience showing might not
be anywhere near as long as planned - and had
actually been grateful to get the gig in the first
place.

When he'd left drama school, he'd been so full
of high expectations but, as much as he tried to
keep the dream alive, now that his hairline was
receding and the offers of work were thinning just
as quickly, it was hard to keep the bitterness at
bay. He lit a pre-rolled cigarette - no Marlboro
Lights on his pay cheque - and inhaled hard.

What would he do if he gave up acting anyway? He
wasn't qualified for anything else. At some point,
though, he was going to have to make financial
plans or he was going to end up back in his mum's
spare bedroom, and that was something he could
live without.

As it turned out, money was no longer going to
be a worry for Colin Friend. Nor in fact were the
terrible reviews that would hit the local papers
the next day calling his performance 'the worst
Macbeth in the history of the Scottish play', one
saying he 'didn't know whether to laugh or cry
and neither in a good way'. These things were
soon to be completely insignificant to Colin, who,
as he rounded the final corner to the slightly tired
modern block he was renting in, spotted a strange
dark shadow against the bus shelter.

He wouldn't have stopped at all if the cat, only
its front paws and head visible, hadn't yowled. It
was an awful sound, not the normal angry hiss
associated with the independent animal, but a
cry of pain and terror. Colin liked cats. His mum
had two, and sometimes he thought he liked those
old moggies more than he liked her. He wondered
if the cat was trapped or stuck to something, or
maybe had been hit by a car and knocked into the
gloom and, throwing his cigarette away, he trotted
over to it.

He frowned as he crouched down and stroked
the cat's head. Its ears were pressed flat against
its head and it was trembling. Nothing was visible
from the midsection, and its lower body was lost
in the pitch-black shadow falling across the back
of the bus shelter. The oddness of the dark was
forgotten.

'Let's get you out of there and take a look,'

Colin said softly. As last words go, they weren't
the ones he'd planned to send into posterity, but
then neither was this exactly how he'd envisaged
his last moments in this dimension. There would
be no wailing fans. There wouldn't even be a body.

His hand reached into the shadow and then he
froze. What the...?

Within moments, both the man and the cat

were gone, and if there had been anyone passing
to listen, they might just have heard the very
faintest of terrible screams.

It would be a small comfort to Colin Friend, if
there were any comfort left in his tortured eternal
existence, to know that he wasn't alone. Over the
course of the night, fifteen more people stepped
into unusual black patches. One stumbled out of
one dimension and into the next while drunk, the
others were simply victims of their own curiosity.

One was the Mayor's driver, who'd had to wait so
long for his boss that he ended up stopping on the
way home to take a piss up against a wall and
thought the dark shadow would hide him from
view. It certainly did that. He arrived in Hell with
his flies undone.

In other parts of town, several people committed
suicide after scrawling 'I Remember' somewhere it
could be seen. The message wasn't for anyone in
particular, it just needed to be out. Torchwood and
the terrible blackness had become one for them,
and with Torchwood gone, there was only the
blackness left and they knew, although the rest of
the city hadn't woken up to it, that the blackness
was coming. It would swallow the people and then
the city and then the entire world and there was
no one left to stop it.

It was coming. The screaming of millions.

When Suzie woke up, she was still tired and
incredibly bleary, confusion coming from inside
her. It was as if she was both in the room and also
spread across the city at the same time. Her ears
ached as if someone had shrieked right into them.

It was the strangest sensation and she shivered
slightly. What had happened? Had the world
inside her escaped a little while she'd drifted?

She felt the darkness pull back inside, curled up
and secure behind her eyes. Maybe it was just
that sleep had eluded her since her most recent
resurrection and now that she'd finally dozed off
her body wanted more. For the first time, she
hoped that was so.

The sheets smelled of washing powder and

cotton and for the first time in a long time, she
felt something close to normal. It couldn't last of
course, she knew that, but she wanted to enjoy it
before the morning rolled around and she'd have
to kill him and disappear into her strange new
life. She stretched one arm out. She didn't want to
kill him yet.
She didn't want to kill him ever.
She
squashed the old Suzie's thought, but she couldn't
quite squash the feeling that came with it. There
was something about Tom Cutler that stopped her
fooling lonely. No one else had over done that. She
had an awful precognition that when she killed
him she'd be lonely for ever. Her hand found
nothing and she sat up on one elbow and looked
around. Ho wasn't in the room.

She found him in the lounge. The curtains wore
open wide and ho was by the window, sitting on the
edge of an armchair and staring out at the night.

Ho lit one cigarette with the butt of another.

'What is it?' she mumbled, tying his tatty
dressing gown around her waist.

'I remember,' he said, softly. I woke up and
remembered everything.'

'What?'

'Torchwood.' He turned to look at her. 'I
remember Torchwood.'

For a moment Suzie froze, her eyes darting
cautiously around the room for something to
attack him with should he lunge at her, adrenalin
surging through her still body, and the darkness
forming a sudden cloud behind her eyes, but then
he turned back to the window and drew in a long
lungful of smoke.

'You might want to sit down because this is
going to sound crazy,' he said. 'They were a special
unit. Dealt with aliens and alien technology. The
first time my path crossed with theirs was in
London. The details of the case don't really matter,
what matters is the whole thing messed me up.

There was an alien inside a man - making him do
things. I
saw
it. I'd been so keen to take him down
and then when I saw what I did - impossible as it
was - I couldn't. Torchwood came and dealt with
the alien, but they sure as shit weren't as good
with the human fallout. I had to manage that.

I screwed up my career over it. Couldn't let an
innocent man go to prison, no matter what they
said. I said I'd planted evidence and the judge
threw the case out.' He shook his head. 'Jesus.'

Torchwood One.
Suzie felt her panic ease
slightly. It was Torchwood One he was talking
about. If she was careful she might be OK here.

She needed to react like a normal person would.

Like she'd seen so many times in the old days.

'Aliens?' she said, softly. 'You mean like illegal
ones from other countries?'

'No.' He laughed a little. 'I mean like the
real deal. Outer space. Bloody Torchwood. I got
transferred down here after that, my glittering
career over. And then along came the opera
murders. Until tonight,' he gazed down at the
glowing end of his cigarette, 'that whole case was
in my memory exactly like it was reported in the
papers. One man gone mad. Practising on others
and then murdering his wife to pay off their
debts. But it wasn't like that at all. Not really. I
remember standing out in the rain when we found
the first body all opened up in the church and with
its voicebox missing, and then, lo and behold, they
turned up again. A different team, but Torchwood
all the same. Captain Jack Harkness and that
pretty little ex-copper and the Welsh coffee lover. I
knew as soon as they stepped out of that SUV that
it was going to be all the weird shit all over again
and I was going to end up more screwed up than I
had been the first time round. And I was right. We
got the alien, though. That time it worked out all
OK. They were good people, those three. When it
was over, we went to a bar, I had a beer with Jack
and then,' his eyes narrowed slightly, 'nothing.

Everything was forgotten.'

'Aliens?' she coughed out a small laugh. 'In
Cardiff? Did someone put something in your
champagne?'

'No,' Cutler said, softly. 'But Captain Jack
Harkness put something in my beer I think.' He
smiled at her. 'Come here.'

Suzie stood between his legs and he pulled her
down so that she too was seated on the edge of the
armchair with him behind her. He wrapped one
arm around her waist and even in this cautious
situation she couldn't fight that it felt good.

She belonged with him. This sudden revelation,
unsettling as it was, confirmed it to her. They'd
both been messed up by Torchwood and Captain
Jack Harkness. If they were damaged souls, then
it was that immortal man's fault. She leaned her
head back on Cutler shoulder. 'Nothing as exciting
as aliens comes to Wales.'

'Look up there.' Cutler pointed one finger up to
the night sky. His breath was warm against her
neck and she wanted to smile. Here with him, she
was as close to happy as she'd ever been. Maybe
she could persuade him to come with her. Maybe if
she could just explain... the thought drifted away.

How could she possibly explain what she'd done?

'What?' she said, her voice light.

'Somewhere up there in space is a rift. Some
kind of cut in space or something, and all manner
of shit comes through it. Including aliens.'