Skypoint (21 page)

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 Himalayas 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.

Lucca stared around in horror. ‘You killed it!’

Toshiko released Wendy, who rushed to her fallen child.

‘Alison! Alison!’

Owen was at her side. ‘Let me look at her.’ He felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one.

‘What’s going on?’ demanded Jack.

‘Tosh,’ Owen commanded. ‘Quick, I need you to give her mouth to mouth.’

Then he started to give her heart massage, talking quickly as he worked. ‘I worked out the thought-form needed living cellular matter. That was why it left me on the floor. I’m dead tissue, I was bad for it. So I pumped it full of my blood.

‘Trouble is, the thought-form was linked to Alison. She brought it back with her. It’s entangled with her being. Killing it could kill her.’

Toshiko was giving Alison the kiss of life.

Owen had his hands on her sternum, pressing, counting. And he found himself praying – if God didn’t exist, then maybe something else might hear him. He didn’t want her to go back into the dark again.

‘You have to save her!’ cried Wendy. ‘Alison, come back to me darling, come back.’

‘Come on, Alison. Come back. Out of the dark, darling. Out of the dark.’

And then Owen was aware of something beneath his hands.

Her heart?

‘Quick, Tosh,’ he said. ‘Check her pulse!’

And then Alison coughed, and her eyes opened.

Alison wrapped her arms around her mother and hugged her tighter than anything in her life.

Owen looked at Toshiko, and they smiled.

Owen thought it felt good to smile.

THIRTY

Ianto was waiting for them outside SkyPoint with the SUV when they came out of reception with Besnik Lucca, his hands fixed behind him with cable-ties. They left him sitting on the steps of the central police station with his ankles also bound with plastic and a package slung around his neck. Gwen made a call as the SUV screeched away and when the cops opened what hung around Lucca’s neck they found all the digital detail they needed to put him away for half a century.

They took the SUV back to Roald Dahl Plass, but Owen didn’t go with the others down to the Hub. He said he’d been cooped up in that bloody skyscraper too long, and he needed some air.

It was half past four in the morning. It wouldn’t be long before dawn broke. There might be time for just one coffee down at Constantine’s before the sun came up.

When he got there the café was empty.

This was no-man’s-hour for the nightshift workers and the clubbers. Neither the night before, nor the day after. In another hour or so there would be the early-shift workers, but until then nobody. Owen wondered if it was even worth buying the cup of coffee that he wouldn’t drink.

The chances of the twins showing up now were pretty remote.

What the hell? Where else are you going to go?

He walked down to the counter, but the kid wasn’t there. Owen thought he’d probably gone to the bathroom, or was maybe taking a drag out back.

Then he heard something break.

There was a doorway behind the bar. Owen had no idea where it led – some sort of kitchen, he had always assumed. It sounded like a bottle breaking. A milk bottle. Nothing too strange about that in a coffee shop, he thought. Only afterwards there was no curse, no sound of someone sweeping it up.

Owen’s senses were electrified. He moved around the counter and into the kitchen area behind it.

The coffee shop kid – or what was left of him – was on the floor. The twins had divided him between them again and were quickly and efficiently devouring him.

Owen felt sorry for the kid. And that it was maybe his fault that he was dead.

Owen stepped into their line of vision and the two sisters looked up at him, with their shark eyes, blood and tatters of meat hanging from their distended savage jaws.

‘Ladies,’ he said.

This was a moment he had thought about a great deal since that first night hiding behind the rubbish while the girls chewed up the ponytailed French student. If ever there was a more certain way of ending this walking death, he couldn’t think what it could be. To be torn apart, eaten and digested by two carnivorous predators might be painful – but couldn’t be any worse than what he had been enduring. And he had seen that they were quick. More importantly, he couldn’t believe that there was any chance that his consciousness would survive. If he gave himself to them, it would be over.

No doubt.

They looked at him and he could see that they were hungry for more.

‘Come and get it,’ he said.

They looked at each other, and he could have sworn they actually smiled. And then they pounced.

And Owen pulled the automatic from inside his coat and tore them to pieces in mid-air with a spray of bullets.

He stepped back as the dead meat hit the kitchen floor tiles with a wet slap next to what had been their last supper.

He slid his gun back inside his jacket and checked himself in a grease-spotted mirror by the doorway for any blood-spray. He looked fine. For a dead man.

Quickly, he slipped back around the counter and got out of the coffee shop. The last thing he needed was to meet any customers coming in.

Instead he ran into Toshiko. She was waiting for him outside the door.

‘Tosh?’

‘I’m sorry. I needed a walk, too.’

‘You mean you followed me?’ he said.

She didn’t try to lie, there was no point. ‘What were you doing in there? You don’t drink coffee. You can’t.’

Owen pulled up his coat collar, the first threads of morning were starting to show in the sky and he thought the first chill of the autumn was coming with it.

‘You know, that’s right,’ he smiled. ‘But do you know something else, there’s so much more to life.’