Torchwood: Slow Decay (6 page)

Since qualifying as a doctor, and then later joining Torchwood, Owen had discovered that the basic human form was more like the norm across the universe than the exception. Not exclusively – there were creatures out there that were about as far from human as it was possible to get – but there were more beings that could pass for human in a dark alley than not. Which, for a biologist like him, raised the question: why? What was it about the universe that favoured a human-like design?

And now, as he looked at a picture of a form of life probably never even seen before by humanity, encoded somehow into a series of alien electronic circuits, all those late-night undergraduate thoughts came back to haunt him.

That lonesome whistle was really beginning to grate on his nerves. He wanted to say something to Toshiko, to suggest that she shut up, but Owen worried about the way Toshiko reacted to things sometimes. She internalised a lot. Not like Owen, who let everything out as often as possible. She pondered. Brooded. He didn’t want to say anything that might make her withdraw even more. It wasn’t that he cared, particularly, but she was a key part of the team. Owen didn’t want to be blamed if she went over the edge.

The face that looked back at him and Toshiko from inside the alien device was differently proportioned to humanity: shorter and wider, something like a hammerhead shark. There were two eyes – at least, there were things that might have been eyes – placed at extremes of the head. A vertical slit right in the middle of the face could have been a mouth, or perhaps a nose. Or something completely different. The image finished at the neck, but Owen would have bet a lot of money on the probability of there being arms and legs somewhere beneath the head, all joined up with a central torso.

Scale was impossible to ascertain – that head could have been the size of a house, or the size of a microbe – but Owen was pretty sure that if you put the alien being and him side by side they could have looked each other in the eye.

‘So is that all this is?’ he asked Toshiko. ‘Just a portrait? A snapshot of the wife?’

‘No,’ she said quietly, still studying the image on the screen, moving her finger across it as she talked. ‘This is a functioning device. There is a power source just there: some kind of battery, I think. And I believe this area over here to be an amplifier, although I’m not sure what is being amplified. Judging by the way the circuits are routed, some kind of energy is being detected
here
, and the amplified version is transmitted
here
. The picture of the creature is a side effect. Something incidental to the primary function.’

‘Incidental?’

She shrugged. ‘Have you ever seen cheap radios shaped like…’ She paused, casting around for an appropriate analogy. ‘Elvis Presley! Or David Beckham!’

‘No,’ Owen said quickly. ‘Never. I’ve never seen a radio shaped like David Beckham, and I’ve certainly never owned one.’

Toshiko glanced back over her shoulder at him, and her expression was disbelieving. ‘I understand they were unaccountably popular, once,’ she said. ‘The circuitry works no matter what shaped case it’s in. The shape of the case is a decoration. And that’s all this is – a decoration. An incidental addition.’

‘But with Elvis Presley radios, the decoration is on the outside. This image is on the inside. In the circuitry itself. It
is
the circuitry. Who was it designed for?’

‘Perhaps it was a joke,’ Toshiko said. ‘Something the designer put in that they knew nobody else was ever going to see.’

‘Or perhaps the race that the designer belonged to had some kind of X-ray vision. Perhaps everything they designed had a picture inside, rather than outside.’

‘I suppose anything is possible,’ Toshiko said. ‘Look, Owen, may I ask you something?’

‘Yeah, what is it?’

‘Could you please stop whistling?’

That took him by surprise. ‘I’m not whistling. I thought
you
were whistling.’

‘I am not the one who is whistling. I assumed it was you. It is the kind of thing you would do. That, and singing. And breaking wind.’

‘Tosh, I promise, I am
not
whistling.’

‘You might be doing it without realising.’

‘So might you.’ He took hold of her shoulder. She tensed under his grip. ‘Turn around. Come on – turn around.’

She turned on her stool, but for some reason would not look him in the eye.

‘Tosh – look at me. Am I whistling?’

Her gaze rose to his mouth. ‘No, Owen,’ she said. ‘You are not whistling.’ Her face tensed as realisation caught up. ‘But I can still hear whistling.’

She was right. Owen could hear that low keening noise as well, a mournful threnody that threatened every now and then to break into a tune but never quite made it. The kind of noise someone might make if they were working, concentrating on something, half-remembering a tune.

‘Gwen’s gone…’ he said.

‘And Jack is in his office, and we wouldn’t be able to hear him from there. And besides,’ she added, ‘he does not whistle. Not ever.’

‘Well if it’s not you, and it’s not me, and it’s not Gwen, and it’s not Jack…’ He left the rest unsaid, but he gazed into the darkness at the edges of the Hub. ‘What about Ianto? Is he still out the back in his little cubbyhole?’ he asked, thinking about the interface between them and the rest of the world. The man who acted as gatekeeper and general office manager for Torchwood. ‘Does he ever whistle?’

‘I have never heard Ianto whistle.’

‘Then the wind? Tell me it’s the wind.’

‘It’s the wind,’ Toshiko said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

‘It’s not the wind,’ Owen said. ‘It’s one of my big complaints about this place – no breeze. I keep telling Jack we need air conditioning.’

He nodded towards the dark depths of the Hub. ‘Do you think we should…’

Toshiko nodded. ‘I think we should. Definitely.’

Together, they moved away from the brightly lit central area of the Hub, and into the shadowy outer areas. As far as Owen was concerned it was like moving backwards in time. In the centre, the high-tech equipment and bright lights, not to mention the metal-backed waterfall that continued on down from the Basin above, gave the Hub a twenty-first-century feel despite the brickwork and the remnants of old pumping equipment. But as they moved further away, along one of the many curved tunnels that led away from the centre, the crumbling masonry and the massive, curved arches always made Owen feel like he was passing back through the twentieth century and into the bowels of the nineteenth. The architecture made him wish he was wearing a top hat and tails. Jack the Ripper should be prowling around there somewhere. Prostitutes in frilly knickers should be showing their wares on the corners.

‘I think we’re going the right way,’ Toshiko said, and she was right. The whistling was getting louder, like an AM radio searching for a signal.

They turned a corner, and as they saw what lay ahead the whistling suddenly stopped.

It was the area where they kept Torchwood’s occasional unwilling guests. A series of archways had been closed off with thick armoured glass, forming isolated cells. Riveted steel doors at the backs of the cells gave access to a connecting corridor. It was where the Torchwood team kept any visitors who really shouldn’t be allowed to wander around. Wander around the Earth, that was, not just the Hub.

At the moment, the cells only had one inhabitant.

It was a Weevil: a hunched, muscular shape with a brutal, deeply incised face that could pass for human in the half-light of a Cardiff alley or the corridor of a crumbling tenement. A cannibalistic life form that – no, not cannibalistic, Owen corrected himself. Weevils weren’t human. Carnivorous, yes, but not cannibalistic, although sometimes, looking at them, it was difficult not to think of them as some kind of human sub-species. Owen had often seen things that looked
less
human than the Weevil here coming into Casualty late on a Saturday night. This one had been captured by Jack and the team about the same time that Gwen had joined them. At first, they hadn’t been entirely sure what to do with it, but as time went on it had become first some strange kind of mascot and then just part of the furniture.

The Weevil turned to look at them as they slowly approached the armoured glass barrier that separated them. It was crouched at one side of the cell: almost kneeling. Its head had been bent, and its arms extended almost ritualistically. Now, seeing them, it slowly straightened up to its usual ape-like stance and stared at them with deeply set, piggish eyes.

‘Surely…’ Toshiko started, then stopped.

‘It must have been,’ Owen said. ‘I mean, I’ve never known the Weevils to whistle, but there’s nothing to say they can’t. I mean, if jackals can laugh then Weevils can whistle, right?’

‘Right…’ Toshiko didn’t sound convinced.

They turned away and started to walk back towards the Hub.

And, behind them, the whistling started up again. Sad. Mournful.

Alone.

* * *

Torchwood
, her mobile read. Again.

The sky outside the window was pale, ethereal, marbled with nascent, nacreous cloud. The air that gusted in was fresh and cool. It was morning, but it wasn’t the bit of morning that Gwen liked to see.

Rolling over, she found herself gazing into Rhys’s slack, sleeping face.

People seemed so different when they were sleeping. Layers of experience sloughed off. Masks slipped away. What was left was the innocent core of the person. The child within.

She loved Rhys. That was a fact – unarguable, undeniable. And yet, there was something missing. The constant and surprising sex, the discoveries about the other person, the peaks and troughs of feeling – they had all faded away, eroded by time and experience into a comfortable emotional landscape of slight hills and minor valleys. It was like they had started off in the Scottish Highlands and were now living in Norfolk. Emotionally speaking. Gwen would never even consider living in Norfolk for real.

What did you do, when passion turned to friendship? When you knew each other’s bodies so well that a voyage of discovery became more like a trip down to the shops? When the kind of orgasms that made you want to scream and rip the sheets became less important to you than a good night’s sleep?

Oh God. Were they drifting apart? Were they splitting up?

‘You’d better go,’ Rhys said, his eyes still shut. ‘If that thing goes off again it might wake me up.’

‘Sorry, love. I thought—’

‘Don’t worry,’ he mumbled. ‘Talk later. Sleeping now.’

She rolled out of bed and dressed quickly, fresh underwear beneath some clothes that she found thrown down by the side of the bed. By the time she left, pausing in the doorway to take a last look at him, Rhys was buried beneath the duvet and snoring.

Outside, the birds were singing. The air was cool against her skin, as if freshly laundered. The smell of the trees – earthy, complex, indefinable – filled her lungs.

A second message had come through to her mobile while she had been getting ready, giving an address on the outskirts of Cardiff. She drove, deftly and fast, through quiet city streets, her mind deliberately blank. She didn’t want to think about the man she was leaving behind – or the man she was driving towards.

When she arrived, at one of Cardiff’s older districts – warehouses built in solid brick, a Victorian gothic church incongruously set across the street – the Torchwood SUV was already there: a black shape with curved edges, almost alien in itself.

Jack was standing in front of one of the warehouses. A smaller opening in the massive wooden plank door, all peeling green paint and rusty nails, stood open. Toshiko and Owen were getting their equipment from the SUV, and bantering quietly while they did so.

‘Twice in one night,’ Gwen said as she approached. ‘I wish this was some kind of record, but it isn’t.’

‘We’re not on the clock,’ Jack replied, without apology. ‘We’re racing it.’

Together they went inside. It took Gwen’s eyes a few moments to adapt. Shafts of light penetrated through holes in the warehouse roof, picking out the dusty air like spotlights in an abandoned theatre. The ground was flat concrete: empty of all but a few scraps of wood, a mangled bicycle and a body, curled up in a foetal position.

Gwen and Jack approached the body together. At first, Gwen thought it was a man with dyed hair, dressed in a heavy and bloodstained overcoat, but as she drew closer the discrepancies began to win out over the similarities. The body was too bulky, the skin too coarse. And that ruff of yellow hair on top of the scalp…

‘It’s a Weevil,’ she breathed. ‘And it’s dead.’

‘Even Weevils die,’ Jack said. He knelt down by its side. ‘And they deserve the same kind of respect from us as anything else that dies. And that also means that, if they die before their time, then we need to find out how and why. We owe them that much, as a fellow life form on this Earth.’

Gently, he eased the creature over, and Gwen caught her breath. The Weevil’s face had been eaten away.
Literally
eaten away: Gwen could see the gouges left by teeth in the gritty skin of the cheeks. The fingers had been chewed away as well, as had half the skin of the neck.

‘What could have the strength to kill and eat a Weevil?’ Gwen asked. ‘Another Weevil?’

‘They don’t eat their own kind,’ Jack said. He sounded sad. ‘They’re a surprisingly gregarious species. And besides, those tooth-marks are too small. Weevils have teeth resembling gravestones. And no orthodontists. Whatever had a go at this one had small, regular teeth.’

Gwen heard a sharp intake of breath from behind her. Turning, she saw Owen and Toshiko standing side by side, holding their equipment cases and staring at the body.

‘It knew,’ Toshiko said. ‘Somehow, it knew.’

‘It was mourning,’ Owen confirmed.

‘Make sense,’ Jack said. ‘Who knew? Who was mourning?’

‘The Weevil back at the Hub,’ Owen said. ‘Somehow, it
knew
that another Weevil had died!’

Something scuffed in the darkness on the far side of the warehouse. In response, something else moved over near the door. Jack reached into his pocket, but didn’t take his gun out. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that the pallbearers have arrived. Tosh, Owen – get your cameras out and grab as many photographs as you can.’