Torchwood Long Time Dead (9 page)

The building grew quieter as he took the stairs
down. It had been a busy day and most people were
still at their desks working upstairs. It was only
Cutler who had vanished, and Andy guessed that
his boss wanted the gym to himself for an hour so
he could vent his frustrations privately. He didn't
blame him either. He'd never seen the DI so angry
as when he'd shown up at one of the crime scenes

- the toilet at the back of a late-night cafe - and
told them all quietly to get the scenes processed
as quickly as possible and to get the bodies to the
mortuary. It was a contained rage.

Thinking about it, it seemed to Andy that Cutler
was screwed either way. With the Department
making him the front man for the case, he had to
take the rap if the murders weren't solved, and
still do all the talking to the press, but he was
unlikely to be given any proper answers even if
the Department did find out who was responsible.

He shivered slightly as he pushed open the door to
the changing rooms. Who were the Department,
anyway? They weren't entirely military, but at the
same time they weren't MI5 or MI6 style spies.

They gave him the creeps almost as much as those
bodies with the bleeding eyes did. He didn't like
the thought that the two were linked. Not at all.

There was nothing comforting about it. It was a
bit like the old days coming back to haunt him.

Both the Department and the state of the

bodies reminded him too much of Torchwood
business, and that made his heart race with more
than fear. Most of the time he could separate his
day job from everything he knew about Torchwood
and the awful events that had left Ianto dead and
poor Gwen in hiding, but there were these strange
murders and now these new developments he
needed to tell Cutler about. Cardiff was going
spooky again. He thought of the number stored
in his brain - the only place he felt safe keeping
it - and wondered if maybe he should call it and
ask Gwen for help. Or at least find out if she'd
heard of anything like this before. Especially as
the contamination suit that had been found could
only have come from the Hub site. But he couldn't
call her. She had enough problems of her own.

Plus, he still had moments of quite well-founded
paranoia that first his unexpected promotion and
now his sudden secondment to CID hadn't entirely
been as a result of his own hard work but more as
some kind of pay-off from above after everything
that had happened with the children. The cool
air didn't help his inner chill, and neither did the
memory of those eyeless corpses.

Still, it wasn't as if either he or Cutler were
going to have too much time to think about them
for a while. That was now Department business,
and as of an hour ago it looked like they had a
whole heap of other trouble to investigate. Andy
Davidson just wished everything hadn
't
abruptly
gone quite so weird.

DI Cutler was standing in front of a locker, a
towel wrapped around his waist.

'Sir?' Andy said. Cutler didn't look up. Steam
billowed from a shower cubicle behind him as if
he'd got out and forgotten to turn it off. Maybe
he'd just needed to get his shampoo or something.

Andy frowned. That was a lot of steam.

'Sir?' he said again. What the hell was his boss
doing? Most of the lockers were empty and had
their metal doors open. Cutler was moving slowly
along the line and closing them. When he finished
the first row, he bent forward and continued along
the bottom.

'What are you doing, sir?' Andy went into the
shower stall and fought his way through the steam
to turn it off, the mist making his shirt cling to his
back as the damp soaked it through.

Cutler had moved to the top row. 'It needs to be
closed,' he muttered. 'It needs to be closed. Before
it's too late.'

'What does?'

Finally, now that his sergeant was standing
right behind him, Tom Cutler turned to face him.

His eyes widened, surprised.

'Where the hell did you come from?'

'Um...' Andy shuffled slightly from foot to foot.

'I've been here a couple of minutes. What were you
doing? What needs to be closed?' He around him.

'Apart from all the locker doors, apparently.'

Cutler frowned. 'What are you on about?' He
picked up his trousers from the bench. 'Anyway,
what are you doing down here? Do the Department
need me to perform some tricks for them? Roll over
and beg? Oh, no,' he sneered slightly as he pulled
his clothes on, 'the DCI has already done that.'

'It's not to do with, that.' Andy put Cutler's
strange behaviour to one side. The DI seemed fine
now. He must have just been mulling something
over and got lost in his thoughts. He needed to stop
seeing strangeness everywhere. The Torchwood
days were done. 'Although Fellowes said the
helmet turned up in one of the bins near the site.

It's gone to the lab.'

'Good. What else?'

'Something odd's been reported. Two suicides.

Quite nasty - one stabbed herself in the kitchen
this morning while getting the family's breakfast
and another hung himself over the side of his
balcony after getting home from his night shift at
work.'

'So?' Cutler said. 'Suicide's not our business.'

'I know but both of these left the same message.

It just said, "I remember".'

'"I remember"?' The DI did up his shirt.

'Yeah. Weird, huh?'

'Well, we may as well take a look before the
Department get on my back to deliver their press
release for them like the dancing monkey I am.' He
grabbed his jacket. 'Just what the hell has got into
this city anyway? Multiple murders and suicides
all within a matter of days?' They stepped out into
the blissfully steam-free stairwell. 'And I'm still
not happy about that suit that was found. I know
the murders are Department business now, but
I want to keep an eye on just how much they're
involved, if you know what I mean.'

Andy Davidson followed him up the stairs and
back to the general hubbub of the station. 'You
think the Department are
involved?'

'Who knows? But they know something.

Whatever's going on here, it's got something to
do with that site. I can feel it in my bones, Andy.

Let's play their game and keep them close. I want
as much access as we can get to the case.'

'And the suicides?'

'Yeah.' Cutler sounded bored. 'We'll take a look
at those too. They'll be a good smoke screen while
we keep an eye on Commander Jackson and his
boys and girls.'

'Yes, sir.' Andy Davidson grinned. It was good
to be busy, and working with DI Cutler could
never be considered dull.

It was a place between places. It sat between time

and space and galaxies, unnoticed. A dimension

of its own. Sometimes, those more corporeal, the

stars, the planets and space had a sense of it. They

thought they glimpsed it in the folds of time and

perhaps they did. Where sentient life existed in the

universe it became a thing unspoken; a shiver
, a

dark shadow, a touch of a sixth sense.

As the worlds grew older and civilisations

came and went, each one had a name for it. All

life could sense its existence, even if they had never

seen proof. They could feel it in the darkness of

night and the nightmares that came from time to

time. They wondered if perhaps it could come for

them in the long sleep after death. They knew it

was waiting and they knew it wasn't empty in all

the ways that they knew it existed despite no proof.

Survival instinct, gut, superstition - all told of the

extra dimension. The one that didn't belong, that

was filled with everything you feared, everything

thing that caused you pain. They all had a name

for it.

Time had no place for it. Life and death did not

exist. There were no planets and stars and moons

and spaces between them. It was empty darkness,

and yet it was not empty. It waited. It was hungry.

As the other dimensions were aware of it, so it and

its inhabitants were aware of them.

For most of eternity, the barriers held, despite

the talk of monsters and demons and madness

amongst those who had given the place so many

names as the years flew by. Civilisations came and

went. Stars burned bright and died. Time passed.

Eventually, a young explorer sat out on the dark

edges of space, so far from his home world, out

near the new star of the nine planets. For a long

time he just stared into what looked like a tiny rift

in space.

He considered himself a clinical thinker and

had no time for superstitions. The tiny cut in space

over the third planet, so small his equipment had

nearly missed it completely, had begun to fascinate

him. Not for itself - but for where it could lead. He

would show those at home that there was nothing

to fear from that place of darkness and nightmares

- if it even existed.

He studied the rift for a long time. The tiny

planet below circled its sun several times as he

sent in probes and measuring devices and studied

the data they sent back. Finally he found it. He

was sure. A measure of space completely other to

anything he'd encountered before. A blip in the

readings. Somewhere inside the rift was a doorway

or a tear of some kind to a place whose physics were

entirely different to their own. His heart raced.

This was it. This was the moment and the place

that he would come into his glory.

He worked carefully. How long such an

unnatural opening would remain he couldn't

determine. The forces of nature would be aligning

to knit it back together. Such an unnatural thing

could not be allowed to continue. Physics would

be unbalanced should one leak into the other and

physics was the one law above all others, no matter

how the spiritualists argued otherwise.

When he was ready, he launched the remote

viewer, as small an item as he could make it, slim

and rectangular, into the rift, attached to a tiny

drone. From within the safety of his own ship, he

navigated it towards the cut in space and time. The

rift itself, tiny as it was, was fascinating. There were

things in it; items of debris from various cultures

and civilisations, some of which he recognised and

some he didn't. It was bigger on the inside than

the tiny entrance suggested. One unnatural thing

housing a gateway to another unnatural thing. He

found that the idea made him shiver slightly and

that caused him irritation. It was superstition to be

afraid with no reason; and he was no spiritualist.

The remote viewer slipped from one dimension

to the next and he turned on the monitor, his vast

palms slick with nervous anticipation. For a long

while, nothing happened. He slept. He checked his

instruments. He tried not to feel disappointed, for

that too was not the clinical way. He would simply

have to try again.

He was sleeping when the screen came alive. It

went from the blackness of simply being o f f , to a

terrible darkness of something other. His mouth

dropped open and his weighty arms flopped away

from the control panels and to the sides of his

command chair. He felt its hunger, the excitement

of all the strangeness that lived - no, not lived -