Slow Decay t-3

by Andy Lane

  Tunnel sixteen, chamber twenty-six looked exactly like the twenty-five chambers that had come before it and the fifteen that Toshiko had overshot by: a red-brick arch in a red-brick tunnel, water trickling down and etching the mortar away, small patches of fungus spread across the walls. Toshiko hoped that they were good, old-fashioned Earth funguses, and not spores of something alien that were patiently eating their way into the walls. She hoped that the rats that she heard scurrying in the darkness sometimes really were rats, and not tiny things with many legs and many eyes that had snuck in along with some of the alien technology they had found. She had nightmares occasionally that something was growing, deep in the bowels of Torchwood. Something alien. Something bad.

  Toshiko shivered. They were just dreams, provoked by some of the strange things they did and saw in Torchwood. They weren’t real. They weren’t backed up by observation, or evidence. By science.

  She looked around, trying to work out where they were exactly, in relation to Cardiff geography. The Hub was directly beneath the centre of the Basin, but now they were probably some distance away, somewhere under the Red Dragon Centre, if she didn’t miss her guess. How much of Cardiff rested on Torchwood’s tunnels? How many ways in or out were there?

  ‘Here we are,’ Ianto said, stopping by a stack of metal, bolt-together shelving. ‘Shelf eight, box thirteen.’ He indicated a box at eye level: an ordinary plastic box — more of a crate, in fact — institutional grey in colour, half a metre along each edge.

  There was nothing written on the box, apart from what looked to Toshiko like a random string of alphanumeric characters. She couldn’t work out how Ianto had got to the right box so quickly. In fact, she couldn’t work out how he had even got to the right chamber, given that there was no way of telling them apart. She gave him a sceptical look.

  ‘I have a system,’ he said, affronted.

  Together they pulled the box off the shelf and lowered it gently to the floor. It was about the weight of a portable TV. Funny, she thought, how they kept comparing alien devices to ordinary things, like iPods and portable TVs, as if they were just different examples of the same thing. But they weren’t. They really weren’t.

  The box was sealed with tape. Ianto ran his thumbnail around the edge of the lid, splitting the tape in two.

  ‘Do you need me for anything else?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Thanks for helping me find the stuff. I might have been down here for days looking for it, otherwise.’

  ‘Helpfulness is my middle name.’ He looked down the tunnel, towards where Toshiko had seen him earlier on. ‘If there’s ever anything else you need down here, let me know. I can find it for you much quicker than you can find it yourself.’ And with that he walked off, back towards the Hub, walking fast and not looking backwards.

  Dismissing Ianto from her mind, Toshiko reached down and pulled the lid off the box.

  Afterwards, when all passion was temporarily spent, when they were lying with Gwen diagonally across Rhys’s chest and with his hand cupping the heaviness of her breast, with the sweat and the moistness of their bodies cooling on their skin, the silence between them was the silence of lovers who didn’t have to say anything, not lovers who couldn’t think of anything to say. Gwen had climaxed twice: once quietly, biting her lip, while Rhys touched her with insistent gentleness, and once again gasping, hips raised, while Rhys moved deeply within her. Rhys had climaxed once, crying out like a man who had just run into a brick wall, the sweat trickling down his face and dripping onto Gwen’s shoulder blades. Now they lay there, on the same bed where they had made love so many times before, trying to incorporate this latest time into the story of their lives.

  ‘That was incredible,’ Rhys said. He was still breathing heavily. ‘You were incredible.’

  ‘You weren’t too shabby yourself.’

  ‘Don’t expect me to recover any time this week. You’ve used me up.’

  ‘I could go again. Just give me a few minutes.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s no good. I’m finished. You go on without me.’

  Gwen laughed quietly beside him, her breast moving gently in his hand in time with her laughter. He felt himself stir. Perhaps he could manage one more time. Once he’d caught his breath. And had a piss.

  ‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ he said. ‘I’m exhausted. Drained. I need vitamin pills. Lots of vitamin pills. In fact, I may just try to dissolve as many of them as I can in a glass of water and drink it.’

  Gwen giggled, and rolled off him. He rolled in turn to the edge of the bed and stood up. His clothes were strewn across the floor. Responding to a half-formed thought provoked by the mention of pills, Rhys reached down and burrowed in his pocket for a moment. There, wrapped in a piece of tissue paper, was the blister pack that he had been given by Doctor Scotus that afternoon. Closing his fingers around the pills, he looked down at himself, at the curve of his stomach, at the way his thighs flattened out against the mattress. Gwen still loved him, but if he wanted to show her that he loved her then he needed to do something dramatic. He needed to lose that weight.

  Padding to the bathroom, he was already pushing the ‘Start’ pill from its blister as the door was closing behind him. The pill was larger than he had realised, spherical and a mottled yellow. He popped it into his mouth and swallowed. The pill stuck in his throat for a moment, as if fighting to get out, then a wash of saliva carried it down.

  As he returned to the bedroom, the night air cold against his naked skin, thoughts of the pill led Rhys to think about the Scotus Clinic, and that in turn led him to think about Lucy, who had given him the Clinic’s address. His brain wasn’t editing his thoughts properly: he was feeling tired, in a good way, and still turned on. That’s why he suddenly said: ‘So have you thought any more about Lucy coming to live here?’ He listened to the words coming out of his mouth with horrified fascination, knowing exactly what kind of reaction they would provoke but unable to call the words back. ‘Just for a while,’ he added, weakly.

  Gwen’s head popped up from the tangle of sheets on the bed. ‘If that’s a joke,’ she said, ‘it’s in really poor taste. What’s the matter — one woman in bed not enough for you?’

  The candle back in the dining room was flickering a deep crimson, casting dancing shadows across the hall and around the bedroom, illuminating Gwen’s incredible breasts with a bloody wash of colour. Although part of Rhys’s mind knew that he’d stepped into a minefield and he ought to back out rapidly, by far the greater part felt a sudden and brutal surge of anger, a dark wave that washed over him, knocking rationality off its feet and leaving something older and nastier behind. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘She’s just a friend. Do you want me to write it down for you to make it easier to understand? Or shall I just text you the details, since you seem to pay more attention to whatever appears on your mobile than anything I say?’

  The light from across the hall was flickering faster and faster, casting Gwen’s ribcage into stark and ugly relief. ‘Fuck you if you can’t understand that I don’t want another woman in my flat. And fuck you if you can’t handle the fact that I have an important job. I guess simpering Lucy the simple secretary is more your type!’

  Gwen sprang to her feet and jumped off the bed, clutching the bed-sheet to her chest. For a moment, Rhys thought she was going to push him out of the bedroom, but instead she sprinted past him and into the hall. The door slammed shut behind her, but not before he had seen, in the insane pulsating light, the expression on Gwen’s face.

  And beneath the rage, which he had been expecting, which he was feeling, there was something else.

  There was horror.

  Nestled together inside the storage crate were a collection of rounded objects, each about the size of a small piece of fruit. No two were identical, but they were all alike, and they were all similar to the object that was currently sitting on her workbench. It wasn’t easy to tell, in the orange light that drizzled down from the overhea
d lamps, but their colours seemed to run the gamut from aquamarine to rose: nothing too bright or too dark, all pastels, all colours that would look good in a nice restaurant or bar. Relaxing colours. Their surfaces were blistered, but the blistering looked as if it was part of the design, not the result of extreme heat or extreme cold. The blisters were all the same size and the same distance apart, and they formed bands, or ribbons, around the objects, with areas of plain material — some kind of ceramic, she thought — between them. They looked to Toshiko like controls of some kind.

  Each object was different in shape from its brethren. Some were long and thin, some were short and squat, and some consisted of globules all massed together.

  There was a sheet of paper in the box. It had slipped down between the objects and the box wall. She fished it out. For a moment she thought it had been printed in an old-fashioned typeface, then she noticed that the paper was yellow and stiff, rumpled slightly by dry conditions in the way that old newspaper often got. The typeface was literally that — the note had been typed. By hand. On a typewriter.

  It was a list of the objects: brief descriptions and colours, enough to be able to identify them uniquely. And there was a paragraph about how they came to be in Torchwood: two of them had been discovered in what was believed to be an alien life-craft ejected from a crashing spaceship, found in an archaeological dig on an Iron Age site near Mynach Hengoed in 1953; five had been bought as a job lot in an auction in 1948, provenance unknown; and one of them had been transferred from an earlier Torchwood box dating back to 1910. They had all been put together in the Archive based on a similarity of appearance, and the function of none of them had been discovered.

  The paper was signed in a bold hand; the ink faded by the passing of years.

  Beneath the signature was the name of the person who had signed these objects into the Archive, along with the date.

  Captain Jack Harkness. 1955.

  SEVEN

  Friday morning arrived unwillingly in the city; dragging itself into existence with reluctance, grey and dull, sluggish and tired. The traffic moved as if drugged; the drivers slow to use their accelerators and brakes, slow to react to traffic lights or pedestrians on crossings. A haze seemed to hang damply in the air, coating the sides of the buildings and making people’s faces look as if they were covered in sweat, even though they were wearing thick coats. The pigeons huddled together for comfort, unwilling to fly for longer than it took to find a new space to land in. Even the water on the sculpture in the centre of the Basin trickled more slowly than usual. The heat and frantic activity of the past few days had ebbed away, leaving a muddy estuary of apathy behind it.

  The mood in the Hub was equally funereal, as far as Gwen could tell. Toshiko looked as if she had worked all through the night again: she didn’t speak unless spoken to, and hardly even then. Owen’s hair was pointing in all the wrong directions and, although he’d left and come back, he was still wearing the same clothes, and he hadn’t shaved. Only Jack was cool and crisp, moving through the still air like a predator; a faint crease of worry between his eyebrows.

  Gwen waited until Jack was talking to Owen before slipping the alien device back onto Toshiko’s desk. Toshiko looked at it blankly for a few moments, then glanced up at Gwen with an unreadable expression on her face.

  ‘Did you get what you needed from it?’ she asked.

  ‘I got what I deserved,’ Gwen replied, and turned away.

  She couldn’t stand to be in the Hub with the others; the silence was too intense. Instead she wandered off, down one of the tunnels she rarely used. Her footsteps echoed off the red brick as she walked, the tock tock tock of her heels matching the drip drip drip of water somewhere off in the darkness.

  Jesus, how had it all gone so wrong so quickly?

  She had meant for the alien device to have boosted the affection between her and Rhys, cementing the relationship between them, repairing the cracks that had developed over the past couple of months. Instead, it had driven a wedge into those cracks and levered the two of them apart. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She should have guessed that the device would amplify any emotion. After all, nothing is ever completely perfect. Even the most loving conversation contains the seeds of argument; the skill is in just nurturing the seeds you want and letting the rest stay fallow. The device just amplified whatever it was fed, with no selection, no discrimination. A momentary flash of irritation on her part had translated itself into anger for Rhys, which had then echoed back into a ferocious rage sweeping through Gwen’s body. She had run out of the bedroom as quickly as she could, knowing she had to turn the device off before she slapped Rhys, or he hit her. She could feel it coming, like the prickling you got before lightning struck. They had been seconds away from violence, perhaps seconds away from one of them killing the other. And what terrified her the most wasn’t that proximity to violence; it was how it had always been there. The alien device hadn’t created it: only accentuated it. You couldn’t amplify something that didn’t already exist.

  Alongside love, lay hate. That was what Gwen had to come to terms with.

  She had slept on the sofa that night, wrapped in a sheet, the rage that had burned within her keeping her warm until it drained away and left her shivering and silently crying. She had showered early and left the flat before Rhys had woken up — assuming he had slept at all, and not just lain awake in their bed staring at the ceiling.

  She needed to text him. She needed to call him and talk, but she needed to text him first to prepare the ground, because if she called him now she didn’t know what he was going to say.

  Perhaps it was all over. Perhaps they had already broken up, in his mind, and she didn’t know it yet. Perhaps she was suddenly single.

  Her blind footsteps had carried her far away from the Hub. She walked past Owen’s medical area, and the firing range. She walked past the entrance to the long platform that extended parallel to a set of metal rails which vanished into a black tunnel; the terminus, Ianto had once told her, of an underground railway system that linked the Torchwoods together, although she had suspected then that he was joking in that straight-faced way Ianto had. She walked past the archives into which Ianto placed the various alien devices Torchwood had confiscated over the years. She kept walking until she was deep into territory that she had never seen before.

  A sudden wave of coldness passed over Gwen, raising goose flesh on her arms. She looked up to see an opening in the tunnel wall on her left. Light began to ripple on the ground, just within the arch of the opening; a deep, violet light. Entranced, she entered.

  Inside the doorway was a large, open space where the walls were punctuated by glass sheets fronting tanks full of water. The room was heavy with darkness, and even the scant violet light that oozed from the tanks was just a minor variation of the darkness. She waited for a few moments for her eyes to become acclimatised then she walked further into the centre of the room and looked more closely at the tanks.

  They were full of nightmares.

  The things that were in the tanks were fish, but not the kind you’d want to see on your dinner plate. Some of them were translucent, with organs and bones clearly visible through their skin. Others were covered in what looked like black armour, or mottled grey flesh that looked unhealthy, diseased. They all had mouths that were too large for their bodies, or eyes too large for their heads, or no eyes at all. One tank contained a nest of slowly writhing, fleshy worms about the thickness of her leg, bright red in colour, with holes at their ends that were less like mouths and more like gaping rips in their flesh.

  Floating, half-deflated, in their tanks, the creatures looked like God’s rough sketches for what he was going to populate the oceans with later.

  ‘Where the hell in this universe did these monstrosities come from?’ she breathed.

  ‘The Pacific Ocean,’ said Jack, behind her, making her jump. ‘The Atlantic Ocean. The Indian Ocean. Pretty much any ocean you care to name on this planet.’

/>   ‘But — but I assumed they’d come through the Rift, like everything else we deal with. You don’t see these things on ice in the supermarket.’

  ‘They live too deep. The pressure down in the ocean trenches is immense. It could turn a polystyrene coffee cup into a hunk of stuff the size of a small coin. If anyone could fish that deep — which they can’t — and could bring one of these fish to the surface — which, I stress, they can’t — the things would just explode. The difference between the pressure in their bodies and the atmospheric pressure around them would just be too much for their skins to take.’

  ‘But — why are they here in the Hub? What’s the point?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jack admitted. ‘They were here when I arrived. Somebody’s little aquarium of freakish fish. I think whoever put them here was trying to make a point that there are stranger things in the Earth’s oceans than slip through the Rift. They could’ve just written it on a Post-it note: I would have got the message. This thing is kinda like overkill, if you ask me.’

  ‘Who feeds them? Who looks after them?’

  ‘I think Ianto does it. Either that or it’s automated. The real trick is how the pressure and coldness of the ocean depths is maintained in those tanks, and I guess that technology is something that came through the Rift. We couldn’t build tanks like this on Earth now.’ She heard, rather than saw, him shrug. ‘Hey, maybe the whole aquarium is some kind of alien tech that was confiscated by Torchwood, and the fish just came along with it.’ He paused for a moment, then went on, quietly. ‘You took that alien device that we recovered from the nightclub, didn’t you? You took it out of Torchwood.’

  Rhys looked at himself in the mirror, and he didn’t like what he saw.

  He was haggard and pale through lack of sleep, and there were dark circles under his eyes. His hair felt lank. Sleep had evaded him for most of the night; too many times to count he’d half got out of bed to go and talk to Gwen in the living room, but he’d just fallen back, unable to form the right words. Each time the flat had creaked he’d thought it was Gwen coming back to bed, but he was always wrong. He’d already phoned in sick, but the sickness wasn’t in his body — it was in his soul.