by Guy Adams
He swung the mallet, but the man got his arm up in time to stop it doing any major damage. Rob was sad. It just wasn't so funny if the punchline wasn't the sound of the young man's forehead splitting open. The invader threw his weight against the door, shoving it closed. Rob roared with anger.
'Stop spoiling the joke!' he screamed. 'Stop spoiling the joke!' He hammered against the door with the mallet, sweat flicking off his vein-lined forehead with exertion until he stopped abruptly, reached into his pocket, pulled out a key and locked the door. 'Ha Ha,' he said in a flat voice. 'Two keys.' He leaned close to the wood. 'I'm going to do something bad now. Bye.'
On the third floor, Jack's body was fizzing in response to the air around him. When you had travelled in time enough to begin developing a somewhat loose attitude towards the here and now, you became sensitive to changes in the temporal fabric around you, as if the skin itself were more aware of the flow of seconds and minutes. It felt the same as when a television was left turned on in a room, its screen blank — that charge in the air, the flow of particles across the glass that radiated out and made the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
As Jack walked towards the corner of the room, he became aware of the charge increasing in the air around him. Suddenly the room changed and he found himself looking on it in better times, the wallpaper and paintwork crisp and new, no cobwebs or dust. He stopped moving and tried to feel the static in the air, holding out his hands and tickling the chronons with his fingertips. Sensing a surge to his left, he aimed for it and found himself back in the present day.
He moved onto the landing, the tingling getting stronger all the time. Things were close to falling apart, time and space becoming no more than a jumble around him. By the stairs, he felt a wave of chronons and, sticking out his arm, watched the hand disappear as it left this point of space-time and entered somewhere else. Leaning forward, he stuck his head through where he estimated the hole to be. He found himself looking down on Rob and Julia as they slept in the main bedroom, Rob snoring while Julia — eyes slowly widening in fear — looked up at Jack's face and recognised it for what it was.
Jack pulled himself back onto the landing and moved into the other room.
'Jesus!' Ianto shouted as he came face to face with Rob in the doorway. Gwen jumped up from her seat, the sound of panic in Ianto's voice more than enough to get her moving. Ianto got his arm up in time to stop Rob doing any damage, darting back and shoving the door closed while Rob was unbalanced.
'Tell Julia I've found her husband,' said Ianto, pressing hard against the door to keep it closed as Rob pounded on it from the other side.
'Stop spoiling the joke! Stop spoiling the joke!' Rob screamed.
Gwen was looking around for something to use as a weapon, even as they heard the lock click and Rob's whispered threat.
'Oh no…' she said, flicking the monitor switch and watching as Rob walked away from the door and towards the lounge where his wife lay sleeping. 'We need to get that door open before he harms her!'
'Right!' shouted Alexander, surrounded by a mess of cannibalised electronics. 'Now we might be getting somewhere.'
Hannah was silent, staring at the abandoned shell of the microwave, the television and her mobile phone. In contrast with Joe's euphoria, the drug seemed to have made her maudlin, and Alexander was quite perplexed by it. Human beings did have such remarkably chaotic biology.
'Now then,' he said, looking forlornly at her, 'do try and look interested. I hate not having an audience when I do something clever. What we have here,' he held up the ugly combination of his PDA and the household items he'd scavenged, 'is not unlike the gadget that young Ianto had for tracking chronon signatures…' He stopped himself, realising the pointlessness of what he was doing. 'You have no idea who I'm talking about. Doesn't matter. With any luck, it will help me find a point of access to that very strange house next door.'
Hannah sighed and kicked a piece of the microwave across the floor. 'Whatever,' she said.
'I think, on reflection, I prefer the dancing buffoon outside,' Alexander said, dumping the apparatus in his lap and heading back towards the front door.
Jack was in the middle of the street. To his left was the half-built shell of a house, to his right there was little but rubble and open earth. Looking directly ahead, he saw the open foundations that would soon become Jackson Leaves, moonlight falling on cement sacks and timber, piles of brick and grit.
'You'll grow up to be trouble,' Jack said, stepping backwards and reappearing by the window in the upstairs room.
There was the sound of frantic hammering from downstairs, and he dashed towards the door, jerking to a halt as the air around him suddenly changed, thickening, coalescing into liquid. His legs came out from under him and he fell backwards. Looking up, floating in the murky water that had overlaid itself on the structure of the room, he found himself staring into Alison's terrified eyes, her hair flailing around her screaming face as hands pressed down from above. Jack reached for her, desperate to help, and his hands brushed on another's fingertips, but something had him by the ankles and he began to sink.
Looking down, he could make out the shape of the river weeds swaying in what little moonlight made it this far beneath the surface of the water. If he could just untangle his feet… He looked up as he tugged at the weeds, watching Alison's panicked movements begin to slow, arms cutting through the water more and more dreamily before the scream on her face sagged into an open-mouthed expression of absence. It seemed to him that he saw the life fade from her eyes. They went from shining green glass to dull as earth. Miles's hands let go and vanished into the air, even as what was left of Alison headed towards Jack, seemingly for an embrace. As she sank, so did he, dropping onto the threadbare carpet of the third-floor room, his clothes as heavy from the river water as his heart was with guilt.
Neither Gwen nor Ianto saw Jack as he disappeared then reappeared in the room above. They were far too occupied in trying to force the lock on the dining room door, fighting not to be distracted by the sight of Rob entering the lounge on the monitor screen beside them.
Rob stood by the arm of the sofa, cradling the mallet in his arms as one would an infant. He looked down at his wife, stroked her forehead with the back of his hand and smiled as she began to come round. Her eyes were glazed with the drug in her system, and when she looked up at him it was first with confusion then with a rather sleepy smile.
'There you are,' she said dreamily.
'You can see me?' he asked.
'Yes,' she said, though her eyelids were drooping.
'I wish I could,' he said, his eyes dampening. 'I was beginning to think I was completely lost.'
Julia was falling asleep.
'Please don't,' Rob said, touching her face again.
'Hello?' she said. 'Tired…'
'Yes,' Rob nodded. 'They poisoned you.' He rubbed away the beginnings of tears. 'We're both poisoned.'
'He talked about drugging us,' Julia murmured. 'Remember? Threatened it… to make us do what he wanted.'
'All poison makes you do what it wants,' Rob replied. 'This house is the same.'
'Need sleep.'
'I know you do… I hope the drug does make you do whatever someone says. If it does… well, that makes this easier.'
'What do you mean?' asked Julia.
'I love you, Julia, OK? Forgive me for what I'm about to do.'
Julia smiled. 'I do.'
Rob sobbed and raised the mallet above his head before bringing it down with all his strength.
As Jack sat up, a stone broke through the glass of the window, bouncing off the wall and rolling into the corner of the room. He didn't notice, getting to his feet in a daze and stepping onto the landing. There were three doors now, rather than two. He stared at the new door, fixed in what could only be an external wall.
Another stone burst through the window next door.
Jack reached out to the brass knob of the impossible door, opened it and
stepped out of Jackson Leaves altogether.
NINETEEN
As Jack stepped through the door, a bell rang above his head, its chime mixed with the sharp hiss of a milk steamer, but it wasn't quite loud enough to drown out the sound of Gene Vincent on the radio. He closed the door behind him, and looked out through the dirty glass that had replaced the wood. Outside was the slow, weekday drudgery of work traffic, lorries and vans, moving things from one place to another.
'Morning, my lovely,' said the woman behind the counter. 'What will it be?'
Jack walked carefully between the tables. A group of spotty-looking mods eyed him from the corner. One of them, working hard at looking more than his meagre years, peered from behind the turned-up collar of his Fred Perry shirt and started tapping his fingers on the formica in an attempt to intimidate. It did nothing of the sort; as a man who had once helped Keith Moon get a Cadillac into a hotel swimming pool, Jack would need a little more sign of the young man's credentials before he felt even vaguely daunted.
The woman behind the counter wore her dark roots with the same confidence as the stains on her waitressing uniform. Stitched into her faded Gingham breast was the word 'Durdles', though whether that was her name or the café's he couldn't guess. She looked at him through glasses whose bright red rims brought no cheer to her tired eyes.
'Well?' she asked again, patience as thin as her happy veneer.
'Coffee,' Jack said. 'Sweet and milky.'
'I'm not your mother. Sugar's on the counter.'
So it was, though the spoon was chained down in case he had the hots for their cutlery.
She wrestled with the machine as if it was going out of its way not to produce. It roared and hissed like feral cats in a slowed-down piece of film, vapour ejecting from the pipes with the industrial vigour of a power station. She vanquished it eventually, wringing a mug of frothy coffee from out of its guts.
'Thanks,' Jack replied, cracking the crust on the sugar bowl and spooning in a couple of shards.
'You're welcome to join me,' said a woman's voice behind him.
He walked over to her table and wedged himself as comfortably into the orange plastic seat as physics would allow.
'This is all very real,' he said, puffing gently on the white coffee froth to cool it.
'Reality is so subjective, wouldn't you say?'
She was an elderly woman, hair an immaculate grey confection as rigid as a plastic hat. She wore wool in layers: a pullover, a cardigan and a skirt that crackled when she moved, as soft as a scouring pad. Jack recognised her from the reports Gwen had shown him.
'Is there a particular reason why you look like Joan Bosher?' he asked.
'Not really, though we were rather impressed with her — such a strong sense of self, she never snapped, never lost control. Not many of your species could say the same.'
'We're a fiery lot, it's true.'
He took a sip of his coffee. It tasted of wet air, but he couldn't decide if that was proof of this fantasy's strength or weakness, British coffee in the 1960s had been pretty lousy.
'So, you wanted to see me?' he asked.
'We were curious,' she admitted.
'You're not the only one.'
'Oh, we're not so interesting,' she said, brushing imaginary crumbs from the table top.
'Like reality, interest can be subjective.'
She smiled, and for a moment the room seemed to bend with her lips, the walls rising and the tables distorting as the floor formed an upward arc that followed the curve of her good humour. Then her mouth straightened and the room with it, the floor flattening out with a loud bang.
'True,' she said, as if the contortions around her had proved her point. 'We are from …' she inclined her head as if checking for the words, 'a potential dimension. Somewhere outside what you know of reality…' She smiled again, though this time the café had the decency to stay still. 'But then so much is. Your view of existence is rather limited.'
'That's humans for you, terribly parochial.'
'We will make considerations. You are only very basic life forms after all.'
'Too kind.'
'Not at all. As a species, we have a… I think you would call it hunger … for temporal damage.'
'You feed off paradoxes?'
She looked up at the ceiling, and Jack tried not to notice the delicate ripples in the pale, wrinkled flesh of her throat. He didn't know whether it was due to a failure in concentration or a deliberate attempt to freak him out, but there was certainly more than blood moving in her veins.
'That's as close to correct as we will manage, I think,' she said finally. 'Forgive me, but it is complicated, like you trying to explain maths to a dog.'
'I'll work hard to keep up.'
The mods in the corner laughed, though whether at him or not he couldn't tell.
A shadow fell across the room as something unseen flew past the front of the building. Nobody paid it any attention.
'We find a point of interest,' she continued, 'somewhere that already has a delicious flaw, a potential.'
'The Rift,' Jack muttered.
'Oh no!' she laughed, the vibrations of her mirth shaking all the tables in the café. 'We barely noticed that until after we'd latched on to your universe. It was you! You light up this continuum like a beacon.'
The shadow passed again, this time flipping across the backs of the vehicles as the unknowable creature that cast it landed on the roof.
'The damage you have done to the time stream is almost incalculable,' she continued. 'Come from the future, steal from the past… I lost count of how many of you we detected in — using your relative year markers — 1941.' She reached out and took his hand. 'You get so involved! The first rule of time travel, my dear, leave the locals alone — if you don't want to attract our attention — ' she smiled and her teeth stretched like clarinet reeds from her gums, long, yellow and eager to cut and chew — 'and believe me you don't. Changing things, people and events, that draws attention. You're a force of nature, Jack, a temporal tsunami, and we tasted you.'
Her tongue fell between the elongated rows of teeth, flopping onto the back of his hand where it curled and licked, enjoying the salt of his skin.
He tried to pull his hand back from her grasp, but she held it tight.
'We found that little house of yours, where, as always, you did so much damage…'
'What damage?'
'So unrepentant! My darling boy, there were two time lines damaged before you'd even had time to let the welcome mat gather dust.'
Jack became aware that there was a couple sitting at the table next to them. He knew it was Miles and Alison without even having to turn. Could tell by the cool drips of river water he heard fall from Alison's slack mouth onto the formica.
'Small fry by your standards, I'll admit,' she continued, dabbing the tip of her tongue on the web of skin between his fingers, 'but the building had such potential. So, we reached for it…' she extended a bony index finger, 'and pushed …' her fingertip disturbed the air around it, sending out ripples, 'forcing ourselves further and further into the universe.'
'Why didn't I notice?' Jack asked, tilting his head as the ripples from the disturbance in the air ricocheted off his brow.
'We've only just started, barely longer than this conversation in your relative time. Our presence echoes all the way along the building's time line, altering things, distorting them… But your position as a time traveller offers you something of a unique perspective. You remember the past the way it was before we started to interfere. Jackson Leaves wasn't always the soup of violence and paradox that it is now; we just made it that way — in less time than the waitress took on your drink, mark you. All the better to feast when we reach inside far enough.'
She bit at the knuckle on his little finger, drawing a drop of blood, before letting go of his hand and withdrawing her tongue back inside a shrinking mouth. Within moments she was just simple Joan Bosher again.
'And we will fea
st soon,' she added. 'You've time to drink your coffee but not much more than that.' She pushed the mug towards him.
Jack got to his feet and walked towards the door. He yanked it open and swore as he found the road on the other side. Above his head he could hear the sound of whatever dream creature perched on the roof as it tightened the grip of its talons on the guttering. He stepped back into the café.
'Just drink your coffee,' said the thing that looked like Joan Bosher. 'Once feeding has been instigated, there's no turning back.'
'Relax,' suggested the waitress, picking up her dirty cloth and dragging its mouldy fabric over the counter. 'It's only a universe, after all.'
'Take the weight off,' said the more aggressive of the mods, walking towards him.
'Just lie back…' added Miles, looking toward his waterlogged wife.
'…and take it,' Alison gurgled.
Jack thought for a moment before marching over to the mod, picking him up by the lapels of his parka and hurling him through the glass of the door. The glass shattered and the mod winked out of existence, even as the room in Jackson Leaves reappeared on the other side of the fracture.
'Don't lay the table just yet,' warned Jack, stepping through the hole in the door and back into his universe.
TWENTY
Alexander's wheels cut channels through the rain as he headed back towards the front of Jackson Leaves, the umbrella wedged behind his shoulder to keep both him and the apparatus dry. If anything, the rain seemed to be getting heavier, bouncing off the road in white sparkles, and flooding the drains, running in great streams along the gutter. Alexander noticed the streetlights begin to flicker as he lined himself up with the drive of Jackson Leaves.
'It's getting worse,' he whispered, his words lost in the clatter of the rain.
Joe and Hannah didn't need him to tell them, though; looking around was clue enough. The privet hedge writhed in front of the house, new growths shooting forth, leaves unfurling into dry then dead, knocked apart by the hammering rain. A season's growth in an instant.