by Gary Russell
The Twilight Streets
( Torchwood - 6 )
Gary Russell
Gary Russell. The Twilight Streets
(Torchwood – 6)
For Scott Handcock
ONE
He counted eighteen of them, on the platform in their neat little black or grey mackintoshes, caps on their heads, gas masks on their belts, some clutching rope-bound suitcases, some just satchels, a few others with nothing more than paper bags. All shared a big, wide-eyed expression, a mixture of trepidation, fear and bemusement. A few hours earlier, they’d been grouped at Paddington Station in London, saying bewildering goodbyes to parents and guardians, brothers and sisters, friends and strangers. Then they’d been bundled onto the steam train and delivered to Cardiff. To somewhere safer, away from the bombs.
Even Cardiff had its moments though. Just a few months back, part of Riverside – Neville Street if he remembered correctly – had gone in a German raid, so really nowhere was totally safe. Just safer than London.
At the top of the steps leading to the ticket hall below, a group of strangers moved forward as one, grabbing at the kids, pulling and pushing, checking names scrawled on manila labels. Every so often, a nametag would be recognised and the child claimed, separated from the others and bundled away. One by one the displaced evacuees were going down the stairs, to begin new lives, never knowing if they would go home again, or when the war would end.
Jack Harkness looked at his watch. ‘In about three and half years,’ he muttered to no one. And then he smiled. There was one kid on the platform, freckled, red-haired, gap-toothed, ears sticking out at absurd angles. A more caricatured evacuee he couldn’t believe existed.
He stepped forward to the boy, holding out a hand to reach for his nametag, but the boy stepped away.
‘Oo are you?’ the lad said.
Jack told him his name. ‘And you are?’ Jack got hold of the paper tag. ‘A NEIL.’ Jack frowned for a second, then laughed. ‘Oh, very droll. You guys.’
The boy cocked his head. ‘Gor blimey guv, leave it out, apples an’ pears, strewth, ’ow’s yer father?’
Jack shook his head slowly. ‘You don’t have a clue, do you. Cool accent though, give you that. You nailed it right down. Never quite got the East London one right, myself.’
‘Luvvaduck, mate, I ain’t got no clue as to wot on erff your sayin’, me old china.’
‘Yeah, whatever, “Neil”. Come on, we need to get you home.’
He took the ‘boy’ by the hand and led him down the steps, turning right to leave by the rear entrance.
They emerged into the August sunlight. Parked a few yards across the road was a sleek black Daimler. The driver’s door opened, and a grey-suited chauffeur stepped out, offering a salute. Jack waved it away.
‘None of that, Llinos,’ he said.
‘Ruddy Nora,’ said the boy, ‘you’re a bit of awright an’ no mistake.’
Llinos smiled and removed the chauffeur’s peaked cap, letting her long red hair cascade down her back. ‘Charmed,’ she said and opened the rear door for the boy to clamber in. Jack went in after him.
As Llinos got back into the driver’s seat and replaced her cap, Jack leaned forward and kissed the back of her neck. ‘The Hub, please, and don’t spare the horses.’
The Daimler eased forward, as Llinos reached down, plucked a Bakelite telephone receiver from the dashboard and passed it back to Jack.
‘Harkness,’ he said simply. Then, after a beat, ‘I see. That’s not my problem. You asked me to locate and identify him for you. Done that, delivering him to the Hub – then I’m out of here. There’s a party in the Butetown docks tonight with my name on it.’
He passed the phone back.
Llinos took it and replaced it without ever taking her eyes off the road, turning right into Bute Street towards the warehouses that littered the mud chutes by the basin, across from Tiger Bay.
After a few moments, the Daimler pulled up outside a row of Victorian buildings and Llinos emerged, opened the doors again and smiled at her passengers as she let them out.
Jack hadn’t let go of ‘Neil’ at any point, and he was virtually dragging him towards the warehouses, a determined grimace on his face.
He heard Llinos drive away to park the Daimler in the Square, round the corner. All those resources, and still no underground car park. One day, someone was going to steal that car and find it had a few little refurbishments that the average wartime Daimler didn’t have, and then there’d be hell to pay.
He rapped on the wooden door of Warehouse B, waited exactly eight seconds, and then rapped again.
The door opened almost immediately, and a uniformed young man – naval today, made a change – let them in.
‘Looking good, Rhydian,’ Jack winked at him.
The young Welshman adjusted his glasses, but said nothing, as always. He crossed to an iron-gated lift and yanked the door back. Jack and ‘Neil’ entered, and Rhydian closed the door behind them, pressing a button that sent them twenty feet beneath the surface of the Oval Basin.
Jack watched as the concreted shaft slowly went by and then blinked as the harsh lighting in the Hub greeted him. Enough electricity to power most of Cardiff, and luckily hidden from the surface – no leakage to draw German bombers’ attentions.
The lift door was wrenched open by one of the two personnel in the Hub, Greg Bishop. He smiled at Jack and then looked down at ‘Neil’.
Jack’s heart raced slightly at seeing Greg. It always did. He was dark-haired, blue-eyed (oh God, such beautiful eyes), cheekbones you could rest a coffee mug on and a toothy smile that had greeted Jack on more than one occasion as the sun rose.
Greg was the reason Jack did anything for Torchwood these days. And he was a damn good reason.
Behind Greg, a severe unsmiling woman raised her head from a big in-tray of documents. ‘You’re late,’ she said.
‘And good evening to you, Tilda,’ Jack said. He pushed ‘Neil’ before him. ‘Meet an alien. Or “A. Neil”, if you prefer. Torchwood London have such a perverse sense of humour.’
Tilda Brennan shrugged. ‘So? You’ve done your job. You can leave now, Mister Freelancer.’
Jack smiled at Greg. ‘Such charm, such a way with the guys.’ He gestured towards a contraption at the centre of the Hub. ‘Had a visit from Turing?’
Greg smiled back. ‘Called it a Bronze Goddess. Says you know what it’s to say thanks for.’
Jack nodded. ‘So, does it work?’
Tilda looked up at the machine. ‘Supposedly it’ll predict Rift occurrences. You’ll have to take it for granted, Harkness, that, as it’s tainted by your involvement, I neither like it nor trust its accuracy, reliability or usefulness.’ She looked back at Jack. ‘You still here?’
Jack ran his finger down Greg’s cheek. ‘What happens to Neil?’
‘Llinos will put it in the Vaults until we find out why it’s here and how to get it somewhere else.’ Greg looked at the alien. ‘Why didn’t Torchwood One want it?’
‘Dunno. I was just asked to get him to you guys. Job done. See you.’
And Jack turned away from the Hub, Torchwood Three and the alien. Then he turned back again.
‘Oh, and Tilda?’
‘Doctor Brennan to you.’
‘Whatever. I don’t want to find Neil over there turning up in a fisherman’s net in a week’s time. If I’d been willing to accept his execution, I would’ve left him to stay in London.’
Tilda Brennan sneered at him. ‘It’s alien rubbish, Harkness. Whether it lives or dies, gets dissected or just forgotten and frozen in the Morgue – all my decision, not yours. Now go.’
Just as Jack was about to leave, he heard a
noise and looked at the alien.
‘Fank you,’ it said. ‘An’ I look forward to our next meeting. Innit.’
This surprised Jack. Not just the gratitude, or the suggestion they’d meet again, but the fact it had spoken such a long sentence, and one that made sense.
‘Sure thing,’ he said, giving a tap on the side of his head with a finger, then out, by way of a salute.
And he left Torchwood Cardiff, or Torchwood Three as it now called itself, and went back out into the cold Welsh night air.
He stood on the dockside, looking first out across the water, then back across the mudflats that formed the Oval Basin. One day, all this land would be reclaimed, redeveloped, become a thriving modern area of shops, apartments and tourism. And there, right there, by that big drain, would be a water tower, a sculpture; and a machine would be there for a short while and would create a permanent rent in the Rift that crossed Cardiff. Then, once in a blue moon, the thing Jack was waiting patiently for (well, OK, not that patiently) would materialise and he’d get away from Wales. From Earth. Back out amongst the stars, back out where he belonged…
Except, damn it, he actually felt drawn to Cardiff now. How easily he’d come to call this place home.
Pulling his long coat around him to keep out the chill, he wandered away from the water, out towards Butetown and the small area beyond known as Tretarri.
No railyard, no bus link, no shops; just a couple of dismal streets of workers’ cottages built about eighty years earlier. Dark, foreboding and run down, the houses were mostly empty. Not even the tramps and bums of Cardiff lived there, and the last few times Jack had had reason to go he’d felt… weird.
And Captain Jack Harkness and ‘weird’ weren’t great buddies – it needed further investigation. And hell, he had nothing else to do for a couple of hours.
TWO
The room was incredibly dark – not just the dark of a late night, but the dark of somewhere that light just seemed to evaporate from, as if something was actually sucking it out, like air from a leaky tyre.
It may have had something to do with the wooden box at the centre of the room, on the floor next to a table. About the size of a shoebox, but crafted elegantly from redwood, with intricate designs across the surface. Not that they could be seen right now. But they were there all the same.
If you listened closely enough, you might be forgiven for thinking the box was sighing. Or breathing deeply. Or perhaps, something inside it was.
The box wasn’t alone in the room. Beside the table was a leather armchair, a Queen Anne, in tan. A bit worn, showing its age, creases and even a minute tear on one wing. On the table, a small glass of dark sherry stood on a white doily.
On the wooden floor in front of a cold fire hearth was a tan rug, which matched the armchair. The fire looked as though it hadn’t been lit in many years – spotlessly clean, the Victorian tiling painted black, the wrought-iron implements in a dark coal bucket next to a grate.
Facing all of this was the door to the room, wooden, stained dark, an iron key in the lock. To the right of the door and the chair was a window. Long, heavily covered with a dark olive velvet curtain.
That was it. Just a dark room filled with dark furnishings.
And the odd sigh from within the box. Probably.
After a couple more sighs, a tiny pinprick of light seemed to seep out from the box, not enough to illuminate the room, but enough to break the dark mood.
Seconds later, the leather chair rustled, almost as if someone was moving in it and sure enough a figure gradually materialised out of nothing. Almost as if it were crossing from one plane of reality to another, in which identical rooms existed, with identical chairs.
After a few more seconds, the figure solidified into a small, thin-featured old man, wearing an evening suit, bow-tie, cummerbund, a small red rose in his buttonhole, as if he’d been attending a night at the opera.
Ignoring the darkness, almost as though he could see as clearly as if it were broad daylight, the man reached out for the sherry glass. He flicked through the pages of a broadsheet newspaper which had been lying on the floor. Each page was blank, yet he seemed to be reading something on it.
He grimaced at the sherry and muttered, ‘I prefer Amontillado.’
The sherry seemed to glow briefly at this. When the glow faded, the sherry was marginally paler than before.
The man glanced at the newspaper. ‘Where am I?’
An empty page was suddenly illuminated. A word appeared on it, scored in a white light that then turned ink-black.
CARDIFF
‘When?’
18 AUGUST 1941
‘What a popular year. And where in this dreary place might one find the divine Captain Jack Harkness today?’
TRETARRI
The old man clapped his hands with a giggle. The newspaper folded itself up and came to rest on an arm of the chair. ‘Delightful. Queen’s Rook takes Queen’s Knight, I think.’ He looked about the room. ‘Light.’
The transformation was instantaneous – the fire was lit, electric lights on the walls were a low-voltage, incandescent yellow, the rug and curtain become cream-coloured, and some framed pictures blurred into existence along the walls.
Photographs, mostly monochrome, showing Cardiff over the previous fifty years.
‘That’s better. If I’m going to be in this dimension for a while, I might as well be comfortable.’ He bent over and scooped up the box – his body as supple as that of a man a third his apparent age.
He crossed to one of the photos.
‘That is 1923, if I recall,’ he said to the box. ‘And there, in that ridiculous coat, with that smug expression – there is our target.’ He patted the lid of the box. ‘Jack Harkness he calls himself. Not his real name, of course, but a guise he once adopted and has continued to use. To all intents and purposes, it is whom he believes himself to be. And you and I shall have some fun with him.’
He crossed to another picture. Again Jack, this time dated 1909; he was inside a railway carriage in Pakistan, with a troop of soldiers, laughing. ‘Take a good look at our enemy,’ the old man purred. ‘This is going to be a long game with a very unpleasant outcome.’
From within the box, a louder sigh than before emerged, and another flicker of harsh white light seeped from the crack between its lid and base.
The old man nodded slowly. ‘Yes, the God-slayer. And we really don’t like him much, do we?’
The box sighed again.
The man clicked his fingers, and the newspaper flipped open to a blank page.
‘Send a message: My dearest Doctor Brennan. Matilda. My respects to you and Torchwood. The time has come to rid ourselves of the vermin that calls itself Harkness. File TW3/87/BM. Read it and follow the instructions. Your servant, as always, Bilis Manger, Esquire.’
The newspaper closed, and the old man smiled.
‘It won’t work, of course. But it will be an amusing diversion, a chance to see how alert the good Captain is.’
He sat back in the chair, sipped more sherry and suddenly yanked open the lid of the box. A massive flurry of bright, fierce halogen white light almost roared out of the box, straight up, through the ceiling and was gone.
And Bilis Manger laughed as he imagined the trauma he was about to inflict, indirectly and untraceably of course, on his… nemesis.
‘Nemesis? Oh I like that,’ he said to the newspaper. ‘I would have settled for “enemy”. “Mortal foe”, even. But “nemesis” – oh, but that’s delicious.’
Jack Harkness stood at the end of a long road. At the far end was a huge brick wall, creating a cul-de-sac of Wharf Street. Off Wharf Street, four other roads to the left. The right of Wharf Street was just a solid row of Victorian terraces.
The four roads were also lined with identical two-up, two-down terraces. All workers’ cottages, built for the dockworkers in 1872. Back then, the land had been owned by one of the local businessmen, Gideon ap Tarri, who wanted his men well
housed with their wives and kids.
At the other end of the four side roads, a street identical to Wharf Street called Bute Terrace.
Six streets of houses, creating a neat square of land.
And all the houses empty. Just as they had been in 1902 when he’d first been drawn here. And all the other times. 1922 – that’d been a good year. And in 1934, that old woman who threw things at him…
Unchanging. No sign of wear and tear. Just… there.
Jack was about to step forward when something that hadn’t happened on his previous incursions suddenly occurred.
A dog, a small brown cocker spaniel, lolloped towards Wharf Street from behind him, panting slightly. It brushed past his leg and into Wharf Street. Momentarily it stopped and cocked its head, as if listening, Jack thought. Hearing something on a frequency that dogs can but humans can’t. Then it carried on moving, and then turned left into the second linking road. Jack had no idea what the street was called; if it had a sign, it was on the facia he couldn’t see from where he stood.
The dog was gone, completely out of his field of vision, so he moved left to look down Bute Terrace. The dog didn’t re-emerge, so he assumed it had found something to amuse itself with in the side road.
Anywhere else, of course, he might just have wandered in to see what the dog was doing.
But this tiny block of streets known as Tretarri was off-limits to Jack. It always had been. Ever since 1902, when he’d first stumbled on it, drunkenly one night. (Oh, that was a good night. That showgirl. And the sailor. Together…) He’d tried going in but had woken up flat on his back, exactly where he stood now. And, for the next two days, he’d played host to King Hangover of the Hangover People.
Same on his other visits – he physically could not get into Tretarri. If he tried, he felt sick.
He stepped forward. Nope, tonight was no different, the nausea was wrenched up from the pits of his gut in a split second – maybe a bit stronger, a bit more nauseous, but always the same sensations. He tried to ignore it, to force himself forward. If he was going to throw up, so what? He was still going to try.