Torchwood: Slow Decay

by Andy Lane

  ‘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 t
he 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.’

  ‘How did they know?’ Owen asked, glancing around nervously as he fumbled in his case.

  ‘How did the one back in the Hub know?’ Jack replied. Keeping his body still, he let his gaze sweep from one side of the warehouse to the other. Gwen followed his gaze. Behind her she could hear clicking as Toshiko and Owen clustered around the dead Weevil, taking their photos. Nothing was moving on the margins of the warehouse, but she could have sworn that some of the pencil-thin beams of sunlight that criss-crossed the dusty space were blocked in places where they had shone brightly before. Blocked by things that were not moving. Not yet, anyway.

  A smell drifted across the open space towards them: thick, acrid, choking.

  ‘Time to go,’ Jack said. ‘We’ve outstayed our welcome.’

  The four of them edged slowly towards the door, leaving the Weevil’s dead body behind them, spread-eagled on the harsh and unforgiving concrete.

  ‘Are you sure they’ll let us go?’ Gwen asked.

  Jack had moved so that his body was between them and whatever was in the darkness. His coat swirled around his body, the light from the doorway casting his shadow solidly across the floor. ‘I’m not sure of anything in this world,’ he said, ‘but I think they have other things on their minds right now. Let’s leave them to their grief.’

  They left, and the Weevils did not follow them. All that Gwen heard as they climbed into the Torchwood SUV was a mournful whistling, coming from inside the warehouse.

  FOUR

  Rhys took a deep breath, braced himself, and looked in the mirror.

  God. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The morning sun streaming in through the bathroom window cast a harsh light across his face, shadowing it in all the wrong places and showing up bumps and odd little creases that he didn’t even know he possessed. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, thinking – if he’d thought about it at all – that it lent him a reckless, Colin Farrell vibe but, combined with the baggy skin under his eyes, it just made him look like a down-and-out who’d been sleeping in the rain for too long. The skin of his cheeks and temples was gritty, and he could have sworn that the flesh on his neck – the red-rashed, chicken-skin flesh on his neck – was looser than he remembered. Jesus, was he getting jowls! He was, he was actually getting jowls!

  Rhys shook his head in disbelief. When had all this happened? When had he gotten old? The last time he’d taken a good look at himself he’d been young, fit and carefree. His eyes had been bright, his skin clear and his stomach as flat and as hard as a butcher’s slab.

  But now…

  He looked down, knowing he wasn’t going to like what he saw. And he was right. The bulge of his beer gut wasn’t anywhere near big enough to hide his feet, but it was getting to the point where he’d have to take polaroids of his wedding tackle so he could remember what it all looked like.

  Was this what Gwen saw whenever she looked at him? He groaned. No wonder she spent so much time out at work. He was a mess.

  They’d had a long conversation, on the way back from the Indian Summer. It was probably the most serious conversation they’d ever had, apart from that hesitant, ‘Are you on the pill?’ ‘No – do you have any condoms?’ exchange the first night they met. They’d started off talking about Lucy, and how Rhys reckoned she needed a safe place to stay. Gwen had ducked the issue, making some sarcastic comment, and then she had started talking about the two of them and where they were going with their lives. Rhys was worried that she was winding herself up towards saying she wanted children, but fortunately her thoughts hadn’t got that far along the road to the future. She was just worried they were drifting apart. The spark just wasn’t there any more. He’d agreed, more because she was talking and he needed to throw in the occasional ‘Yeah’ and ‘I know’ to show that he wasn’t thinking about something else, but looking at himself in the mirror now he had a pretty good idea why they were drifting apart.

  When was the last time they’d been out to a gig? When had they last gone clubbing? When had they last spent money on something frivolous, something that wasn’t for the flat or the car or dinner?

  Somewhere along the way, they’d lost the fun.

  He was turning into his father, that’s what was happening.

  Taking a deep breath, he began running through a list of all the things that would have to change in the flat. Radio 2, for a start. That would have to go. He’d found himself tuning to it more and more, while cooking food or tidying up, but despite the catchy tunes and the humorous banter of the presenters, it would have to vanish from the radio’s memory. Radio 2 was the kind of thing he remembered his dad listening to. It wasn’t called ‘easy listening’ for nothing. Radio 1 from now on – or, even better, one of the cutting-edge broadcasters that had sprung up with the advent of digital radio. Something radical. Something that would make him feel young again.

  The fridge would need some clearing. Get rid of all the milk and replace it with skimmed, for a start. Or, even better, that soya stuff. The bread would have to go: no more cheese on toast of an evening. All that pasta in the cupboard was now surplus to requirements. And he’d go out later and get lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. He and Gwen could revolutionise their eating habits overnight. No more takeaways, no more Indian restaurants, just salads and healthy living.

  No more takeaways. No more Indian restaurants.

  And
no more beer.

  That would be the killer, but that was what had led him to this state in the first place. He let his hand caress his belly. You’re going to have to go, my son. We’ve had some fun together, you and I, but if I need to sacrifice you to keep Gwen then that’s what I’m going to do.

  A gym? They were expensive, and having now taken a long hard look at himself in the mirror, Rhys was reluctant to let anyone else see him in this state, sweating and panting on a rowing machine. There had to be another way. Football? Perhaps he could get together with a few mates and form a team, enter one of the amateur leagues. The daydream made him smile for a few moments, before reality came crashing in. How many men did he see on Sunday mornings down the park, running around a pitch for a few minutes and then stopping, hands on thighs, gasping for breath? Football didn’t seem to be doing them any good.

  And then he remembered a snatch of conversation from the previous night. Lucy, talking about a diet clinic, and how the weight had just melted away from her. Something herbal, she’d said.

  That was it. When Rhys got into work, he’d get the address of this diet clinic off Lucy, and he’d make an appointment.

  The future suddenly looked very bright. Gwen didn’t know it, but Rhys intended to become a new man, just for her.

  ‘So which one of us is Ant, then?’ Owen asked. He spread the photographs out across the metal surface of the autopsy table, sliding them around as best he could until he had a two-dimensional representation of a dead Weevil, life-sized, made out of A3 close-ups.

  ‘Which one’s the straight one?’ Jack asked. He was prowling around the darkened balcony of the forensic lab like a tiger.

  Owen thought for a moment, then swapped the photographs of the left and right hands over. ‘They’re both straight. Or they’re both funny, depending what you mean by “straight”.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m positive.’ He stood back, admiring his handiwork. He had to admit, in the absence of a real Weevil corpse it wasn’t at all bad. If he half-closed his eyes, it almost looked as if there was an actual body on the table. Not one that he could cut open, of course, but one he could examine minutely if he wished. Toshiko had offered to take several different digital images of the same areas and turn them into a 3-D virtual image, but there was something about the physicality of the images that appealed to him. It was a bit like looking at X-rays. The images were about the same size.