Skypoint

TWENTY-ONE

‘Get behind me!’ Ianto shouted. ‘Get behind me, now!’

As he spoke, he pulled his automatic and wondered what the hell he was going to do with it. The thing that was coming through the roof of the elevator looked like slime, a glittering slime that undulated and glowed and spread across the ceiling.

It didn’t look like bullets would do anything but slip through it. But he fired anyway.

The bang of the gun was deafening in the confinement of the elevator cabin. The sound waves slammed off the mirrored walls and hit him in the ears like hammer blows.

As he’d expected, the four bullets he fired punched holes in the ceiling, but did nothing to the creature that clung to it.

It did encourage Andrew and Simon to do what he’d told them, however, and they crowded behind him in a corner of the elevator – not that it was going to do any of them any good, and they all knew it.

Ryan had stayed where he was, crumpled on the floor, the slightest inclination of his head was the only suggestion that he was aware that anything at all had changed – never mind the cabin being invaded by some oozing alien.

‘Jesus Christ! What is it?’ Andrew gasped behind Ianto.

‘What does it matter?’ came pragmatic Simon. ‘We’re dead.’

Ianto stared at the thing that clung to the ceiling. It had no eyes, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were watching each other. His mind raced, trying to think of something he could do. He knew there was nothing. Instead, he tried to think of something that would make the last moments more bearable. He thought of Jack.

The creature began to slide down the far corner of the cabin, collecting there.

Ianto wondered how death would feel, if it was as bad as Owen said it was. It hadn’t only been Owen, of course. Before him they had brought people back with the first resurrection glove. Only ever for two minutes. But they never said anything about angels and harps or pearly gates. And as Ianto had watched their time run out on his pocket watch, they had never wanted to go back there.

He watched the creature slide down the wall of the elevator and thought that there wouldn’t be much left of him to resurrect, even if they still had one of the gloves.

He kind of wished he’d had time for one more cup of coffee.

Then Ryan pulled his shivering body off the floor and threw himself at the creature, screaming his wife’s name.

There wasn’t time to pull him back. And what would have been the point?

Ryan seemed to sink into the creature and as Ianto watched they could see him screaming, but heard nothing – he got the impression that he wasn’t even there with them any more, but that what they were seeing was some sort of image being transmitted from another place. And then the whole thing drew back out through the wall leaving no trace of itself, or the man that it had taken.

For a moment, Ianto and the other two men didn’t move. When they found that they could, they still couldn’t speak.

Ianto had seen strange, strange things. But somehow this was stranger than any. His mind felt momentarily overloaded.

It was Simon that spoke first. ‘Am I going mad?’

Andrew wrapped his arms around him and kissed him hard. ‘I don’t care. As long as I’m alive, I don’t care.’

Simon touched Ianto’s sleeve. ‘Do you think he did that for us? Ryan. Did he save us?’

Ianto didn’t know if Ryan had been a hero, or had just thrown himself after his wife, but he nodded.

‘He saved us,’ he said. ‘For now.’

He looked at the ceiling and let that sink in with his two companions. It didn’t take long.

‘It’s going to come back, isn’t it?’ said Andrew.

Ianto was matter-of-fact. ‘Probably. It knows we’re here.’

‘Canned meat,’ Simon observed.

It made Ianto smile. ‘That’s right. We have to get out. Now, one of you give me a leg up.’

There was a hatch in the roof. From his jacket, Ianto took a small torch and, stowing the automatic in his belt, he slid his foot into the stirrup of Simon’s interlocked hands and boosted himself through the inspection cover, and into the elevator shaft.

He got himself up onto the elevator roof and turned on the torch. He’d never been on top of an elevator before and wasn’t sure of what he’d find. He wasn’t sure if he might find the wall-walker up there chowing down on Ryan Freeman. All he did find was an unimpressive and dirty lift shaft.

He had hoped there might have been some sort of ladder on the wall. He had presumed that someone had to make inspections sometimes, but maybe they just rode the roof of the lift, or they abseiled down from the top of the shaft. Or maybe they just didn’t bother. Anyway, there was no ladder.

‘What can you see?’ Simon called from below.

‘Nothing encouraging,’ Ianto told him.

That wasn’t entirely true: he could see a set of doors that would lead onto the next floor up. The problem was going to be how they got to them. He was pretty sure that he’d be able to prise them open, but the prospect of standing on thin air while he did that was the disheartening part.

Ianto looked at his watch and wondered how long it would take the creature to digest Ryan, and then come back for more.

And then he saw something to really worry him. The elevator was suspended on a cable. It was thick and would take a lot of weight and a lot of wear. But it looked like when Ianto had fired through the roof of the cabin a couple of his bullets had shorn through the cable.

He could see it shredding slowly.

If he needed confirmation, a dozen metal strands suddenly gave way and the elevator car lurched.

He heard the men inside scream, and Ianto held on for grim life.

‘What the hell was that?’ he heard a terrified Simon yell.

The car had fallen half a metre at most, but that only meant that there was another thirty or more metres yet for it to fall. And the cable was stretching and straining.

The good news was that the fall had dropped the elevator alongside a set of doors that Ianto could reach from the roof. But the guys inside were going to have to climb up here to use them – and that meant a lot of clambering about. He wasn’t sure if the damaged, straining cable was going to be able to take it. But the only alternative was a long drop.

Ianto looked at the slowly shearing cable and moved carefully, stretching down into the cabin to reach for Andrew’s hand while he told the two men what they were up against.

‘Sod it,’ said Simon. ‘Sometimes you just wish you’d stayed in bed.’

Ianto hauled Andrew up first, and listened to the sound of the stretching metal fibres in the elevator cable as Andrew helped Simon. If the whole thing went, Ianto thought, it was going to be a toss-up which happened first – the car dropped and smashed them to bits eight or nine floors below; or the flying metal cable decapitated them.

At least he had more of a choice of deaths than five minutes earlier.

Ianto told Simon and Andrew to stay where they were. The less movement there was, the more time they might have. He crawled toward the partially exposed doors and tried to push them apart.

They weren’t having it.

Beneath him, he felt the elevator car groan, its weight pulling against the fraying metal threads of the cable.

‘Hurry up!’ he heard Andrew urging, his voice trembling.

Ianto felt sorry for them. The closest these two had probably ever come to death was crossing the road at rush hour. Now, inside five minutes, they’d been nearly chewed up by something that came through the wall and the odds were they were going to end up smashed to pieces at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

Get a move on!

Ianto got his fingertips on the steel door edges and pulled, but being half-crouched on top of a lift car was far from the optimum position to really get his back into the job. He heard movement behind him and felt the elevator shift a little more. Simon and Andrew were alongside him now and without a word, all three men started to pull on the door.

Ianto felt it start to give, and his fingers got a better purchase. Over his head, he heard the sound of another wire snapping in the cable.

‘Put your backs into it, boys!’ he growled, and strained against the doors.

Beneath him he could feel the elevator car trembling against the weakening hold of the failing cable. They only had a few seconds…

Push!

And the doors slid apart, just a little – just enough.

‘Quickly, now,’ Ianto ordered, and Simon pushed Andrew through the doors. There was the sound of him tumbling to the floor in the darkness on the other side, then Simon went through.

And that was when the cable snapped with the sound of a gunshot, and the elevator car fell from beneath Ianto’s feet. Instinctively, he threw out his hands and caught the edge of one of the doors.

A moment later, he heard the elevator hit the bottom of the shaft with the sound of an express train hitting a mountain side. There was no explosion, but he felt a wave of oily air and dust brush past him. Then Simon and Andrew were hauling him between the doors and onto the thick pile carpet of the sixth floor.

Ianto rolled over and the carpet felt as soft as meadow grass and the still air of the ghost-lit corridor as good as the fresh breeze of a summer’s day.