Skypoint

TWENTY-NINE

The goons that had burst into the photographer’s flat – the men that Jack would soon after think of as Woodwind and Brass – had left Alun and Julie behind. The young couple were stoned out of their heads and probably wouldn’t remember the visit if they survived the night. The only people that the thugs were interested in were Wendy and Owen, and Owen didn’t put up a fight.

When he heard them crash through the apartment door, he had finished what he had gone to do in the bathroom, and stepped out.

His only words were to Wendy: ‘Just do as they say.’

There was no real option for them. The men weren’t waving guns around, but they didn’t need to. Even a living, breathing Owen whose bones would fix wouldn’t have been much of a match for Lucca’s slabs of muscle.

Woodwind and Brass shoved Owen and Wendy out of the flat, and ushered them towards the steps. Before they reached them, Owen heard Evanescence pouring out of the flat once again.

Owen and Wendy were taken up to the twenty-first floor and led along the corridor to what looked like a broom cupboard. It proved to be a secret lift hidden behind a panel. Thirty seconds later, he and Wendy were led into Lucca’s apartment. Woodwind and Brass left them there.

Owen saw Toshiko, still secured to the chair, and went to her, filled with a mix of relief and rage.

‘Tosh, are you all right?’

‘I’m fine, Owen. I’m sorry, I messed up, didn’t I?’

‘No, course you didn’t,’ he said. Lucca stood watching, amused.

‘You two make such a beautiful couple,’ he said. ‘You should really get together.’

‘Screw you, Lucca,’ Owen snarled. ‘What do you want?’ Lucca spread his arms, took in the apartment. ‘Look about you, Owen. I am a successful man.’

Owen took in the money that hung on the walls at a glance. ‘You’re a bloody crook.’

Neither Lucca’s smile nor his pride faltered. ‘I have many interests. I am a man of culture. Success brings with it the opportunity to better oneself, to learn. To study.’

‘What are you, an advert for the Open University?’

Lucca was patient. ‘When this mysterious thing started to take people here at SkyPoint the average man’s reaction would have been fear, would have been to run. But I am very far from average.’

‘Yeah, well you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ Owen taunted.

‘My reaction, Owen, was to study, and learn.’

Lucca had taken the TV remote in his other hand, and he aimed it at the big set. On screen, Owen saw Gwen and Rhys being led into the show apartment by a man he guessed to be Brian Shaw. The camera cut to a new location – a bathroom: as Brian Shaw walked in and was consumed by the amorphous thing that came out of the wall. He felt Wendy stiffen next to him as she watched. The scene switched to another room and someone that Owen didn’t recognise being swallowed by the thing. In another room, another victim…

‘You recorded all of this?’ Owen gasped.

‘I have cameras everywhere. I see everything.’

‘And exactly what have you learned?’ asked Toshiko.

‘How sick you are?’ suggested Owen.

Sticks and stones didn’t even leave a mark on Besnik Lucca. He played something else on the television. It was the Lloyds’ apartment an hour ago. Owen covering Wendy with his body, saving her from the mass of rippling, glowing matter that enveloped them.

‘The man who sees everything, knows everything,’ said Lucca, and he took a couple of steps towards Owen. ‘Now I want to know about you.’

Owen felt Lucca’s eyes boring into him. ‘Yeah, well I like to preserve an air of mystery. Makes me more attractive to women.’

Lucca put the gun against Owen’s temple. ‘How about if I put a hole in your head. How attractive do you think that will make you?’

‘Leave him alone!’

Lucca swung around as Toshiko cried out. He slipped behind the steel chair and pressed the gun against her neck. Owen saw her eyes swell with fear.

‘Get away from her,’ Owen said.

‘Then tell me what you are,’ Lucca said. ‘Why did it refuse you? Twice?’

Owen looked from him to Toshiko and shrugged.

‘Because I’m dead.’

‘Don’t you play with me!’

Owen could see his finger tightening on the trigger.

‘It’s true!’ And Owen ripped apart his shirt, revealing the bullet hole. ‘I got shot through the heart. But I’m still alive. That’s why the thing – whatever it is – won’t take me, it needs living cellular matter to survive. And I’m not alive.’

He glanced towards Wendy. She looked like she was going to be sick.

Lucca stared at Owen. ‘You’re undead.’

‘I don’t sleep in a coffin or anything. In fact, I don’t sleep.’

Lucca was closing on him again, walking around him.

‘Fascinating. Fascinating. The living dead. Tell me, do you feel pain?’

‘Not pain, as such.’

Lucca kicked him in the shin.

‘All the same, I’d rather you didn’t do that.’

Lucca laughed, a great booming laugh. Like he’d heard the funniest joke in the world. Like he was mad.

Suddenly he pushed the gun up under Owen’s head. ‘If I blow your head off, will you run around like something off a cartoon?’

Owen could see Toshiko. She was crying.

And he thought maybe Lucca would do it. Maybe he would pull the trigger and end this cruel, sick joke his life had turned into.

But the last thing he would see, the thing he would take into the darkness with him, would be Toshiko crying.

Behind his back, Owen pulled Ewan’s phone from his pocket. He knew where the call button was. He pushed it.

And Lucca’s phone started to ring. Lucca glanced away – just for a second.

Owen brought his knee up hard into Lucca’s crotch. As Lucca doubled over, Owen kicked the gun from his hand, and went for him again – but Lucca came up with the switchblade in his hand, and lurched towards Toshiko.

‘Maybe I can’t kill you. But there are worse things than death.’ He had the knife at Toshiko’s throat.

‘Maybe you’d like to put that to the test!’

It was Jack. He was standing just inside the garden doors, the Webley aimed straight at Lucca.

As Lucca turned to look at Jack, Gwen pressed her automatic behind his ear and took the knife out of his hand. She used to it cut Toshiko free.

‘I have men. You’ll never get out alive,’ he said.

‘You mean Mr Woodwind and Mr Brass?’ said Jack. ‘They went to feed the birds.’

Lucca smiled. ‘You’ll never get out alive,’ he said again.

Gwen followed his eyes. He was looking across the apartment to where a little girl with golden hair stood. She looked sleepy, as if she had just woken up. She held a strange rag doll in her arms with candy-striped trousers and turned-up shoes.

‘What’s going on?’ she said.

Wendy saw her. ‘Alison!’

She lurched towards her, but Owen caught her wrist.

‘No, don’t go near her.’

Wendy looked at him, her eyes full of rage and confusion. ‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘Why are you aiming guns at Mr Lucca?’ she asked. ‘Mr Lucca is my friend.’

‘It’s OK, little girl,’ said Jack. ‘Just go back to your room. Everything is going to be fine.’

‘Alison!’ cried Wendy.

‘It’s all right, Mummy. But Mr Pickle says we have to help Mr Lucca. Mr Lucca is our friend.’

‘Alison, Mr Lucca is a bad man. You shouldn’t be friends with him,’ said Gwen.

‘But I understand you, don’t I?’ said Lucca, looking at the child. ‘I know who you are, don’t I?’

‘She’s my daughter!’ Wendy shouted.

Owen said, ‘He’s not talking to Wendy. He’s talking to Mr Pickle.’

Wendy snarled like an animal. ‘What? You’re mad! You’re mad! Let me go!’ She started to rain blows on Owen.

Toshiko went to him. Held Wendy. ‘Please, Mrs Lloyd, be calm.’

Jack had moved in closer to Lucca now, still had him covered by the Webley. Alison stood in the middle of the room, holding Mr Pickle in her arms.

‘OK, Owen,’ Jack said calmly, keeping an eye on the girl as much as Lucca, ‘do you want to tell me that Mr Pickle isn’t the sad-looking pixie doll she’s holding.’

Alison turned to look at him as Owen spoke. ‘Mr Pickle is a thought-form. You know, like some yogis in the Himalayas are supposed to be able to create after years of concentration.’

‘What?’ said Gwen. ‘They can just think a creature into existence?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Lucca. ‘A servant to do their bidding. There are many stories.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Wendy. ‘She’s just a little girl.’

Owen addressed Jack and Gwen. ‘Alison had a car crash. She died at the scene for five minutes. She brought something back with her. Something that in hospital became manifested by her as a doll, Mr Pickle.’

‘But the thought-form couldn’t maintain its physical form indefinitely without cellular matter,’ Jack guessed.

He looked across at Lucca. ‘And you worked all that out?’

‘I saw it. And I made friends with Alison and Mr Pickle.’

‘In the name of learning?’ Owen asked, his voice dry with sarcasm.

‘And survival,’ he said. ‘When Torchwood showed up, it sensed that it was under threat. That was why its attacks increased.’

Toshiko looked at the girl. If she understood any of this she gave no sign. The doll remained cradled in her arms, and looked like nothing but a doll.

‘That is why,’ Lucca said. ‘You won’t get out of this room alive. The thought-form knows who its friends are, and who are its enemies.’

And that was when Mr Pickle started to shimmer in Alison’s arms. As they watched, the doll transformed into a cloud of rippling light and slime, and Alison fell to the floor, unconscious.

Wendy screamed and tried to run to her daughter, but Toshiko held her tight, and the thought-form swept across the room towards Toshiko.

Owen leaped between them.

‘You want her? You’re going to have to take a bit of me first!’

And from his pocket he drew the hypodermic that he had snatched from Julie in the flat. It was filled with a dark, almost black substance. Owen raised his fist and pushed home the needle. The black liquid sprayed across the inside of the thought-form, attaching itself to the strange sunburst lights within it.

As they watched the lights began to dim, and the thought-form began to writhe, sweeping this way and that, rippling and sagging.

And then it was gone.

Lucca stared around in horror. ‘You killed it!’

Toshiko released Wendy, who rushed to her fallen child.

‘Alison! Alison!’

Owen was at her side. ‘Let me look at her.’ He felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one.

‘What’s going on?’ demanded Jack.

‘Tosh,’ Owen commanded. ‘Quick, I need you to give her mouth to mouth.’

Then he started to give her heart massage, talking quickly as he worked. ‘I worked out the thought-form needed living cellular matter. That was why it left me on the floor. I’m dead tissue, I was bad for it. So I pumped it full of my blood.

‘Trouble is, the thought-form was linked to Alison. She brought it back with her. It’s entangled with her being. Killing it could kill her.’

Toshiko was giving Alison the kiss of life.

Owen had his hands on her sternum, pressing, counting. And he found himself praying – if God didn’t exist, then maybe something else might hear him. He didn’t want her to go back into the dark again.

‘You have to save her!’ cried Wendy. ‘Alison, come back to me darling, come back.’

‘Come on, Alison. Come back. Out of the dark, darling. Out of the dark.’

And then Owen was aware of something beneath his hands.

Her heart?

‘Quick, Tosh,’ he said. ‘Check her pulse!’

And then Alison coughed, and her eyes opened.

Alison wrapped her arms around her mother and hugged her tighter than anything in her life.

Owen looked at Toshiko, and they smiled.

Owen thought it felt good to smile.