- Adams Guy
- The House That Jack Built
- Torchwood_The_House_That_Jack_B_split_021.html
THIRTEEN
'The door was open,' the strange man said, holding his hands
out in front of him as if Rob were no danger at all. That was
already a lie, though, as far as Rob was concerned, rubbing his
wrist where it had been twisted when the poker was wrenched from
his grip. A dark-haired woman followed the man into the room,
offering an apologetic look that didn't wash for one
minute.
'I saw you before,' Julia said to the
man, confusing Rob even further. What was she talking about? They'd
never clapped eyes on him, he was sure of that. 'You were with the
police,' she continued.
'Sort of,' said the woman. The
American ignored both of them, pushing his way past and talking to
the man that had appeared upstairs. 'We work with them
occasionally,' the woman continued.
What's that
supposed to mean? Rob thought, only too aware he was being
fobbed off. His heart was pounding in his chest... what was going
on? God, but he needed a drink.
'Got any alcohol?' said the American,
as if he'd been reading his mind.
'No...' Rob was wrong-footed. What
did this guy think this was? A house-party? Oh... alcohol... the
penny dropped...for the man... to warm him up. It wasn't as if they
hadn't been looking after him. 'I was lighting a
fire...'
'So light it.'
Rob found he was actually stepping
forward for a second before he stopped himself. 'Look! What's going
on here?' he shouted, sick of being on the receiving end. 'You say
you're with the police?'
'Not as such.' The woman again; the
bloody man was never going to answer his questions it would seem.
'We're independent of them,' she continued. 'But yes, our paths
cross from time to time. Why don't we sit down and go through what
happened?'
Julia shook her head. 'I'm not
staying here a minute longer.'
Rob's head hurt with the confusion of
it all. He tried to put it into words: 'We saw a woman appear out
of thin air... Killed herself in the bath... Not in our bathroom,
you understand, no, in the spare bloody
bedroom...'
'There's a fat man...' Julia added,
'in an old suit... he smells...'
'Banging on the walls, voices in the
TV...'
'Your friend, appearing out of
nowhere in our airing cupboard...'
'Our bloody airing cupboard!'
It was uncontrollable now, the words
falling from him like vomit, poison that needed to be ejected. Dear
Lord, but what was he going to do? He wasn't sure he could handle
this... Everything felt hazy...
'Please!' the woman shouted. 'One at
a time... We can handle this, but we need to know what's been going
on.'
There was only one thing Rob could
think to do. 'Handle it on your own,' he said, grabbing his wife's
hand. 'We're not staying...'
It didn't occur to him to question
leaving them in the house; at that moment, they were welcome to it.
He needed to get out, needed to clear his head. Another moment
stuck in there and he honestly thought he might lose his
mind.
He checked his jeans pocket, giving a
sigh of relief as he felt the reassuring shape of his van keys.
That was all they needed. In a couple of minutes, they'd be driving
down the road, heading as far away as they could.
'Come on,' he said to Julia, pushing
her out of the door in front of him. 'The flat's empty for another
week yet, we can stay there.'
The rain was still lashing down and
neither of them was wearing a coat. They were soaked through in
moments, but they didn't care.
Rob stared at the American's big
black car. 'Typical yank, that is,' he commented, pulling Julia
around it by her arm. 'Compensation for something
else.'
His anger was hardening into a lump
in his throat, his teeth grinding as he fought to stop himself
kicking at the stupid bloody car until he did some damage. Fear had
set him off now and he was finding it hard to keep himself
straight, his muscles twitching and pulsing, his head swimming with
it... he wanted to kick and punch and scrape and
tear...
'Rob!' Julia's voice, thin and
whining, damn her.
'I told you, it'll be fine,' he said,
rubbing the rainwater from his face. Couldn't she tell that he was
struggling? He didn't need her wheedling at him.
'Hurting...' she said, and he turned
on her, fist clenching, only to freeze as he saw the bright white
dimples in her arm where he was digging his fingers in as hard as
he could. The ragged edge of one of his nails had drawn
blood.
Suddenly it was gone, all of it, the
huge pressure that he had fought to keep in, vanished in an
instant. He let go of her arm and put his hand to his
mouth.
'I'm sorry,' he whispered. 'I didn't
realise.'
She was scared. She had that same
look in her eyes that she'd had when he'd hit her a few months ago.
He hadn't meant to, now or then. Sometimes he just got so angry, it
was horrible... To feel such uncontrollable rage, to be shaking
with it, to need to thrash and hit just to shake the feeling out of
his muscles, the feeling that he was going to rupture.
She had nearly left him, he knew
that; he'd scared her enough. The terrible thing was that he hadn't
even wanted to hit her – he'd caught
her by accident. But the look she'd given him when the back of his
hand had hit her temple... It was so full of disgust at him... such
contempt... He had hit her again, just to earn it.
'Please, I wouldn't have...' There
was a look of disbelief in her eyes now and he found himself almost
wishing her to push it. He hadn't been directing any of his anger
at her – wouldn't have done – but after everything that had
happened tonight, wasn't he allowed to lose it a little? The look
on her face said not, and that was nearly enough to set him off
again. Nearly.
He held up his hands placatingly. 'I
wasn't angry at you, sweetheart, just freaked out, you know? I told
you before, that was just... I don't know what that was... but I'd
never do it again, OK?' He tried to look friendly, tried to soften
his eyes. 'I couldn't hurt you, babe, never...' He held out his
hands to her. 'Please? Forgive me? Let's get out of here, OK? Go
where it's safe.'
After a moment, she nodded and took
his hands.
He gave her a genuine smile then and
pulled the van keys from his pocket. 'So sorry, baby,' he said. 'I
just lost it in there, what with everything, you
know?'
'I know.'
They hunched over in the rain and
started to walk quickly up the road.
'What do you think it was?' he
asked.
'I don't know.' Relief, both at being
out of the building and having Rob calm down, had begun to squeeze
tears out of the corners of her eyes, and she rubbed them away with
the rainwater. 'I don't believe in...'
'Ghosts and stuff?'
'Yeah. Mum always used to. She loved
it, always reading books about it... but, well... I thought it was
rubbish.'
'Same here. Good at the movies but
don't believe a word of it at home.'
'So there must be a scientific
explanation?'
'To the fact that we both saw a woman
kill herself in the bedroom and a man appear in the airing
cupboard?'
They looked at one another and burst
out laughing. There was as much panic in it as humour, in fact they
could just as easily have been screaming, but it helped for the
moment, a release of the pressure that had been building all night.
Rob hugged Julia and they carried on walking, his arm around her
shoulders.
'It'll be all right,' he said. 'It'll
seem better in the morning.'
'Where did you park the van?' Julia
asked, though she knew the answer, had seen him park it there
earlier when the police had cordoned off the road.
'It's there,' he said, pointing at
the white van just along the road, 'just a few doors
up.'
'So how come it's taking us so long?'
Julia asked, that note of panic returning to her
voice.
'It's not. I mean, we only just
left...'
They were stood outside Jackson
Leaves. They hadn't moved an inch.
'But that's ridiculous...' muttered
Rob. 'We walked all the way up...' He looked ahead of them, and
they started to walk again, the hedge moving past them, the parked
cars.
'It's fine,' he said. 'I don't know
what happened, but look, the van's just there.' He pointed at it
with the keys. Only a few houses away. They kept walking... and
walking... and walking...
Julia gripped Rob's arm even tighter
as she turned to look up at Jackson Leaves, the tatty gables, the
loose guttering that dripped in this constant damn
rain...
'It won't let us go!' she
cried.
'It's just a house,' Rob said,
pulling her – gentler this time – along the pavement. 'It's just
bricks and rot and damp...'
They began to run. Rob kept his eyes
fixed on the van, pointing the keys at it like a talisman as they
ran faster and faster towards it. The rain made it hard, stinging
in his eyes and making his feet slip on the pavement, but he
focused hard and pushed forward... They'd make it...
His feet lost their grip in the wet
and he fell, pulling Julia down with him. They landed on the
pavement with a grunt, Rob jarring his elbow on the tarmac and
Julia scraping her side.
'Stupid...' he rubbed at his elbow.
'Sorry, love, clumsy idiot.'
Julia wasn't listening. She was
looking up at Jackson Leaves.
It was staring right
back.
'I don't get it,' he said. 'This is
stupid. We were moving, you could tell
we were...' He looked along the road towards the van. 'Everything
was moving but we weren't getting any closer to the things further
away. Which doesn't make sense.'
'None of it does, and none of it
will,' Julia said quietly. 'It just is.
We should go back inside.'
'No way,' Rob said, getting to his
feet. 'I'm not setting one foot back in that house, we're getting
out of here if it ki—'
'Don't say that,' Julia interrupted.
'Don't encourage it.'
Rob put his hands on her cheeks,
rubbing the rain from her eyes with his thumbs. 'Come on, babe,' he
said. 'Keep it together, and we'll get out of here,
OK?'
She got to her feet but made no sign
of agreeing with him.
'We'll try the other way,' he said.
'Walk down to the high street.'
He turned her away from the house,
doing his best not to look at it himself, and they began to walk
along the pavement in the other direction.
'It'll be fine,' he said. 'You'll
see. In a minute, all of this is just going to stop and we'll be
back to normal. We'll probably even laugh about it, that stupid
night when we got ourselves all turned around until we didn't know
what was happening... Shared hysteria, that's what it is... Derren
Brown stuff.' He scuffed at the puddles beneath their feet, sending
a spray of rainwater into the darkness ahead of them as if to test
whether it was safe. 'We won't be able to figure out how we got so
wound up, just you watch, it'll be that night that we lost it,' he
laughed. 'That night we went so bloody mad we ended up walking
around in the rain while some American nutjob tried to burgle us.
That's it, you know,' he continued, moving a little faster. 'That
whole thing in there was just some kind of trick so that they could
get in the place and turn it over. Not that they'll find anything
worth having, not in that stupid... bastard... house!' This last was screamed at Jackson Leaves,
still stood, uncaring, to the side of them.
'I don't know,' he said, dropping
down to sit on the kerb. 'I just don't know.'
After a moment she sat down next to
him. 'We'll have to go back inside,' she said.
He shook his head. 'I'm not going
back in there.'
'It's no better out here.' She had
become gentle, only too aware of how close Rob was to breaking. He
wasn't violent any more, he was too scared even for that. You
couldn't fight Jackson Leaves.
'I just can't bear the idea of going
back in there, baby,' he said, starting to cry. 'That noise, the
blood and water... I just can't...'
'We have to,' she replied. 'Look at
it out here, it's just as wrong. Look at the rain.' She held out
her hand and swiped it gently from right to left in front of his
eyes, and for the first time he noticed that the rain wasn't
moving. Droplets were stationary in the air. He suddenly realised
the rain was silent around them. Looking back over his shoulder
towards the house, the rain there was splashing down on the plants,
the roof tiles, that stupid American's car. But here?
Stillness...
'How is that even possible?' he
asked, sticking out his hand and touching the droplets with his
fingers, watching as the glistening balls, fat with the stolen
light from street lamps, popped against his touch.
'I'm sure there's a proper scientific
explanation,' said Julia with a half-smile. She looked up at
Jackson Leaves, noticing movement at the upstairs windows. Right on
the top floor, the wide shoulders of the American filled one of the
window frames as he stared out into the night, though whether it
was the night she stood in she couldn't
say. Something told her not; that there was more of a gap between
them than simply the hedge and driveway. Directly beneath him, one
floor down, a blob of red paisley alerted her to the fat man's
presence. Unlike the American, she knew that he was watching her and Rob, and whatever version of
the world this was that had trapped them was one that the fat man
knew well. He could move along these
pavements and roads, of that she had no doubt.
'It's...' Rob was staring along the
road into the distance. 'I don't know, something's
happening.'
Julia followed his gaze and tried to
figure out what he was seeing. There was certainly something wrong,
but it was hard to put your finger on. 'We need to move,' she said,
as it became clear. 'We need to move now, Rob, while we still can.'
He stared along the street, watching
as one by one the cars and houses in the distance disappeared. A
great wave of darkness was sweeping towards them, swallowing each
droplet of rain, each inch of pavement and road. Who knew what
would happen if they were still sat there when it arrived? Julia
was right, there wasn't good enough cause to find out.
He got to his feet and they moved
towards Jackson Leaves, the sound of the rain in front of them
building with every step. He took one look over his shoulder just
before crossing the threshold, the darkness was nearly on them, it
had taken the houses, the trees, it had even taken his
van.
'Come on, then,' he said, and they
walked into the moving curtain of rain that would lead them back
home.