- Adams Guy
- The House That Jack Built
- Torchwood_The_House_That_Jack_B_split_027.html
NINETEEN
As Jack stepped through the door, a
bell rang above his head, its chime mixed with the sharp hiss of a
milk steamer, but it wasn't quite loud enough to drown out the
sound of Gene Vincent on the radio. He closed the door behind him,
and looked out through the dirty glass that had replaced the wood.
Outside was the slow, weekday drudgery of work traffic, lorries and
vans, moving things from one place to another.
'Morning, my lovely,' said the woman
behind the counter. 'What will it be?'
Jack walked carefully between the
tables. A group of spotty-looking mods eyed him from the corner.
One of them, working hard at looking more than his meagre years,
peered from behind the turned-up collar of his Fred Perry shirt and
started tapping his fingers on the formica in an attempt to
intimidate. It did nothing of the sort; as a man who had once
helped Keith Moon get a Cadillac into a hotel swimming pool, Jack
would need a little more sign of the young man's credentials before
he felt even vaguely daunted.
The woman behind the counter wore her
dark roots with the same confidence as the stains on her
waitressing uniform. Stitched into her faded Gingham breast was the
word 'Durdles', though whether that was her name or the café's he
couldn't guess. She looked at him through glasses whose bright red
rims brought no cheer to her tired eyes.
'Well?' she asked again, patience as
thin as her happy veneer.
'Coffee,' Jack said. 'Sweet and
milky.'
'I'm not your mother. Sugar's on the
counter.'
So it was, though the spoon was
chained down in case he had the hots for their
cutlery.
She wrestled with the machine as if
it was going out of its way not to produce. It roared and hissed
like feral cats in a slowed-down piece of film, vapour ejecting
from the pipes with the industrial vigour of a power station. She
vanquished it eventually, wringing a mug of frothy coffee from out
of its guts.
'Thanks,' Jack replied, cracking the
crust on the sugar bowl and spooning in a couple of
shards.
'You're welcome to join me,' said a
woman's voice behind him.
He walked over to her table and
wedged himself as comfortably into the orange plastic seat as
physics would allow.
'This is all very real,' he said,
puffing gently on the white coffee froth to cool it.
'Reality is so subjective, wouldn't
you say?'
She was an elderly woman, hair an
immaculate grey confection as rigid as a plastic hat. She wore wool
in layers: a pullover, a cardigan and a skirt that crackled when
she moved, as soft as a scouring pad. Jack recognised her from the
reports Gwen had shown him.
'Is there a particular reason why you
look like Joan Bosher?' he asked.
'Not really, though we were rather
impressed with her – such a strong sense of self, she never
snapped, never lost control. Not many of your species could say the
same.'
'We're a fiery lot, it's
true.'
He took a sip of his coffee. It
tasted of wet air, but he couldn't decide if that was proof of this
fantasy's strength or weakness, British coffee in the 1960s had
been pretty lousy.
'So, you wanted to see me?' he
asked.
'We were curious,' she
admitted.
'You're not the only
one.'
'Oh, we're not so interesting,' she
said, brushing imaginary crumbs from the table top.
'Like reality, interest can be
subjective.'
She smiled, and for a moment the room
seemed to bend with her lips, the walls rising and the tables
distorting as the floor formed an upward arc that followed the
curve of her good humour. Then her mouth straightened and the room
with it, the floor flattening out with a loud bang.
'True,' she said, as if the
contortions around her had proved her point. 'We are from ...' she
inclined her head as if checking for the words, 'a potential
dimension. Somewhere outside what you know of reality...' She
smiled again, though this time the café had the decency to stay
still. 'But then so much is. Your view of existence is rather limited.'
'That's humans for you, terribly
parochial.'
'We will make considerations. You are
only very basic life forms after all.'
'Too kind.'
'Not at all. As a species, we have
a... I think you would call it hunger... for temporal damage.'
'You feed off
paradoxes?'
She looked up at the ceiling, and
Jack tried not to notice the delicate ripples in the pale, wrinkled
flesh of her throat. He didn't know whether it was due to a failure
in concentration or a deliberate attempt to freak him out, but
there was certainly more than blood moving in her
veins.
'That's as close to correct as we
will manage, I think,' she said finally. 'Forgive me, but it is
complicated, like you trying to explain maths to a
dog.'
'I'll work hard to keep
up.'
The mods in the corner laughed,
though whether at him or not he couldn't tell.
A shadow fell across the room as
something unseen flew past the front of the building. Nobody paid
it any attention.
'We find a point of interest,' she
continued, 'somewhere that already has a delicious flaw, a
potential.'
'The Rift,' Jack
muttered.
'Oh no!' she laughed, the vibrations
of her mirth shaking all the tables in the café. 'We barely noticed
that until after we'd latched on to your universe. It was
you! You light up this continuum like a
beacon.'
The shadow passed again, this time
flipping across the backs of the vehicles as the unknowable
creature that cast it landed on the roof.
'The damage you have done to the time
stream is almost incalculable,' she continued. 'Come from the
future, steal from the past... I lost count of how many of you we
detected in – using your relative year markers – 1941.' She reached
out and took his hand. 'You get so involved! The first rule of time
travel, my dear, leave the locals alone – if you don't want to
attract our attention –' she smiled and her teeth stretched like
clarinet reeds from her gums, long, yellow and eager to cut and
chew – 'and believe me you don't.
Changing things, people and events, that draws attention. You're a
force of nature, Jack, a temporal tsunami, and we tasted you.'
Her tongue fell between the elongated
rows of teeth, flopping onto the back of his hand where it curled
and licked, enjoying the salt of his skin.
He tried to pull his hand back from
her grasp, but she held it tight.
'We found that little house of yours,
where, as always, you did so much damage...'
'What damage?'
'So unrepentant! My darling boy,
there were two time lines damaged before you'd even had time to let
the welcome mat gather dust.'
Jack became aware that there was a
couple sitting at the table next to them. He knew it was Miles and
Alison without even having to turn. Could tell by the cool drips of
river water he heard fall from Alison's slack mouth onto the
formica.
'Small fry by your standards, I'll
admit,' she continued, dabbing the tip of her tongue on the web of
skin between his fingers, 'but the building had such potential. So,
we reached for it...' she extended a bony index finger, 'and
pushed...' her fingertip disturbed the
air around it, sending out ripples, 'forcing ourselves further and
further into the universe.'
'Why didn't I notice?' Jack asked,
tilting his head as the ripples from the disturbance in the air
ricocheted off his brow.
'We've only just started, barely
longer than this conversation in your relative time. Our presence
echoes all the way along the building's time line, altering things,
distorting them... But your position as a time traveller offers you
something of a unique perspective. You remember the past the way it
was before we started to interfere.
Jackson Leaves wasn't always the soup of violence and paradox that
it is now; we just made it that way –
in less time than the waitress took on your drink, mark you. All
the better to feast when we reach inside far enough.'
She bit at the knuckle on his little
finger, drawing a drop of blood, before letting go of his hand and
withdrawing her tongue back inside a shrinking mouth. Within
moments she was just simple Joan Bosher again.
'And we will feast soon,' she added.
'You've time to drink your coffee but not much more than that.' She
pushed the mug towards him.
Jack got to his feet and walked
towards the door. He yanked it open and swore as he found the road
on the other side. Above his head he could hear the sound of
whatever dream creature perched on the roof as it tightened the
grip of its talons on the guttering. He stepped back into the
café.
'Just drink your coffee,' said the
thing that looked like Joan Bosher. 'Once feeding has been
instigated, there's no turning back.'
'Relax,' suggested the waitress,
picking up her dirty cloth and dragging its mouldy fabric over the
counter. 'It's only a universe, after all.'
'Take the weight off,' said the more
aggressive of the mods, walking towards him.
'Just lie back...' added Miles,
looking toward his waterlogged wife.
'...and take it,' Alison
gurgled.
Jack thought for a moment before
marching over to the mod, picking him up by the lapels of his parka
and hurling him through the glass of the door. The glass shattered
and the mod winked out of existence, even as the room in Jackson
Leaves reappeared on the other side of the fracture.
'Don't lay the table just yet,'
warned Jack, stepping through the hole in the door and back into
his universe.