TWENTY-THREE

Jack stepped out into a Penylan night at the turn of the twentieth century. Taking a breath of fresh air to cleanse his palate after the oppressive, static-filled atmosphere of Jackson Leaves, he walked to the centre of the hard concrete foundations and began to set his explosive charge.

'I can't see how you think that would help,' said a voice to his right.

He looked up and, squinting in the moonlight, tried to recognise the speaker. 'Alison?' he asked, then shook his head. 'No, of course not.'

'I thought you might prefer her to old Joan.'

The creature walked over to him and squatted by his side as he pushed the timed detonator into the plastic explosive.

'Is it that you just like destroying things?' she asked, lying back on the concrete. The illusion was perfect, the cool, evening breeze erupting gooseflesh all over her body as she squirmed in the dust.

'He can't help it,' said another voice from behind him and he wasn't altogether surprised to see Miles – or a perfect copy of him at least – walking towards him. 'He's a man, and we just love to break things apart.'

'Oh,' said Alison. 'I always thought better of him than that.'

She licked her lips and, even in the low light, Jack could tell the tongue was far too long, rolling across her cheek before dipping its tip into the corner of her eyes to drink.

'No you didn't,' he replied. 'At least the real Alison didn't – she knew me much better. She was under no illusion that I was anything but trouble.'

'How right she was,' said the Miles creature. 'I wonder if that's what she was thinking as I drowned her.'

Jack shook his head and placed the explosive on the ground. 'I imagine she was wishing she had agreed to marry someone much more stable.' He began to walk away. 'I didn't kill her. That arrogant, image-obsessed and deluded lover we shared did.' He turned back to them, trying not to notice how much their fake humanity was slipping as their bodies twisted in the darkness. 'I can't take the blame for everything that happens to people I know. Miles killed her because he couldn't stand who he was. That's sad but it's hardly my fault.'

The creatures gurgled deep in their throats, a sign of anger, Jack presumed. Miles, on all fours, began to scuttle back and forth, while Alison stretched along the floor, her biceps and thighs stretching like toffee as she writhed, limbs snaking away in different directions.

'You are ceasing to be an entertainment,' she said, her voice taking on a hollow quality as it bounced around her elongated chest. 'You would do well to stop this now before you anger us further.'

'Or what?' Jack asked. 'You may be close enough to this universe to make yourselves seen, but if you're that powerful, tell you what, stop the bomb yourself. Go on, all it takes is a finger on a button.' He smiled. 'You can't, can you? You have no real physical presence here, you're just voices and cheap threats. A pair of ghosts.'

Miles reared up, pulling at his dream skin as if even the pretence of flesh was a discomfort to him. 'What do we need hands for,' he asked, the words distorting as he yanked at his mouth, pulling his cheeks out into a loose trumpet, 'when we have puppets to do our work for us?'

Jack smelled Locke before he felt him, but not soon enough to avoid the blow that sent him to the floor in a spiral of cement dust.

'You stupid idiot!' Alexander roared at Joe. 'I've a good mind to send you running into the waveform.'

'You try it, and I swear you'll follow him,' Gwen warned.

Ianto tucked the handgun into the back of his trousers. 'You thought you knew where the safe passage was,' he said to Alexander.

'What are you talking about?' the old man snapped.

'Just before Rob woke up,' Ianto reminded him. 'You were looking at the reader screen and you thought you knew which way we should go.'

Alexander tried to remember. 'Yes...' he said. 'It was about there...' He pointed to the far left of the drive opening. 'But that hardly helps – it's not just about location, it's timing. We would have to move just as the waveform was at its weakest point.'

'Like ripples on water?' Ianto asked. 'When the waves are at their furthest reach, the centre is at its calmest.'

'Yes, and we can't possibly tell when that is without using the waveform reader.'

Ianto climbed into the SUV and began to perform a three-point turn.

'Careful!' Alexander shouted as the wheels nearly ran over him. He looked at Gwen. 'What does the boy think he's doing now?'

'I don't know,' Gwen admitted.

Ianto positioned the car so that it was facing the privet hedge, set the headlamps on full beam and got out. Pulling the gun out of his waistband, he turned towards Jackson Leaves. The house was beginning to lose cohesion now, windows running like mercury into the melted wax of the brick. He aimed the gun at the outside light and fired. The bulb shifted slightly in the distortion and the shot missed. He fired again, this time allowing for the movement and the bulb shattered, leaving the headlights as the only illumination.

'When you've quite finished taking pot shots at the bloody house,' Alexander said, 'perhaps we might like to come up with a plan for getting out of here.'

'Look at the rain,' Gwen said as Ianto walked over to Alexander and picked him up off the ground.

Shining in the beam of the SUV lights, the pattern of the rain as it followed the contours of the waveform was clear, glistening ripples sweeping across the pitch-black absence of the outside world beyond the limits of the house.

'Careful!' Alexander whined, his broken wrist twisting against Ianto's body as he was hoisted up. He stared at the water pattern as Ianto walked right up to the edge of the driveway. 'You know, lad,' he chuckled, 'you might just have cracked this... Now, careful, it's all a question of...'

Ianto threw him at the barrier, where he vanished into the darkness.

'Timing?' he said. 'Looks like it works to me.' He turned to Gwen and Joe, who was still carrying the unconscious Julia over his shoulder. 'Who's next then?'

Locke used his size to great effect, dropping onto Jack and knocking the wind out of him. Jack screwed his eyes against the bad halitosis and a slow dripping of blood that fell from Locke's mouth like a damaged tap. Behind them, the facsimiles of Alison and Miles scampered to and fro, whipped into excitement by the violence.

Locke made to grab Jack's face, hoping to grind it into the concrete, but Jack aimed a strong punch at the big man's armpit and sucked grateful air as Locke squealed and rolled off him. There was no doubt who had the advantage as long as he was on top, but Jack was fitter and back on his feet quickly, while Locke was still cradling his dead arm.

'I'm sorry,' Jack said. 'For all I know, you were a nice enough guy before they got to you.'

'Him?' Alison said. 'He was an accident waiting to happen, a dirty little primate.'

Jack picked up a spade that had been left by the workmen.

'There's nothing wrong with dirty primates,' he shouted, bringing the flat of the spade down on Locke's knee and grimacing as he heard it break. 'I happen to be one of them.'

He dropped the spade, disgusted by the violence, but only too aware that the stakes were too high for him to treat anyone gently.

The timer on the explosive continued to tick down. Two minutes left...

'It won't stop us!' Miles shouted. 'So you cause a little damage... They'll just rebuild, fill it in and start again.'

'Of course,' said Jack as he began to walk away. 'But it'll delay things for a bit, and that's all it needs to shift the time line. I certainly won't end up buying the place. It caught me on a whim. As long as I don't buy it, you won't have used it as your locus, and... guess what?'

'What?' Alison asked, slithering towards him.

'You told me that once your feeding cycle had started it couldn't be stopped. That right?'

'Yes...' Miles hissed.

'Well, the minute the new time line snaps into place, you do know what the biggest paradox will be here, don't you?'

The creatures looked at one another.

Jack smiled. 'That's right! You. Bon appétit.'

The creatures continued to shift, losing all sense of humanity, before leaping on one another with a roar.

Jack turned and walked back towards where he had appeared, holding out his hands to feel for the gap in space-time he had come through. The tips of his fingers tingled as they found the fluctuation in the air, and he stepped through into an upstairs room in Jackson Leaves.

The house wouldn't keep still as time ebbed and flowed around it. The walls kept changing, wallpaper and paint flowing and vanishing as every moment in its history played out, fighting to find a constant. History had been altered around the building and now he had altered it again – a ridiculously dangerous thing to do, but the only option he'd had open to him.

Now time was trying to find a steady path, acting out every conceivable permutation. The house was built in 1906, then it wasn't. He bought it, then he didn't. As he walked out of the room and into the hall, it was like trying to fight his way through a piece of speeded-up film in which he was the only constant. Alison – the real Alison – was there, running naked down the stairs chased by the ever-hungry appetite of her strange lover.

Miles appeared as Jack reached the next landing. Even at a glance, Jack could tell he was pleased to see him...

'If only you could have been as happy in your body as I was,' Jack whispered, holding out his hand to stroke the ethereal chest of one of the many men he had once loved. His fingers jolted as if he had brushed an electric fence, and the image of Miles vanished.

Jack kept walking, fighting the urge to look into the other rooms. He could hear other lives playing out in them, couples fighting and making up, children laughing, as they ran from one room to another before vanishing altogether, perhaps never to have existed there at all.

He stood for a moment on the landing, as he felt the most bizarre sensation wash over him. Just over a hundred years ago, he had stood at this very same spot, showing Alison the house. The words he had spoken bubbled up from him, but when they reached his ears he knew it was his past self that was speaking them.

'Do you like the house?' he had asked, leaning over the banister.

'It could be lovely,' Alison replied, as she moved up towards him, 'with a woman's touch.'

The ghost of Jack, smiled down at her. 'I say again: just like its owner, then.'

'Anyone's touch will suffice for him,' came Alison's reply.

'But your touch is the sweetest.'

The present-day Jack found himself cringing at the way such easy lies and promises fell from him time and time again.

Alison stepped onto the landing, and he had to remember that she was not looking at him but rather the man he had been all those years ago. 'So you say today,' she said, 'but who will it be tomorrow?'

Ah... and didn't he know the answer to that from his vantage point in the future?

His past self took Alison in his arms. 'Stay the night and find out.'

Jack reached out to them, spreading his arms to cover them both, ignoring the sting of temporal flux that clung to the lovers' shoulders. The ghost of Alison shivered.

'You all right?' asked the Jack from her time.

She nodded. 'It felt like something touched me.'

Jack let go and stepped back. They were not his to hold any more.

'Give me a few moments and it certainly will,' his past self replied.

'Really...' Alison said. 'Perhaps you've got ghosts...'

He certainly did. Moving past the translucent figures, Jack ran down the stairs, knowing that by the time he reached the bottom they would have vanished for ever.

The fluctuation was near breaking point by the time he got to the front door, the roar of the hundreds of residents who had lived – or might have lived – between these walls becoming deafening in his ears. He grabbed the door handle, wrenched it open and stepped out into...

... daylight and shouting.

The SUV was still parked at the front of the house (though it was now pointing out towards the road), and Alexander was lying on the pavement cradling his broken wrist.

'How dare you!' he roared at Ianto, who was standing over him. 'Do you know who I am, boy? I will not be treated like that by anybody, let alone a jumped-up little shit like you.'

'Shut up,' Gwen muttered, wheeling the old man's wheelchair over from where she had found it further up the road. 'You should be glad you're alive. Not everyone is, thanks to you.'

'Problem?' asked Jack as he joined them on the pavement.

Ianto grabbed him and gave him a stifling hug. 'Not that I was worried or anything,' he muttered self-consciously as he let him go. 'Plan worked, then?'

'Guess so.'

Jack turned and stared up at Jackson Leaves. It looked the same and yet... not. It was tidier, more looked after, no longer the abandoned relic it had once been. 'What happened?'

'We made it out,' Alexander hissed, pulling himself into his chair and gritting his teeth against the pain in his wrist. 'No thanks to your lot, I might add.'

'He killed the girl,' said Gwen, suddenly feeling even worse as she realised she didn't even know her name.

'I dealt with that lunatic you saddled us with,' Alexander replied. 'The girl was caught in the crossfire. If I hadn't acted, I doubt any of us would still be here. If you got down from your high horse for a moment, you would do well to realise you should be thanking me rather than wailing about a little collateral damage.'

'Thanking you?' Gwen said. 'If I had my way, we'd be locking you up.'

Alexander smiled, and it was one of the most unpleasant things Gwen had seen all night. 'You just try it, girl. I've dealt with worse than you've got to offer.'

'Shut up, Alexander,' said Jack, 'before I do what Gwen suggests. Let's just look after these two.' He pointed at the still unconscious Julia and Joe, whose exuberant mood had well and truly faded, leaving him confused and hung over, leaning against one of the lamp posts.

'By all means,' Alexander replied, unable not to have the last word in the matter. 'Just so long as you remember you would do well to keep me sweet. I could be a considerable irritant to you otherwise.'

'You mean you're not already?' Ianto lifted Julia into the back seat of the SUV as Gwen took Joe's arm and led him over.

Jack looked down at Alexander. 'Don't do it,' he whispered.

'What, my dear boy?' Alexander replied, that oh-so-false smile still in place.

'Bite off more than you can chew.'

Alexander shrugged. 'I don't want to make enemies.' He gave Jack a look that was altogether more powerful than one would expect from such a frail-looking man. 'So don't force me to.'

Jack shook his head dismissively, and they headed over to the vehicle.

They dropped Alexander back at the rest home.

'What about my wrist?' the old man whined as Jack pushed him towards the building.

'Physician, heal thyself,' Jack replied, leaving him at the front door and dashing back to the car.

'You're just going to leave him?' Gwen asked as he got back in. 'Knowing what he does?'

'His biology is so far removed from ours, I wouldn't have the first idea what to do about it,' Jack admitted as he turned on the ignition and drove away.

'Well, I don't trust him,' Gwen said.

'Me neither, but he'll have to be a problem for another day. We've enough to deal with for now.'

'At least the house is safe,' Ianto piped up from the back.

'No more ghosts,' Gwen added with a half-smile.

'Oh, I don't know about that,' said Jack and drove back to the Hub.