‘You too?’ James stood up. ‘I’ve had a killer head for about the last five minutes. Came on like a switch.’
‘Just like Thursday’s?’
‘Just like Thursday’s. You don’t suppose there’s another one of those things around, do you?’
Gwen didn’t answer. A breeze hustled litter across the ground. The muted sensation of haunting that had clung around the site earlier had been replaced by a palpable feeling of malice.
‘Can you even begin to explain what’s going on here?’ she asked James.
He was still setting up the system, snap-extending the aluminium legs of the folding stands that the sensors clipped to. There were six altogether, and he was arranging them in a wide ring around the centre of the warehouse. ‘Some kind of Rift phenomenon?’ he suggested. ‘A crack, a fold, an overlap? A spatio-temporal slip? A cleft? Dimensional transcendence? A chronal bifurcation with-’
‘Whoa. You’re just saying long words now, aren’t you?’
‘Yes I am. Actually, I’m trying to reassure you. I thought if one of us sounded like they were in charge…’
‘Oh, I’m in charge,’ said Gwen fiercely. ‘I’m in charge, me, so very in charge. Look at me, being in charge. Come on, boy! Get those scanners set up! Pronto!’
He grinned. ‘Yes, boss. You could help.’
‘I’m in charge,’ she replied. She stared at their surroundings. The sky visible through the incomplete roof was an ugly shade of white, bruised with grey clouds. ‘This place has got a really nasty feeling about it, hasn’t it?’
‘Yup. Getting nastier by the minute. Oppressive. Very much like my headache.’
‘What do you really think is going on? And skip all that bifurcatory hooey this time.’
James fitted the last sensor in place on top of its tripod. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have a hunch Jack and Tosh have stepped on an insanely malignant cold-spot and been drawn away from us against their will by the unliving appetite of some spectral entity.’
Gwen thought about that. ‘Pooh,’ she decided. ‘That’s cobblers.’
‘Of course,’ said James. ‘Being positive didn’t work, so I was shooting for negative reinforcement.’
‘You’re a nutjob, is what you are.’
James knelt down by the scanner system’s master unit and pressed some switches. A vague filigree of green light spread out from the tripod-mounted sensors: thin rays they could barely see in the daylight criss-crossed and overlapped like a spirograph pattern.
‘Actually,’ James said, ‘I was only half-kidding. I don’t believe in ghosts. “Ghost” is a word people use to explain things that Torchwood can provide much better, scientific explanations for. But in this instance…’
Gwen narrowed her eyes. ‘Stop it.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Saw a ghost once…’
He shrugged. ‘If you say so.’
Gwen got back to business. ‘Getting anything?’
James fiddled with the master control, adjusting wavelengths. ‘Umm… no.’
Gwen’s phone rang. She snatched it out.
‘Hello?’
She heard silence at the other end. Then, the very faintest murmur of something.
‘Hello? Jack?’
The call ended. The phone immediately rang again.
‘Hello?’
‘Gwen?’ It was Jack. His voice sounded thin and very, very far away. Thin, rushing sounds came and went, like gusts of wind. ‘I’ve been trying to get through for ages. Gwen?’
‘I’m here. Are you all right?’
‘I can barely hear you, Gwen. My phone’s on low battery. Can you hear me?’
‘Just.’
‘It’s getting dark, Gwen. Really dark. Nightfall. We’ve gone inside the chapel. Tosh says she can hear noises outside, but I don’t hear anything. She’s telling me she can. Something walking around. Footsteps.’
Static.
‘Jack?’
‘Gwen? Gwen, how are things your end?’
‘We’re… we’re trying to find you, Jack. Hold on.’
‘Battery’s low, Gwen. I-’
Dead.
Gwen looked anxiously at James. He returned her look with one of slight exasperation. ‘I can’t get the system to align properly,’ he said, getting up and walking around the ring of tripods, adjusting each unit in turn. ‘I’m just getting feedback. Interference patterns.’
‘Listen,’ he added, ‘I’m sorry about the roast thing. I didn’t mean to Wooof you out.’
‘What roast thing?’
‘What?’
‘You just said you were sorry about the roast thing,’ Gwen said.
‘I didn’t. I said ghost.’
‘You bloody didn’t.’
James opened his mouth but didn’t answer. He met Gwen’s eyes. They each knew what the other was thinking. They’d been here before.
The pull came on him, without any warning, as it always did.
‘Steady on, mate!’ the traffic warden said. ‘Are you all right?’
The lean man in the black suit had sprung up off the bus stop bench and barged into him.
‘I said, are you all right?’
The man was swaying slightly, glancing around in some confusion. Drugs, thought the traffic warden. The man didn’t look the type — too old, too well dressed — but nobody looked the type any more.
‘Mate?’
The man took a step, halted, looked around again, and met the warden’s eyes.
‘What did you say?’ the man asked.
‘Are you all right? You look a bit spaced.’
‘Alert protocol,’ the man said, as if that explained everything. ‘Threat to the Principal. Jeopardy. Investment is beginning, but the pull is wrong. The pull is wrong.’
‘Ri-ight. Whatever you say, mate. Just mind how you go.’
The man ignored him and began to stride away down the pavement. He bumped into an old woman with a tartan shopping trolley, and then clipped a pushchair with his hip.
The mother gave him what for. The man ignored her too, and moved on, start-stop, a few quick steps, then another bewildered glance around. He changed direction several times.
Definitely drugs, thought the traffic warden, shaking his head. The man was scurrying backwards and forwards, like Jerry Lewis doing his ‘confused’ shtick, except there was a curiously fluid grace to his movements.
Designer drugs, the traffic warden decided. He’d read all about those.
City Road was bustling. Tuesday lunchtime. Bookmakers with coloured-bead door curtains; army surplus stores selling camo-pants and Air-soft guns; slot arcades with doormen; Dragon Burger bars ripe with grease; conga lines of carts outside the Happy Shopper; resigned queues outside the Post Office; bunting-trimmed forecourts of pre-owned cars with stickered windows; hot-dog stands sizzling with onion smoke; bhangra pumping from minicab sound systems; reversing hooters and car alarms; hand car wash and valeting, redolent with pine scent; a council worker in Day-Glo overalls, picking up litter with a squeezy claw and dropping it into his yellow cart; kids with sherbet fountains outside Poundland, laughing at the man by the crosswalk proclaiming Jesus’ constant love to an uninterested crowd; men carrying cue-cases like shouldered arms as they wandered upstairs to the snooker club; double parking; hazard lights ticking; two Somali men arguing in a doorway; chuggers with clipboards asking for just a moment; the stable-smell of straw and pellet food exuding from the pet shop; two women in chadors; Telecom engineers erecting an orange hazard guard around the manhole they are about to lift; someone shouting to get Ronnie’s attention; the pip-pip-pip of the crossing posts; the air-horn of a boy racer’s GTi rendering ‘La Cucaracha’; carentan melons like bald scalps in the fake grass trays of a fruit and veg; people, people, people.
Too many noises, too many smells, too much movement. Too much input. The pull was wrong. The pull was wrong. He couldn’t get a clean fix on the alert. Location? What was the location? How could he respond if he didn’t have a definitive location? The upload was pulsing into him, but it was patchy and contradictory. It pulled him one way, then another, as if it was uncertain, as if it couldn’t make its mind up.