It was a list of the objects: brief descriptions and colours, enough to be able to identify them uniquely. And there was a paragraph about how they came to be in Torchwood: two of them had been discovered in what was believed to be an alien life-craft ejected from a crashing spaceship, found in an archaeological dig on an Iron Age site near Mynach Hengoed in 1953; five had been bought as a job lot in an auction in 1948, provenance unknown; and one of them had been transferred from an earlier Torchwood box dating back to 1910. They had all been put together in the Archive based on a similarity of appearance, and the function of none of them had been discovered.
The paper was signed in a bold hand; the ink faded by the passing of years.
Beneath the signature was the name of the person who had signed these objects into the Archive, along with the date.
Captain Jack Harkness. 1955.
SEVEN
Friday morning arrived unwillingly in the city; dragging itself into existence with reluctance, grey and dull, sluggish and tired. The traffic moved as if drugged; the drivers slow to use their accelerators and brakes, slow to react to traffic lights or pedestrians on crossings. A haze seemed to hang damply in the air, coating the sides of the buildings and making people’s faces look as if they were covered in sweat, even though they were wearing thick coats. The pigeons huddled together for comfort, unwilling to fly for longer than it took to find a new space to land in. Even the water on the sculpture in the centre of the Basin trickled more slowly than usual. The heat and frantic activity of the past few days had ebbed away, leaving a muddy estuary of apathy behind it.
The mood in the Hub was equally funereal, as far as Gwen could tell. Toshiko looked as if she had worked all through the night again: she didn’t speak unless spoken to, and hardly even then. Owen’s hair was pointing in all the wrong directions and, although he’d left and come back, he was still wearing the same clothes, and he hadn’t shaved. Only Jack was cool and crisp, moving through the still air like a predator; a faint crease of worry between his eyebrows.
Gwen waited until Jack was talking to Owen before slipping the alien device back onto Toshiko’s desk. Toshiko looked at it blankly for a few moments, then glanced up at Gwen with an unreadable expression on her face.
‘Did you get what you needed from it?’ she asked.
‘I got what I deserved,’ Gwen replied, and turned away.
She couldn’t stand to be in the Hub with the others; the silence was too intense. Instead she wandered off, down one of the tunnels she rarely used. Her footsteps echoed off the red brick as she walked, the tock tock tock of her heels matching the drip drip drip of water somewhere off in the darkness.
Jesus, how had it all gone so wrong so quickly?
She had meant for the alien device to have boosted the affection between her and Rhys, cementing the relationship between them, repairing the cracks that had developed over the past couple of months. Instead, it had driven a wedge into those cracks and levered the two of them apart. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She should have guessed that the device would amplify any emotion. After all, nothing is ever completely perfect. Even the most loving conversation contains the seeds of argument; the skill is in just nurturing the seeds you want and letting the rest stay fallow. The device just amplified whatever it was fed, with no selection, no discrimination. A momentary flash of irritation on her part had translated itself into anger for Rhys, which had then echoed back into a ferocious rage sweeping through Gwen’s body. She had run out of the bedroom as quickly as she could, knowing she had to turn the device off before she slapped Rhys, or he hit her. She could feel it coming, like the prickling you got before lightning struck. They had been seconds away from violence, perhaps seconds away from one of them killing the other. And what terrified her the most wasn’t that proximity to violence; it was how it had always been there. The alien device hadn’t created it: only accentuated it. You couldn’t amplify something that didn’t already exist.
Alongside love, lay hate. That was what Gwen had to come to terms with.
She had slept on the sofa that night, wrapped in a sheet, the rage that had burned within her keeping her warm until it drained away and left her shivering and silently crying. She had showered early and left the flat before Rhys had woken up — assuming he had slept at all, and not just lain awake in their bed staring at the ceiling.
She needed to text him. She needed to call him and talk, but she needed to text him first to prepare the ground, because if she called him now she didn’t know what he was going to say.
Perhaps it was all over. Perhaps they had already broken up, in his mind, and she didn’t know it yet. Perhaps she was suddenly single.
Her blind footsteps had carried her far away from the Hub. She walked past Owen’s medical area, and the firing range. She walked past the entrance to the long platform that extended parallel to a set of metal rails which vanished into a black tunnel; the terminus, Ianto had once told her, of an underground railway system that linked the Torchwoods together, although she had suspected then that he was joking in that straight-faced way Ianto had. She walked past the archives into which Ianto placed the various alien devices Torchwood had confiscated over the years. She kept walking until she was deep into territory that she had never seen before.
A sudden wave of coldness passed over Gwen, raising goose flesh on her arms. She looked up to see an opening in the tunnel wall on her left. Light began to ripple on the ground, just within the arch of the opening; a deep, violet light. Entranced, she entered.
Inside the doorway was a large, open space where the walls were punctuated by glass sheets fronting tanks full of water. The room was heavy with darkness, and even the scant violet light that oozed from the tanks was just a minor variation of the darkness. She waited for a few moments for her eyes to become acclimatised then she walked further into the centre of the room and looked more closely at the tanks.
They were full of nightmares.
The things that were in the tanks were fish, but not the kind you’d want to see on your dinner plate. Some of them were translucent, with organs and bones clearly visible through their skin. Others were covered in what looked like black armour, or mottled grey flesh that looked unhealthy, diseased. They all had mouths that were too large for their bodies, or eyes too large for their heads, or no eyes at all. One tank contained a nest of slowly writhing, fleshy worms about the thickness of her leg, bright red in colour, with holes at their ends that were less like mouths and more like gaping rips in their flesh.
Floating, half-deflated, in their tanks, the creatures looked like God’s rough sketches for what he was going to populate the oceans with later.
‘Where the hell in this universe did these monstrosities come from?’ she breathed.
‘The Pacific Ocean,’ said Jack, behind her, making her jump. ‘The Atlantic Ocean. The Indian Ocean. Pretty much any ocean you care to name on this planet.’
‘But — but I assumed they’d come through the Rift, like everything else we deal with. You don’t see these things on ice in the supermarket.’
‘They live too deep. The pressure down in the ocean trenches is immense. It could turn a polystyrene coffee cup into a hunk of stuff the size of a small coin. If anyone could fish that deep — which they can’t — and could bring one of these fish to the surface — which, I stress, they can’t — the things would just explode. The difference between the pressure in their bodies and the atmospheric pressure around them would just be too much for their skins to take.’