'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.