The Undertakers Gift (17 page)

Jack Harkness nodded to himself with just a hint of relief and satisfaction, and then turned to Ianto Jones. ‘Anything?’

‘Low-level Rift activity,’ Ianto reported, still checking the PDA. ‘Faint signs of antilositic energy traces. Nothing conclusive.’

‘Shielded?’

Ianto shook his head. ‘No sign of anything like that.’

Jack turned slowly on his heel, letting his gaze take in their surroundings: the scrubby weeds, broken walls and leafless trees. The empty shell of the church. He shivered, visibly, as he returned his attention to Ray. ‘Can you feel it?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘The weight of the future,’ Jack replied. ‘Pressing down on us.’ He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. ‘You can feel it in the air. Like the universe is holding its breath.’

‘Do you really know what’s going on here?’ Ray’s voice sounded small, lost.

‘Not really. But I’ve lived in these parts for long enough to sense when something is wrong, and round here. . . it’s really wrong. Badly wrong.’

‘Can you put it right?’

‘We can try.’ Jack turned to Ianto. ‘We need to go down and take a look.’

Ianto nodded in curt agreement, switched off the PDA and turned back towards the SUV.

Ray watched him go and then turned back to Jack. ‘Are you mad? You can’t go down there. I told you – it’s full of those pallbearer people. They’ll kill you.’

‘No chance,’ Jack replied.

‘But there’s only the two of you.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Jack said. ‘We’ve brought some friends with us to help out.’

Ianto returned with a heavy canvas hold-all, a bit like a cricket bag. It looked heavy, and when he dumped it on the ground it made a harsh, metallic clank. Ianto unzipped the bag and Jack picked out a short, brutal-looking sub-machine gun.

Ray stepped back, amazed and somewhat aghast.

‘Meet my old pal the Sten gun,’ Jack said. He snapped a long magazine into the side of the stock and cocked the weapon with a loud, aggressive action.

‘This is insane,’ said Ray.

‘This is Torchwood,’ Jack replied.

THIRTY-SIX

Gwen couldn’t work out how deep she was under the Black House now, or how far she had come. The twisting maze of dark passages was now just a confusing, nightmare memory. She had crawled until she couldn’t stand the pain in her ankle any longer, and now sat against a cold, wet wall. Her jeans were soaked through, her jacket was torn and filthy, and she was starting to shake.

She felt in her jacket pocket and found a spare magazine for her gun. But she had dropped the automatic somewhere in the initial fight so the ammo was next to useless. In her other pocket she found her pencil torch. She took it out and, after a few seconds work with her trembling fingers, managed to switch it on. She kept one hand cupped over the end so that the small but powerful LED didn’t suddenly illuminate the whole area and give away her position.

Very carefully, she allowed a small, thin ray of light to seep out between her fingers. It stabbed through the darkness, caught the mud-streaked toe of her left boot. Her foot was throbbing now, sending bolts of pain right up her leg and deep into her chest.

She angled the torch beam so that it cut across the passageway, finding the opposite wall in a coin-sized spot of light. It was green, wet, shrouded by old cobwebs. She roved the light across the uneven brickwork until it disappeared into a black abyss.

A doorway, right opposite her.

Cautiously, she probed the floor with the torch. It looked like quite a wide door. Tracing the edge of it upwards, she discovered a low, arched stone ceiling stained with wide, irregular patches of moist lichen. It looked like the map of an alien world, scrawled in decay across a dark, forgotten heaven.

The old church crypt.

Wonderful
.

Gwen slowly pulled herself around and crawled on her hands and knees through the doorway. Every now and again she had heard the distant sound of the pallbearers moving around in the passageways and she guessed they were still searching for her. She hoped that they were too arrogant to realise that the corpses of Wynnie and Gillian hadn’t been enough to scare her off.

She raised the pencil torch and directed it into the darkest shadow. The light fell on a smooth wall of glass, smeared with greasy marks and streaks of algae. It was some kind of tank, or container, long and low.

Like a funeral casket.

The light found its way through a clear section of the glass. At first, there was nothing to be seen but the darkness beyond. The casket appeared empty.

But then something moved inside it. Slowly, calmly, with a soft, dry rustle. An indistinct shape moved into the light of Gwen’s torch and she saw then what it was.

She didn’t scream. She couldn’t. The noise simply died in her throat, strangled by fear.

THIRTY-SEVEN

The Sten gun was clutched tightly in Jack’s hand as he reached the bottom the first flight of steps leading down into the Black House crypts. His eyes peered sharply into the darkness, but the place was deserted.

‘Quiet as the grave,’ remarked Ianto, joining him. The cold evening light seeped down the stairs after him, casting a wan grey light across his features. It didn’t make him look any better.

‘How are you bearing up?’ Jack asked him softly.

‘I’ve felt better,’ Ianto admitted. He was carrying a Heckler & Koch MP5 SMG and it looked heavy in his hands. The strap bit into the bone of his shoulder and the flesh of his neck was as white as his shirt collar.

‘I can’t do this alone,’ Jack told him quietly. ‘Just hang in there and cover my back, OK?’

‘OK.’

Jack moved forward and was swallowed up by the shadows in an instant. Sweating profusely, Ianto started after him.

When they couldn’t see any more, they switched on their torches. Ianto’s was clipped to the barrel of his MP5. Jack carried his in one hand, the Sten gun in the other.

‘Are we expecting a lot of these characters then?’ Ianto wondered.

Jack kept his reply to a whisper. ‘I don’t know. But you remember what Harold said. The Already Dead are suicide soldiers. They won’t spare us and we can’t spare them. They’re hard to kill but not impossible – we’ll just have to hit them with everything we’ve got.’

They continued along the narrow passageway and descended the next flight of steps. Jack’s boots squelched through the mud that lined the tunnel floor, his torchlight searching for the next level. Then, for a fleeting moment, the light struck a piece of ragged cloth that suddenly vanished, its owner recoiling from the glare with a sharp hiss.

Jack paused, crouching, shining his torch along the passage. Suddenly something grey lurched out of the darkness, a humanoid in a long, ragged cloak. The Sten gun let out a deafening rattle and the figure crashed backwards with an angry snarl.

Jack leapt down the rest of the stairs as the creature rolled to its feet. In the light of Ianto’s own torch, he could see the front of the alien’s chest, swaddled in bandages, filthy with blood. The creature’s head snapped up, the black mouth yawning open between the layers of bandages.

And then the nightmarish face caved in under a deafening fusillade of bullets from Ianto’s H&K. One moment there were the bandages, with tiny yellow eyes glittering with hatred, and the next there was just a sticky black mess, and the figure collapsed backwards.

There was another directly behind it, stepping into the light with a hiss. Jack, already on one knee, opened up again with the Sten. Tar-like blood jetted from the ragged holes in the creature’s chest and neck and it, too, fell. The creature writhed on the floor, its ragged hands clutching at the brickwork on either side of the passageway. Jack stepped over the kicking heels, put the Sten to his shoulder and aimed another burst directly into the head. The body gave a final jerk and then lay still.

The clattering echo of the automatic gunfire was still reverberating down the passageway.

‘Well, they know we’re here now,’ Ianto said, breathing hard.

‘Damn right,’ said Jack. His face was grim as he knelt down to examine the corpse. Carefully, he hooked a finger under some of the bandages which covered the face and pulled them free, shining his torch on what was revealed beneath. He winced at the sight, and quickly turned the light away. ‘The Already Dead,’ he said. ‘Worse than I thought.’

‘If I didn’t feel ill before, then I do now,’ said Ianto weakly.

‘Poor creature,’ whispered Jack. ‘What kind of life could a thing like this lead? A rotting, humanoid effigy, held together by filthy bandages. Doomed to an existence of pain and suffering.’

‘So we’re putting them out of their misery?’

‘Maybe.’ Jack stood up slowly. ‘They’ll really be coming for us now, though, Ianto. And they’ll have nothing to lose.’

Ianto leant against the wall and took a couple of deep breaths. The sweat was running down his face now. ‘You realise that Gwen is probably dead.’

‘I know.’ Jack’s lips had compressed into a thin line. ‘But until I see her with my own eyes, Ianto, I won’t accept it. And if I have to fight my way through an army of these pallbearer guys to do it, I will. Are you with me?’

‘All the way.’

There was a noise like a cough from the darkness and something metallic clanged against the stonework by Ianto’s head. He ducked, and another steel bolt ricocheted away into the shadows. Jack swung his torch around, illuminating a pallbearer at the far end of the passage holding a long spear. It was pointed directly at him. With a sharp grunt of compressed gas, the flechette at its tip was suddenly launched towards Jack’s face.

THIRTY-EIGHT

It was spread across the crypt like a giant spider’s web, a complex network of wires and tubes radiating from the central casket and disappearing into the darkness.

At the centre was a container of some kind, shaped like a coffin but more like a fish tank. The glass was murky and stained with green algae, as if whatever was kept inside had been organic and rotten.

But since that time, the container had been expanded, reconstructed, to accommodate what lay within.

The creature inside was clearly dead. The movement she had seen earlier had been nothing more than the reflection of her torchlight in the dimmed glass. At first, all she saw was the body – a withered, grey ribcage mottled with dark sores. The blood was so old it had turned into a black crust surrounding the damaged areas. The head, little more than a bulbous skull, was covered by skin so shrunken to the bone that what remained of the lips was pulled right back from two rows of uneven, grey teeth. The nose had gone, eaten away by parasites, leaving a ragged hole beneath the eye sockets, where creased, long-dead lids were fused shut over sunken eyes.

So far, just another corpse – ancient, dried up matter, the leathery effigy of an unknown man.

But someone, or something, had been working on this corpse. Both the head and torso were held in place by a series of metal rods and pins, skewering the body and bolted into place. The metal was dull and rusted, and the flesh was fused to the pins wherever they entered.

There were no arms or legs. The trunk tailed off to an abdomen which consisted of shrivelled organs hanging like stuffing from the rags of torn skin. The lower part of the spine was visible at the base, trailing off to a series of broken, age-browned vertebrae that just managed to glint with a touch of ivory in the light of Gwen’s torch. Leading into the desiccated remains of the intestine were old rubber tubes, like the kind found trailing from gas taps in laboratories, cracked and perished and snaking away to a series of bottles and stands beneath the casket. There were some wires, too, thick with insulation, but in places Gwen could see that the copper wiring had come adrift where the flesh had dried and withdrawn.

She stared at the mess, frowning, trying to work out what could possibly have happened but failing. It looked like it was all that was left of some kind of dreadful Victorian experiment, and it made her shudder with revulsion.

But not as much as what had been done to the head.

The top of the skull had been cut away and removed, like the top of a boiled egg. Stealing herself, Gwen aimed the light into the cranium, where a dried-up brain, like a giant walnut, rested in a web of rotten flesh. Wires had been fed into the brain matter, inserted through the folds in its surface. They emerged from the skull like a fright wig, leading up and away into the shadows. Some were as thick as mains flex; others were thin, but grouped together and tangled like spaghetti.

Troubled, revolted, frightened – but unable to stop searching for some reason or clue as to who or what had done all this and why – Gwen narrowed her gaze. She directed the torchlight into the skull, inspecting the grizzled contents. She felt her stomach turn as she became aware of tiny things moving in the flesh, little white grubs slowly feeding on the old meat, their bodies pulsing with life in the sudden, harsh light of her torch. She felt herself starting to retch and pulled back, turning the light away, returning them to the privacy of their midnight feast.

Gwen took a moment to gather her wits. What had happened here? Who had done this? Why were the pallbearers protecting this ancient, abominated corpse? The questions whirled around in her head, but there were no answers.