At least he had more of a choice of deaths than five minutes earlier.
Ianto told Simon and Andrew to stay where they were. The less movement there was, the more time they might have. He crawled toward the partially exposed doors and tried to push them apart.
They weren’t having it.
Beneath him, he felt the elevator car groan, its weight pulling against the fraying metal threads of the cable.
‘Hurry up!’ he heard Andrew urging, his voice trembling.
Ianto felt sorry for them. The closest these two had probably ever come to death was crossing the road at rush hour. Now, inside five minutes, they’d been nearly chewed up by something that came through the wall and the odds were they were going to end up smashed to pieces at the bottom of an elevator shaft.
Ianto got his fingertips on the steel door edges and pulled, but being half-crouched on top of a lift car was far from the optimum position to really get his back into the job. He heard movement behind him and felt the elevator shift a little more. Simon and Andrew were alongside him now and without a word, all three men started to pull on the door.
Ianto felt it start to give, and his fingers got a better purchase. Over his head, he heard the sound of another wire snapping in the cable.
‘Put your backs into it, boys!’ he growled, and strained against the doors.
Beneath him he could feel the elevator car trembling against the weakening hold of the failing cable. They only had a few seconds…
And the doors slid apart, just a little – just enough.
‘Quickly, now,’ Ianto ordered, and Simon pushed Andrew through the doors. There was the sound of him tumbling to the floor in the darkness on the other side, then Simon went through.
And that was when the cable snapped with the sound of a gunshot, and the elevator car fell from beneath Ianto’s feet. Instinctively, he threw out his hands and caught the edge of one of the doors.
A moment later, he heard the elevator hit the bottom of the shaft with the sound of an express train hitting a mountain side. There was no explosion, but he felt a wave of oily air and dust brush past him. Then Simon and Andrew were hauling him between the doors and onto the thick pile carpet of the sixth floor.
Ianto rolled over and the carpet felt as soft as meadow grass and the still air of the ghost-lit corridor as good as the fresh breeze of a summer’s day.
TWENTY-TWO
Owen had made two charges. The ingredients were tightly packed into a couple of small pickle jars that he’d found in Marion Blake’s fridge. He’d punctured their lids with a corkscrew and used some twine he’d found in another drawer as a couple of fuses. He wasn’t sure what she ordinarily used the twine for but figured that of all the SkyPoint residents that could have ignored the fire alarm, he was glad that it had been an S amp;M call girl. As he set the makeshift explosives aside on Marion’s kitchen work surface, he caught the face of his watch, and couldn’t quite believe that a part of him was actually wondering if he was still going to have time to go looking for the man-munching twins from Constantine’s coffee shop.
It had taken him half an hour to mix the chemicals. You had to be careful around explosives, especially the homemade variety. There was a reason so many terrorists had only one eye or used hooks for hands. Owen hadn’t wanted to blow his face off. A talking corpse was one thing – you could get away with that – but a talking skull? That was going to make people take a second look in any light.
‘Are you finished?’
It was Marion. She had used the time to shed her work clothes. She hadn’t quite gone back to the Mary Whitehouse look, but they wouldn’t have thrown her out of church, either. She was curled up on the sofa at what she clearly hoped was a safe distance.
Owen noticed that they were alone. ‘What happened to Alison and her mum?’
Marion cocked her thumb towards her bedroom. ‘I think Wendy took Alison to lie down. It looked like you were going to be a while.’
Just as likely, they were under the bed in there in case the madman with the busted hand blew them all to hell, he thought.
‘What about Ewan?’
‘He hasn’t come out of the loo yet.’
Owen didn’t feel his blood chill, but he felt distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. I’m telling you, if he’s made a mess in there…’
He had heard Wendy tell her about what was supposed to be stalking SkyPoint. If the significance of something coming through walls at people and Ewan not having shown after half an hour in the bathroom hadn’t clicked with Marion, Owen wondered if he should be checking her over for signs of something nasty as a result of her profession.
He got up and walked towards the bathroom, dreading what he might find there. He rapped on the door, and called out Ewan’s name.
‘Yeah – yeah, I’m coming!’
Owen felt the tension fall off him like a heavy coat. ‘OK, well hurry up. We need to get moving. And I need to splint up that ankle first.’
The bathroom door opened and Ewan stood in the doorway, his injured ankle held slightly off the ground. His shirt was damp down the front. Owen guessed that he must have been sick after all. He certainly didn’t look any better, his face was pale and shone with sweat, and his eyes were red-rimmed, like he’d been crying, and wouldn’t stop moving. This was a guy that was very close to the edge.
‘Here, let me give you a hand,’ said Owen, and he put one arm across his shoulders and helped Ewan as best he could back through to the lounge.
As they went, Owen spoke to him gently. It was the kind of voice he had used a lifetime ago sitting next to nervous patients in ward beds. ‘Take it easy, Ewan. Everything’s going to be all right, I promise. I’m going to get you and your family out of here. Believe me, we do this sort of thing all the time.’
They reached the couch, and Owen let him down gently. Ewan didn’t look all that comforted.
Owen glanced up at Marion. ‘Have you got any painkillers around? Paracetamol? Hash? I think he could use something.’
‘I think I can find something,’ she said hesitantly and left the lounge to go get it.
Owen gave Ewan a playful wink. ‘Let’s hope she finds the good stuff.’
Then he picked up the two whips, moved back across to the kitchen and selected a knife from the rack she had fitted there. He could have performed surgery with them. All he needed to do was separate the whips from their handles. The knife he chose did the job easily. He took the handles and the whips back to Ewan and started to bind the handles into place with the first of the whips.
‘This is going to hurt a bit,’ he warned.
Ewan said nothing.
The next thing Owen knew was that Ewan had the other whip around his throat and was pulling it tight. Very tight.
The immediate thought that shot through Owen’s mind was that generally since he had been reanimated as a walking, talking corpse the advantages of his condition were comprehensively outnumbered on a day-to-day basis by the ball-crushing downsides. Right now, though, a real bonus was the fact that he no longer needed to breathe – which meant that any attempt to strangle him was going to be pretty futile.
Briefly, he thought about just waiting it out – it wouldn’t take too long before Ewan got bored or, in his
