Slow Decay

She loved Rhys. That was a fact — unarguable, undeniable. And yet, there was something missing. The constant and surprising sex, the discoveries about the other person, the peaks and troughs of feeling — they had all faded away, eroded by time and experience into a comfortable emotional landscape of slight hills and minor valleys. It was like they had started off in the Scottish Highlands and were now living in Norfolk. Emotionally speaking. Gwen would never even consider living in Norfolk for real.

What did you do, when passion turned to friendship? When you knew each other’s bodies so well that a voyage of discovery became more like a trip down to the shops? When the kind of orgasms that made you want to scream and rip the sheets became less important to you than a good night’s sleep?

Oh God. Were they drifting apart? Were they splitting up?

‘You’d better go,’ Rhys said, his eyes still shut. ‘If that thing goes off again it might wake me up.’

‘Sorry, love. I thought-’

‘Don’t worry,’ he mumbled. ‘Talk later. Sleeping now.’

She rolled out of bed and dressed quickly, fresh underwear beneath some clothes that she found thrown down by the side of the bed. By the time she left, pausing in the doorway to take a last look at him, Rhys was buried beneath the duvet and snoring.

Outside, the birds were singing. The air was cool against her skin, as if freshly laundered. The smell of the trees — earthy, complex, indefinable — filled her lungs.

A second message had come through to her mobile while she had been getting ready, giving an address on the outskirts of Cardiff. She drove, deftly and fast, through quiet city streets, her mind deliberately blank. She didn’t want to think about the man she was leaving behind — or the man she was driving towards.

When she arrived, at one of Cardiff’s older districts — warehouses built in solid brick, a Victorian gothic church incongruously set across the street — the Torchwood SUV was already there: a black shape with curved edges, almost alien in itself.

Jack was standing in front of one of the warehouses. A smaller opening in the massive wooden plank door, all peeling green paint and rusty nails, stood open. Toshiko and Owen were getting their equipment from the SUV, and bantering quietly while they did so.

‘Twice in one night,’ Gwen said as she approached. ‘I wish this was some kind of record, but it isn’t.’

‘We’re not on the clock,’ Jack replied, without apology. ‘We’re racing it.’

Together they went inside. It took Gwen’s eyes a few moments to adapt. Shafts of light penetrated through holes in the warehouse roof, picking out the dusty air like spotlights in an abandoned theatre. The ground was flat concrete: empty of all but a few scraps of wood, a mangled bicycle and a body, curled up in a foetal position.

Gwen and Jack approached the body together. At first, Gwen thought it was a man with dyed hair, dressed in a heavy and bloodstained overcoat, but as she drew closer the discrepancies began to win out over the similarities. The body was too bulky, the skin too coarse. And that ruff of yellow hair on top of the scalp…

‘It’s a Weevil,’ she breathed. ‘And it’s dead.’

‘Even Weevils die,’ Jack said. He knelt down by its side. ‘And they deserve the same kind of respect from us as anything else that dies. And that also means that, if they die before their time, then we need to find out how and why. We owe them that much, as a fellow life form on this Earth.’

Gently, he eased the creature over, and Gwen caught her breath. The Weevil’s face had been eaten away. Literally eaten away: Gwen could see the gouges left by teeth in the gritty skin of the cheeks. The fingers had been chewed away as well, as had half the skin of the neck.

‘What could have the strength to kill and eat a Weevil?’ Gwen asked. ‘Another Weevil?’

‘They don’t eat their own kind,’ Jack said. He sounded sad. ‘They’re a surprisingly gregarious species. And besides, those tooth-marks are too small. Weevils have teeth resembling gravestones. And no orthodontists. Whatever had a go at this one had small, regular teeth.’

Gwen heard a sharp intake of breath from behind her. Turning, she saw Owen and Toshiko standing side by side, holding their equipment cases and staring at the body.

‘It knew,’ Toshiko said. ‘Somehow, it knew.’

‘It was mourning,’ Owen confirmed.

‘Make sense,’ Jack said. ‘Who knew? Who was mourning?’

‘The Weevil back at the Hub,’ Owen said. ‘Somehow, it knew that another Weevil had died!’

Something scuffed in the darkness on the far side of the warehouse. In response, something else moved over near the door. Jack reached into his pocket, but didn’t take his gun out. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that the pallbearers have arrived. Tosh, Owen — get your cameras out and grab as many photographs as you can.’

‘How did they know?’ Owen asked, glancing around nervously as he fumbled in his case.

‘How did the one back in the Hub know?’ Jack replied. Keeping his body still, he let his gaze sweep from one side of the warehouse to the other. Gwen followed his gaze. Behind her she could hear clicking as Toshiko and Owen clustered around the dead Weevil, taking their photos. Nothing was moving on the margins of the warehouse, but she could have sworn that some of the pencil-thin beams of sunlight that criss-crossed the dusty space were blocked in places where they had shone brightly before. Blocked by things that were not moving. Not yet, anyway.

A smell drifted across the open space towards them: thick, acrid, choking.

‘Time to go,’ Jack said. ‘We’ve outstayed our welcome.’

The four of them edged slowly towards the door, leaving the Weevil’s dead body behind them, spread-eagled on the harsh and unforgiving concrete.

‘Are you sure they’ll let us go?’ Gwen asked.

Jack had moved so that his body was between them and whatever was in the darkness. His coat swirled around his body, the light from the doorway casting his shadow solidly across the floor. ‘I’m not sure of anything in this world,’ he said, ‘but I think they have other things on their minds right now. Let’s leave them to their grief.’

They left, and the Weevils did not follow them. All that Gwen heard as they climbed into the Torchwood SUV was a mournful whistling, coming from inside the warehouse.

FOUR

Rhys took a deep breath, braced himself, and looked in the mirror.

God. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The morning sun streaming in through the bathroom window cast a harsh light across his face, shadowing it in all the wrong places and showing up bumps and odd little creases that he didn’t even know he possessed. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, thinking — if he’d thought about it at all — that it lent him a reckless, Colin Farrell vibe but, combined with the baggy skin under his eyes, it just made him look like a down-and-out who’d been sleeping in the rain for too long. The skin of his cheeks and temples was gritty, and he could have sworn that the flesh on his neck — the red-rashed, chicken-skin flesh on his neck — was looser than he remembered. Jesus, was he getting jowls! He was, he was actually getting jowls!

Rhys shook his head in disbelief. When had all this happened? When had he gotten old? The last time he’d taken a good look at himself he’d been young, fit and carefree. His eyes had been bright, his skin clear and his stomach as flat and as hard as a butcher’s slab.

But now…

He looked down, knowing he wasn’t going to like what he saw. And he was right. The bulge of his beer gut wasn’t anywhere near big enough to hide his feet, but it was getting to the point where he’d have to take polaroids of his wedding tackle so he could remember what it all looked like.

Was this what Gwen saw whenever she looked at him? He groaned. No wonder she spent so much time out at work. He was a mess.

They’d had a long conversation, on the way back from the Indian Summer. It was probably the most serious conversation they’d ever had, apart from that hesitant, ‘Are you on the pill?’ ‘No — do you have any condoms?’ exchange the first night they met. They’d started off talking about Lucy, and how Rhys