forgotten and frozen in the Morgue – all my decision, not yours. Now go.’
Just as Jack was about to leave, he heard a noise and looked at the alien.
‘Fank you,’ it said. ‘An’ I look forward to our next meeting. Innit.’
This surprised Jack. Not just the gratitude, or the suggestion they’d meet again, but the fact it had spoken such a long sentence, and one that made sense.
‘Sure thing,’ he said, giving a tap on the side of his head with a finger, then out, by way of a salute.
And he left Torchwood Cardiff, or Torchwood Three as it now called itself, and went back out into the cold Welsh night air.
He stood on the dockside, looking first out across the water, then back across the mudflats that formed the Oval Basin. One day, all this land would be reclaimed, redeveloped, become a thriving modern area of shops, apartments and tourism. And there, right there, by that big drain, would be a water tower, a sculpture; and a machine would be there for a short while and would create a permanent rent in the Rift that crossed Cardiff. Then, once in a blue moon, the thing Jack was waiting patiently for (well, OK, not that patiently) would materialise and he’d get away from Wales. From Earth. Back out amongst the stars, back out where he belonged…
Except, damn it, he actually felt drawn to Cardiff now. How easily he’d come to call this place home.
Pulling his long coat around him to keep out the chill, he wandered away from the water, out towards Butetown and the small area beyond known as Tretarri.
No railyard, no bus link, no shops; just a couple of dismal streets of workers’ cottages built about eighty years earlier. Dark, foreboding and run down, the houses were mostly empty. Not even the tramps and bums of Cardiff lived there, and the last few times Jack had had reason to go he’d felt… weird.
And Captain Jack Harkness and ‘weird’ weren’t great buddies – it needed further investigation. And hell, he had nothing else to do for a couple of hours.
TWO
The room was incredibly dark – not just the dark of a late night, but the dark of somewhere that light just seemed to evaporate from, as if something was actually sucking it out, like air from a leaky tyre.
It may have had something to do with the wooden box at the centre of the room, on the floor next to a table. About the size of a shoebox, but crafted elegantly from redwood, with intricate designs across the surface. Not that they could be seen right now. But they were there all the same.
If you listened closely enough, you might be forgiven for thinking the box was sighing. Or breathing deeply. Or perhaps, something inside it was.
The box wasn’t alone in the room. Beside the table was a leather armchair, a Queen Anne, in tan. A bit worn, showing its age, creases and even a minute tear on one wing. On the table, a small glass of dark sherry stood on a white doily.
On the wooden floor in front of a cold fire hearth was a tan rug, which matched the armchair. The fire looked as though it hadn’t been lit in many years – spotlessly clean, the Victorian tiling painted black, the wrought-iron implements in a dark coal bucket next to a grate.
Facing all of this was the door to the room, wooden, stained dark, an iron key in the lock. To the right of the door and the chair was a window. Long, heavily covered with a dark olive velvet curtain.
That was it. Just a dark room filled with dark furnishings.
And the odd sigh from within the box. Probably.
After a couple more sighs, a tiny pinprick of light seemed to seep out from the box, not enough to illuminate the room, but enough to break the dark mood.
Seconds later, the leather chair rustled, almost as if someone was moving in it and sure enough a figure gradually materialised out of nothing. Almost as if it were crossing from one plane of reality to another, in which identical rooms existed, with identical chairs.
After a few more seconds, the figure solidified into a small, thin-featured old man, wearing an evening suit, bow-tie, cummerbund, a small red rose in his buttonhole, as if he’d been attending a night at the opera.
Ignoring the darkness, almost as though he could see as clearly as if it were broad daylight, the man reached out for the sherry glass. He flicked through the pages of a broadsheet newspaper which had been lying on the floor. Each page was blank, yet he seemed to be reading something on it.
He grimaced at the sherry and muttered, ‘I prefer Amontillado.’
The sherry seemed to glow briefly at this. When the glow faded, the sherry was marginally paler than before.
The man glanced at the newspaper. ‘Where am I?’
An empty page was suddenly illuminated. A word appeared on it, scored in a white light that then turned ink-black.
‘When?’
18 AUGUST 1941
‘What a popular year. And where in this dreary place might one find the divine Captain Jack Harkness today?’
The old man clapped his hands with a giggle. The newspaper folded itself up and came to rest on an arm of the chair. ‘Delightful. Queen’s Rook takes Queen’s Knight, I think.’ He looked about the room. ‘Light.’
The transformation was instantaneous – the fire was lit, electric lights on the walls were a low-voltage, incandescent yellow, the rug and curtain become cream-coloured, and some framed pictures blurred into existence along the walls.
Photographs, mostly monochrome, showing Cardiff over the previous fifty years.
‘That’s better. If I’m going to be in this dimension for a while, I might as well be comfortable.’ He bent over and scooped up the box – his body as supple as that of a man a third his apparent age.
He crossed to one of the photos.
‘That is 1923, if I recall,’ he said to the box. ‘And there, in that ridiculous coat, with that smug expression – there is our target.’ He patted the lid of the box. ‘Jack Harkness he calls himself. Not his real name, of course, but a guise he once adopted and has continued to use. To all intents and purposes, it is whom he believes himself to be. And you and I shall have some fun with him.’
He crossed to another picture. Again Jack, this time dated 1909; he was inside a railway carriage in Pakistan, with a troop of soldiers, laughing. ‘Take a good look at our enemy,’ the old man purred. ‘This is going to be a long game with a very unpleasant outcome.’
From within the box, a louder sigh than before emerged, and another flicker of harsh white light seeped from the crack between its lid and base.
The old man nodded slowly. ‘Yes, the God-slayer. And we really don’t like him much, do we?’
The box sighed again.
The man clicked his fingers, and the newspaper flipped open to a blank page.
‘Send a message: My dearest Doctor Brennan. Matilda. My respects to you and Torchwood. The time has come to rid ourselves of the vermin that calls itself Harkness. File TW3/87/BM. Read it and follow the instructions. Your servant, as always, Bilis Manger, Esquire.’
The newspaper closed, and the old man smiled.
‘It won’t work, of course. But it will be an amusing diversion, a chance to see how alert the good Captain is.’
He sat back in the chair, sipped more sherry and suddenly yanked open the lid of the box. A massive flurry of bright, fierce halogen white light almost roared out of the box, straight up, through the ceiling and was gone.
And Bilis Manger laughed as he imagined the trauma he was about to inflict, indirectly and untraceably of course, on his… nemesis.
‘Nemesis? Oh I like that,’ he said to the newspaper. ‘I would have settled for “enemy”. “Mortal foe”, even. But “nemesis” – oh, but that’s delicious.’
