The House That Jack Built

SEVENTEEN

'Right,' Alexander said, checking the coordinates on the PDA he had stolen from a desk in the Hub against the street map. 'It's that house over there.'

He pointed at Jackson Leaves, just visible over its unruly privet hedge.

'Brilliant!' Joe shouted. 'Does that mean I can start singing again?'

'No it bloody doesn't,' Alexander replied. 'One more "Sweet Home Alabama" out of you, and I'll make you eat the steering wheel.'

'Oh.'

Alexander swore and whacked the edge of the PDA against the dashboard. 'Stupid thing's on the fritz, can't seem to make its mind up where we are. Let's get out and have a look.'

'Great!' Joe grinned and started swaying as if he was in a nightclub.

'I am definitely checking the dosage,' Alexander sighed.

'Do you want me to get your wheelchair?'

'No, I'm cured, it's a pissing miracle.'

'Wow!'

'Of course I want my wheelchair!' Alexander shouted.

Joe chuckled and got out of the car. By the time he'd got the boot open he was singing again.

'Right,' said Jack, as Gwen and Ianto came back into the dining room, 'we need to talk.' He kept flicking his way through the camera feeds, checking each room. 'You both think I'm heavy-handed. But the more I think about what's going on here, the more I think I need to be. How is she?'

'Sleeping on the sofa,' said Gwen. 'She's fine.'

Jack flicked a switch, and the lounge appeared on one of the four monitors. Julia was hunched, foetal, on the sofa.

Jack nodded. 'Good.'

He stretched in his chair, his lower back still hurting from where Locke had punched him. A purple and yellow bruise would certainly be blossoming there by now. 'This isn't investigation any more,' he continued, pointing at the monitors. 'This is surveillance. We need to know the minute something tries to get a jump on us. I'm starting to piece this together, and it's freaking me out.'

'I was there from the word go, frankly,' Ianto said.

'Something is causing major time disruption,' Jack continued. 'Think of the deaths: Danny Wilkinson drowns on dry land. But it wasn't always — go back a few centuries and that was marshland out there. You saw a woman killed by a tram that stopped running along that street years ago. Gloria Banks… I don't know, she sits down in her armchair and…'

'Bursts into flames,' Gwen finished.

'Yes! It could have been anything. Perhaps a bonfire was there once… or, I don't know, maybe it was a blacksmith's at some point?'

Gwen had been tapping on her laptop and she turned it around to show them. 'Or, during the Blitz, a bomb went off a few hundred metres away and the house was caught in the blaze.'

Jack glanced at the council report she had brought up. 'Exactly.'

'Blacksmith's?' asked Ianto with a smile.

'Whatever.' Jack rolled his eyes. 'The point is that something is causing temporal disruption on a massive scale. We're not just seeing things; these aren't after-echoes.' He turned to Gwen, thinking of their conversation earlier. 'This isn't residual haunting. The past has weight, it can interact with us, drown us, burn us…'

'Stamp on our heads,' Ianto added.

'Yes! Rupert Locke… he's certainly not floating around is he? When he appears, he's actually here. It's as if the two time periods are folding over one another, layered with each other, physically co-existing for a brief period. When the walls were pounding, maybe that was just the Jackson Leaves of fifty years ago trying to co-exist with the Jackson Leaves of today, the two slightly out of place over the years because of subsidence.'

'Subsidence?' Ianto smiled at Gwen. 'Or maybe just the spatial disruption?'

'Yes.' Jack nodded. 'Maybe. Because it isn't just time, is it? Something is distorting physical space.' He glanced back to the monitors, flicking through and making sure all was clear before turning back to them. 'I can't put into words how that scares me,' he said. 'You just don't start messing with existence like that. It's pretty elastic, but if you screw with it for long enough it'll snap.'

There was a flash of movement on one of the screens.

'Did you see that?' Ianto shouted.

Jack and Gwen turned to the monitors.

'It was one of the top rooms,' Ianto said. 'A woman…' He stared at the screens, infuriated at the lack of anything in them. 'I know I saw her… She moved across the room towards the door. A woman in a long white dress, maybe a wedding gown.'

Jack felt his heart trip. 'You sure?'

'Yes! A woman in a long white dress, she moved across the room towards the door.'

They kept scrolling through the camera feeds.

'She's not there now,' Gwen said.

Jack got to his feet.

'Where are you going?' Ianto asked. 'There's not much point in setting all this up if you're just going to leg it up there and have a look for yourself!'

Jack closed the door behind him and began running up the stairs.

Joe was wheeling Alexander along the pavement towards Jackson Leaves, Alexander keeping himself dry under an umbrella he'd found in the boot of the car. He didn't offer to share it, but Joe didn't care. He was singing 'My Generation' at the top of his voice and was quite happy, thank you very much.

'Shut up,' Alexander ordered. Joe did. Alexander sighed and waited to have to tell him again; each command seemed to afford him about two minutes of silence. 'Stop here,' he said, a few metres from the house. He stared at the building and tried to decide what it was that disturbed him about it.

'There's something not right about that house,' he said, thinking aloud.

Joe looked at the building for a few moments before giving up and going to dance in the street.

Alexander studied it for a while then wheeled himself to Gloria's front garden, where he selected a lapful of small stones. He returned to Jackson Leaves, parked a little way back from the drive and began to throw the stones.

'Oh no!' Joe giggled. 'You can't do that, we'll get in trouble.'

'Just watch me.' The stones flew towards the house but vanished long before they got anywhere near it.

'Hmm,' Alexander said. 'What does that tell us, Joe?'

Joe stopped dancing for a moment. 'Time for a pint?'

'No. Unless there's some form of force-field technology screening the building — and there isn't because you can always tell, force fields give off static like it's going out of fashion, makes your hair follicles go tighter than a fly's arse — it tells us that Jackson Leaves isn't altogether there. Which is rather strange.'

'Yeah!'

'Wheel us next door, Joey my lad,' Alexander said, pointing to the house the opposite side to Gloria's. 'We need some equipment and a dry place to work.'

'OK.' Joe pushed him along the pavement. 'How are we going to convince whoever lives there to help?'

'My dear Joe, I could have you pushing this wheelchair along with your tongue if I wished, couldn't I?'

'Yeah!'

'Good. Then you just leave the convincing to me, all right?'

Alexander chuckled. He could get used to field work, he was really rather enjoying himself.

Hadn't Jack cautioned himself about getting caught up in his memories? Here was the result, chasing through the focal point of a space-time collapse with a head full of guilt and no clear plan of action. To think earlier he'd been preaching pragmatism.

'Follow me on the camera feeds,' he shouted.

***

In the dining room, Ianto jumped forward to turn the volume down as Jack's voice came through loud enough to make the speakers shake.

'Oh, righty-ho, then,' he muttered sarcastically, shaking his head at Jack's comment. 'We'd never have thought of that.'

'What do you think set him off?' Gwen asked, ploughing through the Jackson Leaves documents on her laptop, hunting for any mention of a bride.

'You heard me say there was a woman on the screen, did you?'

'Now, now,' Gwen admonished playfully.

Jack reached the top floor, both rooms were empty.

'Nothing,' he said.

'I could have told him that from here,' said Ianto, 'though that would have cut down on his "looking dramatic" quota for this evening.'

'You're getting more sarcastic with each passing day,' Gwen said.

'It's the only pleasure I have left.'

Gwen raised an eyebrow, but didn't comment. 'Nothing here obviously relating to a woman in white,' she tapped her laptop screen, 'but then it wasn't a huge deal to go on, was it?'

Ianto leaned forward in his seat. 'I'd say she was about my height with long black hair. From the look of her dress, I'd place her at the earlier part of the twentieth century or maybe late nineteenth.' He pointed at the screen where the woman had appeared in the room Jack wasn't. She moved towards the door and promptly vanished.

'Jack?' Ianto stabbed at the audio buttons. 'Oh, come on… patch in your earpiece…' With a roar of exasperation, he got up and opened the door to shout up the stairs.

'Hello!' said Rob, standing in the doorway holding the croquet mallet. 'Sorry, but the house made me do this.'

He swung the mallet.