Torchwood: Slow Decay by Andy Lane Read Free Book Online Page B

as realisation caught up. ‘But I can still hear whistling.’
    She was right. Owen could hear that low keening noise as well, a mournful threnody that threatened every now and then to break into a tune but never quite made it. The kind of noise someone might make if they were working, concentrating on something, half-remembering a tune.
    ‘Gwen’s gone…’ he said.
    ‘And Jack is in his office, and we wouldn’t be able to hear him from there. And besides,’ she added, ‘he does not whistle. Not ever.’
    ‘Well if it’s not you, and it’s not me, and it’s not Gwen, and it’s not Jack…’ He left the rest unsaid, but he gazed into the darkness at the edges of the Hub. ‘What about Ianto? Is he still out the back in his little cubbyhole?’ he asked, thinking about the interface between them and the rest of the world. The man who acted as gatekeeper and general office manager for Torchwood. ‘Does he ever whistle?’
    ‘I have never heard Ianto whistle.’
    ‘Then the wind? Tell me it’s the wind.’
    ‘It’s the wind,’ Toshiko said, but she didn’t sound convinced.
    ‘It’s not the wind,’ Owen said. ‘It’s one of my big complaints about this place – no breeze. I keep telling Jack we need air conditioning.’
    He nodded towards the dark depths of the Hub. ‘Do you think we should…’
    Toshiko nodded. ‘I think we should. Definitely.’
    Together, they moved away from the brightly lit central area of the Hub, and into the shadowy outer areas. As far as Owen was concerned it was like moving backwards in time. In the centre, the high-tech equipment and bright lights, not to mention the metal-backed waterfall that continued on down from the Basin above, gave the Hub a twenty-first-century feel despite the brickwork and the remnants of old pumping equipment. But as they moved further away, along one of the many curved tunnels that led away from the centre, the crumbling masonry and the massive, curved arches always made Owen feel like he was passing back through the twentieth century and into the bowels of the nineteenth. The architecture made him wish he was wearing a top hat and tails. Jack the Ripper should be prowling around there somewhere. Prostitutes in frilly knickers should be showing their wares on the corners.
    ‘I think we’re going the right way,’ Toshiko said, and she was right. The whistling was getting louder, like an AM radio searching for a signal.
    They turned a corner, and as they saw what lay ahead the whistling suddenly stopped.
    It was the area where they kept Torchwood’s occasional unwilling guests. A series of archways had been closed off with thick armoured glass, forming isolated cells. Riveted steel doors at the backs of the cells gave access to a connecting corridor. It was where the Torchwood team kept any visitors who really shouldn’t be allowed to wander around. Wander around the Earth, that was, not just the Hub.
    At the moment, the cells only had one inhabitant.
    It was a Weevil: a hunched, muscular shape with a brutal, deeply incised face that could pass for human in the half-light of a Cardiff alley or the corridor of a crumbling tenement. A cannibalistic life form that – no, not cannibalistic, Owen corrected himself. Weevils weren’t human. Carnivorous, yes, but not cannibalistic, although sometimes, looking at them, it was difficult not to think of them as some kind of human sub-species. Owen had often seen things that looked less human than the Weevil here coming into Casualty late on a Saturday night. This one had been captured by Jack and the team about the same time that Gwen had joined them. At first, they hadn’t been entirely sure what to do with it, but as time went on it had become first some strange kind of mascot and then just part of the furniture.
    The Weevil turned to look at them as they slowly approached the armoured glass barrier that separated them. It was crouched at one side of the cell: almost kneeling. Its head had been