Guy Adams - The House That Jack Built - The House That Jack Built

'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.

'Hello, my dear,' said Alexander as the girl opened the door. 'My name is Alexander Martin, and you would be furthering the safety of the universe were you to let my friend and me use your facilities.'

The girl, about sixteen or seventeen, leaned out of the doorway and scratched at her mop of curly hair.

'Your friend would be the tit getting jiggy in the shrubbery, would he?'

Alexander swallowed with embarrassment. 'That's him.'

'Piss off.'

She was closing the door as Alexander hit her full in the face with the spray he'd used on Joe. 'Dear lord,' he sighed. 'I'm not sure I can stand both of you acting like mental outpatients, but I suppose I have little choice. What's your name, my dear?'

'Hannah Ogilvy.'

'Splendid. Well, Miss Ogilvy, are you by any chance alone in the house this evening?'

'Yeah.'

Alexander visibly slumped with relief. 'Right then. Joe!' 'Yes, boss?' Joe appeared behind his chair waving at Hannah like a five-year-old who's just been introduced to a big purple dinosaur.

Alexander looked at him for a moment and then wheeled himself into the house. 'Never mind, Joe, change of plan. Stay out here.'

'Cool!' Joe spun off into the rain, dancing and singing.

Rob suddenly felt a moment of clarity. He had been sitting very still, occasionally chewing on the head of the croquet mallet but otherwise not moving. Then it was as if something had turned on in his head. He knew it was time to step outside the cupboard and get on with the suggestions the house had put to him.

He heard the heavy boots of the American pound up the stairs above his head. Once they had passed, he reached out in the dark and opened the catch of the door, stepping into the hallway and stretching his arms, letting the muscles pop back into place after being hunched for so long.

The prissy one in the suit — the one they should have shoved back in their airing cupboard and forgotten all about — was shouting on the other side of the door. Rob grinned at the humour of it all. He loved a bit of slapstick, a bit of rough and tumble. As the door opened, he showed his happy teeth to the invader of his house. 'Hello!' he said. 'Sorry, but the house made me do this.'

He swung the mallet, but the man got his arm up in time to stop it doing any major damage. Rob was sad. It just wasn't so funny if the punchline wasn't the sound of the young man's forehead splitting open. The invader threw his weight against the door, shoving it closed. Rob roared with anger.

'Stop spoiling the joke!' he screamed. 'Stop spoiling the joke!' He hammered against the door with the mallet, sweat flicking off his vein-lined forehead with exertion until he stopped abruptly, reached into his pocket, pulled out a key and locked the door. 'Ha Ha,' he said in a flat voice. 'Two keys.' He leaned close to the wood. 'I'm going to do something bad now. Bye.'

On the third floor, Jack's body was fizzing in response to the air around him. When you had travelled in time enough to begin developing a somewhat loose attitude towards the here and now, you became sensitive to changes in the temporal fabric around you, as if the skin itself were more aware of the flow of seconds and minutes. It felt the same as when a television was left turned on in a room, its screen blank — that charge in the air, the flow of particles across the glass that radiated out and made the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

As Jack walked towards the corner of the room, he became aware of the charge increasing in the air around him. Suddenly the room changed and he found himself looking on it in better times, the wallpaper and paintwork crisp and new, no cobwebs or dust. He stopped moving and tried to feel the static in the air, holding out his hands and tickling the chronons with his fingertips. Sensing a surge to his left, he aimed for it and found himself back in the present day.

He moved onto the landing, the tingling getting stronger all the time. Things were close to falling apart, time and space becoming no more than a jumble around him. By the stairs, he felt a wave of chronons and, sticking out his arm, watched the hand disappear as it left this point of space-time and entered somewhere else. Leaning forward, he stuck his head through where he estimated the hole to be. He found himself looking down on Rob and Julia as they slept in the main bedroom, Rob snoring while Julia — eyes slowly widening in fear — looked up at Jack's face and recognised it for what it was.