Sarah Pinborough - Into the Silence

The window was smashed, blown inwards with such force that some parts of it had sliced all the way through the smart-looking brunette who lay twisted and wrecked on the carpet. Her pale and manicured hand was separated from her wrist and a large fragment of thick glass was embedded just below her cheekbone, standing upwards and reflecting the vacant stare from her glassy eyes. Gwen didn't even think about trying to get closer and checking for a pulse. She didn't need anything but her eyes to tell her the boy's mother was very dead. Her blood was everywhere, a large, growing pool under her body, and huge splatters across the walls of the small room where her arteries must have severed as her heart was still beating, pumping the crimson fluid out to stick to every surface it touched.

Gwen looked at the small boy sitting cross-legged on the floor. His mother's blood had tarnished his straw-blond hair and a thin, shiny streak trickled down his cheek, but his smooth face remained impassive. He was singing, softly but perfectly, despite his dead mother lying so close by, and despite the awful creature that crouched in front of him, one hand extended, one thick finger touching his slim, small throat.

'He sings all the time.' The nurse had crept up alongside her. She stared at the devastation, the horror of it echoing in her soft whisper. 'He sings to keep the world out.' Gwen felt the woman's warmth close to her own and couldn't bear to move her back.

Heavy boots thumped out an urgent rhythm on the clinically hard-wearing carpet, and Gwen looked up to see Jack and Cutler running towards her. She raised a hand, turning her gaze back to the boy and the alien in the room. Instinctively, Jack slowed his pace and Cutler did the same, quietening their approach.

Silently stepping aside, Gwen let Jack see the situation for himself. His eyes would read it faster than she could explain it. Jack edged into the room, staying close to the wall, and Gwen followed him, her movements tiny, creeping an inch at a time closer to the scene.

'He's severely autistic,' she whispered to him. 'Sings all the time.'

Jack nodded. Slowly he pulled the portable prison device from his pocket. 'We need to get the kid away from him. I can't trap him when he's touching the boy. And aside from that he might slash his throat open.'

'I'm not feeling that emptiness Ianto talked about.' Gwen let Jack pull away from her. If they were going to distract the alien to get little Ryan they needed to be on different sides of the room.

'Neither am I.' Jack's voice was low. 'But then we're not used to this thing keeping people alive either.'

Gwen looked over at the woman's body on the floor. 'It didn't keep her alive.'

In the centre of the room, the alien tilted its head, the red beams of light pouring from the dark spaces in its head caressing the boy's still face. The uneven hole below opened and shut a few times and then eventually it spat out some sounds.

'The others stopped.'

The words sounded like they were being forced through water, garbled and bubbled with phlegm, and although the creature struggled to produce them their meaning was clear.

Gwen looked over at Jack. In the doorway, the nurse and Cutler appeared, blocking the exit. Jack didn't signal them back, nor did he signal to Gwen that he wanted to start any distraction manoeuvre in order to grab the boy. He frowned. Gwen knew that look. He was curious.

He stepped forward two paces and then tilted his own head.

'What do you mean the others stopped?'

The alien didn't look up from the boy, but rolled its head this way and that as if bathing in the sound.

'It called me.' The words were rough, no tone or resonance, barked out as if the sound was a crime against the creature's nature. 'So far away. The nothing brought me to the sound. It was beautiful.'

Jack moved slowly to the far side of the room, crouching down where he could see both the boy and the alien. The singing child had lifted his head, his eyes on the grotesque fractured and grey visage in front of him.

'Are you from the Silent Planet?'

The beams of red sharpened and lessened, the edges softening. 'My world has no name. There are no names. No sound. No sight. There is only yourself. For ever.'

Jack frowned. 'So why come here?' He edged an inch closer to the boy and Gwen could see the portable device in his hand. 'We must be your worst nightmare.'

The creature sighed, its mouth losing shape. 'I am…' It paused. 'I am wrong.'

'Why did you kill those people?'

There was a long moment where all Gwen could hear was the boy's singing. It was 'Pie Jesu'. It was a song she must have heard a hundred times before, but it had never moved her until now. If her heart hadn't been about to explode from tension, she thought, it might have broken with the sheer emotional quality of his voice.

'The sound. I want the sound.' The creature shook its head, and Gwen felt the air tremble with the weight of the movement. 'But the parts didn't work.' For the first time, the alien turned its attention away from the boy and towards Jack. 'When I took them and made them part of me, they wouldn't work. I couldn't make the sound. Only the words.'

For the first time, Gwen felt a wave of the awful loneliness Ianto had talked about sensing. The sheer despair and hollowness of being entirely alone.

'It's not the parts that make the sound.' Jack eased forward and was within reach of the boy. 'It's the person. Alive. We're not machines.'

The alien's hand hovered, and for a second it moved just the tiniest bit away from the boy's neck, the contact broken. Jack crouched ready to move, and Gwen prepared to take the boy from him and run.

'Look!' In the doorway, Ceri gasped out the word and pointed.

On the floor, Ryan had reached up, his small hand touching the alien's face.

Cutler cursed from the doorway, and Gwen shared his exasperation. The moment was gone. The alien was focused back on the boy again, its own hand once again touching his throat.

Ceri let out a small laugh. 'He's never done that. He's never touched

anyone

He's never even shown any indication that he knows anyone else exists!' Clapping her hands together, she held them to her face with joy, as if there were no dead woman on the carpet and no alien seated in the middle of the room. Gwen stared at her and then looked over to Jack. He watched the boy and the alien for a long time and then slid the prison device back into the hidden pocket of his jacket before backing away.

'Jack?' Gwen frowned. What the hell was he doing?

Jack stood up. 'He's never done anything like this before?'

The nurse shook her head. 'Never. He just sings. Has done since he could speak. It keeps the world out.'

'What are you thinking, Jack?' Gwen tapped her foot. They needed to save the boy before this thing disappeared on them again.

He didn't look at Gwen, fascinated instead by the boy's hands on the alien's face. 'I'm thinking that these two are made for each other.'

'What?'

'It makes perfect sense. It will make them happier.'

'I'm out in the cold here, Harkness,' Cutler said from the doorway. 'Although this is Torchwood, so I don't know why I should expect any different.'

Jack looked from the alien to the boy and back again.

'Jack?' Gwen growled. It was one thing Cutler being out of the loop, but she was one of the team. And it didn't help that she had Ianto in her ear pushing to know what was going on.

'They need to become one. Look at them.' Jack's face carried a weight of seriousness that Gwen had only seen rarely, and always when he was struggling with a decision that went against all he believed about the sanctity of humanity. Gwen felt her own frustration ebbing away. Looking to the door, she saw Ceri was nodding.