Peter Anghelides - Another Life

The blonde woman didn’t need any more encouragement. She struggled up out of the armchair, pulled her coat around herself and fled through the hallway and out of the apartment. The sound of her flat heels trip-tripping their way down the concrete stairs in a flurry of noise quickly faded.

Gwen shoved the armchair savagely to one side. She ran to the socket by the TV to ensure it was switched on. She seized the two-bar fire, flicked it on, and raced back towards the bathroom. The extension lead snaked and coiled behind her. For a second she thought it was going to tangle around the coffee table, but she freed it with a sharp tug that caused the dirty crockery to clatter onto the carpet.

Jack was now lying lengthways on the soaked bathroom floor, parallel to the bath. His right arm was almost engulfed by the tentacle. Worse still, the second nearest limb was starting to slide out of the bath towards his leg.

Gwen could feel the heat from the two-bar fire on her face now. She clambered up onto the toilet seat, hefted the fire above her head, and lobbed it over Jack and into the centre of the bath.

The fire looped overhead, snaking its electrical lead behind it. It splashed into the water.

Immediately the room was illuminated by a huge flash. Blue-white sparks arced over the surface of the water. The repellent creature didn’t make a sound, but its three unattached limbs flailed and thrashed. They slapped repeatedly against the wall tiles, and cracked the shower screen from top to bottom. Water slopped over the edge of the bath and onto the linoleum.

The tentacle that had wound its way around Jack’s arm whipped away with a slurping sound as the suckers detached themselves. Jack sat up abruptly. ‘Don’t touch the water!’ Gwen yelled at him, and he held his hands high up above his head in acknowledgement. He was able to shuffle out of the room and into the living area.

After a few seconds, the blue sparks disappeared and the starfish ceased its thrashing motion. The limbs slid lifelessly down the wall, and the entire creature slid under what remained of the water in the bath.

‘Power’s off,’ Jack shouted from the other room.

Gwen slumped in relief. She stepped down from the toilet, and picked her way carefully out of the drenched bathroom.

‘What the hell is it?’ she asked him.

His expression confirmed that he was as baffled as her. ‘Sure looked like the daddy of whatever Wildman puked, didn’t it? And what was the deal with that aftershave?’

‘You’re right,’ confessed Gwen, ‘it would have taken too long to break its hold with that.’

‘No, I mean who wears that crap? It smells disgusting. Wildman is a sad single guy. Well, hel-lo. He’d get luckier if he wiped his face with his haemorrhoidal towelettes. Ow!’ Jack started shrugging his greatcoat off. ‘Ow! Ow!’

He continued to struggle with the coat. Once he had shucked it onto the floor, he hurried back into the bathroom, still yelling in pain. He pulled off his sleeveless jacket, and slipped his braces off his shoulders so that they hung to either side of him. He wrenched his shirt off so quickly and violently that its buttons pinged off across the room. Jack plunged his right arm into the washbasin, and spun the top of the cold tap around with his left hand. He sluiced down his right arm, rubbing at his flesh with a towel that he’d seized from the nearby rail.

Gwen picked up the blue cotton shirt from where Jack had thrown it. ‘Careful,’ he warned her. ‘The thing was digesting it.’ Jack finished patting at his skin with the towel. He snatched a second one from the rail, soaked it in fresh water, and carefully wound it around his forearm. Then he turned to face Gwen.

‘God,’ she said. ‘That really is a horrible smell.’

‘Told ya,’ said Jack. ‘The great smell of Lonely Bachelor for five dollars a pint.’

‘Not the aftershave,’ she smiled. ‘That thing in the bath.’

In the aftermath of her rescue, Gwen had not looked again at the creature. Now she could see that the thing had shrivelled up in the bath. It looked like a grey, pulpy mass, slowly disintegrating and clouding the water. There were four plastic plant pots floating at one end of the bath, and under the shower were three more empty tins of dog food and a can opener. A small metal watering can was propped at the other end of the bath, as though abandoned.

‘I usually like fried fish,’ sniffed Jack from behind her. The room still stank of burning flesh. ‘Calamari, mmm.’

‘I thought that was octopus,’ Gwen said. ‘Or maybe squid?’

‘Get me some vinegar and a fork. We can do a taste test.’

‘No thanks,’ replied Gwen. She pointed into the bath. In the scum forming on the water’s surface she could make out silver slivers of plant spikes. ‘No point in Betty feeding his plants. He was feeding them to the starfish. That and a regular diet of Pedigree Chum.’

Jack had slipped his jacket back on now, and was examining the arm of his greatcoat. ‘It was secreting digestive juices that can dissolve organic matter. It’s eaten through my sleeves, look.’ There was a large patch in the forearm of his coat and, when she checked, Gwen found a smaller matching hole in his shirt. ‘Pure cotton,” sighed Jack. ‘I’m never gonna get a replacement shirt that good.’ He winced again.

Gwen helped him unpeel the towel from around his arm. There was a raw red patch, an irregular circle about five centimetres across, oozing blood.

Jack gestured to the remnants of the bathroom cabinet scattered around their feet. ‘Reckon there’s a big enough sticking plaster somewhere?’

‘Er…’ Gwen hesitated, half-considering his request. ‘We’ve got a first aid box in the car.’

‘Nah. Give it half an hour,’ said Jack. ‘These flesh wounds sting like hell, but they heal up if I leave them uncovered. Made the mistake of putting a shirt back on over a knife wound once, and had to have the material cut out again. That was hard to explain to the nurse in triage.’

The smell of burnt flesh was less noticeable in the living room. The apartment was eerily quiet, with only the patter of rain against the window to break the silence.

‘Betty’s safely out of the way,’ observed Jack.

‘Will she go to the police, d’you think?’ pondered Gwen. ‘Or to the press?’

‘Or to the pub for a stiff drink and a chat with the locals,’ Jack suggested. ‘If you think kicking the street door down would get the curtains twitching, imagine what this will do for the neighbourhood.’ He gave a disappointed little groan as he examined the hole that now penetrated his coat sleeve. ‘Better get this place sealed until Owen can get across here and examine that… starfish corpse in situ. Let’s give the local cops a call, have them post a guy on the front door.’

Gwen made the call to the local police. Like all the Torchwood mobiles, hers had a direct line. It connected them immediately to the major crime investigation team, whether the police wanted it or not. She was impressed the way that Torchwood not only had the technology to break into the police systems, but also that it was smart enough to accommodate the hierarchy and the standard admin procedures of incident teams. There was the right balance to strike between the need to get officers involved at all and the need to avoid getting the police crawling all over something they could not properly handle.

‘OK,’ she explained to Jack, ‘they have officers on the way to stand guard. Just in case Betty gets enough courage to come back to water the plants again.’

They stepped out onto the apartment’s landing. Jack pulled the front door shut, and pushed it to ensure it was locked again. ‘Watering the plants,’ he mused as they started down the stairs. ‘How? She was there when we arrived. The watering can was in the bathroom, along with the remains of most of the plants. And she’d obviously not met the calamari when we got there.’