Spook_me 2020 - Haunted - Chapter 3

[m_findlow]

Title: Haunted
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Gwen, Ianto, OCs
Author: m_findlow
Rating: M
Length: 50,847 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for spook_me 2020 Prompt - Ghost
Summary: The team investigate rumours of a haunted house in rural Wales.

Ianto had a cramp in his ankle and a need to use the bathroom, but resisted the urge to say “are we there yet?”. Jack was clearly enjoying this little adventure out into the country so he didn't want to be the official wet blanket on their trip. Plus, how often did they really get out past the city limits? Most days Ianto was lucky if he got past the tourist office. And even then, it usually wasn't a pleasant experience.

It was just a house, he told himself. A nice old house out in the beautiful Welsh countryside. Jack was right. There were no such things as ghosts. All his years and all the things he'd seen had led him to hold some very strong beliefs about what could and couldn't exist in the universe. Paranormal stuff just wasn't part of the equation. There were no mummies, no zombies - except for the kind that were brought to life by the overactive imagination of a teenager in an alien induced coma - and definitely no ghosts.

‘They could be projections from the past,’ he blurted out, forgetting that he'd been having a conversation with himself and hadn't let the others join in yet.

‘What?’ Gwen asked, her train of thought interrupted by his musings.

‘Like that time with Tommy Brockless,’ he explained. ‘Bits of the past seeping through into the future.’ It wasn't like him to speculate on things he hadn't yet seen but he wanted to discount the supernatural out of hand by putting forth some other explanation as to why people might think they imagined the ghost of a dead man.

Jack nodded thoughtfully. ‘It could be. Only we don't have any rift keys to send back through time to close up a gap like that.’

‘Okay… so let's hope it's not that then,’ Ianto said, falling back silent. Come up with a problem you can fix next time, he told himself. Mushrooms. Maybe they all ate the local mushrooms. Note to self, if you see mushrooms, don't eat them.

Jack fumbled with a map in his lap as he rounded the bend in the road, trying to refold it to a different section.

‘We do have a satnav, Jack,’ Ianto reminded him.

‘I tried that this morning. It had absolutely no idea where to go so I'm resorting to good old fashioned paper maps.’ He flapped it around again across the steering wheel until Ianto snatched it away, folding it neatly back into its sixteen rectangle format and searching vainly for a tiny spec marked Abercrafen, which didn't even register on the map's index. He finally located it after ten minutes of intense searching, thinking he was going to have to retrieve a magnifying glass from the glovebox to find it. ‘Somewhere in the next seven miles is a tiny Y junction at which point I suggest you veer left. And perhaps slow down so we don't miss it and end up in Conwy.’

‘See? Who needs a satnav when I've got you?’

Ianto patiently refolded the map into a more manageable shape, now that he had their route marked out. ‘Perhaps it wasn't that the house's occupants left and never came back but simply that they could never find the place again.’

Gwen heaved a sigh. ‘Don't suppose we know where any of them are now so we could ask them what they saw, either.’

‘I don't think they'd be all that reliable, Gwen,’ Jack said, setting his focus back on the road, looking for the turnoff. He slowed the SUV right down as something poked out between thickets of blackberries. ‘Is that it?’ he asked, spying a narrow gravel road almost completely hidden from view.

Ianto consulted the map. ‘Nothing else for another ten miles at least so I guess that must be it.’ They could have at least had a sign, he thought, or maybe the people who lived there didn't want visitors.

‘He said it was right at the end of the road,’ Jack said, so I guess we just keep driving. ‘We either find it, or we end up in someone's paddock.’

There were a few rusted farm gates along the winding road that Ianto assumed must belong to the locals, wending their way down to cosy little cottages nestled on wide acreage. The road however grew narrower, more bumpy and even more winding, and deep down he knew that they'd crossed some invisible threshold between public access and private property.

‘There she is,’ Jack announced, as a drab stone house emerged from between the trees that surrounded it. It was just like the picture on the website, square rough hewn stone, stoic and plain, as Jack pulled the SUV up right out by the front. There were no English gardens or box hedges to welcome you to the door, just a scruffy, overgrown collection of weeds and shrubbery plants that had gone to seed and taken over.

‘A bit more run down looking than the photos,’ Ianto remarked. ‘Shabby chic?’

‘I doubt they found time for gardening, those people who moved in and then moved straight back out,’ Gwen said, leaning her head sideways against the window to look up at the building rather than out across the verge gone to pot.

Jack didn't wait for them to make further comment. He was out of the SUV in a flash, making long strides around the front of the house and turning right at the corner.

Gwen slammed shut her own door as they exited and frowned in the direction of where they'd last seen Jack before he'd disappeared around the corner. ‘Where's he off?’

Ianto gave her a shrug and followed after Jack.

The side of the house was just as shabby with what counted for a garden as the trees threatened to encroach on the space. There were rough timber beams that warped in places that seemed to mark out garden beds with a few straggling potatoes and carrots still clinging to life in them. A flat section of dirt marked out a path between that led from there to a small structure jutting out from the side of the house. A creak was heard as Jack pulled open the rickety wooden door and stood half in the doorway. The room was small and dirty, full of rusted yet sharp looking tools, wire baskets containing small chocks of wood and lumps of dark black brown rock which he supposed must be coal. A much larger pile of wood was stacked up along the side of the coal house and the main house.

‘What are you doing?’ Ianto asked, catching up with him and seeing Jack stretched, like he was hanging from the top of the doorway by his fingertips.

‘Trying to find the key,' he said, still running his hands along the inside of the doorframe. ‘It's where I got told to find it. Ow! Splinter!’

Ianto shook his head. ‘Couldn't just leave it under the gnome like everyone else.’

Jack chuckled. ‘Where's the fun in that? I just…’ He gingerly patted along the edges again, slower and more thorough this time, just as Ianto might have suggested he do in the first place to avoid impaling his hand on a large wood splinter. ‘Ah ha!’ He held up a large brass key in a ring with a smaller regular shaped key.

Gwen raised an eyebrow. ‘Two keys?’

Jack beamed as he pulled free the splinter that had lodged in his middle finger, tossing it aside. ‘One for the old lock, one for the newer double deadlock. Can't have just any old person getting inside.’

Gwen peered judiciously up at the house. ‘I didn't think people in the country locked their doors.’

Ianto grimaced at the deadlock key. ‘Or maybe the locks were there to keep out whatever is around here.’

Jack waggled the keys in their faces, his face lit up like that of a child. ‘All the more reason to open her up and get inside, wouldn't you say?’

It took all of Ianto's willpower not to roll his eyes at Jack. It was precisely that kind of reverse psychology he hated.

Jack fussed first with the deadlock, which looked solid enough embedded in the thick wooden door, before slipping the large comical looking brass key into the older lock and giving it a hard turn as the lock mechanism protested against being moved. It clunked with a resounding noise of slightly rusted tumblers moving into place to admit them entrance. Jack pushed open the heavy door and stepped inside, holding it open for them.

‘Wow,’ Gwen breathed out in awe. ‘It's like something off a Downton Abbey film set.’

Ianto's own jaw locked in astonishment for a moment, taking in the foyer. ‘Okay, I take back the comments about the furniture earlier.’

The floor of the foyer was magnificently parqueted in alternating squares of cherry and ash. The lacquer was worn in places where foot traffic was high but otherwise it was in pretty good condition. It stretched as far as he could see from the front of the house to the back, where it met tall windows that let in the light from the acreage beyond. To the right was the base of a large staircase that hugged the wall and led up to a balcony mezzanine level as it encircled the back wall, diverging left and right, leading off to other rooms. It made the place seem bigger than it was, having the entire middle of the house stretch up the full two storeys. The walls were painted a rich claret and were covered in a dense patchwork of tapestries, paintings of country idylls and fox hunts and stags heads. He was convinced that it must have been the collected works of everyone who'd ever lived here. No one person could have afforded that much stuff, or if they could, why pack it all into a place out here in the middle of nowhere?

Jack leaned close enough to his ear that he could feel the warm breath ghosting across it. ‘Might someone be a little impressed?’ He nodded without speaking. ‘Gotta admit,’ Jack continued, ‘I wasn't expecting quite this. A cosy place out in the country, sure, but things would have to be pretty bad to kill yourself and leave all this behind. Which is to say nothing of the people who came after.’

Jack clapped his hands together and both he and Gwen startled at the sound as it echoed around the room, caught up in trying to take it all in. ‘Okay, kids. Let's go get our stuff unpacked. Ianto, you're with me on firewood collection duties.’

‘But…’

‘There'll be plenty of time for looking around later,’ Jack promised him. ‘For now, we need to get the boiler going. Unless of course you prefer a cold bath in the morning.’

He trundled after Jack, leaving Gwen to unload equipment from the SUV. Having to be responsible for keeping your own hot water going was probably one of the downsides to living here that he'd discounted.

Next chapter...