Spook_me 2020 - Haunted - Chapter 18

[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.

Jack's eyes opened onto darkness. It took him a moment to remember where he was, slumped on the floor by the kitchen door. He couldn't be sure if he'd been out of it for a few minutes or a few hours, but that chill that had gripped him outside, clouding his thoughts and stiffening his limbs had finally abated. Warmth flooded back into them, limbering them up and his strength felt renewed. Whatever had been outside seemingly couldn't touch him in here.

His eyes readjusted in the unlit kitchen as he got his feet under him. He flicked a switch on the wall but the lights didn't come on. He might have rolled his eyes at the power being off if it weren't so obviously connected to everything that was going on in this house. Any thoughts of hoodlums being the explanation for it had fled from his mind. Humans couldn't make the weather suddenly drop twenty degrees. The problem was, Jack didn't know of anything that could. Not like what he'd experienced.

He pulled the torch out of his coat and switched it on, letting the beam of light play across the long wooden bench, the ancient stove and the uncovered brickwork. The tap over the sink was dripping with a heavy plop, plop sound on the metal. He walked over to it and felt the droplets on his fingertips, ice cold like everything else. He turned it off tightly, unsettled by the sound. He much preferred the silence. Everything else seemed to be just how they'd left it, their meager supplies in a bag on the bench, dishes washed and put away. Only the cellar door hung open. He pointed his torchlight down the stairs but the darkness ate it up within a few feet. He shook his head, trying to dispel his paranoia and pulled the door tightly shut. He turned the heavy key in the lock for good measure. One less place he had to worry about.

Stepping out into the foyer, Jack called out to Gwen and Ianto as he did a quick reconnaissance of the rooms on the ground floor. No one responded and that in itself worried Jack. The house was large but it was also open and sounds reverberated around it with ease. As much as he wanted to dash straight upstairs, he stopped in the sitting room first. He was anxious to know what their equipment had to say. There must have been something recorded by now that would tell him what they might be dealing with here.

The sitting room was bereft of any signs that Gwen or Ianto had returned here. The lamps were off and the fire cast only the faintest orange glow over the room. Their phones and laptops lay where they'd been and the batteries on both computers were mysteriously depleted. Any data they'd collected was now on a Torchwood server miles away with no other way to access it. Jack flipped open his vortex manipulator to see what it could tell him, but it was equally silent on the matter. What the hell was going on around here?

He wasted no more time, crossing the foyer and taking the steps two at a time, all the while calling out for his two teammates. He drew his webley and held the torch under it, ready for anything as he took long strides along the landing. He looked out the large windows as he proceeded down towards the east wing of the house. There were no lights on out there, no ghostly figures hovering over the graves. If he hadn't been so sure of himself, he might have said he'd imagined them, but no. They'd been in the house, peering from the windows, and then in the grounds all around him. But where were they now, and what did they want?

‘Gwen! Ianto!’ He yelled their names, not caring who heard him. He wouldn't be afraid. He let his torch search every corner, behind every piece of furniture, every last inch of every room. His concern grew heavier as he moved from one end of the house to the other, finding no trace of either of them. They couldn't have just disappeared into thin air.

A slight breeze rippled across his face as he headed back towards the west wing. He followed it into the master bedroom where at last he saw signs that someone had been there. Across the room one of the two large windows had been broken, and the curtains ripped from their fastenings, now dangling out through the broken glass in a tattered mess that fluttered with the breeze.

He leaned over, careful not to place his hands on any broken shards. It had definitely been broken from the inside. Something or someone had tried to escape.

‘Hello! Is anyone down there?’ Jack yelled out the broken window. Down below on the flagstones he could see a few torn strips of curtain but nothing else. He prayed that whoever it was, they hadn't suffered from that same freezing temperature. If they had, surely they wouldn't have made it far. He should be able to see them from this vantage point.

He left the bedroom to wrap up his search of the western side of the house. There were more signs of disturbance in the hall. Things knocked over or thrown that now cluttered the dark space attempting to trip him up. When he reached the end of the hall, the sight of the bathroom stopped his heart for a second. The floor was covered in blood, lying in a huge pool. Bloody handprints marked the edge of the bathtub. There was so much of it. Enough to mark the spot where the body it had belonged to should have been. No one should have survived losing that much blood.

He traced its movements across the floor with his torchlight. There was a patch indicating some kind of struggle and then his light found a bloody footprint. It was impossible to tell if it belonged to a man or a woman. It was too indistinct, but where he found one, he found a second, then a third. They were leading out of the bathroom and into the hall. Whoever they belonged to, murderer or victim, was still alive. The more he shone his light over the floor and the walls, the more bloodied marks he found. He followed them with a sense of urgency, finding them more easily now that he knew to look for them until the last of them stopped at the top of the stairs and then there were no more. They just stopped.

Jack flew back down the stairs, certain that there must be more signs he'd missed. Whoever they belonged to, he'd find them.

As he reached the second to last step, he felt a cold sensation wash over him, like someone had walked over his grave. He took the final step and then blinked in confusion. The foyer wasn't there. When he looked around him he was somehow back upstairs, in the study of all places it seemed. A red light blinked on a motion camera Gwen had set up, acknowledging his presence and recording it for posterity.

He stepped out of the room, looking left and right along the hall. There was no mistaking where he was. The question was how had he gotten here? He hadn't just imagined walking down the stairs. You couldn't take a wrong turn and end up somewhere else.

He walked back down the hall, around the corner and onto the landing. He looked down over the railing at the darkened foyer and the spot at the bottom of the stairs where he'd been just moments ago. Everything looked normal.

He crossed the landing and the hairs on the back of his neck felt like they were standing on end as he paused at the top of the stairs. He descended them again, shining his torch carefully left and right along them, looking for anything out of place. He reached the bottom and stepped off. And found himself in the spare bedroom, facing the windows that looked out over the back of the house.

He paced quickly out of the room, across the landing and down the stairs. He stopped just before he reached that final step and flipped open his vortex manipulator, logging his exact four dimensional position. He stepped over the threshold and nearly tripped as a large overturned marble bust caught his ankle. He'd seen it before, in the hallway with the bloody footprints.

He checked his wrist strap again, confirming his suspicions. Time had slowed almost imperceptibly, but not stopped. The time between his leaving the bedroom and reaching the bottom of the stairs was almost real time, but it was his position in space that changed. Somehow he'd gone from one part of space time to another without any of the technology that made such things possible. He knew what it was to travel through warped space, and the feeling of it on the atoms in his body as they reconstituted themselves in precisely the same configuration. This was different. Like he was being transported to a moment just milliseconds before he'd stepped over that invisible line. That shouldn't be possible. There wasn't a technology anywhere that could do that. He knew that better than anyone. Could Gwen and Ianto have stepped into the same space anomaly and ended up somewhere else?

He gave it one more try, walking towards the mysterious tear in space at a much more confident pace. He found himself back at the top of the stairs. He descended right to the bottom and switched his torch back on, aiming it through the space he'd just tried to step through. The sharp beam of light crossed the gap and bounced off the huge mirror on the opposite side of the wall, filling the foyer with its reflected light. ‘Okay, so the light can go through it, but I can't.’

Another chill ran down his spine as he felt the eyes of every portrait on the walls from the foyer staring straight at him. Something wanted to keep him here. He just didn't know why.

Next chapter...