Spook_me 2020 - Haunted - Chapter 23

[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 gasped as air rushed into his lungs. He rolled over onto his side and sucked in great lungfuls of air as the choking sensation around his neck was finally gone, relishing the delight that some much needed oxygen brought back his sense of awareness. He felt the rush of life running through his veins more acutely than usual. Every death was different and some were always harder to come back from than others. Those where he'd fought tooth and nail until the very end were the hardest and most shocking. Sometimes coming back to life almost felt like an extension of dying, as if it were never a sure thing. He grabbed it with both hands and clung to it lest it slip away from him.

He lay curled over on his side breathing in and out deeply until he could get that simple act of living under control. There were no warm arms and soothing voice to ease his distress. There was no easy way to come to terms with that lack of comforting presence. It dropped him back into reality like cold water poured over him. Ianto… Those screams of terror. He pushed himself to his knees, feeling the worn parquetry beneath his palms. It dawned on him where he was. He'd somehow broken through whatever had been keeping him trapped. Though it had cost him, he knew it was worth it.

He got to his feet, about to head straight for the source of those terrified cries for help when something blocked his path. At first he thought he must have been still suffering from a lack of oxygen to his brain because it was dark and indistinct, blurred edges in his vision. It felt like the room was filling with a thick black smoke and then it slowly began to coalesce, forming a tall shape that was terrible to look upon. The thing was still smoke at the edges but large and humanoid with jagged curved blades that seemed to protrude all over its body. Jack felt that same bitter cold seep into his bones as the thing got closer. Its breath was putrid and reeked of death and decay as Jack held up an arm to his face.

The thing stopped just short of him, towering several feet over Jack's stature. A face began to form from within the empty blackness and the face was distinctly human.

‘Hello, Jack,’ it said.

Jack's face twisted in confusion. ‘You… How do you know my name? What do you want? Where are my friends?’

The face of the man within the cloud of black looked sad. Jack would have said it was the face of a man in his fifties - a face lined with creases borne from a hard life. Though he was all muted shades of grey and black, his beard was trim, dotted with salt and pepper but it was the eyes that grabbed Jack's attention. They were, or had been, blue, and still had light and life left in them. They burned with an intensity as they studied him.

‘You don't remember, do you?’

Jack's heart skipped a beat as he mutely shook his head.

‘You wanted to know about the man who died here, but you knew him already.’

‘Thomas Morgan?’ Jack shook his head. ‘I never knew him. I don't know who he is. No one does.’ He took a stab in the dark. ‘It's you, isn't it? You're Thomas.’

‘I wasn't always. Perhaps I never have been. But I can tell you don't remember me.’

He closed his eyes and Jack watched the way the face began to change. The lines began to fade and the skin smoothed itself out. The beard retracted back into that younger looking skin and hair on his head even began to show a little colour - a deep chocolate brown. The eyes opened again, they were bright blue, and the face at once tugged sharply on Jack's memory. It was the face of a man thirty years younger. He knew those eyes. He'd always noticed the eyes before anything else and these ones he remembered well. He could barely get the name out as his throat constricted in awe and shock. ‘Gil?’

There was a tiny flash of a smile on that youthful face at the final recognition. ‘Hello, Jack. It's been a very long time but I'm glad you're here now. Everything is going to be okay.’

Jack stuttered through his own disbelief at the thing standing before him. So many decades had passed since he'd last seen that face, and seeing it now beggared belief. ‘You can't be here,’ Jack finally said. ‘You were in prison. You killed a man.’

‘I was found at the scene of a man who had died,’ Gil clarified, his voice calm and unaffected. ‘There's a difference.’

‘That's not what the police reports said.’ He could picture the crime scene photographs like it was only yesterday. Sixteen separate stab wounds from a kitchen knife, blood everywhere, the victim lying in a huge pool of it on the bathroom floor. For years it was billeted as the most violent crime to have occurred in Cardiff. ‘You stabbed a man to death in your own house. A university professor emeritus, no less.’

‘It was self defence.’

Jack shook his head vehemently. ‘Neighbours saw you invite him inside. And you had no defensive wounds. That's murder.’

‘He was going to suspend me from the college for alleged homosexual practices!’ The ghostly face twisted sharply in anger. ‘He was going to tell the whole board. My reputation would have been destroyed.’

‘That's discrimination. We could have fought it.’

The spectre waved away Jack's protests. ‘It doesn't matter. All of that is in the past now. I didn't murder him. I don't even remember it. But I was glad he was dead, our secret preserved. I did my time for it.’

Jack swallowed down his awe. ‘They let you out?’

‘Parole. Don't think I was exonerated for mental incapacity. I had to earn it. Twenty years is a long time to serve for keeping your secrets, Jack.’

Jack scowled at the accusation. ‘It wasn't my secrets you were protecting. I was never ashamed of who I was.’

‘Neither was I until I met you.’

Jack felt his jaw clench at the hypocrisy. ‘So it's okay to be gay so long as you do it on your own?’

Gil took a step forward and Jack involuntarily took a step back to maintain the distance between them. ‘I don't want to fight with you. Please.’

Jack huffed a breath. ‘So what? You got out and moved up here to live out your days as a hermit?’

‘I bought the house under a false name.’

Jack rolled his eyes. ‘Right. Because there's loads of Thomas Morgan's but only one homicidal, highly publicised Gil Roberts.’ He scratched the back of his head whilst he considered how it was possible to be talking to a dead man embodied in this terrifying black creature. ‘The police must have known it was you when they came to investigate your suicide, assuming you did kill yourself. They would have taken fingerprints to identify the body. They must have quashed the records, or at least let the death be recorded formally, but the name on the headstone was left as a fake.’ Jack shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘I guess they didn't want people coming up here to desecrate the grave.’

‘What they do with my body is of no concern to me anymore.’

‘Why all this then? Terrifying the people who have tried to live here? Is this your way of getting back at the world? Was this to get my attention?’

‘We didn't know you would come until you had arrived.’

Jack paused over the unusual choice of words. ‘We?’

‘The house is haunted, Jack. Many things fill its halls, but only one offered me salvation. It saw who I was inside. It didn't fear me. It offered a better way to live.’

‘Death is not living. Believe me, I know.’

‘You don't understand yet, but you will.’

Next chapter...