Chapter Text
Tosh had been making the most of the lull in rift activity to read through a few of the books Melody had brought back. The recreational mathematics book hadn’t left her desk since she’d got it and she was about half way through. It was a fun little challenge as she needed to translate it before she could even begin the math puzzles. She’d also found the TARDIS manual very interesting, if a little densely written. Some of the diagrams had given her a myriad of ideas of how to upgrade the rift manipulator but those would take time to develop. She glanced up from her book to see Gwen slump down on the sofa.
“What’s wrong?” Tosh asked, placing her book down.
“Hmm? Oh, I was just chatting with Heather.”
“Isn’t Melody recovering?”
“Yes and no. She wakes up every two to three hours and Heather found her checking the front door was locked at four thirty this morning.”
“It’s going to take time to get out of those kinds of habits.”
“I know. I just worry. You know what she’s like, she’ll keep things to herself until she can’t cope anymore and there has to be a lot she hasn’t spoken about yet. Plus, Heather’s heading off tonight, so she can be back at work tomorrow, so she’s going to be on her own again for a week or so.”
“Why don’t you visit after work. I’m sure she’d be happy to see you.”
“I just don’t want her to think I’m being nosey.”
“If it helps, Owen’s going to check on her tomorrow night anyway.”
“Oh?”
“Technically there were a few tests he should have run the moment she got back, but he thought it might be a bit much psychologically. He can do most of them at her flat and the rest he can do when she comes back on Wednesday.”
“That’s good. I think the change of environment is difficult for her body too. She’s apparently got a cough that she’s not worried about but Heather is.”
“It makes sense. She’s spent a year in a fully atmospherically controlled environment. The air would have been filtered and adjusted perfectly for her, so coming back to the levels of pollution and allergens we’re used to has to have shocked her system.”
“At least she’ll know for sure tomorrow.” Her phone rang in her pocket. “Andy?”
Andy stood outside a small house, the cold wind biting at his face. “Hello, I might have something for you.”
“Oh?”
“Well, it might be, can’t be sure. We got a call last night about someone stalking around a womans back garden. One of the lads had a quick check around but didn’t find anything. Couple of hours later she calls again, says he’s back and tapping on the windows. Out they go again and still not a sign. Then, around five in the morning she calls again and says he’s smashed the kitchen window. I head out and she’s pretty shaken. Understandable. I can’t find what was used to smash the window so I go out and look for footprints. I don’t know what they were wearing but there are scratches on the slabs. Like they were wearing ice skates or something.”
“Bit weird but not our kind of thing.”
“It gets stranger. While I was out there I heard her scream so I ran back in and there was this creature? It looked like it was made of bone. It wasn’t just a skeleton, it had some kind of body underneath but it definitely didn’t look human. It threw itself out of the living room window when it saw me and ran off faster than I could follow. She’s convinced it was a man in a costume but that was not a costume.”
“Ok, definitely more our kind of thing. Are you still at the house?”
“Yea. Miss Wentworth’s gone to her mothers, but I can give you her details if you want to talk to her.”
“Right. Send me the address and I’ll meet you there.”
“Will do. See you soon.”
Owen tilted his head, looking between one side of a wall and then the other, trying to work out if the figure that was simultaneously on both sides had become part of the structure or been sliced in half. It looked like he’d become a part of the wall. In fact, that’s what the gallerys morning manager had thought when she’d first opened the building. She thought it was a slightly morbid new piece she hadn’t been told about, that was until she’d spoken to the evening manager from the day before.
He took a closer look at where the mans skin ended and where the wall began, finding them perfectly merged.
“How bad is it?” Asked Jack.
“I don’t think we can just pull him out of the wall.”
“Good thing it’s just plasterboard.”
He looked over his shoulder to see Jack holding up an electric saw. “He’s going to be a bitch to bag up.”
“Probably. Do you want to cut up the wall or go and get the cctv?”
“I’ll let you do the heavy lifting.”
“Don’t take too long.”
“As long as you don’t plan to take down the whole wall, I’ll be back before you’re done.” The doctor walked away before the sound of the saw filled the room. He was thankful that the security office was marked on the signs because he really didn’t feel like searching the whole building. The manager was sat in front of the monitor, tapping the mouse nervously.
“I’m going to need to see that.” He said, making her jump.
“Oh, yes sorry. I’m not sure what I’m even looking at.”
“Yea, a man stuck in a wall can be confusing.”
She gestured for him to look at the screen. “They walked through the front doors… Like through them. They weren’t opened. They were like ghosts.”
“Let me see.” He leaned on the table and watched the monitor as she rewound the footage from the night before. Two figures, dressed all in black with large backpacks on, seemed to walk right through the locked front doors. As they did they looked to be holding hands. Or something between them anyway. It was hard to tell on the small screen. The two made their way through the building, avoiding the sensors that would trigger the alarm system, heading up to the admin office. They began trying to open the safe.
“They didn’t get anything from there. It was emptied last night when we closed.”
“Looks like they didn’t know that.”
The two figures looked like they were arguing quietly after one phased through the safe door and saw it was empty. After a moment they looked like they were planning to cut their losses and just leave, carefully stepping around more of the sensors. Flashing lights through one of the windows spooked them and they made a run for it, one much faster than the other. The man, who was now merged with the wall, had lost his grip on whatever they had held between them and barely had time to gasp his last breath before he fell limp. His partner in crime barely looked back before he disappeared out into the night.
The manager looked up at Owen, a kind of desperation in her eyes as she tried to make sense of her reality. “How… How did any of that happen?”
“You know about as much as I do.” It wasn’t strictly true. He knew that there were certain pieces of technology that could have the same effect, but he had no idea which one just by watching the footage. What he did know was being suddenly merged with a wall looked like a painful way to go out. “Are you still using tapes or do you have cloud storage?”
“Cloud, why?”
“I’m going to need a copy of that footage.”
“Oh, yes, right. Sorry.” She dug through the office draws for a blank CD before Owen handed her a flash drive. “Thanks. Sorry, I’m just a bit frazzled.”
“No problem.” He actually preferred it when they didn’t have their own supplies, because it saved Tosh a job later. The flash drive would leave a virus on the computer that would prevent it being copied or transferred, then delete it twenty four hours later. No evidence left behind.
“No trace of rift activity.” Tosh said, holding a scanner up to where miss Wentworths window had been broken.
Andy crossed his arms. “So it was a man in a costume?”
“Not necessarily. It just means it didn’t travel directly through the rift within the last week. It was unlikely to have stayed hidden that long as it had such an aggressive entrance.”
“Oh, I see. Could still be alien then.”
“Yes, but we’d need more evidence to be sure.”
“You said this thing spent hours knocking on the windows?” Gwen asked from the kitchen.
He walked over to the doorway. “Yep. Started out creeping around the garden.”
“Sounds like it was trying to get her attention.”
“Or scare the living daylights out of her.”
“If it just wanted to scare her it wouldn’t have been that quiet for so long. When you ran in was it attacking her?”
“Not exactly. It was looming over her, holding her arms. Didn’t even look like it was holding on that hard.”
Tosh looked up from her scanner. “Maybe it was trying to talk?”
“It wasn’t doing a very good job of it but I suppose so. It was hard to hear over the screaming.”
“Do you have your gloves?” Asked Gwen as she rifled through the cutlery draw, much to his confusion.
“Um, yea, but what are you doing?”
“Testing a theory.”
He tentatively held out his gloves.
“You said it was tapping and scratching at the windows, right?”
“Yes.”
She began placing teaspoons in each of the fingers before slipping one of the gloves on. “When we got here I saw scratches around the front door handle, and there are some on the back door as well.”
“And that means spoon gloves?”
She sighed and walked over to the door and used her gloved hand to try and turn the doorknob, the spoons holding her fingers straight so they gave her little grip and would have left scratches in the wood if she’d dug them in harder. “It means whatever it was tried to use the doorknob to let itself in. Sounds pretty sentient.” She pulled off the glove and took out the spoons before handing it back to him. “So, it was humanoid and trying to communicate with the woman who lives here, but ran away when it saw you.”
“Yea, you’re doing that thing again where you talk but don’t actually make any point.”
“Beings that are armoured up to the gills don’t usually run away just because they’re outnumbered. I don’t think it was trying to hurt her, or scare her for that matter.”
“So why run away from me?”
“It recognised you as police.”
“Eh? You’re telling me aliens recognise a uniform.”
“Some do, but that’s not my point. I think it’s been here for a while and knows how our world works.”
“Ok, so it’s gone native, what does that mean?”
“It means we can try and talk to it if we can find it, and I don’t think it’ll be a danger to the public.”
“If it’s not a danger then why did it break in here?”
“I’ll need to talk to miss Wentworth before I can say much about that.”