Ok first of all, if you do not believe in ghosts then please don't flame me when you review this by saying stuff like 'don't be stupid they don't exist' and 'ghosts have no place in Torchwood', well, I say keep your opinions to yourself on that one, because I believe they do exist through personal experience, and I don't want to be crushed under a tonne of scientific critcism. Trust me, I get enough from my dad. And ghosts are an interesting addition to sci-fi I think. The paranormal could simply be a science we don't understand. Anyway, I was watching Most Haunted lately and this was the inspiration for this story, and I hope you enjoy! Some characters are my own, such as Ellie and Jedrek, and are also mentioned in Chapter 10 of my 'The Fine Line' Doctor Who story. Decided to make them characters instead of just random names. Would be interesting for the reviewers of that story I think. Rated T to be safe, because of the sh1t word and it's a bit spooky I think. Please tell me if it isn't.
"Whatever you do, don't go down into the lower levels after dark." She warned him, and Jack clearly remembered laughing at this point, simply because of the overly dramatic way Ellie had constructed her sentence. She had sounded like she was about to tell a spooky story at a sleepover.
"But it's a basement. It's supposed to be dark." He replied, not even taking his eyes off of the work he was doing under the slightly unnerving azure glow of a computer screen, something that had made her next words all the more chilling.
"I mean after the lights have gone out, after most of us have gone home for the night, after Torchwood officially shuts its doors until morning – don't go down there then." There had been something utterly compelling in her voice, and as his eyes had finally heaved themselves away from the dull logic of his work, he saw two very frightened ones staring back at him from across the shadowy darkness of his office.
Jack suddenly felt some part of his heart twinge with realisation – she was being dead serious. Silence ensued for several seconds as he watched her sitting on the edge of that hard and uncomfortable chair that he was always swearing he would someday throw out, her face so pale and gaunt against the black background that she stood out like a sore thumb.
"Where's this suddenly come from?"
"Nothing…I'm just warning you, that's all. Almost as an afterthought, she added, "I figured that you would want to know."
With that, peace had been shattered. Jedrek came stomping into the room, togged up in a thick winter coat and ready to grace the bitter night air of a freezing February.
His strong Polish accent seemed to carve through the office's chilling atmosphere like a freshly sharpened knife, jarring Jack and Ellie back into the real world.
"Security is just getting ready for the night shift, so you'll be near enough on your own until morning." He looked pointedly at Jack. "Sorry about that sir, I would have put on extra patrols in your area but-"
"-Not enough staff?" Jack gave a dry laugh. "Yeah, the Executive and his cutbacks, eh? Next he'll be putting us on rations. Still, it doesn't matter. I'll be fine. You two go home and…do whatever it is you do…"
Ellie had suddenly brightened up, her face returning to its usual rosy complexion as she took Jedrek's proffered hand and left the room, quickly turning her head at the last possible second to flash him a brilliant smile.
Jack couldn't help but return those, no matter how bad he was feeling, but tonight had been different. Almost as soon as she was out of sight, his tense smile had gone. He listened carefully as he heard their echoing footsteps and the hushed murmurs of their casual chatter grow more and more distant, until he was left with nothing except the cold, empty space that was Torchwood 3 at night. The silence was deafening, and Jack wouldn't have been surprised to hear the mysterious scraping of a chair being pulled across a concrete floor, or even the ghostly slam of a once open door…
…. so how he found himself throwing on a jacket and arming himself with a torch to tackle the many stairs down to the basement, he didn't know. If only Ellie had told him what was down here, what had seemingly frightened her so much. Maybe then he wouldn't be physically shaking as he clapped eyes on the pitch-blackness that lay beyond the basement's ancient, rotting doors. He hovered in front of them restlessly for at least a minute, shining the bright white light of his torch through one of the dusty windowpanes, and watching carefully as the shadows of the many stark, metal beams played across the cold concrete floor behind them. Down here, there was nowhere for anyone to hide. The basement was disused and empty – a relic to Torchwood's brutal and secretive past. Most of that was over now. The secret underground chambers were clearly marked out with a modern, glitzy glass building on the surface, and nowadays they seemed to deal with more illegal alien immigrants than infinite Dalek invasions.
Jack was mostly glad. There was no need to bring horrors and misfortune upon an already tested and tried human race, all for sake of something different to break the dull monotony of everyday life. He just sometimes wondered whether he would spend his entire existence here, watching as the world grew and changed…or crashed and burned. With one final sum of courage, Jack pushed against the slightly stiff door, wincing as it gave three terrible groans before swinging open wide enough for him to get through. The cold, musty air of the basement hit him immediately in the in the face, and not for the first time, Jack felt his legs grow weak as he treaded over the thick blanket of dust carpeted across the ground.
He tried to forget the look of mortified terror on Ellie's face – how haunted her gaze was when she told him about this place, because he felt that same face creep slowly onto his. Every trick of the light, every shadow that seemed to inexplicably move built up the anxiety in his mind, until he could hear the blood pumping wildly through his ears and feel the trickling beads of sweat on his forehead turn as icy cold as the frosty air in the room. It seemed to swirl around him like an invisible, freezing fog, leaving his skin tingling as if something ghostly had breezed past him in its chilled wake. In particular, the word 'ghostly' echoed in his head, and suddenly he felt his stomach churn at the mere idea of it.
Fifty years ago, they had proven the existence of a 'paranormal force' that resided in the universe, and Jack himself had been brought up with the knowledge dished out at school that there was definitely something left behind after a person or a creature had died – usually the echo of the emotions they had carried with them or the sheer trauma of dying in a horrific way. That was why battlefields, crash sites and the places where people had been murdered were so active. But there were also things that the paranormal experts couldn't explain, even in the 51st century. There were things that were simply left alone, because no one dared to explore them. 99.9% of activity, be it poltergeist or the simple 'bad feeling' that people got when they walked into a room, could be explained with an investigation. It was just that 0.1% that scared the shit out of everybody, that couldn't be explained by the most advanced sciences, and that left you with a morbid fear of ever encountering it again.
As Jack stood there, his mind running away with itself in the dark, he heard a noise that made his heart leap up his throat with fright. It was a pitiful whimper, but as he listened more closely to the constant whining, he recognised it. Spinning on his heel and pointing the torch at the doorway, he picked out the trembling figure of a cowering German Shepherd Dog, whose head was peering around the edge of the door at him. A German Shepherd – the most fearless dog breed in the world reduced to a quivering wreck at the sight of a dark basement.
"Ben!" Jack hissed, his voice lost through a mixture of relief and fear. Ben was Ellie's dog – only a year old and barely out of puppy-hood, who Jack thought had gone on home with her, but it seemed that she had made him stay behind, probably just to keep him company whilst Torchwood was dead for the night. But why he had followed him down here, Jack didn't have a clue. Maybe he had been down here with Ellie before? Maybe, despite being absolutely terrified, he still felt a sense of duty to protect him from whatever it was living in the inky darkness that engulfed the place?
Slowly and bravely, Ben trod forwards, making sure to stay within the torch's reassuring beam of light. He still whimpered, his eyes blinking as he squinted into the shadows, looking past Jack and the monstrous metal beams as if expecting something to leap out at them. Suddenly, a light growl rumbled in his throat, and his keen brown eyes fixated on a spot behind Jack. A dog, he thought as he nervously turned to take a look, the perfect creatures to alert you to something you can't see. But Jack did see. Flitting randomly through the darkness like a gathering of strange and alien creatures were several silver flashes of light, floating and curving through the air before disappearing completely. He recognised them, and the name practically rolled off of his tongue.
Orbs. Spiritual energy. And this one must have been strong because he'd read somewhere that they were rarely seen with the naked eye. Ben rushed to his side, so scared by whatever it was that his cold, wet nose was pressed against Jack's right hand as if he was seeking reassurance. Jack offered nothing but a pat on his muzzle as he reached into his trouser pocket to fish out a small, black camera that was no bigger or thicker than the face of a watch. He aimed it right at the blackness ahead of him, at the spiralling orbs, before taking a single, harmless picture.
That was the exact moment that his ears rang with pain, his heart skipped a thousand beats in a fraction of a second, and he felt himself automatically turn to run for the door as the primal instincts kicked in – vision blurring and his body burning with the massive wave of adrenaline that surged through him. There had been a scream, no, more like a screech that had sounded so twisted, evil, and close to where he was standing that that he didn't even have a moment to think about running away – he just did it, suddenly more terrified than he had ever been in his life. More terrified than facing down the Daleks on Satellite 5. More terrified than coping with immortality. Even more terrified than realising he was stuck in 1859 – and had a long, long wait until he could find the Doctor.
Those things paled in comparison to this. This was something else. The scream had gone by the time he had reached the door, Ben already well ahead of him and scrabbling up the stairs, but it echoed in his head, still rattling about in there like some kind of ghastly bell. He just kept running, not once daring to look behind him in case he saw it following him back to his office – the one place that felt like sanctuary…
…he got there about three minutes later, wide-eyed, breathless and in a state of complete shock. He was slumped in his chair, Ben whimpering at his feet under the desk, still feeling on edge as his restless eyes scanned the room, looking feverishly for any more orbs. Not that he actually wanted to see any. It was the case that if he did, he would be ready. For what, only made him feel worse. Every little creak of the old pipe work or burst of rowdy laughter from the distant guards made him jump. How could they have not heard it? It was so loud… The camera he had taken the picture with lay on the desk before him, tempting him every time he stole a glance at it to take a look at what was stored on its hard drive. As the terror died down curiosity eventually got the better of him, like it always did, and he found himself reaching out to connect the gadget to his laptop. A few seconds passed in silence. It connected, and the pictures of happy, distant events scrolled past on the screen, some dating as far back as two or three years that he'd never backed up on his computer. Stupid really. If anything happened to these precious images then they would be lost forever, and in thousands of year's time they would soon become a remote and hazy memory in his mind, and in another couple of thousand, they would turn into nothing. A black void in his mind somewhere, where ghosts and bleak Welsh landscapes roamed, completely alone.
Then he saw it, the last picture in the sequence of events, and he felt a shiver run down his spine. His head swam, and for a fleeting moment he had to avert his eyes. Not even zoomed in, he could see a twisted face that shone a terrible white and blood red in the consuming darkness, swirling like smoke about the picture with the flecks of orbs surrounding it. Jack felt sick. The creature, or whatever it was, was looking right at him, its mouth wide open in a terrible warped way, screaming at his presence. And he had actually been in there with it, treading in its dark domain.
Now he felt sorry for Ellie, understood the fear that had been in her voice and spread across face when she had told him, and knew the reason why she always hesitated when it came to going down into the basements. The others had laughed at her for that. They always did, and for a moment he used to also laugh along with them at the fact that a woman who opted to hunt down dangerous alien criminals on the streets, and who wasn't a stranger to the violence that often came with it, would shy away from the dark – but no more. He understood now, and just knowing that he was probably right above that thing – that noise – made Jack's stomach turn and his long, long night all the less tolerable.
So he sat there in constant fear until morning, listening to the brutality of Torchwood's past.