Chapter Three of The Untold Story of Gwyneth Jackson
by carefreewritergirl
/3/
"Welcome, welcome, Gwyneth," the man that Gwyneth now knew to be Harold Saxon said carelessly. "You must have many questions...never fear, they will be answered soon enough. But first, you may be interested to meet someone you may know…would you like to see someone familiar, Gwyneth?"
Gwyneth didn't answer; her eyes still trained on the man. She still didn't know if he could be trusted.
"Come here, then."
The crowd of people parted to let Gwyneth through. She made her way to a severe-looking woman who pushed her down roughly and wrapped a blindfold around her head. Gwyneth did not struggle but let the woman secure the blindfold without protest. Mainly she felt puzzlement. Certainly blindfolds couldn't be their way of blinding captives? They had to have more advanced technology than that? Anyone who went into the most high-security areas in Torchwood were required to take a pill to temporarily impair their vision, and that way they wouldn't remember how they had gotten there. But Harold Saxon apparently felt that with a small child like herself he could afford to use old-fashioned methods. Well, she thought, gritting her teeth, she'd show him she wasn't to be underestimated.
The same severe-looking woman took her away from the large control-room. For a long time they walked through brightly-lit white linoleum hallways; Gwyneth could see them even through her cloth. It was all very inhumane and cold and she felt herself shivering involuntarily.
Every once and a while they would pass a junction between two hallways and Gwyneth would see a flash of a number and a letter with a dash between them. A-1, A-2...B-5, B-6...when they had reached C-1, the woman told her brusquely to stop. Gwyneth halted and peered painfully through the striped fabric to what looked like a mini computer set into the wall. The woman pointed a slender, pencil-like object at it and a soft buzzing filled the air. Bright blue light blinked three time from the end of the tool and Gwyneth could hear an audible click. A door slid gently open.
"Just in here," the woman said in a dull, bored voice. "You may take the blindfold off."
Gwyneth untied it easily and slipped it into her back pocket. She was standing in a plain, metal room without windows or furniture. She glanced around the room. It was quite empty.
Then she heard a faint groan.
She turned toward it, half expecting the noise to be a figment of her imagination. But it wasn't. A small shadow lay hunched in the corner, its dirty gray clothes blending into the featureless wall behind it. It was rocking back and forth, slowly, mournfully, crooning in a voice like wind through prairie grass.
A bang echoed behind her.
She whirled around, the breath catching in her chest. The woman had closed the door behind her; the door now blended seamlessly with the rest of the wall.
She thought suddenly, I'm trapped.
But the next instant she pushed the thought away. There was nothing she could do about it. Instead she walked hesitantly to where the figure lay, still murmuring tonelessly.
"I'm lonely."
The figure stopped murmuring at her words and sat absolutely still.
"I'm lonely," Gwyneth said again. She had found that if you shared a bit of yourself with someone first, they were more willing to open up to you. "I'm more intelligent than everyone I know that's my own age, and everyone I can have legitimate discussions with are all four times my age or more. And strange things are happening to me, and I don't know why."
She began to talk. She started with that day, with everything that had frustrated her, and worked backwards. Soon she was talking about memories she had half-forgotten-the smell of paint from when she had built her own ramp for her wooden cars her father had made her when she was three, making marshmallow cookies and other strange concoctions in the kitchen. Anything that came to mind, she said it, and soon forgot she was talking to anyone at all.
"There is something I need to tell you."
The urgency in the voice startled her. She saw to her astonishment that the figure had sat up and pushed his hood back, revealing a gaunt face, straggly hair, and wide, empty eyes.
Her breath caught in her chest. It hit her like a pillow in the stomach; suddenly she was gasping for breath. This man...she knew him. He worked at Torchwood. Her father and him were co workers.
"Mr. Ty-," she began.
But it was too late. The world was starting to fade around her-some sort of teleport was at work. The last thing she saw was his huge, desperate eyes and his mouth open in a silent yell of horror.
Slowly her vision focused. Her face was pressed to the cool linoleum and she could see the side of a polished black shoe. Around her was a forest of legs, constantly moving, making her feel sick. Everything was blurred and unreal.
Brisk steps echoed weirdly in her ears and someone hoisted her to her feet. Everyone and everything had gone completely silent. She was facing a gigantic screen, and on it, that loathed man, Gerald Bacon, or whoever he was.
"Did you recognize him, then?" Gerald Bacon said into the silence. "But ah, not quite as you knew him, am I right? A little bit older, perhaps?"
The whole world seemed to be vibrating. Gwyneth realized she was shaking. Shaking with fury.
"What have you done to him?" she whispered, every syllable barely distinguishable from rage. "What have you done?"
Gerald Bacon talked over her, taking no notice of her words. "I will be teaching you many lessons, Gwyneth Jackson, over the following days, and the first lesson I will teach to you today. This is it: You will obey every order I give you, trivial though it may seem to be, or he will die."
The screen flicked to an image of the bedraggled man, once again hunched in his corner. Gwyneth's skin had turned hard and unresponsive, like rock. Only her eyes were working, burning with unshed tears.
Someone took her hand roughly and led her away. Vaguely she was aware that people were moving again, going about their tasks, like nothing had happened, like an innocent man's life hadn't been threatened for no reason at all.
He might not be innocent, a voice said in Gwyneth's ear. Immediately hot revulsion rose up in herself for thinking it. No, it was Gerald Bacon who was not innocent, not Pete Tyler.
A slam echoed from behind her. Oblivious while in her thoughts, she found herself now to be in a small, boxlike room, very similar to the one she had recently left.
Strange...the air had a weird scent...was that smoke?...her eyelids were growing heavy...her hearing was muffled...she felt herself dropping, as though from a long way away, on the cold white floor…
Tony scribbled an extra sentence beneath question six to achieve the three sentences required to answer the question, then threw his pencil across the room, where it hit his blinds and punctured them, producing a long, jagged line. He surveyed it for a moment in distaste, but couldn't bring himself to feel any guilt-He was still angry at his father for his unexplained spasm at seeing Gwyneth. Wasn't she a hero in her own world? He had heard all about it, how Rose Jones had meet this man named-
Thuwump.
Tony leapt to his feet, startled from his reverie. A sound had come from downstairs, where his father was working, a sound of something falling…
Before Tony knew what he was doing he was running as fast as he possibly could, running out his bedroom, down the stairs, through the sitting room, almost falling in his haste down the downstairs steps…
He stopped at the foot of the stairs.
"Dad?" he said uncertainly.
There was no sound.
His heart missed a beat, then drummed faster, as if to make up for lost time.
He pushed his way past the heavy black drapings concealing his father's business at Torchwood, the ones his father had warned him never to pass, lest he be subjected to his anger. He barely glanced at the stuff that he had wished for so long to see-A long, thin metal tube with a glowing blue half-sphere at the end of it, some pieces of heavy metal equipment that looked like levers, a silvery metal helmet with empty eye sockets-but instead fought through the surrounding pareheralia to where he knew his father would be sitting, because whenever he called for him to come to dinner, his voice always emanated from here-
But no one was there. The chair his father always sat in lay on the floor, empty.
Gwyneth was thrust into wakefulness by an electric shock. She was distractedly trying (without much success) to comb her hair with her fingers, but before she had much time to make herself presentable, a door opened and a number of feminine-looking robots invaded her privacy.
"We will take you now through the G.A.P. Please follow us. Any resistance you make will be directly reported to Harold Saxon."
Gwyneth suppressed rolling her eyes with difficulty. No matter how technologically advanced robots were, in the end they were all the same: unable to talk more rapidly than the average 90-year-old person. "Could you please print out your commands on your hand-implanted screens?" Gwyneth asked them politely. The robots obliged, holding their palms up so Gwyneth could read the words glowing there: YOUR SIGHT WILL BE TEMPORARILY IMPAIRED SO AS TO ENSURE YOUR SAFETY.
My safety, Gwyneth thought sceptically as the nearest robot put a blindfold over her. Yeah right. Turning to the robot on her left she asked, "What does G.A.P. stand for?"
The robot held up her palm and Gwyneth read: GROWTH ACCELERATION PROCESS.
Gwyneth suddenly had a queasy sort of feeling in her stomach-a horrific image had entered her brain, that of a old, frail, hunchbacked woman with her eyes and T-shirt.
Following the robots docilely she was led into a large glass container, like a gigantic, upside-down drinking glass. She knew, because as she stretched out a quick hand her fingernails managed to scrape its smooth surface.
Without warning, there came a steady whirring. Starting out as barely a murmur, it grew and grew until it became an incessant, irritating buzz that neither changed pitch or volume. It slithered into Gwyneth's head and nested there, slowly sucking away at her thoughts. Gwyneth stood there, gritting her teeth, trying to fight against it, but it was impossible.
Gradually, a strange feeling came over her, as though every cell in her body had gone into hyperdrive. Every mitochondrien and protein and neutron were working harder than they ever had before, her pituitary gland was throbbing in her brain like a minute, nut-sized heart. She was growing-rapidly.
She could feel her body stretching, her hips widening, her chest expanding-and yet she did not feel angry, or frustrated, or interested. She did not feel anything at all. The buzzing, she realized in a detached way, was muting her feelings. It was allowing her to experience this without actually experiencing it.
The buzzing gently, almost imperceptibly, faded away. With a soft click the glass dome popped open. Gwyneth opened her eyes and gazed down at her body.
Tall. Willowy. Almost too skinny, she noted with distaste. Her long brown hair curled in soft waves down her back. She guessed she was around eighteen or nineteen years old, but she couldn't be sure.
She let her long legs carried her easily down to where a single robot waited, pointing a thin, cylinder-shaped instrument directly at the glass dome. Oh, so that was where the buzzing had come from, technologically amplified, of course.
A sudden rage filled her. Sprinting the last couple meters, she used the momentum of her downward run to throw herself onto the robot, wrenching the cylinder, buzzing tool out of its hand. Then, without thinking, she flipped the device around in her hand and pointed the blue glowing end at the robot.
Electric connections sizzled, sparked. In a moment the robot lay there still, unmoving.
Gwyneth stood, holding the cylinder device in her hand, staring at the robot blankly in shock. What had she done? What had she been thinking? In any moment, she thought, looking up wildly, Harold Saxon's people are going to be here, they're going to lock me up and-NO." An image had just surfaced in her mind, of a bent, hunched figure in a shadowy corner. They're going to kill him, they're going to kill him and it will be all my fault.
She sank to the ground, throwing the evil device as hard as she could across the room-it hit the wall and bounced harmlessly to the ground. For a moment she considered picking it up and throwing it again and again and again, throwing it until it broke into a thousand tiny pieces. But her anger had deserted her. She sobbed into her palms, her face growing wet and slimy from tears. Gradually the world grew dim around her, and she fell asleep on the cool white floor.
Tony lay in his bed staring at the ceiling while police lights throbbed through his bedroom curtains and low anxious voices talked on the floor below. It was night, but not late-usually he'd be watching his favorite television show right about now. Instead he had gone to bed early, hoping that if he fell asleep maybe the whole nightmare would go away, or at least be replaced with a less scary nightmare. But he hadn't been able to fall asleep at all, and try as he might, he couldn't wipe their faces from his mind-his father and Gwyneth. Both gone. Both vanished at the same time. It couldn't be a coincidence, could it?
Tony rolled over on his side and gazed out the window at the few stars peeking through the hazy clouds. As he looked a strange thought entered his head: What if they had been abducted by aliens…?
He shook himself-Idiot, he thought-and turned over on his other side, away from the window into his sweet-smelling sheets. Their aroma comforted him, and he felt his limbs relax, his eyes close…
Gwyneth woke up with a start.
The sterile, eye-blindingly white room was still brightly lit, so she had no idea how much time had passed. She peeled her cheek from the floor and gazed around-she appeared to be alone. No one had come for her. No one had punished her.
For a split second she felt an almost dizzying sense of relief.
But then she realized that she had no idea where she was, she was hungry, and she was still very, very far from home.
There was only one way to fix that problem: She had to get away from here.
Retrieving the cylinder device from the ground, she walked swiftly to the large white doors that stood at the right end of the room. She tried, half-heartedly, to push them open, but she knew it would work. It would never be that easy.
She remembered with a pang something her father had once said to her: If you're given a choice between the easy way and the hard way, Gwyneth, always choose the hard way.
She had asked, Why, Daddy?
If you choose the hard way, when trouble comes, it won't bother you, because you'll be so, so strong from doing hard things all your life.
Well, trouble had come, real trouble, and Gwyneth was pretty sure all the little hard things she had done in her life couldn't add up to this, the hardest thing of them all.
Well, Dad, she thought as she pointed the silver tool at the door and it clicked open, I don't feel very strong right now. But I promise I'll do everything in my power to save Pete Tyler and get back home.
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