- 3 -
After returning to the Hub and handing the pendants and Rift key over to Ianto for locking away in secure storage and the album for analysis, I told everyone I needed to take the rest of the day off. They were all very understanding and sympathetic, assuming I needed time to deal with my bereavement. But my grief at losing Mary had been replaced with excitement at the prospect of getting her back.
At home I donned the fifth pendant and lay down on my bed, suddenly concerned that I might not actually be able to fall asleep. I needn't have worried. I hadn't slept well last night so that, coupled with the stress and emotional turmoil of the last twenty four hours, meant that I did so almost immediately.
"Wake up, lover!" said a familiar voice.
I opened my eyes, and there was Mary smiling down at me.
"Is...is it really you?" I said, scarcely daring to hope.
"It really is, my love."
She took me in her arms, we shared a passionate kiss, and I was lost because Mary completed me. No one had ever made me feel beautiful and desirable, but she did. As hard as it was, I broke our kiss and gently pushed her away.
"God I needed that!" I said. "And I want more of it, a lot more, but first I have questions."
"Like what this is and am I dead?" she said.
"And are you? Dead, I mean?"
"It's... complicated. Jack is not as clever as he thinks he is because our transporters are yo-yos."
"I don't understand."
"They'll take you great distances, but then they always return home. Jack thought he could override that programming but he didn't. Far from ending up in the middle of the Sun it returned to our home planet, only without me. Thanks to Jack's meddling I'm now insubstantial, existing as a ghost that can only be seen and heard by you when wearing one of our pendants."
"You seem pretty substantial now."
"That's because you're asleep and this is a dream state, one where we can experience touch."
"But we're in my bedroom," I protested, gazing around me at those oh so familiar walls.
"Oh sweetie, I just wanted to present you with familiar surroundings so as not to freak you out any more than you already are," said Mary. "But since this is all a dream we can be anywhere you want to be, like this for instance."
With that my bedroom walls melted away and I was standing on a stage. I was wearing a bathing costume, high heels, and a sash proclaiming me 'Miss Torchwood'.
"And now here to present the winner with her tiara," announced a male voice from someone offstage, "is last century's winner Miss Arcateenian!"
Then, to applause, Mary stepped forward, attired the same as I was but with the addition of a long, fur-topped cape and a diamond tiara. She took the tiara from her head and placed it on mine, draped the cape around my shoulders, handed me a bouquet of flowers, and stepped back. The applause that followed was thunderous.
"Is this really how you see me?" I asked Mary when it subsided.
"As a woman whose beauty should be celebrated? Oh yes. You cover it up too much, Toshiko, make yourself smaller than you are."
"The Arcateenian," I said. "Jack claims your people are a benevolent race of artists, singers and poets who travel the galaxy spreading love, peace and harmony."
Mary gave a snort of derision.
"Ours is a deeply caste-ridden society. Only the children of the highest caste are considered to have souls pure enough to be poets and singers even though all Arcateenian have powerfully creative imaginations. They get to travel freely offworld and may well believe in all that love, peace and harmony stuff, but only for themselves. Those of us from the lowest castes they regard as unclean, untouchable. We are kept down and all attempts by us to rise above 'our station' are crushed. Since the caste system is entwined with our religion any attempt to change that system is also considered heresy, cementing it firmly in place. They don't tell offworlders about any of this, of course, and we're kept well out of sight whenever any are permitted to make tightly controlled visits to my world."
"And the... the killings?"
"Let me show you something," she said, and with that the stage and surroundings melted away to reveal a forest at night. Mary, in her Arcateenian form, was floating over the body of another of her kind.
"My arrival on this world," she said as we watched. "My guard was an agent of the regime and about to go back with my only means of returning home. If I was to have any chance of one day rejoining the resistance I couldn't allow that."
A woman in Regency dress emerged from the trees behind Mary, with the face and body of the human Mary I knew. As soon as Arcateenian-Mary became aware of her she was sucked backwards and into the body of human-Mary.
"That... that didn't look like something you had any control over," I said.
"It wasn't. Scientist-priests on my world had altered us exiles so that when we got to this world we would automatically be bonded to the first human we encountered. Mary Wozniak was a prostitute, and when we merged I acquired all her memories. Oh, and there was one other nasty little surprise."
As I watched a soldier appeared and levelled a flintlock pistol at the newly-human Mary.
"Do whores have prayers?" he said. Then he shot her.
The lead ball travelled through her chest and burst out her back, whereupon she crossed the distance between them and thrust her hand into his chest, pulling out his still beating heart, her own wound now fully healed.
I gasped at the sight.
"I didn't eat it," said Mary, seeing the look on my face. "Tearing out a heart like that releases the life-force and it's that which the part of me that's alien feeds on. Arcateenian are energy-feeders but that's not how we usually get sustenance. Another cruel twist from our sadistic scientist-priests, along with the instinct to do it."
"And you've been doing it ever since."
"Only to the extent I needed to survive, and not in the numbers Torchwood seems to think. Thanks to my pendant I was also able to make sure those I chose were people who deserved to die."
"Even Owen's paediatric nurse?"
"Even her. Check out the infant mortality rate in her unit before and after her death."
"You mean she...?"
"Was one of those nurses who kill, yes. Some get away with it for years before they're caught, if they ever are. There's more to my story than Torchwood thinks it knows. When you go into work tomorrow review the footage from last night and all the reports with an open mind and an open heart, and I have faith you'll figure it out. And now..."
The forest melted away to reveal a large, luxuriously appointed bedroom, and we were both now naked.
"The honeymoon suite at the Savoy," she said, taking my hand and leading me over to the bed. "Shall we?"
So we did, oh how we did.
Afterwards, I lay snuggled up against Mary while she enjoyed a post-coital cigarette. Well, sort of enjoyed.
"Smoking is one of life's great pleasures," she sighed, "but this is the memory of a cigarette, not the real thing. It just isn't the same."
It winked out of existence, then she took me fully in her arms. Kissing me on the head, she said: "Time you got some sleep now, babe."
"I thought I was asleep."
"Your body is but your mind is wide awake in this dreamscape I created. It still needs real sleep."
And so, cradled in my lover's arms, I drifted off into slumberland. As I did so I heard her murmur "Ah, Toshiko! I've been yours since our eyes first met across a crowded dance hall bar, all those years ago."
"Dance hall?" I mumbled, drowsily. Then true sleep claimed me.