‘Shouldn’t be too much of a problem,’ Gwen muttered, winding down the window.
CARDIFF IS A ONE-WAY CITY
Town was even worse than earlier. Someone was slumped across every bench, or, in some cases, just stretched out across the pavement. Exhausted pensioners sat slumbering at bus stops. Rain beat down mercilessly on cars, buildings and people. Traffic crawled sluggishly, causing Gwen to scream with frustration.
‘It’s this new one-way system,’ she howled.
‘Or the end of the world,’ said Ianto.
‘Whatever.’ Angrily, she shook the tracking device which refused even to bleep.
The lights changed and the SUV slid glacially forward in the traffic.
‘Look at the sky, Gwen,’ said Ianto, sadly.
Gwen looked, and didn’t like it. Cardiff had its fair share of menacing clouds, but these were biblical in their darkness. Pushing down on the buildings, boiling angrily away, pouring rain down on the city.
‘That doesn’t look good,’ Gwen sighed.
The car crawled along a few hundred metres, and suddenly the tracking device screamed like a toddler.
‘Bloody hell!’ Gwen yelped, waving it around. She frantically adjusted the settings and the screaming subsided. ‘It’s over there,’ she pointed. ‘Jack’s over there.’
Ianto took the tracker and stared at the screen. ‘What can have produced that many pheromones? That’s off the scale, even by Jack’s standards.’
‘I know,’ said Gwen, grimly. ‘We’ve got to get to him.’
‘Charles Street,’ said Ianto. ‘It’ll be a few minutes before we can get back round the one-way system.’
‘Sod that,’ snapped Gwen. ‘Just park on the pavement.’
BOUNCER BEN IS WONDERING WHY HIS NOSE GOT BROKEN
It had been a long night. Actually, it seemed to have gone on for… well, Ben wasn’t quite sure, but he was quite snug, really. Even in the pouring rain, he was wrapped up warm, and the heat fairly blasted out of the club’s doors along with the music, which, although it wasn’t normally his kind of thing, he had to admit, was pretty spectacular. He’d work at the Temple for free, if it meant listening to the music. Of course, he was too wise to say that kind of thing. Professional pride. But he liked to think they knew.
And since he’d turned his phone off, his wife had stopped ringing him to demand he come home.
Something was wrong with that sentence. Hmm.
He snapped awake as he heard steps on the metal stairs above him. He watched as two women walked down them. One was startlingly beautiful and having trouble with her shoes. The other was holding out a small blue phone thing. He decided it was best to look business.
The beautiful one stepped up. ‘Hello, mate,’ she said, surprisingly. ‘Two, please. We’d like to disco very much.’
Her companion glanced at her in something like shock and then turned to Ben. ‘How much, please?’
Ben looked at them both. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a private party.’
The stunning one leaned closer and smiled. Ben noticed her friend was rolling her eyes. ‘Oh come on now, surely you can make an exception for us? We’re always where the party’s at.’
The other one stepped forward. ‘Thing is, see, we’ve got a friend in there, we said we’d join him and…’ She made to step through, but Ben moved easily out to block her.
He looked at them both, patiently. Lasses like this, it was worth telling it to them frankly. He put on his firmest voice. He knew what it was like – a night out on the lash, few too many bottles of blue alco-piddle, kebab, loud vows to party on past dawn. He’d had nearly eight years of it, and was an expert in turning people gently but firmly away.
‘Now listen, ladies, why don’t you go home and have a cup of tea?’ he began, talking first to the tall, stunning one. ‘Now, you – pretty girl like you, this isn’t really your place to find a fella. Waste of effort, if you know what I mean. And you,’ he said, turning to the second woman, not unkindly. ‘Well, I’m afraid we’ve got our quota of fag hags.’
Gwen broke his nose.
IANTO IS JUST MURDER ON THE DANCE FLOOR
They stood on the threshold of the club for a few moments, unable to believe what they were seeing.
Torchwood had shown Gwen a lot of things. She’d seen a fair bit of carnage inside, outside and underneath nightclubs. This was unlike anything she’d ever seen. Even when she was young and going to festivals in Fungus’s camper van. This was…
She remembered being a bit stoned and leaving the folk tent, getting a falafel and then accidentally wandering into the techno tent. This was the nearest thing – suddenly plunged into a dark place filled with endless noise and bodies and lights and screaming and a vague feeling of panic and revulsion mixed with a wonder about how she could ever fit in and be cool here.
The club, with its blood-red walls and mirrors and lights seemed to stretch into infinity. The dance floor was packed, packed with topless men all dancing, dancing the same little dance moves, all at the same time, all of them staring ahead, their muscles twitching, their eyes white, looking like racks and racks of meat in a disco abattoir. Just moving to the beat, swinging like they were on rows of meat hooks. Just empty meat dancing and dancing and dancing.
Sweat dribbled down the mirrors and columns and pooled on the ceiling and the floor. She could see the odd figure, passed out but propped up by those dancing around it. Slack jaw staring at the ceiling, collecting drops of sweat.
She thought briefly of that YouTube clip of hundreds of prisoners all doing synchronised dancing to Michael Jackson. It was kind of like that. Only crammed in all together, and the guys were semi-naked and really, really hot.
The smell was incredible. It was an actual proper stench – of hundreds of different types of sweat, of stale dry ice, of spilt beer, of decay and death and blood.
And then she noticed the pulsing music, the way the walls, the lights, the twitching bodies were all pulsing like a heartbeat. Regular, somehow sickening.
Ianto turned to her. ‘This could be heaven, this could be hell,’ he breathed. All he could see was row after row of beautiful people, somewhere near a state of rapture. And the music and the music and the beat and the lights and the music and-
Gwen slapped him. Pretty hard, he thought.
‘Sorry,’ said Gwen flatly.
‘Thank you,’ he replied rather crisply. ‘It’s strangely… compelling.’
Gwen shrugged. ‘Oh, I dunno. Dancing, I can take it or leave it, me. But look at all this. What the hell do we do?’
Ianto paused. ‘They’re behaving like a mass. They’re just standing there – not even lifting a foot off the floor. We should find what’s causing that. Perhaps we could stop that.’
‘Yep,’ agreed Gwen.
‘We could find Jack. See if he can help.’
‘Also good,’ said Gwen.
‘We could also find out why the walls are breathing.’
‘Um. Yeah.’
Actually, they made their way awkwardly to the bar. No one seemed to notice them. Everyone was dancing, dancing, dancing, their eyes rolled up, enraptured.
Gwen giggled. ‘It’s like the nineties, but no one’s tried to hug me or backwashed in my water bottle.’
Ianto nodded. ‘I’ve been to parties like this too. But normally in abandoned warehouses. Not, you know, on Charles Street.’
The pounding was starting to really beat down on Gwen. She looked at the DJ, who was mixing away at his desk, but without even looking at it. It was really, really creepy. As she leaned on the bar she sensed the beat travelling through her. She tried to move and found it harder than she thought, as though the surface of the bar was really, really sticky. She finally got the attention of a barman, who beamed at her glassily. ‘What’ll it be?’ he asked.