Non Sum Qualis Eram, Part One
Title: Non Sum Qualis Eram
Author: lookninjas aka ninjasnano
Character/Pairing(s): Full Torchwood Team, one character from Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, slightly altered.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Takes place mid-series Two, so no real spoilers for Torchwood. Some spoilers for House of Leaves. Some violence, not explicit.
Disclaimer: I own neither Torchwood nor House of Leaves, and am making no profit from this. Also, I am not as cool as Mark Z. Danielewski, and never will be.
Author's Note(s): Written for ladykorana, for the help_haiti auctions. Although this is technically a crossover with House of Leaves, you don't need to have read that book to understand this story. You should read the book, though. It's amazing. This story is in some ways a companion piece to Motherless Boys, but you don't have to have read that, either.
This is the low-format version. For the full color version, click here
Also, solsticezero has written Ianto at the top of the ftairs. And it is amazing. Go read it.
Summary: When a ghost hunter vanishes in the haunted house that he was examining, the Torchwood team is called in to investigate. Once inside, they discover a mysterious hallway, a spiral staircase, and a strange series of connections to a childhood that Ianto can't remember.
Tosh sank back into her chair, and pressed her palms into her eyes, trying to rub away the exhaustion. When she looked again, there was a mug of coffee sitting by her mousepad, handle turned towards her, inviting. She reached for it; the ceramic was warm in her hands, and the first sip was brilliant as always, just enough cream, just enough sugar. "Any luck?" Ianto asked, resting one hip against the edge of the workstation.
She shook her head, mug still cradled in both hands. "There's almost... a sort of flutter in the readings, like it's picking up on something just out of range, background radiation or... But no spikes, nothing I can really pin down." She shook her head again, took another sip of the coffee. "You?"
Ianto shrugged, setting his own coffee down on Tosh's workstation. He had a small steno pad in his free hand; no files, nothing that spoke of any large discovery. "Everything I found on Will Navidson matches what Jack got from his contacts at UK-Paranormal." He flipped the pad open. "Famous photojournalist, won a Pulitzer in 1994 for a picture taken in Sudan during the famine... lived in New York, never married, had two children with his long-term girlfriend Karen Green... Three years ago, he left it all behind to become a ghost hunter in Cardiff. No one's sure why." Ianto glanced up from his notes. "The name sounded familiar, though, so I had a look through my diary. He called me, Tosh. On the fourteenth. He wanted to talk about the house in Cyncoed, the one he was investigating when he disappeared. I kept meaning to call him back, but..."
He looked so guilty, then, and Tosh wished for something to say. The best she could muster up was a commiserating shrug, and a "Well, the Rift's been so active..."
Ianto nodded. "Not that I could have told him much of anything, really. The paper archives are organized by subject; failing that, by date. I tried searching for the house's address in the database, but those files don't go back much more than a decade, so..."
Tosh grimaced. She and Ianto had been working to get everything entered into the Mainframe, but there were always new cases to work on, new projects to tackle, and there simply weren't enough hours in the day for everything to get done. At a loss, she turned back to her computer. "It's weird, though," she said, after a moment. "We know that when the Rift takes something, or someone, there's a spike. Not a big one, not always, but it's visible. I've gone through everything for the past month, and it's just..."
"Fluttering." Ianto sat his coffee down at the edge of the workstation, leaning in to examine the screen along with her. "It's steady, though. Consistent." His finger traced the slightly jagged line across the bottom of the screen. "This is the last week?"
"Two weeks." Tosh tapped one of the spikes. "That's the box of rubbish that we found in Penarth. There's the Hoix, and that one's the vine monster -- you know, with the tendrils, and the --"
Ianto wrinkled his nose. "I remember." He shifted so that he was crouching by Tosh's chair; she budged over to give him room. "So the vine monster was on Sunday, which was the... seventeenth?" He glanced at Tosh, and she nodded. "Navidson went in to investigate the house on the fifteenth. Either he was taken on the seventeenth, and we're just not seeing it because there's a larger spike in the way, or he was taken afterwards, and it's not showing up."
Tosh frowned at him. "It could have happened between the fifteenth and the seventeenth," she pointed out.
"It's the twenty-first today. I'm sure Jack's friends at UK-Paranormal are used to odd comings and goings, but I imagine they wouldn't give it a week before deciding that one of their own had been snatched up." Ianto reached across Tosh's lap, groping for her mouse; she settled back and let him take over, closing in on the readings for the past four days. "This one," he said, tapping the screen. Tosh put her glasses on and leaned in. She thought the spike he was indicating might be slightly larger than the ones immediately preceding and following it. Might be. She checked the dates on it.
"The nineteenth," she said, glancing at Ianto. "Forty-eight hours to declare a missing person. Still, though, you'd think there'd be more than just this."
Ianto settled back on his haunches, resting one hand on Tosh's armrest for support. "The monitors are designed to pick up Rift energy," he reasoned. "But if there's something else, some other large energy source, it might be throwing the readings off a bit. Just enough to cause that wobble."
It made sense, and yet it didn't, quite. "It'd have to be pretty large to throw off the Rift Monitor, though," Tosh pointed out.
"Wouldn't be the first time." Ianto's face was placid. "That meteor, the one that landed up near Abergavenny. Threw off the monitors for a week before we managed to dispose of it."
Tosh felt her eyebrow raising despite herself. "You think there's a meteor. In Cyncoed."
Ianto just shrugged. "Doesn't have to be a meteor. Could be anything, really. Could be the house itself." Just for a moment, Tosh thought she saw a shadow pass over his face, but it was gone almost as soon as she'd noticed it. He pushed himself to his feet. "Just, you know, it's not always the Rift."
"No," Tosh agreed, turning back to her computer. "Sometimes it's cannibals." Ianto laughed at that, and Tosh smiled to herself. It faded as Ianto turned to walk away. "Ianto?" He glanced back at her, his expression inquiring. "Suppose it isn't anything? Maybe Navidson just decided... maybe he just didn't want to be a ghost hunter any longer. He's done it before."
"He has." Ianto frowned, then shrugged again, his face clearing. "But then again, maybe it is something. Can't hurt to at least look into it, try to figure it out." And with that, Ianto walked away, back towards the dark tunnels of the Archives.
Tosh settled back into her chair, studying her screens. Ianto's spike was maybe a little bigger than the others around it. Maybe. It certainly wasn't anything she'd want to take to Jack. But then, Jack had been the one to dump this case in their laps in the first place. And really, even if the flutter wasn't related to Navidson exactly, it could still wind up being important.
With a sigh, she flagged the relevant spikes, including Ianto's, and then printed it all off to show the others.
*
"Well, the neighbors weren't much good," Gwen said, flipping through her notebook. "It was the same things they told Navidson: cats have gone missing, families move in but don't stay there long, creepy feeling... There was one thing, though. Some of the older folks remembered a family living there, back in the eighties. They had a little boy, maybe three or four. One day, he went missing. The police were called in, the whole neighborhood went out looking for him. No one could find him. Two days later, they found him curled up on the lawn, crying. He wouldn't say what had happened. Said he couldn't remember."
Ianto shrugged. "He probably just wandered off, got too scared to come back home. Or got lost, if he didn't go out very much."
"It's possible," Gwen said. "Here's the weird thing, though. The whole time, his mother kept saying he'd gone through the door. There was this bit of blank wall in the living room, between a couple of windows, and she just sat by it, knocking on it and calling his name. Saying that there was a door there, and he'd gone through it. Granted, maybe she was hysterical; some of the neighbors seemed to think she was... just, you know, not right, but..."
"But maybe there was a door," Jack finished. He and Owen shared a look; Tosh was surprised at how serious Owen's face was at that moment. He'd been slagging off the case from the moment Jack announced they were taking it, the missing cats, the missing ghost hunter; even Ianto's pointed references to fairies couldn't seem to stop him. But, then, he had stopped: somewhere between leaving to talk with Navidson's UK-Paranormal minders and getting back to the Hub, he'd gone quiet and serious. The thought made Tosh feel a bit uneasy.
Jack reached over to the controls set on the far side of the table; the lights in the room dimmed, and the screen on the far wall lit up. The image was almost steady, but not quite; a handheld camera, probably. There didn't seem to be anything special about it, though -- it was just a door, in a wall. There was one window to the left of it, another to the right. Both windows were open. "This is the last thing Navidson sent to UK-Paranormal before they lost contact with him," Jack said. The camera dropped down to the floor, tracking a few wobbly steps before lifting up again, now right in front of the window, now going through it and outside. Again, the camera dropped, showing well-kept flower beds being trodden through by heavy feet. Then the camera lifted and turned, skimming over a quick glimpse of the someone's front yard before turning to the white siding of the house. For a few moments, it focused on the plain, flat wall. Then it dropped again as the camera operator moved right, climbing in through the other window, completing the circle and once again standing in front of the door. A hand appeared, reaching out to grasp the door's handle, pulling it open. Where there should have been nothing more than insulation, or at best a shallow cubby terminating in white vinyl siding, there was instead a narrow hallway, shockingly dark on the inside; the light from the living room barely lifted the gloom. The camera trembled, and then there was a bit more light, a torch or a small spot trained into the darkness. It was difficult to say, but the hallway had to go on for at least ten feet. Probably more.
Out through the window again. Back to the exterior wall. This time, the camera's operator backed up a bit, to show the full view -- one window to the right, one window to the left, the wall completely smooth and flat between them. Then back inside, and the hallway was still there, as impossible as it was. The camera moved in, one step, then another. "It's freezing in here," the camera's operator said. Then the screen went blank.
When the lights came up again, Gwen was frowning, double-checking her notes. "That could be the same door," she concluded, after a moment. "Assuming there really was a door in the first place. But Jack, how do we know that the footage wasn't doctored somehow? Or edited? Or that it was even taken at the same house?"
Jack grinned, showing his teeth. "We don't. But there's an easy way to find out."
*
"Anything?" Ianto asked, wandering aimlessly around the unfurnished room. So far the house was completely empty and uninteresting: no mysterious doors, no tunnels into endless night, not even Navidson's belongings, although he'd been camped out at the house for several days before vanishing. It was, Tosh thought, almost a little too empty.
She frowned down at her scanner. "Just that same fluttering," she said. "It's stronger now, though. Look."
Ianto crossed behind her, studying the scanner from over her shoulder. Whatever energy was present, either in this house or near it, it was strong enough to produce definite peaks and valleys, just slightly irregular, like an EKG line. It wasn't the same as a Rift spike, though, not steady, just a constant shifting presence. "Stronger now than before we entered the house?"
"Definitely. If nothing else, we've figured out what was causing the problems with our Rift readings."
"Now we just have to figure out what it is, and what to do about it." Ianto's eyes met hers for a moment, but then they were sliding away, back towards the white, unmarked walls of the unfurnished room they were standing in. "That's odd," he said, stepping around her, moving towards a door set in the wall. "I could've sworn..." His fingers closed around the knob, but he didn't pull it open. Hesitating.
He'd hesitated on the walkway, too; Tosh had been so absorbed in her scanner that she'd nearly run into him. Hesitated on the foot of the stairs; Tosh had looked back and seen him there, one hand on the banister, one foot on the first step, his eyes turned towards the living room, as though looking for something. "This must remind you of the house you grew up in," Tosh guessed, and immediately felt what a stupid thing that was to say.
Ianto just chuckled, and his eyes were still crinkled in a smile when he turned back to look at her. "Not at all. We never lived anywhere near as..." His voice trailed off, then, and he turned back to the door, turning the knob and pushing it open. There was no dark hallway, narrow and oppressive, stretching out before them. Just a few feet of white-painted corridor, and a door at the other end. "Well," Ianto said. "It doesn't look as though it wants to eat me."
"Yes, well, you can never really trust architecture," Tosh said, closing up behind him, the scanner held in front of her like a shield. She couldn't be completely sure, but she thought the spikes were somewhat taller now, coming more rapidly.
"Only one way to find out," Ianto muttered, and stepped inside. He stood there for a moment, running his hands over the walls, as if trying to feel out any difference. "Seems normal enough." Another step had him in the middle of the strange space; Tosh felt the strangest urge to grab him by the jacket and pull him out again. "Cold in here."
"No heating vents," Tosh pointed out.
"Still, you'd think the residual heat from the rest of the house..." Two more steps saw Ianto to the other door; he pushed that one open as well. It led back into the master suite. "Huh."
Tosh let out a deep breath. "This must have been used as a child's bedroom," she said. "The parents could go back and forth between, checking up on strange sounds or anything."
Ianto frowned at her over his shoulder. "It's no easier than going into the hallway and around," he pointed out. "And I'd have sworn there wasn't this much space between the two rooms to begin with."
"We could measure it," Tosh suggested.
"More to the point, how did we miss this door when we were examining the master suite? We should have found this earlier."
"We must've--"
Before she could finish, Jack's voice was sounding in her ear. "As I stood upon the stair, I saw a door that wasn't there. It wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish --"
Ianto shook his head. "You've butchered that quote, Sir." But he spun on his heel, heading back down the little hallway. Tosh turned as well; if their mysterious door had reappeared, she wanted a chance to get some readings before the others were plunging willy-nilly into the darkness. It wasn't until she'd reached the door of the children's room that she realized Ianto wasn't behind her.
He had stopped just before the doorway that would take him out of the corridor and into the children's room; he had one hand on either wall, his face turned towards the ceiling. He was hesitating. "Funny," he said, quietly. "It seems like it should be so much bigger, doesn't it?"
"Ianto?" She stepped back into the room, watching him.
After a few seconds, he refocused, his eyes settling on her. "Right," he said. "Let's go see what Jack's found."
*
"Well, someone's been down here," Owen said, his voice echoing strangely over the comms.
Ianto looked up from his unpacking; he and Gwen had pulled a motley assortment of spelunking gear out of the SUV after Jack's initial foray revealed that the house's mysterious hallway stretched on for at least a mile, possibly more. Tosh had asked him once why they carried miner's headlamps with them. Now it looked as though they might actually be useful. "Got something, have you?" he asked.
"Reflective tape, on the walls. Whoever it was, looks like they were trying to leave themselves a trail, in case they got lost on their way back. Dunno if it's Navidson's, though. Looks like it's been here a while."
Gwen frowned at no one in particular. "That estate agent was pretty insistent that no one had been in the house unsupervised, though. Just Navidson. Well, and us."
"Well, it's been a rough few days for this tape, then. Looks like something with claws went after it. Might have been the missing cats."
Tosh glanced over at Gwen; Gwen's eyes were worried. "Hang on," Ianto said. "I thought you were traveling in a straight line -- no twists, no turns, no other hallways. So why would Navidson need help finding his way back?"
"Same reason you gave us a spool of fishing line to mark a trail with?" Owen asked. "Which is none, as far as I can see."
"Maybe he was just being cautious," Jack said. "Maybe it gets more complicated as it goes on. Given that this place wasn't here when we first entered the house, I wouldn't be surprised if the walls started shifting on us." And it was almost like Jack could see Ianto's eyebrows drawing together in the beginnings of a frown, because he was quick to add, "Which is why we're heading back. I want to return to the Hub, see if we can't cobble together some sort of tracking system in case things go wrong. And we'll need more supplies; this place is huge, and we're not going to explore the whole thing in just a few hours. It could take days."
"Also, it's getting late, and I'm starving," Owen said.
"That too," Jack said. "See you in a few."
The comms went quiet, then; Tosh looked over at Ianto and Gwen. Gwen was chewing her lip, still frowning; Ianto had a bit of rope in his hands and was twisting it, staring into the darkness just behind the door. "Well," Tosh said, when it was plain that no one else was going to talk. "Looks like it'll be another late night."
Gwen nodded. "I should call Rhys," she said. But she didn't reach for her phone.
Ianto just stared into the darkness, twisting the rope in his hands.
*
Gwen had fallen asleep stretched out on top of her sleeping bag, her head pillowed on her jacket, Ianto's wool coat spread over her like a blanket. Ianto himself was nowhere in sight; he'd helped Tosh get the laptop set up, with the portable Rift monitor next to it, everything plugged in and tested, then gone back to the SUV to unload the rest of the supplies. He'd gone in and out at least four times before Tosh had gotten too absorbed in her work to keep count.
Jack had been right about the hallway changing over time; he and Owen hadn't been in there ten minutes before they found the first of several hallways, branching off from the main path, twisting and turning. Tosh watched them on her laptop, the tracking devices that they wore showing up as bright red dots on the screen, using a bit of hastily cobbled together software to try and build a map of the labyrinth around them. They hadn't gone very far before turning around and heading back towards the main path. It was the same with the next hallway, and the one after that -- they'd go down a bit, realize it was another endless corridor, then head back to the main path. Eventually, they'd just let the side passages go unexplored.
The main hallway had eventually led them into a large room, and from there into another, even vaster space. They'd been exploring the Great Hall ever since.
"There's a staircase here," Jack said, at long last. "Spiral. Looks like it goes down... well... forever, pretty much."
"Before you ask, Harkness, I'm not going down there." Owen sounded tired. "Not unless you want to carry me back up."
"Guess that settles it," Jack said. He, of course, didn't sound tired at all. "We'll come back in the morning, see where it leads. Who knows, we might find --" His voice died before he finished the thought. "Did you hear that?"
"Yeah." Owen's voice was tense, strained. Behind her, Tosh heard a rustling; Gwen was sitting up.
"Owen? Jack?" There was always something unsettling about hearing one of her teammates in her ear and in her earpiece at the same time, a strange echo that Tosh couldn't seem to get used to. "What's happening?"
"Dunno," Owen said. "There was a noise, kind of like a --"
"I've got something." Ianto's voice. Tosh froze, glancing back at Gwen in alarm. She hadn't seen him go into the hallway, but then, she hadn't really been looking. But he wouldn't head into the labyrinth alone, would he? "There's a box here; Navidson's things, maybe. Papers, some photographs--"
"Ianto, where are you?" Jack's voice was sharp with irritation, maybe fear.
"Upstairs; children's bedroom." Without a word, Gwen scrambled to her feet and hurried to the stairs, taking them two at a time. "Jack, Tosh and I went through every cupboard and cubbyhole in this room. This box wasn't here before."
Jack sighed; it went through the earpiece straight into Tosh's bones. "Right. Bring it down. We'll be back in a bit to help go through it. And Ianto? Do not wander off again without checking with me first. This place is changing constantly; if you just leave without a tracker on, and get stuck somewhere--"
Tosh thought she could almost hear Ianto rolling his eyes. "Of course, Sir. I'll see you when you get back."
There was a momentary pause. Then the two dots of Owen and Jack's tracking devices were moving again, taking the same straight line that had led them into the Great Hall. Gwen had found Ianto; Tosh could hear their voices, too muffled for her to make out the words. Footsteps sounded on the ceiling above her, and she decided that it didn't really matter. They were coming back. That was what counted.
*
"'Ftaires.'" Owen drawled the word out, over-pronouncing the "F" in a way that Tosh thought was deliberately calculated to drive the rest of them mad. "'We Haue Found Ftaires.'"
"I believe the word is 'stairs,' Owen," Ianto said. "Which you did find, if I remember correctly." He took the battered journal from Owen's outstretched hands and flipped through it. "This isn't anywhere near old enough to match the language being used. Could be copied from an older document, maybe. Or some student creative writing project. One of the two. Navidson must have thought it was important, anyway." He held the book out to Tosh. "What do you think? Early Modern?"
She set aside the file she'd been working on to take the journal from him. It looked like it was some sort of traveller's journal, an expedition log, something like that. The writing was fragmentary at best -- sometimes whole paragraphs, sometimes just words or bits of sentences, centered on the page. "Could be. Sixteenth century, maybe." She handed the journal back. "Cardiff was already a city at that point, wasn't it?"
"County Town of Glamorganshire," Ianto said, flipping back to the beginning to examine the journal more closely. "It was smaller then, though. They hadn't settled out as far as Cyncoed yet." He frowned down at the pages. "I wonder if we could find the original of this somewhere..."
Tosh watched him for a bit longer, then turned back to the stenographer's pad she'd been looking at. Navidson had devoted quite some time to researching the previous owners of the house. Most of the names had a note next to them: "deceased," maybe, or "couldn't find," something like that. One of the names, however, was highlighted, starred, and heavily annotated. "Alun Jones," she read, and looked up at Ianto; he raised an eyebrow at her. "Don't suppose he's related?"
Ianto shrugged, thoughtfully. "My dad's name is Alun. Of course, so is my old dentist, one of my primary school teachers, three of my primary school classmates... Jack, you're humming again."
Jack held up a piece of paper, turned so Ianto could see. "It's sheet music," he said. "Kind of." Tosh thought Jack was being overly charitable; someone, presumably a child, had attempted to transcribe some music onto a sheet of lined paper. There was no time signature, and the notes were nothing more than black dots gracing the lines. "I know I know this song." And he promptly went back to humming.
Tosh grinned at Ianto, who only shook his head, and went back to studying Navidson's notes. "It looks like Alun Jones owned the house from 1987 until 1988. Maybe he was the owner of the house when that little boy vanished." Tosh glanced over at Gwen, who was flipping through some sort of scrapbook, eyes saucer-wide. "D'you -- Gwen? You all right?"
"Fine." Gwen clapped the book shut with a sudden snap, setting it aside. "Navidson's old war photographs," she added, by way of explanation. "It's funny, the things you see in this life -- and yet those pictures still get to me."
Tosh gave her a small smile, and was trying to think of something comforting to say, when Jack burst into song. "Dominique, nique, nique s'en allait tous simplement, routier, pauvre et chantant..." The others could only gape; he laughed, apparently completely unembarrassed. "It's 'Dominique.' Come on, Soeur Sourire? The Singing Nun? One of you has to have heard of the Singing Nun."
"I have," Owen said, with great reluctance. "And if you slept with her, Jack, I don't want to know."
Grinning, Gwen dove back into the box, coming up with a sheaf of papers. Her smile quickly faded into a look of concentration. "Jack, was Navidson a smoker?"
Jack shrugged. "Not that I'm aware of, but I didn't know him that well. Why?"
She passed over a sheaf of papers. "Look at all the burn marks. I can't tell if it was an accident, or if he was trying to ... erase something completely."
"Bit of an overkill," Ianto murmured, leaning in to examine the papers in Jack's hands until the two of them were pressed shoulder-to-shoulder. "He's already struck most of it out... That one might be Theseus; what do you think?"
Jack frowned down at the paper, his finger joining Ianto's in tracing the scratched and burnt words. "Which would make that Ariadne, and the secret word is... Minotaur."
"'The roar of the Minotaur,'" Ianto quoted. "You said you heard something down in the labyrinth, didn't you?"
"Right before you found the box," Jack said, his face shifting into a frown. "This was up in the children's room?"
"There's a sort of... hallway, between the children's room and the master bedroom," Ianto said, turning back to the battered journal in his hands. "I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be part of the house or not, so I --" He gave Jack a sidelong glance, then, and fell abruptly silent.
"And you didn't tell me about this hallway earlier, because --"
"This is sweet," Gwen announced, halting the argument before it could get a chance to start. "Sort of, anyway. 'Dear Mam. I am sorry for getting into fights at school. I know that I should control my temper and not get angry when people make fun. It's not their fault that they can't understand, and I should try to be better than they are, and not --'"
"May I?" Ianto's voice was unusually sharp, and he reached across the pile of photographs and notes to snatch the paper from Gwen's hands without waiting for her to reply. She stared at him; everyone was staring, but Ianto didn't look up from the letter. It trembled in Ianto's hands as he studied it. "Huh," he said, quietly.
"Something wrong?" Jack's tone wasn't as light as he probably thought it was; there was an uncertainty in it, an anxiety.
"I wrote this." Ianto's eyes never left the paper; he'd gone pale. "Ages ago. My mam was... she was sick in hospital, and some of the boys were... Anyway, when Da couldn't get me to leave off fighting, he told me I'd have to write her and apologize every time I got into trouble. I only ever had to write the one letter, so I suppose it worked." Gwen rested a hand on his knee. Finally, he looked up, his eyes settling on Jack. "But how did Navidson get it? And why... It's nothing to do with this. At all."
"I don't know," Jack said.
Owen had picked another paper off the pile. He studied it for a few moments, then handed it to Ianto without a word. Ianto stared at it for a long time, barely moving. When he finally looked up again, his eyes were huge. He thrust the paper at Jack, then hurried out of the room, leaving the rest of them to stare after him.
Jack looked down at the paper for a few moments, then turned it so that the others could see. It was an ordinary enough piece of lined paper, wide-ruled, made for a child's huge letters. At the top, someone had printed the words "Draw a picture of your house," in large, round letters; the sort of handwriting that a primary school teacher might have. The rest of the page was taken up with a black square, done in several layers of crayon. It was so thick that it stood up off the paper. "He signed it," Jack said, quietly. "I. Jones."
Tosh looked up to where Ianto had disappeared into the kitchen.
"There's more," Owen said, continuing to rummage through the documents. "Marriage license for Alun Jones and Pelafina Lievre. Birth certificates for Ianto and Rhiannon Jones. School records, medical records, newspaper clippings..." He glanced up from the sheaf of papers in his hands. "Jack, his whole life is here. How did Navidson get this stuff? And more to the point, why?"
"Jack, Navidson called Ianto," Tosh said, as the memory suddenly resurfaced. "The day before he came to this house, he called and left a message on Ianto's voicemail, looking for information about the house. Ianto said he never got around to calling him back. He was too busy."
Jack's face was stony; he stared down at the papers in his hand, not speaking. "Jack," Gwen said, finally. "What are we going to do?"
"I don't know," Jack said, quietly. "I don't know."
*
It wasn't Jack's voice that had woken her, but it was Jack's voice that kept her awake, a soothing murmur of words that she couldn't quite make out but didn't want to let go of, either. They weren't directed at her, of course, but that was all right; she wasn't going to begrudge Ianto that. At the moment, she wasn't much prepared to begrudge him anything.
The murmur broke off after a bit. Tosh could hear Ianto's sleeping bag, sliding along the floor. He was probably sitting up. "Want to talk about it?" Jack asked, after a while.
"Not really." Jack chuckled at that, and Ianto let out a tired sigh. "I just... Jack, if I'd ever lived in a place like this, I think I'd remember it. Even without the door, and the black hallways, and..." He left the thought incomplete. "You know where I come from, Jack. And it's about as far from Cyncoed as is possible to be. I'd remember living in a place like this."
"I know," Jack said, quietly. "Look, you said it yourself. There's more than one Alun Jones in Cardiff. Navidson was looking for the previous owners of this house, saw the name Alun Jones, and thought it was your father. It's just a coincidence. Nothing more than that."
"I suppose," Ianto said. He didn't sound very convinced. "It's strange, though. And that song you found, the sheet music... my mother was obsessed with Soeur Sourire. She'd sing 'Dominique' to me every night; it was the only way I'd get to sleep."
"Want me to sing it to you now?" Jack asked; it was half teasing, and half something else entirely, although Tosh couldn't quite put a name to it. It was strange to hear the two of them together like this, almost alone. It wasn't much different from the way they spoke to each other during the day, at the Hub, not really. Just... gentler, somehow. More warmth to it.
"Thanks, no." Ianto sighed again. "The thing is, Jack... If there is something to this, if there's something I've forgotten, or... If something goes wrong down there, I don't want it to be me. I don't want to be a liability, or --"
"I don't want you to be a liability either," Jack said. They were quiet for a bit. "I'd planned to have Tosh stay with the remote setup; she's the one who built the imaging software, and she's better at -- But if you really think it'd be better for you to stay here --"
"It'd be an absolute nightmare," Ianto admitted, and Tosh squelched a perverse pride at that. "I can't do half the things that Tosh can, and we both know it. No, I'll go down; I just..."
"I was going to have someone camped out at the top of the stairs," Jack said, slowly. "As backup, in case we get caught down there, or if Tosh needs --"
Ianto didn't even let him finish. "I'll do it."
"You'll be alone," Jack pointed out. "If something goes wrong --"
"I'll do it," Ianto said again.
"Are you sure you want to go down there?" Jack asked. "Really sure?"
"To be honest, Jack, I don't want to go back down there at all. I mean, not back... I mean... I don't know what I mean."
"I know what you mean," Jack said. Tosh was pretty sure, though, that he didn't. "Don't decide yet. Get some sleep, see how you feel in the morning."
"Fair enough," Ianto murmured, although it was plain that he'd already made up his mind. Now it was just a question of Jack coming around to Ianto's way of thinking, which he almost certainly would do by the morning. Because Ianto was right; Tosh was the only one who could handle the monitors and the remote imaging software, and if Ianto were to... if something were to happen to him, it was better that he be near the entrance to the labyrinth, so he could get out quickly. And Jack would need at least two other people to really explore the labyrinth, if they were going to take samples and do readings and figure out what the place was; he couldn't afford to send Ianto back to the Hub and have Gwen or Owen stay behind at the top of the stairs, not if they wanted to know the truth about the labyrinth.
Tosh knew all of those things, as well as Ianto or even Jack. But that didn't mean she was happy about it.
Jack and Ianto were quiet, apart from the soft noises of Ianto settling back into his sleeping bag, trying to get comfortable. "Jack?" Ianto asked after a moment. "Stay here, just for a bit?" Tosh couldn't remember a time when he'd sounded quite so vulnerable.
"I'm right here," Jack replied. "Not going anywhere."
The room fell silent for a long time -- just Gwen and Owen's breathing, the sounds of Ianto shifting, trying to get comfortable on the floor. Maybe his head was in Jack's lap. Maybe Jack was sitting next to him, stroking his hair. Maybe they were just a little closer to each other than they should have been, like they always were at work. Then Jack started singing, very softly. "Dominque, nique, nique... s'en allait tout simplement, routier pauvre et chantant..."
Tosh burrowed deeper into her sleeping bag, and within a few moments, she was fast asleep again.
Continue to Part Two
Author: lookninjas aka ninjasnano
Character/Pairing(s): Full Torchwood Team, one character from Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, slightly altered.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Takes place mid-series Two, so no real spoilers for Torchwood. Some spoilers for House of Leaves. Some violence, not explicit.
Disclaimer: I own neither Torchwood nor House of Leaves, and am making no profit from this. Also, I am not as cool as Mark Z. Danielewski, and never will be.
Author's Note(s): Written for ladykorana, for the help_haiti auctions. Although this is technically a crossover with House of Leaves, you don't need to have read that book to understand this story. You should read the book, though. It's amazing. This story is in some ways a companion piece to Motherless Boys, but you don't have to have read that, either.
This is the low-format version. For the full color version, click here
Also, solsticezero has written Ianto at the top of the ftairs. And it is amazing. Go read it.
Summary: When a ghost hunter vanishes in the haunted house that he was examining, the Torchwood team is called in to investigate. Once inside, they discover a mysterious hallway, a spiral staircase, and a strange series of connections to a childhood that Ianto can't remember.
Tosh sank back into her chair, and pressed her palms into her eyes, trying to rub away the exhaustion. When she looked again, there was a mug of coffee sitting by her mousepad, handle turned towards her, inviting. She reached for it; the ceramic was warm in her hands, and the first sip was brilliant as always, just enough cream, just enough sugar. "Any luck?" Ianto asked, resting one hip against the edge of the workstation.
She shook her head, mug still cradled in both hands. "There's almost... a sort of flutter in the readings, like it's picking up on something just out of range, background radiation or... But no spikes, nothing I can really pin down." She shook her head again, took another sip of the coffee. "You?"
Ianto shrugged, setting his own coffee down on Tosh's workstation. He had a small steno pad in his free hand; no files, nothing that spoke of any large discovery. "Everything I found on Will Navidson matches what Jack got from his contacts at UK-Paranormal." He flipped the pad open. "Famous photojournalist, won a Pulitzer in 1994 for a picture taken in Sudan during the famine... lived in New York, never married, had two children with his long-term girlfriend Karen Green... Three years ago, he left it all behind to become a ghost hunter in Cardiff. No one's sure why." Ianto glanced up from his notes. "The name sounded familiar, though, so I had a look through my diary. He called me, Tosh. On the fourteenth. He wanted to talk about the house in Cyncoed, the one he was investigating when he disappeared. I kept meaning to call him back, but..."
He looked so guilty, then, and Tosh wished for something to say. The best she could muster up was a commiserating shrug, and a "Well, the Rift's been so active..."
Ianto nodded. "Not that I could have told him much of anything, really. The paper archives are organized by subject; failing that, by date. I tried searching for the house's address in the database, but those files don't go back much more than a decade, so..."
Tosh grimaced. She and Ianto had been working to get everything entered into the Mainframe, but there were always new cases to work on, new projects to tackle, and there simply weren't enough hours in the day for everything to get done. At a loss, she turned back to her computer. "It's weird, though," she said, after a moment. "We know that when the Rift takes something, or someone, there's a spike. Not a big one, not always, but it's visible. I've gone through everything for the past month, and it's just..."
"Fluttering." Ianto sat his coffee down at the edge of the workstation, leaning in to examine the screen along with her. "It's steady, though. Consistent." His finger traced the slightly jagged line across the bottom of the screen. "This is the last week?"
"Two weeks." Tosh tapped one of the spikes. "That's the box of rubbish that we found in Penarth. There's the Hoix, and that one's the vine monster -- you know, with the tendrils, and the --"
Ianto wrinkled his nose. "I remember." He shifted so that he was crouching by Tosh's chair; she budged over to give him room. "So the vine monster was on Sunday, which was the... seventeenth?" He glanced at Tosh, and she nodded. "Navidson went in to investigate the house on the fifteenth. Either he was taken on the seventeenth, and we're just not seeing it because there's a larger spike in the way, or he was taken afterwards, and it's not showing up."
Tosh frowned at him. "It could have happened between the fifteenth and the seventeenth," she pointed out.
"It's the twenty-first today. I'm sure Jack's friends at UK-Paranormal are used to odd comings and goings, but I imagine they wouldn't give it a week before deciding that one of their own had been snatched up." Ianto reached across Tosh's lap, groping for her mouse; she settled back and let him take over, closing in on the readings for the past four days. "This one," he said, tapping the screen. Tosh put her glasses on and leaned in. She thought the spike he was indicating might be slightly larger than the ones immediately preceding and following it. Might be. She checked the dates on it.
"The nineteenth," she said, glancing at Ianto. "Forty-eight hours to declare a missing person. Still, though, you'd think there'd be more than just this."
Ianto settled back on his haunches, resting one hand on Tosh's armrest for support. "The monitors are designed to pick up Rift energy," he reasoned. "But if there's something else, some other large energy source, it might be throwing the readings off a bit. Just enough to cause that wobble."
It made sense, and yet it didn't, quite. "It'd have to be pretty large to throw off the Rift Monitor, though," Tosh pointed out.
"Wouldn't be the first time." Ianto's face was placid. "That meteor, the one that landed up near Abergavenny. Threw off the monitors for a week before we managed to dispose of it."
Tosh felt her eyebrow raising despite herself. "You think there's a meteor. In Cyncoed."
Ianto just shrugged. "Doesn't have to be a meteor. Could be anything, really. Could be the house itself." Just for a moment, Tosh thought she saw a shadow pass over his face, but it was gone almost as soon as she'd noticed it. He pushed himself to his feet. "Just, you know, it's not always the Rift."
"No," Tosh agreed, turning back to her computer. "Sometimes it's cannibals." Ianto laughed at that, and Tosh smiled to herself. It faded as Ianto turned to walk away. "Ianto?" He glanced back at her, his expression inquiring. "Suppose it isn't anything? Maybe Navidson just decided... maybe he just didn't want to be a ghost hunter any longer. He's done it before."
"He has." Ianto frowned, then shrugged again, his face clearing. "But then again, maybe it is something. Can't hurt to at least look into it, try to figure it out." And with that, Ianto walked away, back towards the dark tunnels of the Archives.
Tosh settled back into her chair, studying her screens. Ianto's spike was maybe a little bigger than the others around it. Maybe. It certainly wasn't anything she'd want to take to Jack. But then, Jack had been the one to dump this case in their laps in the first place. And really, even if the flutter wasn't related to Navidson exactly, it could still wind up being important.
With a sigh, she flagged the relevant spikes, including Ianto's, and then printed it all off to show the others.
*
"Well, the neighbors weren't much good," Gwen said, flipping through her notebook. "It was the same things they told Navidson: cats have gone missing, families move in but don't stay there long, creepy feeling... There was one thing, though. Some of the older folks remembered a family living there, back in the eighties. They had a little boy, maybe three or four. One day, he went missing. The police were called in, the whole neighborhood went out looking for him. No one could find him. Two days later, they found him curled up on the lawn, crying. He wouldn't say what had happened. Said he couldn't remember."
Ianto shrugged. "He probably just wandered off, got too scared to come back home. Or got lost, if he didn't go out very much."
"It's possible," Gwen said. "Here's the weird thing, though. The whole time, his mother kept saying he'd gone through the door. There was this bit of blank wall in the living room, between a couple of windows, and she just sat by it, knocking on it and calling his name. Saying that there was a door there, and he'd gone through it. Granted, maybe she was hysterical; some of the neighbors seemed to think she was... just, you know, not right, but..."
"But maybe there was a door," Jack finished. He and Owen shared a look; Tosh was surprised at how serious Owen's face was at that moment. He'd been slagging off the case from the moment Jack announced they were taking it, the missing cats, the missing ghost hunter; even Ianto's pointed references to fairies couldn't seem to stop him. But, then, he had stopped: somewhere between leaving to talk with Navidson's UK-Paranormal minders and getting back to the Hub, he'd gone quiet and serious. The thought made Tosh feel a bit uneasy.
Jack reached over to the controls set on the far side of the table; the lights in the room dimmed, and the screen on the far wall lit up. The image was almost steady, but not quite; a handheld camera, probably. There didn't seem to be anything special about it, though -- it was just a door, in a wall. There was one window to the left of it, another to the right. Both windows were open. "This is the last thing Navidson sent to UK-Paranormal before they lost contact with him," Jack said. The camera dropped down to the floor, tracking a few wobbly steps before lifting up again, now right in front of the window, now going through it and outside. Again, the camera dropped, showing well-kept flower beds being trodden through by heavy feet. Then the camera lifted and turned, skimming over a quick glimpse of the someone's front yard before turning to the white siding of the house. For a few moments, it focused on the plain, flat wall. Then it dropped again as the camera operator moved right, climbing in through the other window, completing the circle and once again standing in front of the door. A hand appeared, reaching out to grasp the door's handle, pulling it open. Where there should have been nothing more than insulation, or at best a shallow cubby terminating in white vinyl siding, there was instead a narrow hallway, shockingly dark on the inside; the light from the living room barely lifted the gloom. The camera trembled, and then there was a bit more light, a torch or a small spot trained into the darkness. It was difficult to say, but the hallway had to go on for at least ten feet. Probably more.
Out through the window again. Back to the exterior wall. This time, the camera's operator backed up a bit, to show the full view -- one window to the right, one window to the left, the wall completely smooth and flat between them. Then back inside, and the hallway was still there, as impossible as it was. The camera moved in, one step, then another. "It's freezing in here," the camera's operator said. Then the screen went blank.
When the lights came up again, Gwen was frowning, double-checking her notes. "That could be the same door," she concluded, after a moment. "Assuming there really was a door in the first place. But Jack, how do we know that the footage wasn't doctored somehow? Or edited? Or that it was even taken at the same house?"
Jack grinned, showing his teeth. "We don't. But there's an easy way to find out."
*
"Anything?" Ianto asked, wandering aimlessly around the unfurnished room. So far the house was completely empty and uninteresting: no mysterious doors, no tunnels into endless night, not even Navidson's belongings, although he'd been camped out at the house for several days before vanishing. It was, Tosh thought, almost a little too empty.
She frowned down at her scanner. "Just that same fluttering," she said. "It's stronger now, though. Look."
Ianto crossed behind her, studying the scanner from over her shoulder. Whatever energy was present, either in this house or near it, it was strong enough to produce definite peaks and valleys, just slightly irregular, like an EKG line. It wasn't the same as a Rift spike, though, not steady, just a constant shifting presence. "Stronger now than before we entered the house?"
"Definitely. If nothing else, we've figured out what was causing the problems with our Rift readings."
"Now we just have to figure out what it is, and what to do about it." Ianto's eyes met hers for a moment, but then they were sliding away, back towards the white, unmarked walls of the unfurnished room they were standing in. "That's odd," he said, stepping around her, moving towards a door set in the wall. "I could've sworn..." His fingers closed around the knob, but he didn't pull it open. Hesitating.
He'd hesitated on the walkway, too; Tosh had been so absorbed in her scanner that she'd nearly run into him. Hesitated on the foot of the stairs; Tosh had looked back and seen him there, one hand on the banister, one foot on the first step, his eyes turned towards the living room, as though looking for something. "This must remind you of the house you grew up in," Tosh guessed, and immediately felt what a stupid thing that was to say.
Ianto just chuckled, and his eyes were still crinkled in a smile when he turned back to look at her. "Not at all. We never lived anywhere near as..." His voice trailed off, then, and he turned back to the door, turning the knob and pushing it open. There was no dark hallway, narrow and oppressive, stretching out before them. Just a few feet of white-painted corridor, and a door at the other end. "Well," Ianto said. "It doesn't look as though it wants to eat me."
"Yes, well, you can never really trust architecture," Tosh said, closing up behind him, the scanner held in front of her like a shield. She couldn't be completely sure, but she thought the spikes were somewhat taller now, coming more rapidly.
"Only one way to find out," Ianto muttered, and stepped inside. He stood there for a moment, running his hands over the walls, as if trying to feel out any difference. "Seems normal enough." Another step had him in the middle of the strange space; Tosh felt the strangest urge to grab him by the jacket and pull him out again. "Cold in here."
"No heating vents," Tosh pointed out.
"Still, you'd think the residual heat from the rest of the house..." Two more steps saw Ianto to the other door; he pushed that one open as well. It led back into the master suite. "Huh."
Tosh let out a deep breath. "This must have been used as a child's bedroom," she said. "The parents could go back and forth between, checking up on strange sounds or anything."
Ianto frowned at her over his shoulder. "It's no easier than going into the hallway and around," he pointed out. "And I'd have sworn there wasn't this much space between the two rooms to begin with."
"We could measure it," Tosh suggested.
"More to the point, how did we miss this door when we were examining the master suite? We should have found this earlier."
"We must've--"
Before she could finish, Jack's voice was sounding in her ear. "As I stood upon the stair, I saw a door that wasn't there. It wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish --"
Ianto shook his head. "You've butchered that quote, Sir." But he spun on his heel, heading back down the little hallway. Tosh turned as well; if their mysterious door had reappeared, she wanted a chance to get some readings before the others were plunging willy-nilly into the darkness. It wasn't until she'd reached the door of the children's room that she realized Ianto wasn't behind her.
He had stopped just before the doorway that would take him out of the corridor and into the children's room; he had one hand on either wall, his face turned towards the ceiling. He was hesitating. "Funny," he said, quietly. "It seems like it should be so much bigger, doesn't it?"
"Ianto?" She stepped back into the room, watching him.
After a few seconds, he refocused, his eyes settling on her. "Right," he said. "Let's go see what Jack's found."
*
"Well, someone's been down here," Owen said, his voice echoing strangely over the comms.
Ianto looked up from his unpacking; he and Gwen had pulled a motley assortment of spelunking gear out of the SUV after Jack's initial foray revealed that the house's mysterious hallway stretched on for at least a mile, possibly more. Tosh had asked him once why they carried miner's headlamps with them. Now it looked as though they might actually be useful. "Got something, have you?" he asked.
"Reflective tape, on the walls. Whoever it was, looks like they were trying to leave themselves a trail, in case they got lost on their way back. Dunno if it's Navidson's, though. Looks like it's been here a while."
Gwen frowned at no one in particular. "That estate agent was pretty insistent that no one had been in the house unsupervised, though. Just Navidson. Well, and us."
"Well, it's been a rough few days for this tape, then. Looks like something with claws went after it. Might have been the missing cats."
Tosh glanced over at Gwen; Gwen's eyes were worried. "Hang on," Ianto said. "I thought you were traveling in a straight line -- no twists, no turns, no other hallways. So why would Navidson need help finding his way back?"
"Same reason you gave us a spool of fishing line to mark a trail with?" Owen asked. "Which is none, as far as I can see."
"Maybe he was just being cautious," Jack said. "Maybe it gets more complicated as it goes on. Given that this place wasn't here when we first entered the house, I wouldn't be surprised if the walls started shifting on us." And it was almost like Jack could see Ianto's eyebrows drawing together in the beginnings of a frown, because he was quick to add, "Which is why we're heading back. I want to return to the Hub, see if we can't cobble together some sort of tracking system in case things go wrong. And we'll need more supplies; this place is huge, and we're not going to explore the whole thing in just a few hours. It could take days."
"Also, it's getting late, and I'm starving," Owen said.
"That too," Jack said. "See you in a few."
The comms went quiet, then; Tosh looked over at Ianto and Gwen. Gwen was chewing her lip, still frowning; Ianto had a bit of rope in his hands and was twisting it, staring into the darkness just behind the door. "Well," Tosh said, when it was plain that no one else was going to talk. "Looks like it'll be another late night."
Gwen nodded. "I should call Rhys," she said. But she didn't reach for her phone.
Ianto just stared into the darkness, twisting the rope in his hands.
*
Gwen had fallen asleep stretched out on top of her sleeping bag, her head pillowed on her jacket, Ianto's wool coat spread over her like a blanket. Ianto himself was nowhere in sight; he'd helped Tosh get the laptop set up, with the portable Rift monitor next to it, everything plugged in and tested, then gone back to the SUV to unload the rest of the supplies. He'd gone in and out at least four times before Tosh had gotten too absorbed in her work to keep count.
Jack had been right about the hallway changing over time; he and Owen hadn't been in there ten minutes before they found the first of several hallways, branching off from the main path, twisting and turning. Tosh watched them on her laptop, the tracking devices that they wore showing up as bright red dots on the screen, using a bit of hastily cobbled together software to try and build a map of the labyrinth around them. They hadn't gone very far before turning around and heading back towards the main path. It was the same with the next hallway, and the one after that -- they'd go down a bit, realize it was another endless corridor, then head back to the main path. Eventually, they'd just let the side passages go unexplored.
The main hallway had eventually led them into a large room, and from there into another, even vaster space. They'd been exploring the Great Hall ever since.
"There's a staircase here," Jack said, at long last. "Spiral. Looks like it goes down... well... forever, pretty much."
"Before you ask, Harkness, I'm not going down there." Owen sounded tired. "Not unless you want to carry me back up."
"Guess that settles it," Jack said. He, of course, didn't sound tired at all. "We'll come back in the morning, see where it leads. Who knows, we might find --" His voice died before he finished the thought. "Did you hear that?"
"Yeah." Owen's voice was tense, strained. Behind her, Tosh heard a rustling; Gwen was sitting up.
"Owen? Jack?" There was always something unsettling about hearing one of her teammates in her ear and in her earpiece at the same time, a strange echo that Tosh couldn't seem to get used to. "What's happening?"
"Dunno," Owen said. "There was a noise, kind of like a --"
"I've got something." Ianto's voice. Tosh froze, glancing back at Gwen in alarm. She hadn't seen him go into the hallway, but then, she hadn't really been looking. But he wouldn't head into the labyrinth alone, would he? "There's a box here; Navidson's things, maybe. Papers, some photographs--"
"Ianto, where are you?" Jack's voice was sharp with irritation, maybe fear.
"Upstairs; children's bedroom." Without a word, Gwen scrambled to her feet and hurried to the stairs, taking them two at a time. "Jack, Tosh and I went through every cupboard and cubbyhole in this room. This box wasn't here before."
Jack sighed; it went through the earpiece straight into Tosh's bones. "Right. Bring it down. We'll be back in a bit to help go through it. And Ianto? Do not wander off again without checking with me first. This place is changing constantly; if you just leave without a tracker on, and get stuck somewhere--"
Tosh thought she could almost hear Ianto rolling his eyes. "Of course, Sir. I'll see you when you get back."
There was a momentary pause. Then the two dots of Owen and Jack's tracking devices were moving again, taking the same straight line that had led them into the Great Hall. Gwen had found Ianto; Tosh could hear their voices, too muffled for her to make out the words. Footsteps sounded on the ceiling above her, and she decided that it didn't really matter. They were coming back. That was what counted.
*
"'Ftaires.'" Owen drawled the word out, over-pronouncing the "F" in a way that Tosh thought was deliberately calculated to drive the rest of them mad. "'We Haue Found Ftaires.'"
"I believe the word is 'stairs,' Owen," Ianto said. "Which you did find, if I remember correctly." He took the battered journal from Owen's outstretched hands and flipped through it. "This isn't anywhere near old enough to match the language being used. Could be copied from an older document, maybe. Or some student creative writing project. One of the two. Navidson must have thought it was important, anyway." He held the book out to Tosh. "What do you think? Early Modern?"
She set aside the file she'd been working on to take the journal from him. It looked like it was some sort of traveller's journal, an expedition log, something like that. The writing was fragmentary at best -- sometimes whole paragraphs, sometimes just words or bits of sentences, centered on the page. "Could be. Sixteenth century, maybe." She handed the journal back. "Cardiff was already a city at that point, wasn't it?"
"County Town of Glamorganshire," Ianto said, flipping back to the beginning to examine the journal more closely. "It was smaller then, though. They hadn't settled out as far as Cyncoed yet." He frowned down at the pages. "I wonder if we could find the original of this somewhere..."
Tosh watched him for a bit longer, then turned back to the stenographer's pad she'd been looking at. Navidson had devoted quite some time to researching the previous owners of the house. Most of the names had a note next to them: "deceased," maybe, or "couldn't find," something like that. One of the names, however, was highlighted, starred, and heavily annotated. "Alun Jones," she read, and looked up at Ianto; he raised an eyebrow at her. "Don't suppose he's related?"
Ianto shrugged, thoughtfully. "My dad's name is Alun. Of course, so is my old dentist, one of my primary school teachers, three of my primary school classmates... Jack, you're humming again."
Jack held up a piece of paper, turned so Ianto could see. "It's sheet music," he said. "Kind of." Tosh thought Jack was being overly charitable; someone, presumably a child, had attempted to transcribe some music onto a sheet of lined paper. There was no time signature, and the notes were nothing more than black dots gracing the lines. "I know I know this song." And he promptly went back to humming.
Tosh grinned at Ianto, who only shook his head, and went back to studying Navidson's notes. "It looks like Alun Jones owned the house from 1987 until 1988. Maybe he was the owner of the house when that little boy vanished." Tosh glanced over at Gwen, who was flipping through some sort of scrapbook, eyes saucer-wide. "D'you -- Gwen? You all right?"
"Fine." Gwen clapped the book shut with a sudden snap, setting it aside. "Navidson's old war photographs," she added, by way of explanation. "It's funny, the things you see in this life -- and yet those pictures still get to me."
Tosh gave her a small smile, and was trying to think of something comforting to say, when Jack burst into song. "Dominique, nique, nique s'en allait tous simplement, routier, pauvre et chantant..." The others could only gape; he laughed, apparently completely unembarrassed. "It's 'Dominique.' Come on, Soeur Sourire? The Singing Nun? One of you has to have heard of the Singing Nun."
"I have," Owen said, with great reluctance. "And if you slept with her, Jack, I don't want to know."
Grinning, Gwen dove back into the box, coming up with a sheaf of papers. Her smile quickly faded into a look of concentration. "Jack, was Navidson a smoker?"
Jack shrugged. "Not that I'm aware of, but I didn't know him that well. Why?"
She passed over a sheaf of papers. "Look at all the burn marks. I can't tell if it was an accident, or if he was trying to ... erase something completely."
"Bit of an overkill," Ianto murmured, leaning in to examine the papers in Jack's hands until the two of them were pressed shoulder-to-shoulder. "He's already struck most of it out... That one might be Theseus; what do you think?"
Jack frowned down at the paper, his finger joining Ianto's in tracing the scratched and burnt words. "Which would make that Ariadne, and the secret word is... Minotaur."
"'The roar of the Minotaur,'" Ianto quoted. "You said you heard something down in the labyrinth, didn't you?"
"Right before you found the box," Jack said, his face shifting into a frown. "This was up in the children's room?"
"There's a sort of... hallway, between the children's room and the master bedroom," Ianto said, turning back to the battered journal in his hands. "I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be part of the house or not, so I --" He gave Jack a sidelong glance, then, and fell abruptly silent.
"And you didn't tell me about this hallway earlier, because --"
"This is sweet," Gwen announced, halting the argument before it could get a chance to start. "Sort of, anyway. 'Dear Mam. I am sorry for getting into fights at school. I know that I should control my temper and not get angry when people make fun. It's not their fault that they can't understand, and I should try to be better than they are, and not --'"
"May I?" Ianto's voice was unusually sharp, and he reached across the pile of photographs and notes to snatch the paper from Gwen's hands without waiting for her to reply. She stared at him; everyone was staring, but Ianto didn't look up from the letter. It trembled in Ianto's hands as he studied it. "Huh," he said, quietly.
"Something wrong?" Jack's tone wasn't as light as he probably thought it was; there was an uncertainty in it, an anxiety.
"I wrote this." Ianto's eyes never left the paper; he'd gone pale. "Ages ago. My mam was... she was sick in hospital, and some of the boys were... Anyway, when Da couldn't get me to leave off fighting, he told me I'd have to write her and apologize every time I got into trouble. I only ever had to write the one letter, so I suppose it worked." Gwen rested a hand on his knee. Finally, he looked up, his eyes settling on Jack. "But how did Navidson get it? And why... It's nothing to do with this. At all."
"I don't know," Jack said.
Owen had picked another paper off the pile. He studied it for a few moments, then handed it to Ianto without a word. Ianto stared at it for a long time, barely moving. When he finally looked up again, his eyes were huge. He thrust the paper at Jack, then hurried out of the room, leaving the rest of them to stare after him.
Jack looked down at the paper for a few moments, then turned it so that the others could see. It was an ordinary enough piece of lined paper, wide-ruled, made for a child's huge letters. At the top, someone had printed the words "Draw a picture of your house," in large, round letters; the sort of handwriting that a primary school teacher might have. The rest of the page was taken up with a black square, done in several layers of crayon. It was so thick that it stood up off the paper. "He signed it," Jack said, quietly. "I. Jones."
Tosh looked up to where Ianto had disappeared into the kitchen.
"There's more," Owen said, continuing to rummage through the documents. "Marriage license for Alun Jones and Pelafina Lievre. Birth certificates for Ianto and Rhiannon Jones. School records, medical records, newspaper clippings..." He glanced up from the sheaf of papers in his hands. "Jack, his whole life is here. How did Navidson get this stuff? And more to the point, why?"
"Jack, Navidson called Ianto," Tosh said, as the memory suddenly resurfaced. "The day before he came to this house, he called and left a message on Ianto's voicemail, looking for information about the house. Ianto said he never got around to calling him back. He was too busy."
Jack's face was stony; he stared down at the papers in his hand, not speaking. "Jack," Gwen said, finally. "What are we going to do?"
"I don't know," Jack said, quietly. "I don't know."
*
It wasn't Jack's voice that had woken her, but it was Jack's voice that kept her awake, a soothing murmur of words that she couldn't quite make out but didn't want to let go of, either. They weren't directed at her, of course, but that was all right; she wasn't going to begrudge Ianto that. At the moment, she wasn't much prepared to begrudge him anything.
The murmur broke off after a bit. Tosh could hear Ianto's sleeping bag, sliding along the floor. He was probably sitting up. "Want to talk about it?" Jack asked, after a while.
"Not really." Jack chuckled at that, and Ianto let out a tired sigh. "I just... Jack, if I'd ever lived in a place like this, I think I'd remember it. Even without the door, and the black hallways, and..." He left the thought incomplete. "You know where I come from, Jack. And it's about as far from Cyncoed as is possible to be. I'd remember living in a place like this."
"I know," Jack said, quietly. "Look, you said it yourself. There's more than one Alun Jones in Cardiff. Navidson was looking for the previous owners of this house, saw the name Alun Jones, and thought it was your father. It's just a coincidence. Nothing more than that."
"I suppose," Ianto said. He didn't sound very convinced. "It's strange, though. And that song you found, the sheet music... my mother was obsessed with Soeur Sourire. She'd sing 'Dominique' to me every night; it was the only way I'd get to sleep."
"Want me to sing it to you now?" Jack asked; it was half teasing, and half something else entirely, although Tosh couldn't quite put a name to it. It was strange to hear the two of them together like this, almost alone. It wasn't much different from the way they spoke to each other during the day, at the Hub, not really. Just... gentler, somehow. More warmth to it.
"Thanks, no." Ianto sighed again. "The thing is, Jack... If there is something to this, if there's something I've forgotten, or... If something goes wrong down there, I don't want it to be me. I don't want to be a liability, or --"
"I don't want you to be a liability either," Jack said. They were quiet for a bit. "I'd planned to have Tosh stay with the remote setup; she's the one who built the imaging software, and she's better at -- But if you really think it'd be better for you to stay here --"
"It'd be an absolute nightmare," Ianto admitted, and Tosh squelched a perverse pride at that. "I can't do half the things that Tosh can, and we both know it. No, I'll go down; I just..."
"I was going to have someone camped out at the top of the stairs," Jack said, slowly. "As backup, in case we get caught down there, or if Tosh needs --"
Ianto didn't even let him finish. "I'll do it."
"You'll be alone," Jack pointed out. "If something goes wrong --"
"I'll do it," Ianto said again.
"Are you sure you want to go down there?" Jack asked. "Really sure?"
"To be honest, Jack, I don't want to go back down there at all. I mean, not back... I mean... I don't know what I mean."
"I know what you mean," Jack said. Tosh was pretty sure, though, that he didn't. "Don't decide yet. Get some sleep, see how you feel in the morning."
"Fair enough," Ianto murmured, although it was plain that he'd already made up his mind. Now it was just a question of Jack coming around to Ianto's way of thinking, which he almost certainly would do by the morning. Because Ianto was right; Tosh was the only one who could handle the monitors and the remote imaging software, and if Ianto were to... if something were to happen to him, it was better that he be near the entrance to the labyrinth, so he could get out quickly. And Jack would need at least two other people to really explore the labyrinth, if they were going to take samples and do readings and figure out what the place was; he couldn't afford to send Ianto back to the Hub and have Gwen or Owen stay behind at the top of the stairs, not if they wanted to know the truth about the labyrinth.
Tosh knew all of those things, as well as Ianto or even Jack. But that didn't mean she was happy about it.
Jack and Ianto were quiet, apart from the soft noises of Ianto settling back into his sleeping bag, trying to get comfortable. "Jack?" Ianto asked after a moment. "Stay here, just for a bit?" Tosh couldn't remember a time when he'd sounded quite so vulnerable.
"I'm right here," Jack replied. "Not going anywhere."
The room fell silent for a long time -- just Gwen and Owen's breathing, the sounds of Ianto shifting, trying to get comfortable on the floor. Maybe his head was in Jack's lap. Maybe Jack was sitting next to him, stroking his hair. Maybe they were just a little closer to each other than they should have been, like they always were at work. Then Jack started singing, very softly. "Dominque, nique, nique... s'en allait tout simplement, routier pauvre et chantant..."
Tosh burrowed deeper into her sleeping bag, and within a few moments, she was fast asleep again.
Continue to Part Two