Chasing Ghosts (attn: Ianto)

Ianto couldn't help being only a little uncomfortable when Jack began going through the drawers of the bureau. There were actual things in there, belonging to a person, and suddenly he wasn't so sure if he could maintain the Torchwood-required clinical eye and aloof attitude on this case.

"What have you got? Anything useful?" He tried, looking at the back of Jack's head. "Anything other than underwear and fond memories?" He asked again.

Jack grinned, but it was fleeting, at Ianto's question. "Nothing yet. Definitely nothing interesting-- Victorians, honestly." As if that was surprising. But it was better than saying 'no, and I don't expect to find anything', so he went with it. Reaching the last drawer, he shut them and sighed, hands in his pockets as he looked around the room again, for somewhere else they might keep things.

"Check the desk drawer," he told Ianto, pulling down the blankets - sparing a moment to remember that there probably weren't real blankets there, merely perceived blankets - and finding nothing off import there, either. Dammit.

Ianto swallowed hard and turned to the desk, opening the 4 drawers slowly, one by one. In the first one there was nothing but dust. A lot of it. Too much of it, in fact, and Ianto felt his throat itch, and coughed.
The second one had nothing but an old, battered handkerchief, with the initials "DP" embroidered in blue on it. Ianto handled it carefully, afraid the fabric was going to tear, and handed it to Jack.
The last two drawers had nothing but old papers with faded ink, he could hardly make out anything it said. No, actually, he really could
not make out anything it said. Ianto deposited the papers on top of the desk, looking at Jack significantly.

"Well? Anything of worth?" He asked the Captain, knowing rather well that an old handkerchief was hardly ever anything of worth. Was it? Ianto's eyes shifted as he wondered if in that particular case, the handkerchief meant anything valuable. Without any clue on the former habitants of that house, they couldn't even try to guess what the initials stood for. He waited for Jack to say something.

Jack took the handkerchief and examined it briefly, taking note of the initials before handing it back to Ianto. It probably didn't mean anything - the name of the inhabitant of the room, probably - but he couldn't help thinking this was all one great puzzle. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't; maybe he was just too used to opponents with great big plans for everything.

"Hard to say," he said at length, sitting a little uneasily on the edge of the bed. There was no mattress there in 'reality', but it felt like there was. Psychosomatic reactions - that is, pertaining to both mind and body - were so fun (that was sarcasm, just there). "Funny that the handkerchief and those papers seem as old as the room really is, though. Someone didn't do their homework."

"It's a fragmented illusion, it seems..." Ianto smirked, shaking his head. "Maybe if both of us tap our shoes together we can read what's in those papers?" Ianto suggested, now just plain joking at the whole situation.

Ianto was at loss as to what could be trapping them in that room, but not bothering with the details. It seemed the purpose was to make them think they had been transported into another time, except it was clear that wasn't the case. They were still very much in the same time and place they had been before, except there was something making them feel trapped. Wonderfull.

"Nah, no red heels," Jack replied, shaking his head. They were trapped and then not trapped. It was a paradox. By all rights, they should have been able to walk directly out of the room without a thought, but whatever it was that had constructed the lie inside their minds had also constructed a trap there. It gave them some clues, but not quite enough. "You know," he commented lightly, "I really hate it when things try to mess with my mind. It's irritating." More than that, really, but...

"Obviously," he added, more seriously, "It's in this room. There can't be 'no way out'. We can't get out of the door, and we've checked everything, but..."

Jack hated it when things tried to mess with his mind. Well, so did Ianto, and he was getting quite aggravated by the lack of possibilities, or things to try.

"I don't know what else to suggest, should we dig a hole in the floor and try to fall downstairs?" He asked, half-serious. "Or perhaps we should try yelling "show yourself" and it would come out of wherever it's hiding?"

Ianto was, now, visibly aggravated. If only they could do some proper investigation, but without being able to leave, and without some precious background information, there really wasn't much to do. Ianto felt like he was repeating himself, so he decided to stop thinking altogether.

"Pretty sure that wouldn't work. And we haven't got anything to break the floor with," Jack pointed out, and took a moment to think. He'd checked the bureau's drawers and the bedclothes. Ianto had checked the desk drawers. There wasn't anywhere else for anything to be hiding, beyond the perfectly ridiculous, except...

It wasn't subtle and it wasn't clean, but it was a relief of some of that frustration to draw the Webley and send a bullet into the mirror, plunging through the glass and digging into the wood behind it, shattering it completely. As it broke, the illusion around them flickered and fell, and they were left in the very same room they had started in, old and dilapidated, now with shards of glass littering the floor.

Well, it wasn't like that was the first time Jack would start shooting out of nowhere, for a number of unknown reasons, at least to anyone but Jack himself. The good news were that it had worked, and the bad news was that the chair Ianto had been sitting on moments ago had just gained about 150 years of termite-damage.

It cracked, and Ianto fell on his back. Instead of screaming, or cursing, Ianto didn't make a sound. However, the look on his face was, indeed, worth a thousand words. His brow was furrowed to his maximum, and Ianto was gritting his teeth, while trying to stand up again.

"Thanks for that, sir." He told Jack.

Jack turned to look at Ianto when he heard the crack and the thud, putting the Webley back in its holster as he moved. "Sorry," he said, not entirely sincerely (because he was sorry Ianto had fallen down, but he was far from sorry for breaking the mirror and getting them out of the illusion), offering a hand to help the other man up. "I was only half-expecting that to work."

But he was very glad that it had. Now that he knew the mirrors were the key... that made things easier.

Ianto took Jack's hand and got up, trying to get the floor dust off his suit right away. He had no idea how Jack had been able to break the illusion by breaking the mirror, and he was now even more lost than he had been before. What kind of alien creature used mirrors to create partial, half-arsed illusions as a form of entrapment?

"So, then, mirrors? They're using mirrors?" Ianto asked Jack, looking at the shattered mirror, its frame still on the wall, one or two shards hanging on to it. To him, it looked like any other broken mirror.

"Looks like it. The other rooms' mirrors were already broken.." He stepped away, going to the mirror and pulling one of the larger shards still stuck in the frame out. "It's a machine," he remarked, pulling at it - tiny, almost vein-like wires ran from the edge of the frame to the glass, then vanished beneath its surface. "It's using the mirror the magnify the effect." He sounded a little bit in awe of it.

He loved the sophisticated technology they found at times. And, well, as it wasn't presently doing anything to harm them, he felt safe to be impressed with it. The wires only ran along the edges, apparently conducting a charge through the rest of the glass that was broadcasting the mental 'interference'. When the glass was broken, the charge was interrupted, and the illusion broken. It was a simple enough theory to grasp once you knew what it was doing, but amazingly complex in what effect it was actually having.

"We're going to need Tosh to have a closer look at this," he said, once he was (about) done being in awe of the alien tech. "I wonder what set this up?"

As much as the machine's way of working made all the sense in the world, Ianto still needed an identification of whatever had used it, and why it had used it on them. It was quite impressive, but Ianto didn't like to be in the dark, and that's where he felt he was at that moment.

"If I knew what had set this up, we would be far from here by now." Ianto told Jack, making his way out of the bedroom. He looked at the staircase that led, inevitably, to the attic. "I swear, if the great revelation is in there, I will laugh in the face of whoever is doing this." He muttered, waiting for Jack to come out and decide if they should finally go upstairs or not.

Jack set down the piece of glass he'd been looking at, once he'd had a good enough look at it that he would remember how it had fit together later. It would be important to be able to describe it to Tosh later. Making his way out to the hallway, he grinned at Ianto's remark, almost despite himself and the oppressive mood of the place. "You're not the only one. Guess we ought to go up, though, or we'll never know." And he was never the kind of person who liked not knowing.

Heading up the stairs to the attic, he felt an almost childish sort of foreboding and ignored it. That sort of 'monster in the closet' feeling was something he'd long, long, long since learned was merely a product of the mind, not any actual indication of trouble. Though, this was Torchwood, and trouble tended to follow no matter the feeling...

The attic, they found, was rather expansive, if low-ceilinged and cluttered. Jack had to lean down slightly not to hit his head on the rafters. It was strung up with cobwebs nearly thick enough to masquerade as cloth, and dusty. The entire attic was filled with a circular arrangement of broken mirrors, the glass, inch-thick dust smeared over every piece, scattered across the floor.

"Backup mirrors?" he asked, a little skeptically. It was like a fricking psychic mirror warehouse.

Ianto sneezed as he walked further into the attic, and gave a slight chuckle as he noticed the "backup mirrors", as Jack had called them. Suddenly, Ianto felt as though he were inside one of thouse wacky mirror houses often found in Fun Faires, except the mirrors in those places weren't usually broken to pieces.

"If they're all shattered, what are they good for, still?" Ianto wondered out loud, half expecting Jack to know the answer.

"If I'm right, they wouldn't be," Jack replied, shrugging as he walked to the center of the arrangement, looking at all the mirrors. They were all turned to face inwards towards the one spot. "My guess is, somebody got here before us, and figured out what the mirrors were doing. Question is, what's powering the illusion as a whole?" A pause, and he added, "Thankfully for our sanity, I don't think the answer's up here."

But there was still the ground floor-- maybe a basement, or a wine cellar. It wasn't completely out of the realm of possibility.

Ianto shrugged and took it upon himself to leave the attic before he had a full blown sinus attack - the sneezing was becoming unbearable.

"Should we bring some of this glass for Toshiko, sir?" Ianto asked Jack, but not waiting for his answer, for he knew he could get another shard of it from the room they had recently been trapped in.

For a moment, Ianto thought they would find a giant, out-of-this-world mirror in the one floor they had still not been to. Perhaps the whole floor would be covered in glass, the floors, the walls, the ceiling. Then, Ianto told himself to stop being silly, and kept walking down the creaking staircase.

Figuring there was nothing more to see in the attic, and slightly unsettled by being in the center of all those mirrors, Jack followed Ianto back down the stairs. "Probably," he said, in answer to the question, "We can grab it on the way out, though." He didn't add that they might need both hands each for whatever was awaiting them on the ground floor, but it was implied. Alien machinery, a hundred years old or more... well.

He led the way back down the hall and then the stairs to the ground floor. Before, not hearing anything, he had disregarded those closed doors, but now he paid them special attention, pushing at the first one he reached. When it didn't open, he shoved at it, hard, and thankfully the old wood gave way.

The room was not quite the mirror-covered box that Ianto had imagined, but it did have several of the things, big antique things hung on the wall - three of them that he could see without stepping inside. The whole room was covered in dust, furniture covered in cloth to prevent the stuff from accumulating directly on the surfaces, with the result that it looked like a room full of Halloween ghost puppets.

There were several shapeless forms pressed up against the wall, probably tables or a desk, an armoire. It was a sitting room, if the number of sort of couch-shaped objects was any indication. There was no radio or television, as it dated from a time before both. One table was uncovered, a large sheet of paper on it covered in chicken scratch writing. Its author was unclear, until one took a closer look.

Draped across one of the couch-forms as if sitting up, there sat a skeleton still poised to write, already decomposed after probable decades spent in the room. An odor of dust and what was definitely decay permeated the room, and the sheet over that couch was stained.

Jack scowled at it, but he didn't move back. "We found our mirror-breaker," he said simply.

Ianto looked shocked at the skeleton, and frowned at the stench. The mirrors were beginning to make him sick, now, too, and he had this odd, unexplainable feeling of dread creeping up to him.

He dare not touch the sheet of paper, but tried to look at what it said. He couldn't make out anything that made sense, though, which frustrated him.
Looking back at the skeleton, Ianto shrugged.

"Looks like breaking every mirror in the house didn't do much for his health." Ianto said, his voice echoing in a phantasmagoric sort of way.

"No, but I have a feeling the mirrors didn't do this," Jack said, a little offhandedly. Dead bodies he could handle - the smell was disgusting, and the sight wasn't doing anything for him, either, but he had been around a lot of death, and he knew how to handle himself around it. "Maybe..."

He didn't finish the sentence, as the room shifted again. This time it was different, and the change was so noticeable that it was shocking. It wasn't merely a matter of everything becoming new again. The mirrors were scraped but not broken, gilded around the edges of the framework. The covers were off of the furniture, and it was pristine, but for the one with the skeleton -- the skeleton which had become a man, bleeding all over the upholstery, the blue fabric quickly turning to a dull red.

There were bottles on the table which hadn't been there before, broken, the liquid spilling out over the side, narrowly missing the paper (now new, its writing legible). It was wine, its color deep red, nearly matching the blood on the couch. It pooled on the carpeting, soaking into it.

The most disturbing aspects of the 'new' room were the walls, the paper torn away in places and streaked with red. Something was written there, impossible to make out. Perhaps a foreign language, or merely something that the mirrors didn't have a function to clarify in their minds.

Jack stared for a long moment before he moved, going to the wall to examine the writing. It looked like blood. What the hell was going on here?

Ianto's jaw had been doing a whole lot of dropping that day, and this was no exception. If the room changing to look like its early days was shocking, Ianto didn't think there was a word to describe what was going on this time. All the red, all the blood, it was scary and disgusting, and Ianto's first reaction was to retreat his steps all the way back to the door - except it banged shut just as he got closer, and as he tried to pull it open, it did not budge.

He looked to Jack, who was trying to figure out the literal writing on the wall.

"We're locked in again." Ianto announced redundantly, for if the sound of that door shutting itself locked didn't startle Jack, then nothing would. Somehow, Ianto managed to keep himself from trying to help the man, who was bleeding dry all over the place. All in all, Ianto was quite sure he could do nothing for the man now.

Jack turned when the door shut, his expression difficult to read. Grotesque didn't begin to cover it, but at the least, he was beginning to get a feel for what had gone on here. It was something, and sometimes that was the best you could hope for. Somethings.

"Yeah, figured that would happen," he said, looking at the bleeding man again. There wasn't going to be any saving him: he was already too far gone. "This guy must have been working within the vision.." That was an unsettling thought. They said nightmares couldn't kill you, but this was seeming an awful lot like a nightmare, and that guy was very dead. Of course, Jack knew that wouldn't do anything to him, but...

Pieces of the puzzle. They were collecting them, and Jack moved to look at another one. The chickenscratch writing that had become clear when the scene had shifted, revealing itself not to be all writing at all. There were drawings as well, a sketch or two of the mirrors in the attic, a girl on a bed that Jack hadn't seen but Ianto had.

Of course he figured it would happen, it was cliche horror movie behaviour. Ianto felt stupid for having ran to the door; of course, looking back at it now, it had been naive of him to expect whatever was playing with them to just let him go.

Ianto looked over Jack's shoulder at what was scribbled on the paper sheet. He recognized the girl on the bed as being what he had seen in his vision, and he wondered what the drawings really meant.

"Are those instructions, a riddle, clues?" He wondered out loud, actually hoping for Jack's input. It was becoming very clear to Ianto that both himself and Jack would have to solve some sort of mystery if they wanted to get out of that place - alive.

"Observations, I guess," Jack told him, reading over the paper quickly. It was scrambled, much of it, little bits of description interspersed with things like, 'There's something watching me,' or 'the thing in the mirror is there again'. "Mostly about the mirrors. He wrote about smashing them, so that's one mystery solved." Not that it was the greater mystery, or even the more interesting one, but it was something.

If they found a shutterbox camera, he was out of there, really.

"Not much choice about what to do, though, is there?" he asked, glancing at the mirrors again. The sense of foreboding here, and the smell of blood, were getting intolerable. He was good at dealing with these things, but he'd be damned if he would stay in this fucked up horror movie set a minute longer than necessary.

Ianto sighed, in impatience mixed with despair, and turned around to look at the ever bleeding man. He seemed to have been bleeding for ages, but there was still much to run out of him. Making a frown, Ianto looked back at the paper.

"I am no detective, sir, I don't do mystery solving." Ianto told Jack, his annoyance quite visible. If he hadn't been so freaked out by the reality of all those events, he would have laughed at the cheese factor. It really was a cheesy haunted house. Bloody, too.