Into the Silence - By Sarah Pinborough Page 0,1

and, when the train had finished its breathless journey past, she realised they'd started again. The sound was only faint, but Kate could pick up the strains of the men and women's voices as they surged louder towards the peak of the tune. She didn't know what the song was, but it was pretty. Even cocooned in her nightly battle with the dark, she smiled a little.

But then, almost imperceptibly, something shifted in the night air. A few streets away, a dog set up an anguished howl, joined by two or three more before they whimpered into subdued silence. Kate frowned. Cats shrieked and hissed in the street outside. The music from the church a few hundred metres away faded in her head, the sound draining to nothing and taking the throbbing car engines and the raindrops with it.

Thump. Something landed heavily on the roof and Kate's terrified eyes rolled upwards, her mouth falling open a little. It was too heavy to be a bird or a cat. What was it? Sweat seeped from the palms of her hands into Lucky's fur. Mummy. She wanted Mummy. The thing on the roof moved and Kate froze.

With each leaden step taken on top of the house, sound faded from Kate's world. Cold silence oozed through the tiles and down through the attic, its fingers reaching for the little girl, wrapping round her mind and digging sharp nails in, squeezing tighter than she held the tatty toy. Her throat worked to make a scream, but she couldn't find it. For a horrible moment, she couldn't remember how.

The clock beside her bed ceased its quiet, steady electric tick, even though the luminous hands continued on their regimented journey. Her heart stopped its panicked beat in her ears. Even the inner whine that accompanied complete stillness vanished. Her head was empty, cut off even from the regulation clicks and whirrs of its own body. Alone. Vacant.

The monsters had found her in the dark and they were never ever going to let her go.

And then she gasped and sat bolt upright, air pounding noisily through her lungs, the clock bursting back into life, the rustle of the sheets and duvet an explosion of joyous sound as whatever had been on the roof took a final leap clear of the house.

Kate didn't go to the window. She couldn't bring herself to move, not even when she heard glass shattering just before the choir fell silent. Not even when a shriek of human agony filled the street and her head. She wasn't a big girl. She wanted her night light.

She finally found her own scream fifteen minutes later when the sirens' wails filled the quiet roads outside, but this time no maternal reassurance would calm her. Kate Healey slept in with her parents that night, curled up tight against her mother Cara's back. She stayed there for the rest of the week, and no amount of shouting from Daddy could move her.

Kate Healey had found a fear that made the dark seem like child's play. And it came shrouded in silence.

ONE

Gwen Cooper pulled up outside the Church of St Emmanuel and stepped out of the black SUV before quickly zipping up her fitted leather jacket, flinching a little against the rain. Bloody weather. It had been raining for days and showed no sign of letting up, the sky hanging constantly heavy and grey over the city.

Jack Harkness slammed his door and looked over at her as she tucked her chin into the fitted collar.

'It's only water, Gwen. Pure, natural, recycled for millions of years, good old Earth water.' He grinned. 'This little downpour's probably been through you a few times already. Embrace it!'

She stared at him for a moment.

'Thanks for that insight, Jack. It makes me feel so much warmer and drier.'

'You need a proper jacket.' He looked down at his grey wartime thick wool overcoat, which stopped somewhere around his shins.

Gwen raised an eyebrow. 'You wouldn't catch me dead in something like that.'

'Me neither. But then, what's the chance of that?'

Unable to hold back the smile, Gwen shook her head. 'Actually we have caught you bloody dead in it. You just don't stay that way long.' There was something about Jack that could always make her feel good, even after everything that had happened. She blew her damp fringe out of her face. 'Come on. Let's see what's causing all this excitement.'

The rain forgotten for a moment, Gwen took in the activity around them. Since joining Torchwood,