The Sin Eaters (audio story)

The Sin Eaters was the fourth release of the BBC Torchwood audio stories.

Publisher's summary
Alien larvae in a baptismal font mark the beginnings of a terrifying adventure for the "Torchwood" team in this exclusive audio adventure, read by Gareth David-Lloyd. Searching for the source of a bizarre Rift reading, Gwen, Jack and Ianto find a corpse on the beach, his face covered in hundreds of tiny cuts. Watching from the shadows is a man in black...The Reverend Hayward thinks he has found a way to take away people's sins. The trouble is, his special baptisms tend to take away their lives too. For the creatures he collects and puts in his church font are nightmarish parasites, feeding on their hosts' negative emotions before consuming them. It is up to Torchwood to track them down and destroy them...

Plot
Jack, Gwen and Ianto race in the SUV to a repeating energy signal off the coast of Monknash, but it fades away before they can reach it and they only find the corpse of a 1940s sailor covered in cuts. Unbeknownst to them, Reverend Neil Hayward sets down a flask which fills up with a liquid that he takes to the Holy Church of St Francis to rebaptise members of his congregation and cleanse them of their sins. Gwen performs an autopsy on the sailor at the Hub, identifying him as Ron Arnold who went missing in 1946, and finds that he was host to a number of egg sacs of which one remains. Jack finds an alien maggot inside and he and Ianto take a bioscan to use to trace the others.

Muriel Thomas is rebaptised by Hayward and asks if her son Matt, a friend of Rhys's, could be cleansed as well, but she is soon found dead in her home with her body covered in small cuts. Jack and Ianto try to follow the likely path of Arnold's body by activating the SUV's untested submersible mode, but it quickly sinks and Gwen and Rhys drop them back off at the Hub on their way to find Matt, whom they hope has an idea of where his mother became infected. When Jack and Ianto get back, the maggot turns into a creature with wings and Jack realises when it touches him that it is an eater of sins from the Shadow Dimensions.

Gwen and Rhys find the rebaptised Matt with Hayward at the Holy Church of St Francis and Gwen looks around after deducing that the holy water is responsible and noticing a large number of shoes in the vicarage, including a sandy pair of boots. The garage is full of cut bodies and the ceiling is covered in growing larvae. Gwen reports to Jack, who has gone to Arnold's sunken ship with Ianto and found a giant creature tended to by larvae, after knocking out Matt and punching Hayward and warns him that the larvae will soon be ready to fly. She is knocked out by Hayward and tied up with Rhys, awakening to find the larvae transforming into locust-like creatures.

The swarm head out into Cardiff and Gwen, after Rhys helps her get free, joins Jack and Ianto to try to stop them as they feed on sin and return to their mother in the ship, leaving those they have fed on without concern for others. Hayward is disillusioned by the resulting violence and drowns himself in the sea in despair. The creatures die after feeding their mother, who emerges from the ship and begins to transform into a winged creature itself. Jack coats it in diesel from the Sea Queen and he, Gwen and Ianto set it alight with flare guns, managing to escape in a life boat as the creature burns.

Torchwood manage to remove the larvae from Matt with ultraviolet light, blame the violence around Cardiff on it being a bank holiday and, once Hayward's corpse is recovered, pin the deaths of his parishioners on him. Gwen returns to Rhys, who uses the recent experiences as an excuse to suggest that they buy a bigger house, and Jack agrees to go out with Ianto once he has burnt down Hayward's church.

Characters

 * Jack Harkness
 * Gwen Cooper
 * Ianto Jones
 * Rhys Williams
 * Matt
 * Paul
 * Muriel Thomas
 * Derek Thomas
 * Claire
 * Pusska
 * Esyllt

Continuity

 * The corpse of a sailor from 1940 is found; the sailor is said to have been part of Operation Dynamo. (AUDIO: The Nemonite Invasion, PROSE: Timewyrm: Exodus)
 * Gwen mentions Rhys' encounter with the space whale. (TV: Meat)
 * The door to the Hub is still damaged from the Dalek attack. (TV: The Stolen Earth)
 * By the events of PROSE: Risk Assessment, Torchwood have replaced the Sea Queen with the Sea Queen II.