The big, dark man who indeed, as she had suspected, was not a doctor after all, and who had told her his name was Sabbath agreed with her about the crack. He couldn't see it with his eyes, as she did, but he detected it on his instruments. These were fabulous things, like the old scrying mirrors or stones, but somehow, he explained, connected to the light in the new, brilliant, electrical bulbs that he had in the study of his grand house. They sat in this new, strange light, he in a leather armchair and she on a slender, petit-point covered one, in front of the fireplace a large thing, with a graceful marble mantel, not like the narrow little coal fires of the houses she'd worked in and he'd explained to her that there was a crack in time he called it a fissure and that she had the gift to see this fissure and the monsters it produced.

This made sense to her. She had known people with the sight all her life. They too saw things that others said didn't exist. And these monsters these freaks of time, as Sabbath called them stood oddly in the world, too flat somehow, yet also too thick, and not angled right. They were wrong things, things that pulled the normal inside out, like a walking corpse or a stone that spoke. She feared and hated them on sight, with the deep, life-preserving terror she might feel towards a cliff edge or a whirlpool.

According to Sabbath he did not let her address him as 'Mister' these time freaks were actually part part of the fissure, not just a manifestation of it. So destroying one closed up the fissure just a bit. This made sense to her too. It was like Satan coming through evil people. When the evil person was dead, there was one less doorway for the Devil. of the fissure, not just a manifestation of it. So destroying one closed up the fissure just a bit. This made sense to her too. It was like Satan coming through evil people. When the evil person was dead, there was one less doorway for the Devil.

About whether Sabbath were an agent of the Devil she had suspended judgement. On her first nights in the house, lying between sheets soft as the petal of a flower, she had not slept, waiting for his approach. The Angel-Maker wasn't vain. She knew she was nothing much to look at. That hadn't stopped men before. They were a sex that would have congress with farm animals, so why not with her? She felt safe with Sabbath; she wouldn't have minded with him. Nor did she mind when he didn't come. She began to sleep, deeply and sweetly, without dreams, and waked warm and relaxed to find, always, a fine porcelain coffeepot and cup on a silver tray beside the bed. Whoever brought this, she never heard them. She could not imagine Sabbath doing it. Perhaps he had invisible servants.

Why shouldn't he? She thought him capable of anything. He showed her marvels. In the zoo were animals with necks longer than she was tall. Overlooking the stony beach at Brighton stood a palace. In what had once been an even grander mansion than his, she saw the ancient dead of Egypt, swathed in linen and laid in magnificently carved boxes. Using an orrery and a lunary, he had explained how the orbits of the planets worked and why there were eclipses. He taught her chess, which she liked, because when she looked at the pieces she saw immediately dozens of their possible permutations. It was like looking into the future.

And naturally, any little errand she could perform for him, she was glad to do.

For three nights, Octave managed not to look at the blood-stained floor.

He didn't even glance in its direction. When he stood on stage, the dark wing-space to his left became a blind spot, darker even than the unseen audience. He could sense their presence, their shifting and breathing, but from the wings came only stillness. The man had screamed into the gag once, muffledly and horribly, when the sack shattered his chest. Then there had been no sound except Octave's own shallow breathings. With what had seemed to him great presence of mind, he had retrieved his handkerchief and made his soft, multiple way from the theatre and, by various routes, home.

The manager had considered closing the next night, but as the man hadn't actually died, he told Octave to proceed with his performance. And then things had gone on as before. The police had talked to Octave. They thought it was all an accident. The man had not recovered consciousness; they expected him to die any day. Octave supposed that by now he had. He had deliberately not asked the manager any questions or looked at the papers or the stains on the floor.

But tonight... For some reason, Octave's eyes kept drifting to his left. He couldn't help it. For three nights, that shadowy offstage area had been a blank, without definition or presence. Now, suddenly it had acquired substance. It seemed to him to be a bulk of darkness. Solid. Massive. Like a weight that might fall on him.

Octave took a deep breath and drew the string of bright scarves from his sleeve. There was tepid applause. His heart wasn't in his act tonight. He performed the opening tricks with even less flair than usual, and though the cabinet 'illusion' still stunned the spectators, their enthusiastic reaction reached him from a distance, as if through thick glass.

He had discovered that he wasn't cut out to be a murderer. He spent that whole first night crying, like a frightened, remorseful child. All eight of him, blubbering like infants in his sordid rooms, some of them on the bed, one on the single hard chair, some on the floor, some standing. All weeping. It had been disgusting. And he had been afraid someone would hear, wonder at the sound of so many in rooms supposedly occupied by one. Not that the bulk of his neighbours were even in at night, and those who were generally weren't sober. He had chosen his seedy neighbourhood and down-atheel apartments carefully.

Oh, what was he going to do? His life was already wretched before. Hiding. Pretending. Having to do without servants. Covertly taking his bulky washing to an indifferent Chinese laundryman streets away. Cleaning the coal dust off the sills. Hauling his own hot water. Huddled indoors when he wasn't at the theatre, shivering, not looking at one another. One went out occasionally for air and sunshine and exercise, but two couldn't. It wasn't simply the care that had to be taken not to be seen leaving the building twice. It was that the multiple sensory input was almost unbearable. He could just stand it for the time every day it took to sneak to and from the theatre, journeys that took hours. And all of them had to go. He'd tried staying partly at home and it was a disaster the spatial separation was so disorienting he almost didn't get through the act. Now three hid in a storage room while the others performed. It wasn't so bad in the storage room. It was dark, like the interiors of his cabinets. Things were better in the dark.

Except for the dark at the side of the stage.

Tonight, he knew, he would look, if for no other reason than to try to replace his last sight of the spot, with the crushed body, and the blood. The blood had got on him, on all of him except the one at the rope, and later he had spent hours in his rooms examining every article of clothing. Bit by bit, over several days, he had painstakingly burned each soiled piece in his little fireplace. He wondered if there would actually be any stain left to see on the floor. The manager had brought in men to swab and sand and revarnish. Probably the only noticeable change would be that the boards now appeared cleaner and newer-looking than the rest of the area. It would look as if nothing had ever happened. Octave took comfort from this.

Maybe, he thought, removing his makeup after the show, he wouldn't look tonight either. There was something morbid in this new obsession that he should resist. He put his dirty makeup towel in the hamper and checked to see that his nails were clean. It was hard to keep the greasepaint from lodging beneath them. He didn't glance in the mirror. He never did. He saw himself often enough as it was.

Octave always went home in shifts, carefully, one at a time, by different routes and in and out of different doors. Now he sat in his flat waiting for himself and feeling almost cheerful. He wasn't going to look, after all. Why should he? What difference would it make? He was being foolish and unmanly, allowing a mere whim to have so much power over him. It was only a floor, some old boards. The sight would be as meaningless as those historical sites where you knew some luckless prince or pretender had been slain and you looked at the stones or the tiles in the nineteenth-century sunlight and they were just stones or tiles, dusty and ordinary, nothing notable about them at all.

He was strong. He was in control. He heard the steps of his second returning self on the stairs, glanced up those stairs to the slit of light beneath the door, waited in the empty, echoing theatre, and smiled. No need to look. No need at all. It was over. It had never happened.

And then, at the last possible moment, he betrayed himself.

As his final self emerged from his cabinet at the left-hand side of the stage, the ghost light threw his shadow into the wings and somehow, before he realised it, his gaze followed the shadow. Then he was trapped, staring at the patch of floor only a few feet away. It wasn't too late, of course. He could still turn and leave. There was no need to walk over to the spot. There was no need need...

He walked over to the spot.

He was shocked. He stood paralysed, staring down. True, there was no stain. Just as he expected, the floor had been revarnished, so that it gleamed slightly. That was just as he had imagined. What he had not imagined, had never even thought of, were the gouges, not terribly deep, but deep enough that the sanding hadn't eradicated them, and still visibly pale under the new varnish. Scars in the wood. Made by... what? Octave's hand sought out and gripped the edge of the curtain. Surely not... surely the man's broken bones bones hadn't actually... come... through... hadn't actually... come... through...

Octave gasped and turned aside. He felt sick. In his miserable flat, his various selves gripped themselves and swayed. He caught the curtain with both hands, held himself up, pivoted slowly so that he faced on to the stage. The ghost light glowed feebly, Above it, the high flyspace seemed as dark as if there were nothing there. Behind it, the opposite wings, through which he would have to walk to reach the exit, looked blackly impassable. He took a deep breath. This was nonsense. Nonsense. Why this cowardice now? He was not going to be one of those pathetic murderers undone by their weakling consciences...

And even as he thought this, a figure emerged from the shadowed wings, and he understood that indeed he was not going to be one of those guilt-stricken, self-accused, self-betraying killers. That soon, in fact, he was no longer going to be anything at all.

Anji and Fitz knew there was nothing they could do to help the Doctor, but they went regularly to the medical lab anyway. They always found him the same: ashen and motionless. He was still wearing the coarse, white hospital-issue nightshirt, stained near the collar with the blood from his mouth. Anji had cleaned his face when they'd brought him back, but she hadn't liked to it felt like an imposition. And his cold immobility frightened her.

Fitz assumed this was his usual healing trance, except that he didn't heal now as he once had and also he really didn't seem to be breathing. Watching him now, Fitz could have sworn his chest wasn't moving at all. He wanted to ask Anji if she could see any movement, but what if she said no? She was staring rigidly at the Doctor. Fitz was afraid to talk to her. If they talked they would have to agree that of course he couldn't be breathing, because his lungs were smashed flat.

'The TARDIS will fix him,' he said.

Anji stared at the unconscious figure, biting the edge of her thumb. 'Why hasn't he died?'

The Doctor was dying and not doing a very good job of it. This had begun to annoy him. It seemed a simple enough task. Get most of your inner organs crushed. Expire. Basic cause-andeffect. What was the problem?

He seemed to be walking in the TARDIS. Corridor after corridor of white-roundeled walls. Turn a corner, more of the same. It was very boring. Maybe this was death. But he didn't really think so at the edges of his unconsciousness, he could feel his nerves screaming. He was still attached to the body.

The body. What an odd way to put it. He supposed this was the detachment of near-death. Certainly, he felt strangely separate from his physical form. As if it were a coat he'd taken off and any minute now he'd round a corner and find another one. Peculiar notion. He suddenly glanced back. For a moment, he had thought he wasn't alone. Who is that on the other side of me? But there was only him. Not even a shadow for companion. He stood for a while staring at the blank floor, thinking that ought to remind him of something. But all he could think of was Peter Pan Peter Pan. He walked on.

After a time, he began to feel that he was was getting somewhere after all. Or, more specifically, that there was somewhere to get. He had a sense that any minute now he'd round a corner and actually see something. And sure enough, he took a turn and there, at the end of the corridor, he glimpsed an open door, a splash of green and sunlight. Then, as if the walls had moved, it shifted out of sight. getting somewhere after all. Or, more specifically, that there was somewhere to get. He had a sense that any minute now he'd round a corner and actually see something. And sure enough, he took a turn and there, at the end of the corridor, he glimpsed an open door, a splash of green and sunlight. Then, as if the walls had moved, it shifted out of sight.

The Doctor began to jog. He came around another corner and, yes, there was the door again, and then, in a blink, it was gone. He sped up. Another corner. Another glimpse. Another disappearance. He was becoming angry. This was ridiculously difficult. He was of half a mind not to die after all.

Suddenly as he came around yet another corner, he realised that it wasn't the walls that were shifting at all. As the tantalising green doorway vanished, he felt just a tiny tug, like a pluck at his coat, jerking him back. He stopped and stood very still, one hand against the wall, head down. He shut his eyes. If he had been breathing, he would have held his breath. He concentrated... There. Yes, there was something. It was like... He opened his eyes and slowly turned his head to look over his shoulder. Behind him, as if it had come out of his back, a silvery filament, thin as spiderweb, stretched tautly away and out of sight. He watched it. Very faintly, it was throbbing. Not too fast. Steadily. Rhythmically.

The Doctor's eyes snapped open. Fitz and Anji jumped. The Doctor said, 'You son of a bitch!'

Chapter Eight.

Sabbath had taken a mansion in Regents Park built by Nash in the previous century, a finely proportioned house filled with tall windows and light. Its elegant rationalism amused him. He made his office in the library, whose polished shelves reached to within a foot or two of the high ceiling and which looked out through French doors on to a parterre of low boxwood centred with an eighteenth-century armillary sundial. Near the doors, he placed a graceful mahogany table to use as a desk. If this occasionally held instruments an observer would have found perplexing, Sabbath wasn't concerned: he had no visitors, and he didn't worry about intruders.

Which meant that he was, if not alarmed exactly, certainly brought to attention when one sunny morning in the week following the Doctor's adventures in Liverpool he sank into the leather armchair by the fireplace, tome in hand, and heard a rude spurting noise.

Sabbath started and turned red. Recovering himself, he rose and examined the chair cushion. Lifting this exposed a deflated rubber bladder with a short, wide tube. Sabbath glared for a moment at the alien object, then lifted his eyes and scanned the room. He found what he was looking for on the top of one of the bookshelves.

'This is temporal contamination,' he said.

'I know,' confessed the Doctor, 'but I couldn't resist.'

'Typical of your immaturity.'

The Doctor smiled. He was stretched out languidly on the bookshelf, eyes half shut. He looked thinner to Sabbath, and pinched, as if he'd been ill, but perfectly, almost liquidly relaxed. Now he sighed. 'Yes, it is, isn't it? Such a pity. I once had so much promise.'

'How did you get in?'

'Oh, can't you figure it out? All your alarms and defences are keyed to your biodata.'

Sabbath remained expressionless. The Doctor's smile thinned mockingly. He slipped to the floor, padded over to Sabbath and laid his ear against his chest, listening. 'Tick tock, tick tock, like the clock in the crocodile. I don't think it sounds very happy.'

Sabbath calmly pushed him away and crossed to his desk.

'Ah,' said the Doctor, 'I see I was standing too close. Invading your personal space. Of course, even from over here I'm invading your personal space.' Sabbath looked at him. 'All nestled up under your ribs. Quite intimate, really. Yet we hardly know each other. Love songs have been written about less.'

Sabbath sighed and sat down. 'Have you finished?'

'You wish.' The Doctor gave a little hop and perched lightly on the edge of the desk. 'I kept wondering where my heart had got to. Was it in the highlands a-chasing the deer? Did I leave it in San Francisco? Had it joined a club for other lonely ones of its kind? Was it achy? Or breaky? Did it now belong to someone named Daddy?' Sabbath had turned his attention to some papers. The Doctor suddenly stretched out across them, like a cat taking over a computer keyboard. He gazed soulfully into Sabbath's eyes. 'Shall I call thee Father?'

Looking bored, Sabbath rose.

'Hamlet?' the Doctor queried. 'Royal Dane?'

Sabbath left the room. ' "I've got you under my skin",' the Doctor warbled after him. Then his face grew sober. He moved his hand to the empty side of his chest. 'You know,' he murmured, 'I think once I did did leave it in San Francisco.' He shivered, as if, as the saying went, a rabbit had run over his grave. leave it in San Francisco.' He shivered, as if, as the saying went, a rabbit had run over his grave.

When Sabbath returned, the Doctor was seated crosslegged on the desk surrounded by origami penguins.

'Oh, I see,' Sabbath said. 'Time for some infantile destruction.'

'I haven't destroyed anything. The papers are intact, they're just a different shape.' The Doctor surveyed his flock. 'Penguins are all right,' he muttered. 'I'm not saying a word against them. But I used to be able to make birds that flapped their wings when you pulled the tail. Only I don't remember how any more. Have I told you about my memory problems?'

'Please don't.'

'Well, I can't, can I, having forgotten?'

Sabbath looked at him speculatively for a moment, as if considering whether it would be worth the bother to break his neck. 'Was there something you wanted?'

The Doctor snorted with laughter. 'What do you think? Walked into that one, Sabbath old man. You're slipping. Tell me, you haven't felt a bit shaky recently, have you? Under the weather? Full fathoms five under the weather.'

'What happened to you?'

'You noticed, did you? I'm touched. Literally.' The Doctor was off the desk and in his face. 'I almost died. Only I couldn't.' He placed a hand on Sabbath's chest. 'I wonder... why... not.'

'Oh please, don't be coy. If you'd wanted to kill me, you would have. But you can't do without me yet. You don't know your way around well enough.'

Sabbath removed his hand. The Doctor put it back. Sabbath pulled it away again, gripping the Doctor's wrist as if he'd like to break it.

'It's time you accepted the situation. Stop taking it personally.'

'How can I?' The Doctor jerked his wrist free. 'You're the one who's taken it. Personally. What did you want it for, anyway, if you don't mind my asking?'

'As a human being, I had intrinsic physical limitations in penetrating Deep Time.'

The Doctor's. eyes flashed. 'You fool. Do you think Time is nothing but a flame to imprison in your little lantern? Do you think I I am?' He stepped back and smiled, grimly. 'Speaking of which, how am?' He stepped back and smiled, grimly. 'Speaking of which, how are are the side effects?' Sabbath said nothing. 'I see. A little twinge on Station One perhaps. A slight weakness in Spain. And perhaps a bit of difficulty about ten days ago?' The Doctor laughed. 'Still, quite an accomplishment. The very first human-alien transplant. I hope you kept records.' the side effects?' Sabbath said nothing. 'I see. A little twinge on Station One perhaps. A slight weakness in Spain. And perhaps a bit of difficulty about ten days ago?' The Doctor laughed. 'Still, quite an accomplishment. The very first human-alien transplant. I hope you kept records.'

'Octave's existence,' said Sabbath, as if the Doctor hadn't spoken, 'indicates a severe interference in the stream, either deliberate or accidental.'

'It was Octave who tried to kill me.'

Sabbath sighed irritably. 'I should have guessed. I assume you tried to talk to him, and he panicked.'

'More or less.'

'So, instead of solving the problem, you might have got yourself killed.' Sabbath smirked. 'Dear me. That would never do.'

'I appreciate your concern,' said the Doctor drily. 'Of course, given your regrettable paucity of allies, I suppose I'm worth keeping around. And though I hate to say it given my new understanding of what you call the situation, I now agree we should join forces.'

'Is that why you came?'

'No, of course not. I just came to get on your nerves.' The Doctor strolled to the fireplace, tossed the cushion back into the armchair, and flopped into it. 'They are your your nerves, aren't they? Haven't borrowed them as well?' nerves, aren't they? Haven't borrowed them as well?'

'Shall we return to Octave?' said Sabbath stiffly.

'By all means. What was the question? Oh yes is his interference in the timestream deliberate or accidental? I rather think accidental, don't you? Difficult to imagine a fiendish plot in which Octave could be a tool. I'll have to ask him.'

Sabbath smiled, pityingly but with a glint of amusement. 'Oh yes,' he said softly. 'It worked so well the first time.'

'Never give up,' said the Doctor blithely. 'That's my motto.'

'What exactly happened to you, anyway?'

'Crushed chest. One of those what do you call them? Flyweights.'

'Your TARDIS put you back together.'

'In a manner of speaking.'

"And you tracked me through our biodata connection.'

'Yes. It's fairly simple if you have the right technology. I daresay even you could cobble together something of the sort.'

'If I ' Sabbath began, but he was interrupted by the appearance of a young woman in the door from the garden. She shot a quick look at the Doctor and immediately glided to Sabbath's side not, the Doctor noticed with interest, as if seeking safety, but protectively. He was intrigued by her strong-featured face, particularly the two tufts of dark hair right at her hairline, one directly above each eyebrow, like little patches of fur or perhaps even budding horns. They gave her a feral look that her simple wine-coloured frock with its black lace collar could not entirely domesticate. She touched Sabbath's shoulder warningly.

'It's all right,' Sabbath said. 'I know him. He's a time traveller, like myself. That's what you're seeing. This is Miss Elizabeth Kelly,' he said to the Doctor. 'She is sensitive to time disruptions. It's all right,' he told her again, 'you can leave us. I'll be quite safe.'

Reluctantly, with a backward glance at the Doctor, she left the room. The Doctor looked after her, his mind clicking away to find where he had stored her name. He knew he'd run across it recently. 'She's very solicitous of you,' he observed. 'You seem to bring that out in women.'

Sabbath ignored the comment. 'Octave's act is impossible, of course, without some warping of the fabric of space-time. It's unlikely he was the cause of that.'

'Doesn't seem the type,' the Doctor agreed. 'You never know, of course. But I'd think someone with that much power, not to mention the sophistication to access it, would have better things to do than tour the North with a conjuring act.'

'Indeed. From the evidence, it would seem that he had somehow acquired certain characteristics of quantum space-time, specifically the ability to flick in and out of what we call reality '

'Oh no,' said the Doctor impatiently. 'No, no, no, no. That's not it.' Sabbath raised an inquiring eyebrow. 'Octave has been split.'

'Split?'