'Oh my,' the Doctor said. 'The power seems to have blacked out. I do hope the whole cinema hasn't been affected. Now carefully, use the walls as a guide, and feel your way along them.

We should find the door easily enough.'

Ben reached out for the wall and felt a heavy blow knock his arm down. 'What the...!'

Something charged towards him, hitting him in the stomach.

His breath knocked out of him, he fell to the floor.

A terrible animalistic cry filled the room and in the shadows Ben could make out few details of his attacker. Its growl seemed to mix a low, bear-like rumbling with the shrill scream of an animal in jeopardy, but judging from its size and the terrible bonfire-like smell it was giving off this thing wasn't human.

'Doctor!' Ben tried to shout, but it was too late. He heard the Doctor gasp, heard the thud as the creature smashed into his friend.

'Ben!' the Doctor called. 'Are you all right?'

'Fine,' Ben gasped, pulling himself up. Something sharp suddenly smashed into his face, sending him reeling back to the floor. He felt a wet and painful sensation and he realised he was bleeding.

There was a deafening screech from the creature.

'Where... the key. .' it growled, clearly enough for Ben to understand the words even if they couldn't quite be counted as speech.

'What?' the Doctor said, coughing. A series of smacking and slicing noises followed. 'I don't know what you mean,' Ben heard the Doctor shout. 'I don't know anything about a key!'

Ben tried to get to his feet and almost stumbled as he did so.

He ran blindly forward to where he thought the creature would be and collided into it. Its skin was soft but leathery, and it was so bulky that Ben felt as if he had just run into a concrete wall.

He catapulted across the room and felt the edge of the basin unit stab into his spine. He flinched and steadied himself against the unit.

From somewhere on the edge of his perception he heard a creaking noise. Suddenly light shone through the doorway into the room.

'What the hell?' a gruff voice said. There was a clicking sound as a switch was flicked and the room was illuminated once more.

Ben looked over and saw the creature for the first time.

With rows of glistening teeth and bulging red, lizard-like eyes, the thing was a terrifying monster.

Ben's attention was snapped away from it by the cracks of three gunshots being fired in succession. He looked up to see Detective Fletcher standing open-mouthed at the door to the rest room, one hand hovering near the light switch and the other on his gun.

Growling, the creature lurched forward but another shot from Fletcher sent it flying back. Ignoring the Doctor and Ben.

it ran to the back of the room, bouncing off the walls as it did so and covering its eves, blinded by the light. Its screams continued, but it was clear that this time they were less like war cries and more like screams of agony.

The creature ran to the open ventilation duct. It leapt up but failed to reach it and landed in a crumpled heap on the floor With one final defiant growl, it stopped moving and began to melt away, its skin peeling as if on fire. In a matter of seconds, it had faded away. The only evidence that it had ever existed was the damage to the rest room.

Fletcher was breathing heavily, trying to take in what he had seen.

Ben looked over at the Doctor who, apart from a couple of cuts, looked like he hadn't been seriously injured. The Doctor stood up and dusted himself down.

'It's all right, Detective.' he said, getting his breath back. 'It's gone now.'

Fletcher was breathing heavily, shaking his head, his eves wide with bewilderment. 'What... What was it?'

'A bloody nightmare,' Ben said, checking the mirror. His nose was bleeding, but there wasn't too much damage.

'Well, at least we've had an eventful night,' the Doctor concluded. Ben marvelled at the way he appeared to be able to take anything in his stride.

The Doctor turned to Fletcher. 'Tell me, Detective, why aren't you watching the film with the others?'

'I damn well hate the movies,' Fletcher murmured. 'I only came for the party.'

'Doctor,' Ben said, trying to come to terms with what he'd just seen, 'that monster, what was it? Doctor, what the hell's going on?'

'Hell indeed,' the Doctor said sombrely. 'Whatever it was, it wanted something from me.'

'But what was it?' whispered Fletcher.

Ben was trying to place the extraordinary sensation of de-ja de-ja vu vu he'd felt when he had seen the monster in the light. 'I've seen it somewhere before,' he said. he'd felt when he had seen the monster in the light. 'I've seen it somewhere before,' he said.

The Doctor appeared to think for a moment, then smiled and nodded his head. 'Indeed you have, Ben. That creature was one of the demons that attacked the main character in a certain film you and I have seen a couple of times recently.'

' Dying in the Sun Dying in the Sun?' Fletcher asked.

The Doctor nodded. 'If that thing was real, then it's no surprise the film's effects were so good.'

'What do you mean?' Ben asked. 'You mean the film shows those creatures in the flesh?'

'Oh no,' the Doctor said. 'I think the film is is those creatures in the flesh!' those creatures in the flesh!'

Chapter Twenty-Three.

The premiere was over and Hollywood was bubbling with excitement. The crowd at the screening had never seen anything like it. Journalists and celebrities were entranced by De Sande's masterpiece and word spread rapidly around town that this movie was something pretty special.

The Doctor, Ben and Fletcher had made sure they'd left before they got caught in the crowds, and soon they were back at the hotel.

'Thanks for the lift,' Ben said as he got out of Fletcher's car.

'This better be worth it,' Fletcher said, ambling into the Doctor's room. 'If that monster was anything to go by, then...'

'What are we going to do about Polly?' Ben asked.

The Doctor looked at Ben with compassion. 'Try not to worry. We'll do all we can. I've a suspicion we won't be able to avoid running into her tomorrow. We'll get some sleep, then do all we can to find her and work out why she's acting so strangely.'

He clapped his hands and glanced around the room, then smiled as he worked out what he wanted to do next.

He picked up the device he'd obtained during the FOCAL meeting and placed it on a table. 'In all yesterday's madness I never got a chance to examine this properly,' he explained.

The object appeared to be made of glass, or perhaps finely cut crystal. It reminded Ben of an elaborate Christmas decoration, with points sticking out and swirling around a central column. The thing seemed vaguely star shaped, and glistened spectacularly as mirrored surfaces bounced light off each other. Ben readied down and picked the object up. As he did so, pieces of it clashed together making an almost choral chiming sound.

He held the glass object up to the light. 'So that Christmas decoration's supposed to be the key to stopping the film?'

'I certainly hope so,' said the Doctor.

'Is that what the creature was after then? You reckon De Sande sent it to get back this knick-knack you stole?'

The Doctor smiled.

Ben winced as the object caught a ray of sunlight through the window and amplified it, dazzling him. He almost dropped the object but, just in time, managed to keep hold of it.

'Here you go,' he said, handing it back to the Doctor. 'You want to see what that thing does to the light. It's lethal, I tell you.'

The Doctor held the object up and turned it around, studying it. 'I wonder how this thing would react when placed in close proximity to the film?'

He pointed to the safe in the corner of the room. 'Ben, get the film reel out of there would you? You know the combination.'

Ben hurried over to the safe, unlocked it and took out the reel.

'What's that?' Fletcher asked.

'Oh, you'll see,' the Doctor said, a broad smile on his face.

After ten minutes he had set up the projector, which he hadn't yet returned to the hire shop. He closed the curtains, loaded the stolen film reel into the projector then switched it on.

Several seconds into the reel the monster appeared. Ben found the sight disturbing. On the surface level, it was clearly a man in a rubber costume. While it was recognisably meant to be the same as the thing that had attacked them at the premiere, it clearly wasn't real. But, despite its appearance, Ben found that just looking at it gave rise to the same emotions that he had felt during the attack.

The logical side of his mind could see that the thing was fake, just a costume, but the irrational side screamed that it was real, that he was in danger from the monster. Ben could feel its breath on him, could sense the fear the characters in the film felt as the creature attacked them. Logic told him not to worry, that it was just the Selyoids changing the film's appearance, triggering his senses to manipulate his emotions, but his body couldn't help reacting as it was expected to react, and he found the experience of watching the film as uncomfortable as it had been before.

'Quite frightening, eh?' the Doctor said. 'Before, the reel seemed to have no emotional impact at all, but now we know more about the film... it's feeding off our emotions, changing as it reacts to our thoughts.'

'I don't get frightened,' Fletcher said. 'But I know what I saw with my own eyes. Whatever that animal is...' He stopped talking as a woman was sliced in two by the creature's claws.

'Was that... was that real?'

'I don't think so,' the Doctor said. 'You can't tell the colour of blood in black and white.'

'But I saw that creature in real life, Doctor,' Fletcher said.

'That murder... that looked pretty real to me. If this turns out to be a snuff movie... that De Sande's gonna be in a whole ton of trouble.'

'No, I don't think the monster's real,' the Doctor said, 'but that doesn't mean it can't appear real. The thing we saw was a real-life interpretation of the image on screen. Somehow what's on there has been brought to life out here.'

He held the glass object up in the projection beam. 'I wonder...' he said. A patch of the screen warped slightly as the light from the projector was disrupted by the device.

The Doctor stood up, walked to the projector and placed the object on the table immediately in front of its lens. 'This round piece on the end of the device,' he commented. 'It's exactly the same size as a standard projector lens. The people De Sande hired to create this thing must have been master craftsmen.'

As the light began to pass through the object it glowed and sparkled as the hundreds of tiny mirrors inside it bounced the light waves around, finally throwing them back on to the screen.

The device seemed to switch on, as if powered by electricity, and Ben was sure he could hear a slight humming noise.

'It's intriguing, isn't it?' said the Doctor. 'But not as intriguing as what's happening on screen, I feel.'

Ben turned and saw what the Doctor meant. The reel had reached the point where one of the lead characters was meandering through a crowded city street. He seemed more on edge than he had the last time Ben had watched the reel, looking back over his shoulder and checking the time on his watch more often.

As the sequence continued the street appeared to collapse.

At first the change was so slow that it was barely perceptible, but slowly the buildings in the background of the scene began to peel away like onions, shedding one layer of reality at a time. The walls peeled away to reveal floors of people working in offices, and then those people were peeled away to reveal a swirling mass of nothingness, as if the entire city was melting out of existence.

The film had been silent up until this point, but a distant noise of shouting and distorted cries was now audible.

Eventually, the entire scene was replaced by a chaotic mix of dark colours, speckled with the occasional appearance of characters from the film. The colours coalesced, forming images of stalactites, flames and pillars of smoke. An image of a corridor was forming, a corridor in a cavern, along the walls of which hundreds of people were chained, all being tortured with a variety of gruesome-looking devices.

The walls of hell rippled and the stone became sandbags, the tortured souls became First World War soldiers scrambling through the trenches on their way to their deaths. The soldiers'

faces fell away, their flesh melting as the effects of a nuclear bomb hit them.

Pictures of children, the real victims of war, flashed across the scene. Innocent lives left blinded, mutilated and cancered by a war over before they were old enough to talk. Slowly the images mutated again, this time back into the monsters that had originally attacked the characters in the film. This time the monsters weren't men in suits. This time they really were real.

Ben tried to look away but couldn't. He saw the monsters staring directly at him, beckoning him to join them. One of the creatures reached out beyond the confines of the screen, its talons grasping for him. The others started to follow it, bone fragments shattering to the floor as wings sprouted from their backs. They screamed and flapped their wings, propelling themselves away from hell and towards their captive audience.

'Incredible,' Ben heard the Doctor say. 'I think I understand now. By Jove, I can see what's going on!'

Before he could say any more one of the creatures let out a scream that shook the room like a minor earthquake. It lurched forward, its wings making a heavy swooshing sound as they sliced through the air. Ben cowered away, covering his eyes as it bared its teeth, saliva dripping off several rows of razor-sharp fangs. The creature circled around the room, seemingly unbothered that it was supposed to be a fictional character, supposed to stay on the screen. Another scream and it moved in for the kill, flying straight towards the Doctor.