'No flesh-eating ghouls.'

'Ifrits, they call them.' He ticked them off on his fingers. 'Ifrits, which are ghouls; djinn, which are more like spirits; qutrub, which you might call werewolves, really, and kabikaj, and they are spirits with control over the insect world. They could set a plague of locusts on you, or -'

'You've brought me somewhere horrible again!'

He looked hurt. 'I think Hyspero is a sensational planet.' She tutted.

'Have you been bored yet?'

"That's not the point!'

'I think we should go and take a look at this captive of yours.'

There was a sudden thudding noise as that captive came down the stairs from the top deck.

'I take it you're Gila,' said the Doctor, going up to shake his hand.

The captive ignored him. He glared at Sam.'You took your time.' Then he started to inspect the whitened scales of his body. He was covered from head to toe. Some kind of genetic mutation, the Doctor thought. 'My skin looks terrible,' said Gila. 'She's kept me away from water.' He looked around.'Have you found her?'

'Who,' said Sam.'The witch that kept you prisoner?'

'He called her a witch, did he?'

'How else could she keep me,' moaned Gila,'without enchantments?'

'Iris was never without her enchantments,' the Doctor smiled.'But she isn't a witch.' Gila muttered.'Do you know where she is?'

'No,' spat Gila.

The Doctor suddenly felt unsettled. Here he was, once more aboard her ship, with all her gaudy, silly things about him, and yet somehow he didn't expect to see her again in the flesh.

'Doctor!' Sam let out a great yell."They're all around us!'

They had been attracted by the unusual lights of the bus. Pallid, soft-bodied, bluish-coloured creatures like this weren't used to warm, friendly lights. They circled the vehicle gradually, muttering and chittering to themselves. Their noise grew greater as those above the bus realised they were being watched.

'Ifrits,' said the Doctor.

They brushed against the windows. Soft tattered flesh and leathery wings slid by. Once or twice Sam caught a glimpse of a chattering death's head. The eyes were lidless and puzzled-looking, gazing moonily at her.'Can we fight them off?'

"They won't harm you; said Gila lazily. 'I've sat in here night after night, locked in chains, and nothing bad happened to me.'

'All the same,' said the Doctor.'I don't like being stared at by zombies.'

'We aren't dead!' said GUa.'They aren't interested in us!'

The Doctor was at work on the snip's console.'I'm trying to home in on Iris. Her telepathic circuits work beautifully... Ah, there she is! She's alive, everyone!'

'Hooray,' said Gila caustically, and glared at the ghouls swishing by outside.

'Are we going to follow her?' asked Sam.

He nodded, touched a few controls decisively, and the whole bus slid sideways into the vortex.

'At least we can't see those things now,' Sam said.

'Hold on tight, everyone,' said the Doctor.'I'm not sure how accurate her-'

They re-entered real time at the top of a great, steep hill, overlooking the desert. It was still night-time and as hot as an oven.

'She's here somewhere,' said the Doctor, once everything was still and all the wheezing and groaning was over.

'This is an amazing machine!' said Gila.

'It's nippy,' said the Doctor sniffily. 'I prefer my own, though.' He pulled a TV monitor down from the ceiling of the cab. It came on a snaking, unsafe-looking cable. He twiddled a few k.n.o.bs and the picture hissed into life. Black and white, like an old Sat.u.r.day matinee. 'Maybe we can find out why Iris has started kidnapping young men. Ah, here's a picture.'

The desert. It was what lay immediately outside, shown in smeary infrared. The scene resolved itself, and showed three colossal dogs guarding a hole someone had dug in the desert. They pawed the sand and growled, bearing their s...o...b..ry fangs in the moonlight.

"That's where she is,' said the Doctor. 'At the bottom of that pit.'

Chapter Four.

After AII I've Survived!

She was a woman used to being quite alone. For many years she had travelled by herself, considering herself to be excellent company, the best she could ever hope for. Her own jokes made her laugh, she had wonderful taste in music, art, clothes, food, wines, poetry, prose and places, she always made the appropriate comment, and had the most precise and pertinent quotation to hand. Any possible companion wouldn't stand a chance against the qualities she perceived in herself.

Once or twice she had tried out an a.s.sistant, to share expenses and nervous energy, to lighten the spiritual and psychological load on the longer, lonelier hauls through time and s.p.a.ce. But these people, once invited aboard her TARDIS, only ended up getting on her nerves. And she on theirs, she didn't wonder. They had been humans for the most part, and she deplored their limitations. Their endless what-do-we-do-nows and their come-and-rescue-me's. And for a while she had travelled with an obtuse shape-shifter who loved nothing better than to spend much of his time as a tippy and garrulous penguin.

In recent years Iris had been alone.

There was, however, one companion she had always longed for. One she had desired with both her hearts ever since the earliest of her voyages. That being whose own peripatetic career rivalled and was so oddly parallel to her own. Whose adventures took him in such similar directions to hers, and whose peril-strewn path she had sometimes purposefully crossed.

He was here, somewhere on Hyspero. There was something in the air.

She could sense him nearby.

And yet he wasn't here to rescue her. So near and so far.

Never had she felt more dismally alone than this - pitched into a well sunk deep into the crumbling sandstone of the desert. She wondered how stable the rock might be, what its condition was. Gloomily she imagined things getting much worse, and a grand creva.s.se opening up beneath her stout walking boots, and burying her for ever in the desert's bowels. But that was no good. Think on the bright side, Iris.

She was so deep in the ground the night sky was reduced to the size of a Hysperon coin. If she craned her neck she could still see the fierce blue of the sky and the mocking glimmer of its stars. She sat despondently at the bottom of the hole and wept bitterly through the night.

Soon, she thought, I'll starve and that will be the end of everything. After all I've survived! Giant spiders on Metebelis Three, the Cybermen tombs of Telos, the Drashigs in feeding frenzy on their fetid swamp world.

She cringed when she heard one of the dogs above baying at the moon.

The other two pitched in. So they were still there. Even if she managed to climb out she'd be ripped to pieces by ravenous hounds. They reminded her of the dogs in the tale by Hans Christian Andersen - the dogs that guarded the old witch's treasure, with eyes as big as cartwheels to keep watch in the night.

Then she remembered: she had a bar of chocolate in her handbag. Kept for emergencies. She ripped into it.

I'm lucky I've got my journal with me, she thought.

Iris wrote in thick, coloured hardcover books, on creamy unlined paper.

She had hundreds already filled with her crabbed handwriting, her densely allusive and florid prose. Her current volume was a relatively new one, beginning with notes stolen in a free moment during her recent escape from Xeraphas. The text picked up again with her arrival in bustling, sweltering Hyspero, a week ago.

She was sitting in a cafe in the capital city, fans swooshing coolly above her head, a gla.s.s pitcher of iced coffee set before her. She stirred the thick froth and the ice cubes in the pitcher and looked at the brief list she had made.

The alligator man.

A cyborg.

That bearded lady.

A mock turtle.

Iris stared out into the street for a full ten minutes. The colourful crowd swept by and she barely took in a single detail.

I have my instructions, she wrote, and never was I more leery about setting out on a jaunt. Never have I embarked with greater trepidation or, indeed, the express purpose of depriving others of their liberty.

Never mind who they were. The proposition is ant.i.thetical to my whole being. No way would I ever be involved in such a dubious enterprise unless I was desperate. And let's face it, I'm desperate. So I have my instructions.

This iced coffee's a bit tepid.

And let's ignore the fact that I'm terrified of the woman for whom I find myself working. I've met some chilling personalities in my time. Foes that would make your hair curl. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the Scarlet Empress gives me the w.i.l.l.i.e.s.

Still and all, I have my mission. I know what I have to do. I just have to get on with it. If I succeed, then I have nothing to fear from the Empress.

I am hoping for quite the opposite. I am bargaining for the greatest reward the Empress can bestow.

In the meantime I have everything I always had: my wiles, my wits, my looks.

That was the most recent entry in the book - apart from two scrawled addresses: 1/7 n.62 Abss. and Nilt.6.12 (back).

Iris checked her watch and saw it was time for more painkillers. Not a drop of anything to wash them down with of course. The pains were biting harder now, and the climate here and all these deprivations weren't making it any easier. She only hoped her old bones would carry her on to the end of this affair. Even supposing she escaped from this well.

Maybe he would come. He was definitely here somewhere.

She thought they ought to be together, simply because they both knew what it was like to live at risk. For most of their lives they had clung to the margins, inching and then zipping along the various interstices that bound the rest of the world together. They had made their homes in cafes, s.p.a.cecraft, streets, offices, jungles, bookshops, volcanoes, emergency military headquarters, dungeons, deserts, gleaming control rooms and dank and dripping tunnels. They had lived by their wits and come through the most fearsomely difficult escapades.

While he had written scarcely a word about the things he got up to, there was barely an hour that Iris hadn't doc.u.mented. There was nothing to remember him by, once he faded away from a place. A lingering trace, perhaps, in the dodgy memories of friends and foes. He might have set some wrongs right, or he might have caused further muddle. But he managed to efface himself.

Iris wrote it all down for him.

He was her muse, and her reader, and one day she would sit him down and make him catch up with everything she had put by for him. Then, when she had him listening at last, she could ask him what made him tick. Where did he invest his hopes? What made him truly happy? She wanted to know if he ever enjoyed himself. She was fascinated by his breakneck lifestyle, the hair-raising energy that fuelled his life - but she was even more drawn by the strange lacunae in the Doctor's life.When did he fit in the ordinary things? When did he eat, sleep, drink, read?

Who did he cuddle up with at the end of the day?

No wonder that miraculous Ship of his had hidden dimensions and pocket infinities. That was where he hid all the things that he didn't want anyone to see. A kind of Freudian transdimensionalism, to use an allusion to his favourite planet.

In a way Iris considered herself the very opposite to him. She embraced the very ordinary things, and celebrated them. They were what she had left stifling Gallifrey for. She wanted the stink and the swelter of the everyday. And she blessed the Latin poet Terence who said, 'Nothing human is alien to me.'

Iris suspected that everything human was alien to the Doctor. Whereas she had no end of appet.i.tes.

Here she was, the most vital, colourful, intelligent, beautiful and fullest-figured woman on the planet and she was starving in a pit with no one to talk to.

She upended her handbag and groped around for cigarettes. The first lungful was, as ever, bliss. She watched the indigo smoke describe arabesques in the dusky air.

It would rise as a perfect, narrow column and climb effortlessly out of the hole where she was trapped. Her smoke, blown like a kiss, would slip blithely past the three hounds that guarded her at the gates of h.e.l.l. Her smoke would pall gently above the desert, overseeing the vast stretches of wasted land, his didn't really enjoy empty places. The city, the boulevards, the seething highways - these were her natural s.p.a.ces. Her cigarette smoke would rise above it all and hang like a djinn, able to survey the whole of glittering, corrupt Hyspero to the west, the listing towers of the palace of the Scarlet Empress in the north, and to the south, and the cragged, hazardous mountain range she had pledged to traverse. It was as she was stubbing that cigarette out on a rock that she heard the kerfuffle above ground. The dogs had gone wild. Someone had come to rescue her.

More desert. An exterior view of the livid red bus. A bulky figure in an old coat is scrubbing at the dusty windows with a handkerchief. The green fur collar of her coat hides her face. The camera wobbles, zooms in. We see she wears Jackie O sungla.s.ses and her vividly lipsticked mouth is pursed in concentration. She grins into the camera and sticks out her tongue. Then she peers over her gla.s.ses. 'Getting your own back, Sam!

Well, I don't mind being filmed. I never did: Sam's voice comes from off screen. 'If we're meant to be keeping a watch out for the Scarlet Guard, shouldn't we be travelling in something less conspicuous than a London bus?'

'I wouldn't go anywhere without my ship. She's my only consolation. And anyway -' Iris grins again, her weathered face fills our screen - 'I think conspicuousness is a marvellous thing. I can't abide skulkers!'

Chapter Five.

Down, Boys

The three black dogs were too busy howling at the moon to notice that the Doctor had arrived, with Sam and Gila emerging from the bus behind him.

The Doctor stuffed his hands in his pockets and wondered how he should go about this. He never was very good with dogs. And look at these ones. He gulped. They were the size of horses, and he couldn't help thinking of the hounds that ripped Actaeon apart when he came across Diana bathing in the forest. Why can't I ever think of nice Earth cla.s.sical allusions? he wondered. Why always the horrible ones?

'Do we have to get past them?' asked Sam.