'Champion gymnast, remember. Just give me a bunkup.'

They were standing at the back of the Big White House, beside the threemetrehigh wall that ringed the property. Normally, they'd have bluffed their way in through the front gate, but after the taxi Rose had suggested a sneakier approach.

The Doctor laced his fingers into a basket, then she stepped on it and let him propel her upwards. She reached for the top of the wall and thought she had it, but the next thing she knew she was back on the pavement, stumbling and almost falling.

'What the h.e.l.l just happened?' she complained.

'Don't look at me,' said the Doctor. 'Ever thought of cutting down on the chips?'

'Oi, less of the cheek, you!'

They tried a second and a third time but again the Doctor's hands just seemed to part beneath her foot to leave her back where she'd started.

'Oh, honestly, Doctor,' groaned Rose. 'I bet you throw like a girl too.'

They found a bin in an alleyway across the road, waited till no one was looking and pinched it. They wheeled it up to the wall and Rose climbed onto it. The Doctor was meant to be holding the bin steady, but it almost slipped out from under her.

Now, though, she could reach the top of the wall with a short jump. Her hands clamped onto it...

...and a jolt of something cold stabbed up through her arms, into her chest and stomach. Rose gasped, lost her grip, fell, landed hard on the bin and bounced onto the pavement.

'Ah,' said the Doctor.

'Ah, what?' she snapped at him, verging on mutiny. She picked herself up, waving aside his offer of a helping hand.

'Ah, I thought there might be something like that. Force field, from the look of it. A more advanced alternative to barbed wire. You OK?'

'I'm OK and thanks for the warning.'

'Looks like it's back to Plan A,' said the Doctor brightly.

'The front gate,' said Rose. 'OK, how about you pretend to be a doctor and I'm a nurse?'

'Wouldn't work. They'll have ways of checking, and without the psychic paper...'

'Yeah, what was up with that anyway?'

The Doctor shrugged. 'Maybe there's something about these people, makes them immune.'

'Something our monster did to them.'

'Could explain why so many of them go "fantasy crazy".'

There was a short, awkward silence. Rose wondered if this was the time to come clean, to tell him about her own delusional episode. But she felt much better now and the zombies seemed like a longfaded dream.

'S'pose we could say we're visiting someone,' she suggested. 'A patient.'

'I don't know,' said the Doctor. 'If half of what we suspect about this place is true, I doubt they put out the red carpet for visitors.'

'Well, d'you have any ideas?'

'Yeah. I can think of one sure way of getting into a lunatic asylum.'

It took Rose a moment to latch on to his train of thought, then she grinned. 'Oh, you're joking!'

'So, which of us do you think'll make the best lunatic?'

'It came on all of a sudden like,' explained Rose to the bored guard at the gate. 'He thinks he's a doctor.'

'I think I'm the Doctor.' The Doctor fixed the guard with his most manic grin.

'He thinks he... he's 900 years old and he flies around the universe fighting farting aliens and pigs in s.p.a.ce.'

'I want locking up, I do,' said the Doctor. 'I'm mad as a March hare, daft as a brush.'

'You should take him to see your community physician,' said the guard.

'Oh... yeah, yeah, I know that, but he's away, you see. Some conference on the other side of town. Anyway, he's got a backlog. We can't get an appointment for two weeks.'

'Padded cell. Straitjacket. Throw away the key for all I care.'

Rose leaned closer to the guard, conspiratorially. 'Thing is, he's got this barmy idea that there's a monster in this building.' She had hoped to get a reaction to that, but the guard's expression didn't flicker at all. 'It was either bring him here or wait for the police to do it. I mean, you've gotta see he needs help, urgent like.'

The Doctor walked up to the guard and stood so close that their noses almost touched through the bars of the gate. He stared at him intently for a moment, then broke out into an animated impression of a chimpanzee.

The guard looked right through him, his attention fixed on Rose. 'Yes, ma'am,' he said tiredly, 'I reckon I do see that some form of medical intervention is needed here. Maybe you should go through to the house after all.'

Rose could hardly keep a big grin off her face as the guard opened the gate and waved her through. She couldn't look at the Doctor at all, for fear that she would burst out laughing. They walked side by side down a path towards the Big White House itself, but they were still only halfway there when he muttered in her ear, 'You realise he'll have called ahead, don't you?'

'They'll be waiting for us.'

'On the plus side,' said the Doctor cheerfully, 'getting captured usually works gives us a short cut to the big bad guy. Or we could...'

Rose glanced back over her shoulder. The guard had returned to a little booth just inside the gate. She could see him through a window, with his back to her, apparently talking to someone on a vidphone. She looked at the Doctor and they smiled at each other. He offered his hand and she took it.

They broke away from the path at a joyous run.

They found a door leading into the lefthand wing of the Big White House, but it was locked and didn't seem to have been opened in months. Round the back of the building, two people in white kitchen overalls chatted outside another door, and Rose and the Doctor pulled back before they could be seen.

Beside them a row of windows gave access to a woodpanelled pa.s.sageway. Rose tried one, but this too was locked. So were the second and the third and as soon as she touched the fourth, an alarm began to shriek. She thought she'd set it off at first, but the Doctor pointed out that the staff inside had probably just noticed the disappearance of their new patient and his escort.

'They know we're in the grounds, but they don't know where yet. Should give us a minute or so.'

'You could help, y'know,' said Rose as she tugged at a fourth window in vain. She could have screamed with frustration. She hadn't realised how much she had come to rely on the Doctor's bag of tricks to take them anywhere, any time he pleased.

He wandered up to a window that she'd already tried and peered through it. Without looking, he pointed to the left and said, 'Next along but one. Looks like a broken latch.' He was right.

Rose was clambering onto the window sill when the first orderlies came racing around the corner. One of them shouted something, but she couldn't hear it over the incessant alarm. She scrambled into the building and turned to help the Doctor, but it was too late. He ran, just inches ahead of the orderlies' reaching hands. A couple of them began to climb in after Rose, while two more set off after the Doctor towards the kitchen door.

Rose soon lost sight of them as she made two turns at random, hoping to shake off her pursuers, looking for a place to hide. Her heart sank as she spotted a spherical camera in a ceiling corner, rotating to follow her.

The Doctor was suddenly beside her. Rose couldn't imagine how he'd got here so quickly he must have found another way in. She saw no sign of the orderlies who'd been following him, but they couldn't be far behind. She could hear more footsteps and raised voices from the right, so the Doctor took her hand again and led her to the left. Normally she would have felt safer by his side, whatever the situation, but this time there was something nagging at her. Something wrong.

A large, arched wooden door was standing ajar and the Doctor made for it. They crashed into what appeared to be a patients' common room. People were sitting around, holloweyed, slow to react to their appearance. The same, unfortunately, could not be said of the orderlies inside the door or of those who stood guard at another door, opposite.

Rose was herded into the centre of the room, a ring of black uniforms closing in. She had nowhere else to go, so she leaped up onto a table, causing a man who'd been leaning on it with his head in his arms to fall off his chair in surprise.

Simultaneously, another man threw himself at an orderly, with a desperate plea, 'Help me! I can see them again! I can see the pretty girls again!'

A young woman with long, straight hair slapped him across the face. 'Sinner!' she spat. 'Parading your s.m.u.tty dreams in here for all to see!'

'Formica!' shouted another woman, before collapsing into a giggling fit.

It was taking one orderly to subdue the distressed man, another to keep the straighthaired woman away from him. Rose made for the gap between them and broke through, the far door in sight. She barrelled through into another long, straight corridor...

...but there were more orderlies ahead of her, coming for her.

She threw herself at the nearest door, feeling a surge of hope as it opened, finding that hope dashed at the sight of a cleaning cupboard, empty but for an overturned bottle of bleach on the top shelf.

And then she was overrun, and the orderlies' hands were grasping at her, pulling her down, and she was trying to fight, but for every hand she batted away there were two to replace it, and that alarm was shrieking like a drill in her head, and the itch in her brain had flared up into a ball of pain.

As she was forced onto her knees, Rose caught one last glimpse of her trusted companion standing above her, seemingly unconcerned.

'Doctor, do something!' she spluttered.

'Can't.' He shrugged. 'I thought you knew I'm invisible.'

And then she was lying face down on a white floor on which the recent application of a mop had just made wet dirt patterns, and the weight of three, four, five bodies was holding her down, and the alarm stopped at last and the world seemed to fall into a deathly hush as, out of the corner of her eye, Rose caught sight of the gleam of a sharp needlepoint...

...and felt it p.r.i.c.king into the side of her neck.

TWELVE.

'D'you wanna come with me?' Domnic couldn't describe how he had felt when he heard those words. It was as if, in the few seconds he'd been in his life, the Doctor had changed it for ever. As if the future he'd been waiting for had arrived at last. Domnic couldn't describe how he had felt when he heard those words. It was as if, in the few seconds he'd been in his life, the Doctor had changed it for ever. As if the future he'd been waiting for had arrived at last.

It had taken Domnic those few seconds to adjust to the fact that this man, this stranger this... this normallooking bloke was the one about whom Rose had said so much. Despite her protestations, he had still half thought of her Doctor as a fiction. Now, transfixed by a pair of intense blue eyes, he remembered s.p.a.ceships and time travel and monsters and...

He knew he shouldn't have believed, but... but...

'D'you wanna come with me?'

He had timed it to perfection. He had read Rose's note the one that Domnic still didn't understand; the one that said she had gone off with him and he had scowled and muttered, 'Not her.' His shoulders stooped as if carrying a great weight, he had turned and left the hotel room. He might have forgotten that Domnic was there.

Just enough time had pa.s.sed. Enough for Domnic to realise that, wherever this stranger was going, he had to be there. Enough to fear that, if he let the Doctor walk out now, he would be throwing away everything he'd ever wanted. So what if it was a lie? He couldn't sleep until he knew for sure.

Just enough time for him to realise that he didn't have the words.

And then the Doctor had paused, one hand still on the halfopen door, and he had looked at Domnic as if noticing him for the first time. His expression had cleared and he had issued his invitation at exactly the right moment, before the doubts and the fears had begun to set in.

The only moment at which the invitation could have been accepted.

So now Domnic was outside the city for the first time, wading through a lush jungle that he had only glimpsed in natural history programmes and his dreams, and it was as if he had found a whole new world already.

There were colours he had never seen in the city and shapes that seemed at once gloriously random and yet meticulously plotted. But there were roots pulling at his feet too, thorns snagging on his jumpsuit and branches scratching his hands and face. And the alwayspresent sense of danger, the fear that some predator could leap from the foliage at any moment.

Not that there were were any predators. There were no indigenous life forms at all on Colony World 4378976.DeltaFour. That was why it had been so perfect for settlement. But Domnic's comic strips had often used the jungle as a backdrop and filled it with beasts from his darkest dreams. The jungle represented the unknown, the unexplored and no matter how many scans had confirmed it empty, there was always the tiny, tiny possibility that the scans were wrong. That something was hiding. any predators. There were no indigenous life forms at all on Colony World 4378976.DeltaFour. That was why it had been so perfect for settlement. But Domnic's comic strips had often used the jungle as a backdrop and filled it with beasts from his darkest dreams. The jungle represented the unknown, the unexplored and no matter how many scans had confirmed it empty, there was always the tiny, tiny possibility that the scans were wrong. That something was hiding.

He tried not to think about it. If he did, he would hear them. He would hear the crunching of footsteps behind him, the rasping of breath as something waited in ambush. He would catch signs of movement in the corner of his eye a creeper disturbed here, a leaf shaken from a branch there and he would know that the monsters were waiting.

He focused on the Doctor instead. As they'd set out on their journey, Rose's friend had fired off a barrage of questions, about Domnic, about his life and his dealings with Rose and Captain Jack. That had helped him. Talking about things he remembered, real things, had anch.o.r.ed him, kept him from being overwhelmed by the possibilities of the new. Once the Doctor had his answers, though, he had lapsed into a silence that had at first been contemplative but now just seemed sullen.

Domnic needed that anchor again, so he ventured, 'It's like something out of a storybook, isn't it?'

'No,' said the Doctor shortly.

'Oh, I... I mean, I'm not saying they're real, the stories, I just... What if they... Well, what if they were? Because how can we be sure? Really sure?'

'They're not real.'

'I can show you, if you like. One of my comic strips.'

The Doctor froze and looked at Domnic for a moment. He seemed to consider his offer, but then a smile tugged at his lips and he said, 'No ta. Not interested.' And he ploughed on.

A minute later, the Doctor asked, 'Why do you keep doing that?'

'What?'

'Pinching yourself. You just did it again.'

'Oh. I hadn't realised. A reflex, that's all.'

'Helps you concentrate?'

'I guess, yeah. It's just... all this, I'm finding it a bit hard to, you know... The jungle. You. If I pinch myself, I can feel the pain and I know I'm not dreaming. You must have heard... I mean, it's what people do, right?'

'It's what they say,' said the Doctor, 'but no one actually does it. No need. If you're dreaming, yeah, sometimes the mind can be fooled, the dream can seem real, but it doesn't work the other way round. When something's real, you just know. Otherwise you'd be knocked flat by the first bus to appear round a blind corner while you're still stood in the middle of the road telling yourself how improbable it all is.'

'How?' asked Domnic. 'How do you tell the difference? Because I've had dreams like this before, and they've looked like this and sounded like this and smelt and felt like this and I've do you tell the difference? Because I've had dreams like this before, and they've looked like this and sounded like this and smelt and felt like this and I've wanted wanted them to be real, but I've still woken up and... Sometimes, I think that might be the dream, my bedroom, and I'm pinching myself and I'm trying to go back to the jungle or the s.p.a.ceship or the zombie castle or... or...' them to be real, but I've still woken up and... Sometimes, I think that might be the dream, my bedroom, and I'm pinching myself and I'm trying to go back to the jungle or the s.p.a.ceship or the zombie castle or... or...'