'Mmm... look, I think I'm on to something here. I think the cylinder reacts to telepathic communion. Half of what I just told you, I didn't tell you, you understand. It told you through me. What did I say?'

'I'm asking you... it a question. What stopped the spread?'

The Doctor pauses. He stares at the deceptive-looking object in his hands. 'It doesn't know. Perhaps we need a different cylinder. Somehow they found a way. The Old Ones found a way.'

'And got themselves wiped out in the process. Doctor, what the h.e.l.l are we doing here?'

He hurls the object across the library. 'Finding a neural inhibitor!' He bellows up at the gallery. 'Where are you? Show yourself. You know it's all your fault! A million years ago you found a way. Somehow you sealed up the gateway. Tell me!

Tell me now!'

Pelham shies away from him. A cold thought has just entered her brain. The way he's acting, his obsession. He's just like Paul Neville.

He turns to her. 'We'll have to search the cylinders one by one. This is going to take a while.'

Pelham picks up the second cylinder. She stares at it, desperate to calm the Doctor down. 'OK, OK,' she says. 'We'll find it. Just stop shouting.'

'Stay calm? Stay calm?' He is astonished by her scolding.

For a moment, Pelham thinks he going to start on her again.

Instead, he sags in realisation, looking so sorry for himself that she can't help giggling. 'Was I shouting? I'm terribly sorry. It must be the cylinder. It must leave some sort of psychic residue in the mind.'

Pelham nods sarcastically. 'Oh yeah? I think you just had a tantrum and you're trying to make excuses.'

'You know, I think you might be right. Come on!'

Laughing, Pelham stands and starts to help the Doctor pull the cylinders out of the walls.

Chapter Nine.

There is someone living inside his head. This, he has long suspected. His mind stings, rings from the blasts of the ritual. If he opens his eyes, he can see little but a red haze, and odd floating dots. He prefers to keep them closed, and look with his mind.

Sometimes he hears music, out amongst the stars. The man in his head, the dark man with Neville's face, tells him this is the music that binds the stars together. Like invisible strings, oscillating strands of white sound.

The dark man has opened up so much to him, taken him out of that body he hates. This is what he has waited for all his life. He hardly remembers the golden-haired boy, cannot recall at all what he did to him. Only that overwhelming flood, that tide that came from within. Had been hiding inside him for so long. He felt his mind slip away, that white-out he used to get when absorbed in composing his poems, when the muse descended, but a thousand times more powerful.

There is so much pa.s.sion in him, so much energy. Scores to be settled.

The someone inside his head is laughing, egging him on.

This must be Valdemar, he realises, come for him.

'Huvan?' comes a distant voice, from his old life. He tries to hang on to the music but it is fading, fading fast. He wants to cry out, shut out the voice. He doesn't want to return to their fragmented, incomplete world. He can no longer live separately from the whole.

'Huvan?'

Yet there is something in that voice, something he remembers. The sound of that word, once his name, spoken in such a manner. He is drawn back, chasing the bait.

The lights and the music and the man in his head fade away. The dark man licks his lips in antic.i.p.ation of when he will return.

Huvan opens his eyes.

Romana is not thrilled to be following the Doctor's orders.

'No,' she had stated categorically. 'Ask me anything, but not that.'

They had been standing in the ruins of the cabal. Shock had them rooted to the spot until the Doctor realised Neville had disappeared.

Huvan had slumped forward, apparently unconscious, over the table. The rest of the pathetic coven had scattered.

The Doctor had run to the boy, hauling his head back. He pulled open his eyelids, revealing the dark retinas within.

'The psychic energy running through him must have burned out a mental fuse. He's lucky to be alive. Poor soul.'

'Poor?' Pelham had shrieked, clutching the drapes. 'He was going to kill us all!'

'We haven't much time,' said the Doctor. 'If he wakes up and I'm not ready, he may well kill us all. We need a way to keep him calm. Find someone he can trust.'

He looked up at Romana and she could see it, could sense that vile idea germinating in his mind.

'Romana...'

'No,' she stated categorically. 'Ask me anything, but not that.'

And now, here she is, back in Huvan's room, paper and other less savoury items strewn all over it. Gingerly, she drops a cold compress on to his head. Over and over in her mind she revisits the image of Stanislaus coming apart. She has never seen anything like that, not even when the Sontarans were strutting through the Academy, no one daring to halt them in their atrocities.

She wonders how much the Doctor has seen, has witnessed through his many lives. What had it been like for him, the first time? She feels like she has entered a war, a war where unimaginable realities must be sublimated, dealt with, taken for granted. The idea that she might become blase sickens Romana.

Mind you, the idea that she now has to return Huvan's pathetic crush is equally appalling. She is certain the Doctor had the ghost of a smile on his lips when he suggested it, and Pelham turned away completely. Five minutes ago, this was the child, claiming to be an ageless dark G.o.d back from the dead, who turned an innocent young man inside out. Now, she is supposed to simper and fuss over him. As far as Romana is concerned, this is melodrama of the lowest of the low-brow.

'Huvan?' she forces herself. Lighten the pitch, add a few sobs of concern, ignore the fact that perhaps it is an emotion more primeval than repulsion that is making her tremble.

That for once the Doctor might have underestimated his opponent.

'Huvan?'

The boy's eyelids flicker. He groans. 'Romana?' he utters.

'Don't leave me...' He goes on to deliver a speech so bathetic, so choked with childish self-absorption, so stuffed with cackhanded adolescent craving, that she can only a.s.sume he has rehea.r.s.ed it.

'Hush now, Huvan. Yes, I feel the same.' Come on Romanadvoratelundar, at least try and sound sincere. 'You must come back to me. You must tell me what happened to you.'

Huvan is awake. He looks up with glistening eyes. 'I don't know. I felt... live, like I was being electrocuted. But it was nice. I didn't do anything wrong, did I? Was I... was I all right?'

He grips her arms. Romana smooths his pitted forehead.

Well, if you're going to do it, you've got to do it properly. She gazes into his eyes, those eyes so recently altered, and shamelessly says, 'Huvan, you were marvellous.'

And the coven? And the guards? Just what is the upshot of Valdemar's apparent return?

Let's start with the lower levels and work up. And that's not just for show, for as the night outside gets darker, the palace itself is continuing its emergence as a character. The scattered tenants hear all sorts of strange far-off (and not so far-off) noises, not all of them mechanical. Lights appear in the distance, glowing b.a.l.l.s that dance and bobble, inviting you to chase, to follow. The lifts become erratic, sometimes not working at all. n.o.body uses them any more; they are sticking to their own levels.

Down in his artist's studio, Kampp rises to his feet. Black, coral-like scale has grown over the sockets of his eyes like the shiny carapace of a beetle. Ignoring the body of the dead guard (who remains dead, whatever you might think was going to happen), he staggers out into the corridors, looking for someone. He comes across the duty guard a dull-witted, heavy man called Srohan, deemed fit only to act as jailer and night-watchman down here.

This slow-wittedness manifests itself in his sleepy failure to recognise the alterations crawling all over the advancing Kampp. Instead, fatally, he leaps to his feet and salutes, just as the butler is on him. In time-honoured fashion, Srohan doesn't even have time to scream.

And then there are two of them.

At about the same time, probably and correctly on the stroke of midnight, the scattered children of the cabal cower in their quarters. The palace is no longer their playground.

Through Huvan, a boy they have tormented without cessation since they met him, Valdemar has returned. With the deaths of their two friends, they understand the extent to which Paul Neville has betrayed them.

The twins Diana and Juno, the two bovine ladies in yellow and red from the masque, particular playmates of Huvan's, have hidden themselves in their plush apartment and blocked the doors with furniture. Like Srohan, they are not overly burdened with intelligence or sense, such needless qualities bred out of them over the centuries. They have been frightened out of their wits by the day's proceedings. They curse their dispossessed parents for sending them here with Neville, conveniently forgetting it was they themselves who staged the tantrums and sulks until they got their own way (Hermia had said it would all be a blast. One supposes that for her, it was).

'No one is getting through that door,' says Diana, taking her red-handled lady's pistol from the cabinet.

'No one,' replies her sister, taking the equivalent yellow handle.

'You're getting fat,' says Diana.

'So are you,' says Juno.

Now only Neville remains in this precis of the night's proceedings. Shocked beyond all reason by the display of Valdemar's power via Huvan, and the overwhelming success of his plans, he has spent the last few hours communing with the Dark One, praying for guidance.

It is the Doctor who upsets him the most. How has Valdemar allowed him to live? It was his interference that prevented Neville's final transformation. He had been so close, so close to Becoming. He would have got away from himself, yes, if it hadn't been for the Doctor and those meddling kids...

The Magus releases the answer. The human Neville is not worthy of Becoming. He has not completed the tasks Valdemar has set for him. The Doctor is his responsibility.

And the Doctor is still alive. There is work to be done.

Neville returns from his meditations. He opens his eyes and stands. He needs to find some guards.

The night wears itself out. Morning triggers the palace to light up the Doctor and Pelham still at work in the library. Well, the Doctor anyway. Pelham has fallen asleep.

Even the Doctor is reaching a point where fatigue is overriding efficiency. He could swear he has read this knowledge cylinder before. He senses that the palace is in some way to blame for this. It has done something to time, slowed him down, given itself a chance to grow. The night seems over much too quickly.

And then, as he thinks about this, the solution pops into his brain. He hadn't read this cylinder before after all.

It shows him the dormant organs of the human brain, collected and dissected by the Old Ones when man was merely an unthinking brute, little more than the ape he grew out of. Yes, the Old Ones visited then. They knew the Earth.

The organ is located inside the hypothalamus; a mere stub in a ma.s.s of newer, better-developed cells and synapses. It is a vestige of a time when all life was connected, without the barrier of consciousness and self-awareness, to the complete and synchronous universe. Before there came a severance somewhere along the line, for some evolutionary reason, and life moved outside the whole.

No wonder the Old Ones were so curious about the higher dimensions, no wonder they risked everything. They had discovered so much, the interconnection of everything. And they rushed like lemmings to re-attain it, not caring what they might lose. Only their experiment turned back on itself.

Instead of reaching into the higher dimensions, the higher dimensions reached into them.

There had to be a way that they had protected themselves, there had to be something.

Now that the Doctor has learned the cylinder's tricks he forces it to reveal its secrets. What did you do? he asks. What did the first explorers do to protect themselves from madness and transformation when they opened the gateway? Tell me, relic of the Old Ones, give it up!

Miranda Pelham wakes to find the Doctor sprawled over the table, his face utterly white, his right hand clasped around one of the knowledge cylinders. His hat is jammed on to those vibrant curls. For a moment, nothing registers but the disappointing revelation that sleep is over. Then the panic hits her.

'Doctor!' she shrieks.

To her intense relief, he jumps awake. 'Search the plastic factories, Brigadier!' he yells, much to her confusion. He turns and laughs. 'I found it, Miranda. I found it!'

Still, she doesn't understand. She just wants to get out of here. But she is glad he's glad. 'Great. Now what do we do?'

'We go to the control room and find the neural-inhibition vaccine the Old Ones left there for us.'

'I remember, I remember... a man, he was following you. You and Tenn... Stanislaus. I didn't like it.' Huvan is clutching her, like a drowning man. Romana concentrates on a spot on the wall. Remove oneself from the physical proceedings, rise above them.

'Really?' she replies. 'What did you do?'

'I don't know how I saw him. I could do anything. He tried to kill you. I stopped him, made him stop himself.'

'How?' She tries to remember when this might have happened, or whether Huvan is lying again. The guard. The guard they found in the corridor.

Huvan chuckles. Romana feels his mirth shaking her. 'He was afraid, I knew that. He thought something was in the palace. He was right, but he created it out of himself.'

'That was clever of you. And what was it he created?'

'Big.'

The anti-grav lifts don't seem safe, she doesn't trust them. In fact, she doesn't trust anyone or anything. And that includes this Doctor. Somehow, using this strange pencil-like sonic device, he unscrews a panel Pelham hadn't even guessed was in the ceiling.

This guy is impressive.

Once off, the panel reveals an upward-leading shaft and a set of pipes that maybe a small mouse could scale. 'Doctor, I'm forty-two, not twelve.'

'Breathe in,' he offers. Smart a.r.s.e.

At least he goes first. The climb isn't as bad as she'd thought. The squeeze only hurts if she does something silly like breathe, or attempt to move any of the limbs of her body.

It isn't so much a climb as a corkscrew, arms up, fingers brushing the underside of his battered shoes. Get me out of this alive, Doctor, Pelham promises, and I'll get you a new pair. Ten. A hundred.

One of the other really nice advantages of this climb is this it gives her plenty of opportunity to think about the nightmare in that black magic room. It was one thing to write about Valdemar. It had even seemed a sensible rationalisation to agree to come here with Neville to reopen the tomb. It was quite another to come face to face with the Dark G.o.d she had equated with the destructive power of the big bang. Yes, she could really have done without that. And knowing that it was all her fault.

In the next life, Miranda, she promises herself, you'll write a romance. OK?

Just as she is going to die of claustrophobia, there is light at the end of the shaft. Pelham hears a clanging noise and sc.r.a.pes her head on the Doctor's shoe. 'Sorry,' he says in what sounds suspiciously like a stage whisper.