Simon was beside him in a moment. 'Loads of things. We set up clean fields of course. Ex-Areas. That's what we were planning to do at the top of the stairs until Peter's accident.'

'What's an Ex-Area exactly?'

'An area, roughly square.' Simon was in his element now.

'Right, what you do is put the buzz-dams at the four corners and set up a wave-field pulse. It doesn't last long but it can 59 create a dead zone - an area of complete solitude within a room.'

'Our experiments at uni were quite effective,' Carfrae added. stood inside the buzz-dam field once while it was operating. They played music at me, shouted at me, everything. But you're totally cut off aurally. It's brilliant fun.'

The Doctor nodded, writing copious notes. 'Yes. Yes, I see.' He dashed over to Peter's sleeping form and shook him awake.

'Hey!' Carfrae ran over.

'Hey!' echoed Peter stirring. 'What's going on?'

'Sorry, Peter, but I need you all. We have to try and create an Ex-Area in here. I need all of your help.'

Simon tapped his elbow. 'You don't need to, Doctor.

That's why this is called the Ex-Room - it's totally soundproofed. You can't hear anything in here from out there.'

'And vice versa?' The Doctor sounded panicky.

Peter grunted and sat up. 'Of course.'

'Polly!' The Doctor looked even more startled. 'Polly and Ben! Where are they?' He ran to the door and pulled on the handle.

It was locked.

The Page of Cups.

Flick.

The Tower. A huge seated cat-statue, struck by lightning.

Three figures falling from the top.

Danger.

She and her friends were in danger. He leaped up, scattering the tarot pack to the floor. For a moment he stared at them and then swore. Dropping down, he began gathering them together. He needed them. He needed her as well.

Once he had gathered them up he breathed deeply. He crossed to the window where the new candles he had bought that morning stood. He poured oil on the yellow female one and lit the wick.

60.As he stared into the flame, his mind briefly flickered back to Mrs Fuller's body. And the Cat-creature. He shook his head. That was yesterday or a month ago or twenty years ago. It did not matter, what was time to him anyway. He felt a pang of conscience for Mrs Fuller, but like all her kind, life was ridiculously ephemeral. Now was all that mattered.

Now and the girl. Originally he had wanted the Doctor but her mind was even more open, a receptacle for him to dip into. She had the gift and she knew the power. She might even be able to dowse the path, retrace his steps. And the others. She would help him; she had to or life on this planet was doomed to the cat-creature - the dream had proved that much.

Reaching out and grabbing the candle, he crouched down and whistled a shrill note. The candle wavered, re-formed into a perfect waxen effigy of Polly Wright. 'All mine.' He rocked back on his haunches. 'Now, show me. Show me where you are right now.'

He closed his eyes and held his breath. The incense wavered around his nostrils and he breathed it in deeply, letting it flow into his lungs. In his mind's eye he saw a gossamer of light, spiralling outwards like a minute galaxy, spiralling into existence. He concentrated on the very centre of it, ignoring the tendrils of light that circled out, just the centre point. He felt his physical body suddenly gain weight - extraordinary weight - and mentally pulled himself up.

Out. Away. He was floating. Floating in the darkness towards that central zone of bright light. As he felt his astral self drift towards it, the central spot blurred and shaped itself, like a cloud in the blue skies he infrequently saw above London. Clouds that could be seen as anything from the crudest outline of a duck or boat to complicated audio wave patterns governing the mathematical structure of the entire universe. Around him now, the blackness was interrupted by straight shafts of bright light, spearing out from the central zone he was nearing. He shut them out of his vision and mind - only that main point was allowed to occupy his consciousness and it continued its reshaping. It 61 became a face, the one he sought, this Polly Wright. 'Show me more,' he muttered to nothing in particular. The white zone flared up, blotting out all the dark, the various shafts of light blending together to create a more precise picture. He could clearly see Polly and a young man - a fellow traveller of the Doctor's? Yes, he recognized him from the previous night's dreaming - standing talking to another man. He could not hear what they were saying but she did not seem to be in any danger. Where were they?

Of course. The Doctor had taken them to c.u.mbria, where he had asked him to. Where the songline was strong and where he had first arrived, with her, so long ago. He wondered if she had ever gone back, back to see if the beacon was still operational. He could not explain why he was drawn back there at this time. Or why he had told the Doctor about the ghosts - The ghosts! Of course, how could could he have been so slow-witted. That's where she had been going. That's why she worked at that ridiculous learning establishment. She was tracking them as well. Could she have sensed them trying to break through as well? If she had, then Polly, the Doctor and the young man - Ben, wasn't it? - were in very great danger. Not only would she try to use them, but her motives would not be quite as important as his. He had to get there quickly. Just in case. he have been so slow-witted. That's where she had been going. That's why she worked at that ridiculous learning establishment. She was tracking them as well. Could she have sensed them trying to break through as well? If she had, then Polly, the Doctor and the young man - Ben, wasn't it? - were in very great danger. Not only would she try to use them, but her motives would not be quite as important as his. He had to get there quickly. Just in case.

Just in case she sacrificed Polly to her own twisted morality.

After such a long walk, he was disappointed that the street was more than just deserted - it was positively empty. Empty of other people, of bird song, of the sound of distant traffic, of everything that a main street in a small village should have. Where were the people? He needed to see people. There was no sign that it had ever been inhabited - just shop facades, a couple of rubbish bins (empty of course) and double-yellow lines painted around the road edge.

62.And the red telephone box. And the laughing, pointing man in the wheelchair being pushed by the woman in the black dress.

Professor Nicholas Bridgeman was not a particularly self-pitying man, yet the sight of the man in the wheelchair, giggling incoherently, brought a taste of bile into his throat and sent his mind reeling back to his childhood, growing up in Blyth, on the bitterly cold windswept coast of Northumberland. Born a couple of years after the end of the Second World War, the continued use of ration books, pa.s.ses and general security paranoia mixed with the optimism of a new beginning made his childhood a very bizarre mixture of good and bad - usually a reflection of his father's employment status. Invalided out of the Royal Air Force after ten years as a flight lieutenant on Air/Sea Rescue craft, his father had settled in Blyth along with many other ex-servicemen. The shipyards of Newcastle and the other Tyne regions had been an enormous draw, with the promise of regular hard work, good living conditions and the right atmosphere in which to bring up a young son.

It was just five days after young Nicholas's ninth birthday that the accident happened. Bridgeman senior had been on his way home from the docks, on the forty-five-minute bus ride out of Newcastle, on the old A913 through Whitley Bay, when the bus driver was apparently distracted. The bus spun briefly and mounted the kerb, crashed through a roadside bench and hit a large oak tree bordering the park.

The right-hand side of the bus caved in instantly, the driver's body being pulped in his little cab and two pa.s.sengers on the lower deck equally flattened. The great branches of the oak tree smashed through the upper deck of the bus - and through the shocked frame of pa.s.senger Alexander K. Bridgeman. It took the Tyneside fire service four hours to cut the bus free from the tree and get medical aid to the shocked pa.s.sengers trapped upstairs - trapped because the staircase down was immediately behind the first row of seats and was similarly crushed.

63.Bridgeman senior was still alive, but despite the best medical efforts of the doctors, nurses and surgeons at the local cottage hospital, the breakages to his spine had whiplashed his neck backwards, fracturing his skull in three places. Bone fragments had jammed into his brain and the once proud and forthright Royal Air Force Flt/Lt officer (rtrd) was now what was unofficially referred to as a vegetable, confined initially to a hospital bed and then moved back home to reside in a wheelchair, looked after by a wife and young son both too much in shock at the sudden change in their livelihoods to know what was happening.

The effect on the family was devastating. Friends, both embarra.s.sed and uncomprehending at the family's altered status, suddenly ceased visiting. Nicholas's mother's frequent jolly nights out at bingo soon stopped and within weeks the smiles of 'we look forward to seeing you back again soon, Margaret,' became behind-the-back whispers of 'well, I doubt we'll ever see Margaret back. Poor cow.' As she struggled to feed, dress, wash and toilet a husband who, to all intents and purposes, might as well have died and been replaced by a silent, uncomprehending and useless stranger, the effect on Margaret Bridgeman was even more devastating. Young Nicholas swore that life drained from her on a daily basis. Every day when he returned home from school, she looked greyer, thinner and less caring. The coalition government's still fledgling welfare state put a paltry bit of money in her purse every week but it was hardly enough. And as his mother's life essence faded away before him, so Nicholas's own interests waned. He began avoiding friends and before long had lost most social graces. He rarely spoke and instead buried himself in medical and science books, naively determined to discover a cure for both his parents.

Around the age of thirteen, a sympathetic teacher recognized that Nicholas's obsessive interest in science was something that should be cultivated and arranged for him to take a scholarship exam for the Blue Coats school in Berkshire where, because his father was ex-RAF, there 64 would be no problems with the fees. By then Nicholas's self-absorbed p.u.b.erty had resulted in a stammer and inadequate drive to push himself socially, so by the time he was eighteen, Nicholas Bridgeman had excelled academically and earned an early scholarship to Manchester University, but was still very much a loner. On one of his first visits back home he explained how much he enjoyed his life in Manchester and saw a glimmer of pride in his mother's eye momentarily replace the more common one of exhaustion and despair. He reached over to his mother, hugged her and, casting an eye over the now very frail form of his father hunched uselessly in his wheelchair, promised that once he began earning money teaching science somewhere, he would see that the family was well provided for. The Sixties were beginning and the 'you've never had it so good' att.i.tude was starting to be believable.

That night he slept in his own bed and dreamed of fame, riches and being able to provide a good home for his mother and the funds to finance his father's future in a well-cared-for environment, freeing his mother to get her own life back on track. It had been nearly ten years since his father's accident and his mother had aged thirty. Nicholas was determined that the future was going to be rosy. He awoke the following morning feeling that something was not quite right. A few seconds later he realized that he had been woken by the Blyth bird song and not by the sound of wooden wheels being pushed over concrete floors. Slowly he dressed and went downstairs. What had once been the living room had been converted into a bedroom for his father and Nicholas went in.

The porcelain colouring of his father's face immediately told him that he would not require the wheelchair ever again. Although the only deaths Nicholas had experienced first-hand were laboratory rats and hamsters he was remarkably calm about his discovery. He checked for a pulse but the cold, hard wrist immediately made it a pointless search. Alexander K. Bridgeman had been dead for some hours, possibly since he had been put to bed the 65 previous night. Rigor mortis had set in and there was nothing for it but to tiptoe upstairs and gently break the news to his mother.

As he left the room Nicholas felt a sudden gut-wrenching guilt - his father was lying dead in front of him and all he could think was what a relief it was. His mother was free of her obligations at last.

Three minutes later he was sitting on the floor of his mother's room, holding an equally pale but less rigid hand in his, reading the beautifully handwritten note, apologizing for what she had done but hoping that Nicholas understood she had done the two most wicked acts possible to free Nicholas to get on with his life. She explained in great detail, for the coroner's sake as much as Nicholas's, that she had obtained a new bottle of sleeping pills from the doctor by saying she had dropped the previous bottle accidentally down the toilet. She then crushed the entire contents of the new bottle up and added it to Alexander's soup and porridge the previous night. She had sat up with him, holding her husband's hand until with a final deep breath he had died.

She then tiptoed up to her own bed and took ten or twelve of her original pills herself, written the note, put on her favourite nightdress and gone to sleep. A photograph of herself, Alexander and four-year-old Nicholas lay on the pillow beside her.

The sympathy from both family and personal friends had been genuine enough, although he could have lived without the local Catholic priest proclaiming that his father's murder and mother's suicide meant they could not be buried in the consecrated ground of the local church. Instead, Nicholas paid for the bodies to be cremated and returned to Whitley Bay where he threw their ashes into the sea.

Four years later he succeeded to the professorship of science at the newly formed UMIST in Manchester and soon transferred to London, where his growing interest in the paranormal slowly absorbed all his time. Occasionally he allowed himself to remember his mother and would travel to Whitley Bay twice a year on pilgrimage to stand on 66 the seafront and stare at the waves, as if hoping that the ashes were still lying atop of the water and would one day re-form into two perfectly healthy parents who could one day walk towards him, hug him and tell him the world was all right. Sometimes he would sit in the room at the guest-house he had always stayed in and hold a large bath towel around himself, remembering how big it seemed when he was about six and one, or both, of his parents would wrap him in it after a bath and hug him, telling him how much they loved him.

Nicholas Bridgeman had never found anyone else to love or be loved by. He was fond of his students and knew that those who shared his interest - obsession maybe - with the preternatural were fond of him in return. But there had never been any one person in his life so special that he entertained thoughts of marriage, love or even s.e.x. He was alone but never really lonely.

Until he stood in the deserted, empty village that his every instinct told him should be bustling with gossipy, insular but attractive life. Deserted except for the crippled man in a wooden wheelchair and a woman dressed in a severe black dress staring at him and pointing. And laughing. Bridgeman watched as the woman slapped the man across the back of the head. 'Stop that, Mr Dent.' Her voice was harsh and bitter, without a trace of humanity, as if scolding her charge was the only attempt at communication she ever made. 'Stop laughing at the shadows.'

'Can't you see him, you daft bleeder!' cried Dent between guffaws. 'There, beside that funny red box. He's just staring at us.'

The woman looked straight at Bridgeman. No, he thought, straight through him. She can't see me!

'You're going on about ghosts again, Mr Dent,' the woman was saying. 'I've told you before, I won't have such unChristian talk from any of my charges. You stop it now.'

Bridgeman watched as Dent seemed to deflate and immediately lose interest in him. 'Oh, all right, you miserable cow.' Then he seemed to brighten again. 'One 67 day, Mrs Wilding, you'll be dead, d'you know that? I hope I'm still alive to see you die. On that day, I promise I'll get out of this chair and dance around your corpse. You hear me? I'll be dancing again.'

Mrs Wilding suddenly began pushing the wheelchair away from Bridgeman, muttering that the chances of Dent outliving her were minimal. 'In any case, I'll kill you myself if you carry on cursing and swearing like that. It's not right.'

As Bridgeman watched the two figures faded away in front of him.

'Ghosts,' he murmured. And then shouted, 'They're b.l.o.o.d.y ghosts!'

'What are, sir?' said a voice at his elbow.

Bridgeman shook his head and leaned heavily against the red phone box. In front of him, the street was a bustle of activity - people talking, a woman with a pram trying to negotiate the steps of the post office and a small yellow van came to a halt outside the Happy Shopper grocery store. The village was exactly as it ought to have been.

'Are you all right, sir?' asked the voice again.

Bridgeman looked straight at the policeman and frowned.

'I think so, Officer. I-I'm sorry, I'm a bit tired. I need to call an ambulance.'

'Are you hurt then?'

Bridgeman shook his head. 'N-no, Officer. B-but one of my students, up at the Grange, is. I need to get some help.'

He stepped into the phone box, and got a twenty-pence piece out of his pocket and placed it on top of the coin-box.

It crossed Bridgeman's mind that it was a spanking new call-box with all the latest facilities, coins, phone-card and credit-card slots all together. Obviously encased in the old style red phone box specially for the tourists. Aware that the policeman was watching him curiously through the gla.s.s windows, Bridgeman turned his back on him and pulled out the phone directory. 'Carlisle. That'll be nearest,' he muttered.

As he lifted the receiver Bridgeman suddenly started. His vision was blurred by a ma.s.sively bright white light, 68 blotting everything out. He tried to back away but could not.

It filled the confined s.p.a.ce of the phone box, enveloping him totally. His last thoughts were that the policeman would help him.

The bright light vanished as suddenly as it had arrived.

Police Constable 452, Gordon M. McGarry, frowned. He stared at the phone box, vandalized six months ago and therefore totally inoperative. Why was he standing there?

Something at the back of his mind was nagging him - had he seen someone in there? Something to do with the Grange? No, of course not - he was just tired. He cast an eye inside the call box through the shattered windows but of course it was as grimy, dirty and undisturbed as it had been.

Tutting at his own stupidity, Gordon M. McGarry walked away.

Inside, dripping down the front of the vandalized call box were the very hot liquid remains of a twenty-pence piece.

'Well, that wasn't much fun,' muttered Polly as she slammed the door behind her.

'Yeah, well, he's a bit uptight about something, that's for sure,' replied Ben.

'That still doesn't ent.i.tle him to be rude and accuse us of interfering with his work. And what exactly is a bimbo anyway?'

Ben almost answered that one, then thought better of it.

Polly's somewhat sheltered upbringing and high society partying probably shielded her from similar accusations said to her face. 'Dunno, d.u.c.h.ess, but I doubt it's anything to worry about.' He was aware that Polly was staring at him.

Scrutinizing him, the Doctor would say.

'You're lying to me, Ben Jackson, I can tell.' She jabbed him in the chest with her finger. 'What's a bimbo?'

'Honest, Pol, I don't know. Perhaps it's some Nineties word us poor hicks from the Sixties haven't learned yet.' He smiled. 'It's certainly nothing some poor merchant seaman would ever have heard of,' he lied.

69.Clearly unconvinced, Polly tucked her handbag over her shoulder and ran a hand through her long hair. 'Well, when he wasn't abusing us, Herr Kerbe told us that Professor Bridgeman had gone to the village for help.' Ben sighed - Polly was doing what he called her 'come here, common little oike, and learn something from me' bit. Luckily it had changed from being an annoying to an amusing little quirk of hers - it was not intended to patronize him. It just did.

He then remembered that Polly was lecturing and he ought to listen.

Euston Station, London. A veritable hive of activity at any time of day, any day of the week. And trains to Preston (where he needed to change for Carlisle and there for Sellafield) were going to be packed.

He stared at the queue, frustrated. What was this human obsession with standing in long lines? Why did the British turn it into an art as they patiently waited in turn, never moaning or complaining at the speed with which the ticket sellers did not work? He cursed the day that queues were invented - about forty thousand years ago. Humans!

He looked at the timetable above platform eight. 14.13, platform five. Change at Manchester! Another change.

'Got any change, mate?' said a scruffy young girl with a moth-eared dog at her heels.

'What?'

The young girl leaned back against Tie Rack. 'Spare a quid? You know, for a cup of tea?'

'Expensive tea.'

'British Rail, mate. Screw us for everything we got, don't they?'

'Anyway, no. Sorry.'

The young girl looked affronted. 'Oh, go on. If not for me, then what about Petra here? She needs some food.'

He stared at them both. 'If you ate your dog, it'd save you begging for food for either of you.'

The young girl reeled back as if she had been hit. 'You what? You sick or something?'

70.'Oh, do shut up and go away. It was only a suggestion.'

The young girl tried a different approach. She took a step nearer and sneered, 'I hate goths. b.l.o.o.d.y Cure, The Mission and all that depressing rubbish. No tune.'

'Yes, yes, I'm sure you're right. Now, excuse me.'

The young girl blocked him. 'I only asked for a quid, mate. It's not that much, is it?' She reached out and blocked the way to the platform.

He stared at the young girl for a moment and sighed. 'I'm sorry.'

For a second the girl relaxed, possibly thinking she was going to get her money. Instead, he opened his mouth and sang a high note. For a second the girl frowned - she could not hear it. But then Petra yapped and whined and ran in a circle. Around them, the ma.s.sive gla.s.s doors and walls of Euston station cracked as a network of spidery lines snaked across them. The gla.s.s front of Tie Rack exploded inwards into a ma.s.s of tiny, blunt fragments, showering the stock, staff and customers. Screams started all around and the girl went to cover her ears. And stopped. Her right arm hurt - it ached and throbbed. She grasped at it with her left hand and then started screaming herself. From the shoulder down, both her clothing and her flesh shrivelled and began to fall to the ground in green, foul-smelling chunks. Within a few seconds, her arm was just a blackened bone, fleshy hand at one end clenching and unclenching in uncomprehending panic.

Her pained screaming attracted those already yelling in fear at the fragmenting gla.s.s. They rushed over to her but backed away as the smell wafted towards them. Petra the dog ignored the smell and started licking the putrid flesh flopping on the floor.

He only took an instant to realize he had over-reacted.

'Wretched humans,' he murmured. 'I haven't tried this for centuries.' He put his arms upright above his head, let his neck relax and closed his eyes. Opening his mouth, he relaxed his throat and then breathed out deeply, the air accompanied by a long moan.