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Thunder rumbled like a slow peal of cosmic bells. The silver sketch of the Doctor's face was tortured and haggard. Its eyes gleamed like white coals. It glided nearer, looming above her and Shonnzi. Again its hand stretched towards her.

There was a clatter of stones. The pile of rubble shifted and the Doctor, his face and clothes white with dust, began to clamber out.

"Miserable, insubstantial, jerry-built prefab!" he choked. "Nothing's built to last these days . . ."

The dark wraith turned towards him and he faltered, momentarily lost for words.

The spirit seemed to grow still taller as it bore down on him. Its robe swirled out like a rippling sculpture in a slow elemental wind. Its face was hidden from Ace by the collar, but its glaring eyes lit the Doctor's face as he stared up into them. His hand groped out to steady himself as he extracted his legs from the rubble. "Don't I know you from somewhere?" he said, dwarfed by the massive shape.

The ghost did not speak, it only stared implacably down at him.

"Wretched spirit, doomed to wander the dark causeways of the universe. What do you want with me?"

"Doctor! Can't you see what it is?" Ace dared to call out. "It's you. It's your own ghost!"

The Doctor apparently ignored her. He stood nervously running the fingers of one hand around the girth of his wrist. Suddenly she realized that he was checking his own pulse. "Aren't you being a bit presumptuous?" he warned the ghost. "Turning up unannounced like a spectre without a feast to go to! Just clear off! I'm not dead yet, you know!"

The two manifestations faced each other like duellists: one huge, darkly preternatural and doom-laden; the other urbane, dusty and doomed.

"Is it you that inhabit my mind?" cried the Doctor. "You that steal my memories? Speak, I charge thee!"

If the thunder was its voice, then it roared. Its robe flapped wide in the wind that they could not feel. A wind stirred by the passing of Time. The dark spirit glided to the edge of the tower. Its arms swept slowly out in an expansive gesture of rage that encompassed the whole City and the universe trapped at its centre.

"Yes," the Doctor confided, "I couldn't agree more. It's a miserable place, isn't it? No sense of proportion at all."

The spirit made a fist of its anger. In the air beyond the broken parapet, an oblong silver frame drew itself. Its empty centre flickered as it hovered like a hopeful TV screen.

"A reality window?" observed the Doctor with mounting irritation. "What good is a window with nothing to lookout at? I want to know where I am. And exactly who I am too." His voice rose again into the Shakespearean cadence which was apparently the correct way to address errant ghosts. "Return my memories, false spirit of this haunted wasteland, or I shall hurl thee into the sepulchasm of night from which there is no recourse! And return my TARDIS too!"

The air crashed as flickers of red lightning played in the stars.

"Professor," shouted Ace. "You remembered!"

The Doctor fell back on to the rubble with a startled look. "Remember?" he said. "What did I forget?" He pressed his fingers to his temples with a look of mounting astonishment. "Good grief!"

Ace quailed as the dark shape turned. Its arm moved inexorably out, levelling an accusing finger at her.

"Yes, yes," muttered the Doctor, deep in his rediscovered thoughts. "How many volumes does this CV run to?" He looked up at the ghost. "But this still doesn't tell me who you are, or where my TARDIS has gone . . ."

His eyes followed the line of the spectre's dark arm, across its hand to the accusing finger. Beyond that, through the air, he saw the culprit and her accomplice cringing by the stairway.

"Hello Ace," he said as if he had just noticed her. "I think you may have something for me."

Her hand slipped tentatively into her jacket. "Are you all right, Professor?"

"Ace." He extended an open hand towards her.

Her hand closed around the scroll. "I looked after it, you know. I couldn't give it to you until I knew you