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The corridor was a long one, junctions and doorways leading off it at all angles. Some of the doorways were in darkness, a weird kind of darkness that reminded Chris of his kidhood, watching simcord holo-vid episodes of EarthDoom XV from behind the sofa. Some of the passages he passed didn’t seem to fit in with the architecture of the TARDIS at all, like he was looking into another ship, a mirror-image of the one he was used to.

What you really need is a Frisbee, he told himself, but couldn’t for the life of him work out why he’d thought it.

He made it to the end of the corridor, turned a corner, skidded, lost his balance, and tripped against a door.

Pretending he’d done it deliberately – he was determined to hold on to his dignity, even if the only ones watching him were shapeless alien monsters – he grasped the door-frame and used it to swing himself around, looking back along the corridor at the ticking-tocking things that were breathing down his neck.

‘Ag,’ he said, then lost his grip on the frame and fell against the door. It opened at his touch, sending him sprawling into the hallway on the other side.

I’m telling you, you need a frisbee. Remember when you were a kid? You had this really neat frisbee...

As the door was swinging shut, he caught a glimpse of one of the monsters in close-up. It had been hiding just around the corner, not two metres away, waiting for him ‘Lurking’. That was the only word for it, ‘lurking’. The thing turned to watch him, its head clicking and buzzing on top of a copper-coloured neck. The last thing Chris Cwej saw before the door closed was the thing’s face; and the thing’s face told him that it was fifteen minutes to ten.

It had taken Marielle Duquesne less than ten minutes to find the device. If ‘find’ was the word; in truth, the device had hooked her by the spine and dragged her to its door.

It had begun the second she’d stepped off the ship, the sensation that told her a caillou had left his spoor behind, more powerful than she’d ever known it before. She’d moved like a sleepwalker, and the call had led her to a stretch of woodland on the fringes of civilization, where bugs chattered to each other in the nettles and everything stank of damp earth. Even before she’d reached the glade, she’d known that the device would be there, and now she was standing no more than three yards from its cool blue surface, shivering in the rain.

It was just a box. Yes, it was the most terrible and glorious thing she had ever seen... but it was still just a box, a simple construction of wooden beams and glass panels. At this distance, she could see the shapes that had been printed onto its sides, but she had to stare at the markings for at least a minute before she realized that they were nothing more than ordinary letters. Were they moving? Turning themselves into anagrams?

No. Something was altering her perception – perhaps it was the box itself – so that the words became irrational and meaningless. They were in English, though, she was sure of that much. A ‘P’, an ‘L’... was that an ‘O’ between them? An

‘X’?

Suddenly, Duquesne realized that she was stepping closer to the device, her arms stretched out in front of her. The letters blurred again, and it was only then, in that moment of true panic, that she noticed how the very angles of the box were wrong, as if geometry itself had ceased to function.

Her fingers touched the front of the box. She felt nothing, but there was an impression of something vast and liquid hidden beneath the surface. She could only watch as the wooden veneer started to melt and flow, lapping across her fingers. Her hands began sinking into the shape. Absently, she remembered the stories she’d heard her superiors in the Directory tell, about those who had been captured by the caillou. They’d been taken to other worlds, said the tales, carried away in heavenly carriages, used as subjects in horrible and incomprehensible experiments...

And there was no longer a box. There were just corners and spaces, rectangles that danced and holes that seemed to penetrate