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The Doctor had insisted that the gynoid had been right behind them, though Roz’s senses still hadn’t managed to get a grip on it. ‘They have ways of not being seen,’ he’d muttered, and an image had popped into Roz’s head of a gynoid wearing a false nose and moustache, but before she’d been able to open her mouth and share it, the Doctor had been hopping up the stone steps towards the church door.

Above them, a brass bell chimed ten times. The original bell, Roz had been informed, had been melted down for the artillery shells two decades ago. The replacement was cheap and tinny.

‘Our subliminal friend outside seems to want to keep an eye on us,’ mused the Doctor. By the time he’d finished the sentence, he’d already started juggling with an odd assortment of objects that had spontaneously emerged from his pockets, pebbles and credit-chips and oil cans and Sidelian memory-bubbles. It looked like a nervous habit, a way of keeping his mind off the absence of his umbrella. ‘Something very intelligent and very ambitious is at work here. Sadly, we have no idea who he, she, or it is, or what he, she, or it wants.’

‘Uh-huh. And I don’t suppose we could just ask them?’

The Doctor stopped juggling and frowned at her, as if she’d just won the Eurovision Stupid Question Contest. ‘Why else would we come to a church?’ he asked, innocently. ‘Observe.’

He stood, looking around the church, and Roz wondered where the juggled objects had vanished to all of a sudden. He was taking in the architecture, apparently looking for some special feature, but not giving any indication of what it might be. Then, abruptly, he threw his arms wide, cane outstretched, and whirled around to face the grubby stained-glass window that was set into the wall above the lectern.

‘ What do you want? ’ he shouted.

His voice echoed around the church, and the words blurred into one deep, steady throb; but there was no answer. No shit, thought Roz. What had he been expecting?

‘Here,’ he shouted. ‘Here in the church. Whoever you are, I know you can hear me. These walls were built for calling.

What do you want?’

Roz looked around, checking that there wasn’t anything crawling from the shadows. There wasn’t. Aside from the echo, still bouncing from corner to corner, the church was perfectly quiet, perfectly still. The Doctor lowered his arms and stood, waiting, not taking his eyes off the window.

The echo was still throbbing through the room, which struck Roz as unusual. Shouldn’t it have faded? Maybe that was what the Doctor had been looking for; maybe he’d been checking out the acoustics. ‘These walls were built for calling,’ he’d said... and she could still hear his last word,

‘want’, repeated over and over, almost like a heartbeat. Want.

Want. Want. Want.

And now the beat was slowing down.

Now, that just wasn’t natural. The pitch of the echo stayed the same, but the pulse was becoming more relaxed. Hypnotic, even.

‘Doctor –’ Roz began.

‘I can hear you,’ he said.

She immediately realized that he wasn’t talking to her.

‘ Want,’ said a voice.

Roz spun on her heel. The voice had come from one of the corners. Which one?

‘ Want,’ it said again.

It wasn’t the Doctor’s voice. It had crawled out of the Doctor’s voice, the way maggots crawl out of cheese, but it had a character all its own. The Doctor had turned to look as well, but judging by his expression, he couldn’t see anything either.

‘ Want,’ insisted the voice, and the stained-glass window exploded.

4

Moment of Catastrophe

Erskine Morris stood at the end of Eastern Walk, not sure whether he was staring up at the night sky, staring up towards Heaven, or just staring up in general. Blunt, mud-coloured droplets plopped onto his upturned face.

‘Hellfire and buggery,’ he told the sky. ‘Clockwork and anarchy.’

From somewhere nearby, there was the sound of breaking glass. Behind him, Walter Monroe cleared his throat.

‘We’ll be seeing you at the next meeting, of course?’ the pudgy little man said. Monroe’s face was deadly serious.

Coldly rational.