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The Doctor hardly even reacted. He stood, still and calm, as if trying to out-stare it. There was a moment’s pause.

A frown flickered across his face. His ears twitched.

‘Run,’ he finally declared.

Roz backed away slightly, but that was all.

‘ Run,’ he repeated.

‘I thought you wanted to talk to it.’

‘It. Not them. Listen.’

Then she heard the footsteps. Two pairs, maybe three, thick-soled shoes on stone, and a murmuring from the other side of the church doors. People – ordinary human-type people

– attracted by the sound of breaking glass.

Roz turned just as the door opened, and came face-to-face with two of the local men. Funny how they suddenly looked the size of enraged gorillas. Not very funny, though. Their faces were dark at first, obviously expecting to see someone vandalizing the church, but that soon changed.

They looked at the creature, then at the Doctor, then at Roz, desperately searching for something to say.

‘Let me just check,’ said Roz. ‘Do you burn people for being witches around here?’

And she could have sworn that the glass gynoid laughed, polished flesh rippling with a sound like applause. The men were starting to edge closer, fists clenched. Not an aggressive gesture, Roz guessed, but a defensive one; they were trying to imagine that they were holding clubs. A primal impulse. And they called me a savage? There was already a crowd building up behind them, shouts and rumours exchanged across the nearby streets. The gynoid shuffled. The Doctor sighed.

‘I call Thee, Baalzebub,’ he said, making sinister gestures with his hands. ‘Lord of the Pit, I bid Thee appear, and lay waste to the domain of Thine enemies!’

On the final word, he whirled around and pointed dramatically at the wall directly above the door. Startled, the men who were already inside the church turned to follow the gesture, still wielding their imaginary clubs, and the others in the doorway surged backwards, not wanting the spawn of Satan to drop down onto their heads. Naturally, no foul apparition materialized. The space above the door remained resolutely empty.

Roz suddenly realized that the Doctor was looking at her.

‘Ahem,’ he said.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Got it.’ And she began to run, pushing her way through the confused townsfolk and away down the steps of the church. She knew a distraction when she saw one.

Marielle Duquesne wasn’t even scared. There were sensations buzzing around in her head that she knew she should be interpreting as fear and panic, but her body had forgotten how to make the chemicals that would normally send her into a state of hysteria. Her fears of being abducted by the caillou –

to be used as an exhibit in some other-worldly carnival peepshow, perhaps? – no longer seemed to make much sense.

So she just walked, slowly and calmly, along the impossibly long corridors she’d found inside the ‘magic box’, letting the walls hum their alien melodies to her. Her spine should have been on fire. Instead, there was just a numbness, as if her extra sense (she absolutely refused to call it ‘the Sight’) was trying to scream, but some other force was keeping it gagged, keeping it quiet.

She stopped, stared at the walls. The roundels stared back.

‘Is it you?’ she asked the corridor. ‘Is it your doing?’

And for one brief and improbable moment, she was sure she saw one of the roundels wink at her.

‘Hey,’ called a voice. ‘Hey, hello there?’

Duquesne turned, startled. There was a shape approaching from down the corridor, a large, lanky shape that moved like a trained athlete. ‘Can you see me?’ the shape asked. ‘I mean, you’re not a ghost or anything, right?’

It was a man. A tall man, well over six feet in height, dressed in a silky silver-tinged material that reminded Duquesne of the worst fashion excesses of Paris. Paris before the Revolution, naturally. His narrow face was topped by a crop of short blond hair, and from this distance his eyes seemed as wide as the roundels. His accent suggested that he was American, though there was a peculiar alien