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And now there was Forrester. She was moving around Catcher’s cellar with short, careful steps, taking in every little detail. She stopped in front of a shelf, stacked high with books, heavy and bound in black hide. She took one down and opened it.

Daniel looked over her shoulder. He couldn’t read, of course, but he’d seen enough books to know what letters were supposed to look like, and the symbols scratched into the pages just weren’t right. He thought maybe it was some foreign language, then realized that whenever his eyes moved across the paper, the letters moved too.

‘Odd,’ Forrester said. ‘They look just like the Doctor’s old time-logs, but it’s like they’ve been scrambled.’

She was talking to herself, obviously. Daniel kept quiet. ‘In fact, everything here’s been scrambled,’ she continued, replacing the book and moving towards the altar-thing in the middle of the room. ‘A- ha.’

Then she was reaching into the glass column at the centre of the table. Daniel held his breath, waiting for... what? An explosion? Worse? ‘Like I said. Lost property.’

She turned around. In her hands was a sphere, about the size of a child’s ball, its colour halfway between gold and bronze. ‘This is beginning to add up,’ she said. ‘Your Catcher must have used the amaranth to build this place. Question is, why does it look like a TARDIS? What is he, another renegade Time Lord? Goddess, the universe must be stuffed with them.’

The sentences made no sense to Daniel. Lord Jesus Christ, did he want them to make sense? Did he want to get caught up in all of this?

‘My guess is, the amaranth is linked to the TARDIS. That’d make sense, most of the Doctor’s toys are. So, when Catcher did his magic ritual or whatever it was, the amaranth rebuilt this place according to the pattern it was most familiar with.

The TARDIS pattern.’ Forrester paused, thinking ‘Hold on. If this place, this UnTARDIS, is linked to the amaranth as well...’

She walked across to one of the walls, and stroked it gently.

The surface bubbled, shifted, a tiny portion of the wall collapsing in on itself. Daniel Tremayne winced.

‘Right,’ said Forrester. ‘So the TARDIS and the UnTARDIS are linked together, via the amaranth. The UnTARDIS is unstable, because the amaranth can only build temporary structures. So the TARDIS is unstable as well.

That’s what’s causing the ship to break down. Does that make sense?’

‘I don’t care,’ said Daniel, hardly noticing that he’d spoken aloud.

‘What?’

‘I don’t care. Please. Just get me out of here. I don’t care about TARDISes and am’ranths. I don’t want to have to care.

Just get me out.’

‘Daniel –’

‘ Stop it!’ His hands twitched. Instinct telling him to cover his ears. ‘It’s none of my business. I don’t want any of this shit, all right? I want to leave this town. I want you to get me out.’

Forrester paused. Then sighed. Then nodded. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ve got what I came for. Time we got after the Doctor.’

She turned and walked back through the darkness of the entrance, away from the impossible room, away from the heart of Hell. Daniel followed. Christ, yes. Followed fast.

Monroe was standing by a building that might as well have been made of sticks for all the protection it offered from the elements. He was talking to a Negro man, talking in the kind of language you usually reserved for children and other such sodding nuisances. The Negro must have been about twenty, his clothes so worn and thin that he looked almost naked as the rain flattened the fabric against his body.

‘You understand?’ Monroe gargled, poking a thick finger into the Negro’s chest. ‘Ca-co-pho-ny. Diabolists.’

The Negro shook his head, said something in a language that might have been English. His accent was too thick for Erskine to make out the words.

‘Witch-doctors,’ Monroe tried. ‘Unga-bunga men. Yes?’

Erskine looked around the street, not knowing what to say.

Negroes and riff-raff peered out from the doorways and the broken windows of the decaying buildings, some afraid, some just alert. They were watching him, by Jesus Christ