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‘Open it,’ Cwej beamed. Duquesne shrugged, opened the book, looked down at the first page.

Except that there was no page. There was just a space, a hole that seemed to stretch into infinity. A tunnel.

Alarmed, she studied the edges of the book. On the outside, it seemed perfectly normal. But on the inside...

‘Where in his library would a Time Lord put a secret passage?’ said Cwej. ‘Answer: in one of the books.’

Duquesne just stared at him. Cwej stood, walked over to her, indicated the book.

‘After you,’ he said, politely.

The island was empty. It had carried two people, but now they were gone, leaving only an untidy pile of reference books and second-hand paperbacks.

Satisfied, the force that held the TARDIS together released its grip on the island. The cracks blossomed across it, until there was nothing left of the platform but a hundred marble shards that fell away into the darkness.

There was the sound of splintering wood. Wet scraps of fabric, some painted with stars and moon-signs, drifted past on the night breeze. From the crowd, there wasn’t so much as a shout; just a murmur, like the roar of the sea. White noise.

‘Sheol,’ whispered Roz.

She and Daniel were hiding behind the corner of the town records office. Or, rather, she was hiding. Daniel was just standing behind her, tugging at her sleeve.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Not this way.’

‘What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know. Come on. They’re going to notice you.’

Notice me, Roz thought. Not us. Thanks, partner. She pointed towards a part of the street where a tent had once stood. ‘See that? I used to work there. If you can call it work.

Looks like somebody’s got a grudge against fortune-tellers.

Probably someone I gave a bad reading to.’

She watched the people tearing down the remaining stalls.

They’d started by venting their anger on those attractions that seemed ‘philosophically corrupt’, the conjurers and the ersatz gypsies. Now they were attacking anything they could see.

Twenty feet away, a man in a colourful waistcoat was being pinned to the ground and repeatedly kicked by four serious-looking middle-aged men who’d probably been accountants or clerks or something earlier in the day.

Then she saw the man in the hood. He stood at the very heart of the crowd, waving his arms like a conductor, determined that if this madness was going to become a riot, it was going to be a damned well-ordered riot. He was short but muscular, his entire head obscured by grey sackcloth. Roz narrowed her eyes. The behaviour of the townsfolk was odd enough, but this one looked downright weird.

She stared into the twin slits of his eyes, and suddenly realized that he was staring back.

Slowly, carefully, he raised his hand. A pointed finger.

Daniel stopped tugging at her sleeve. Roz turned, started to run, and saw that he was already running. The adrenalin burst triggered off a memory, and she saw herself tearing across a desert full of shadows... but there were worse and angrier things in the universe, she reminded herself, than gynoids.

As if to prove the point, something hard and heavy promptly cracked against her neck. There were peculiar pink-and-orange lights exploding inside her head as she fell to the ground.

‘He’s mad,’ said Mr Wolcott. ‘I always said he was a bit on the peculiar side.’

‘When did you say that?’ inquired Mr Van DeVanter.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Always. He tried to force me to read this scientific paper he’d written, once. About how you could build a machine to travel through time using mirrors and electricity.

Said he was a century ahead of his time. I mean to say...

Isaac Penley’s eyes danced nervously around the hall. The other three had forgotten about him again. He considered leaping to Mr Catcher’s defence, then remembered that if he’d been able to defend anyone properly, he’d still be practising law and probably an awful lot richer.

‘If I might bring this meeting to or der?’ trilled Mrs Wilson.

Mrs Wilson had no official position on the council, but her husband seemed