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He pulled harder on the lead. The dog leant back and reared up, heaving herself from side to side. She began to whimper. It struck Frank that all that sniffing and dawdling might actually have been her way of avoiding going further into the ancient, rustling, darkening, freezing, frightening, haunted bloody wood.

'Sod it,' he said abruptly. 'Who am I kidding?'

He stopped and turned back. 'You're right, girl. Let's get the hell out of here!'

Eagerly the dog set off back the way they had come. She towed him along behind her and although he found it hard to keep his feet, slithering and stumbling across the suddenly slippery tree roots, by the time they reached the edge of Norswood Frank and the dog were both running.

Leela had watched the man put the animal on the tether and walk with it into the wood. From the moment he stepped among the trees his movements and the way he held himself made it clear that he was frightened. The further he walked the more frightened he became. Leela decided she needed to find out what it was that he was so afraid of.

She was not sure what purpose the animal on the tether was serving. The man was concerned for it. He paid a lot of attention to it. He behaved almost affectionately towards it. He spoke to it, calling it 'girl' as he tried to persuade it to do what he wanted. Her best guess was that the creature was there to warn him of danger, or it could just possibly be a source of food. Apparently they did breed several different sorts of animal here and kept them close until they were ready to eat them. But whatever the creature was for, it too appeared to be frightened.

Staying in cover, and treading lightly through the crackling leaf litter, she followed the man and the tethered animal to try and see what it was that was threatening them. She knew there must be predators here no matter what the Doctor said. Men, even timid men, were not afraid for no reason.

A closer look at the animal confirmed Leela's first impression that it carried little meat on its bones and that its nature would be to run: so it was probably a guard creature rather than a food creature. It seemed strange to her that, although it was reluctant to keep walking into the gloom, it was not until it began struggling against the tether that the man responded to the warning it was giving him.

By the time he turned to run away Leela was so close she could have reached out and touched him and yet he was totally unaware of her. Fear sharpened the senses only up to a point, as her warrior-trainers never tired of telling her. A little fear might have its uses, but too much fear overwhelmed the mind and made you unseeing and stupid and helpless. It was easy to give yourself up to fear. Easy and usually fatal. She stepped out of cover as the man and his animal blundered off.

From the way they were running Leela concluded the danger must be in the opposite direction, towards the place where she and the Doctor had left the TARDIS, and she set out to hunt whatever it was. Tribal hunting theory taught that predators are attracted to disturbance and, although she had found this teaching less reliable once she had left her home world, she knew it still made basic sense. Any predator must look for changes and differences if it was going to see its prey. The TARDIS would be a change, a difference and a disturbance so there was a good possibility it would attract the attention of the creatures that stalked this gloomy place. This suddenly very gloomy place.

She glanced up through the fire-bright leaves to the pale clouds high above the trees in the still-light sky. Her eyes were failing her. Unless something was swallowing the light as it shone down, it should not have been this dark here on the ground. What she had taken to be shadows must be something else, something harder to explain.

Thickening darkness, cold and dim like deep flowing water, seemed to be filling the space below the trees. It could not be shadows, she realised, because it went