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By Root 210 0

Doctor felt himself lift from the body strapped to the bed. Images from his past threatened to overwhelm him, memories he had fought to keep buried, memories of the time war; of the peoples he had sworn to protect. He struggled to maintain control over his thoughts and dreams, focusing his mind. The Cynrog machinery was operating on a similar frequency to the TARDIS telepathic circuits; the fact that Rose’s dreams had been affected while they were still in flight proved that. His own link to the TARDIS meant that he should be able to use that power, channel it, turn it back on itself. . . Blackness swirled around him, dark shapes flitting through the shadows, nightmares from his distant childhood. He forced himself to ignore them. There were other minds in the ether with him, belonging to Morton and the six sleepers. He could feel the human parts of them struggling to be free of the powerful influence of Balor, sense their relief as the alien that had inhabited their minds for so long was slowly drawn out.

Balor was terrifyingly strong. The Doctor could sense the ancient force that the Cynrog sought to harvest. But something was not right. The creature was savage, primal, but unfinished somehow, unfocused, as if some part of it was missing, some controlling part that would bring order to the whole.

The Doctor could feel the Cynrog machines probing at his memories, trying to force their way into the darkest fears. He shut down sections of his mind, erecting psychic barriers that would keep the Cynrog out. He hoped. . .

The power started to increase and he struggled to retain control.

‘Hello.’

The voice was shocking and loud. The Doctor could hear it all around him.

A small child stood next to him, staring down at the body that lay on the bed. It was the child the Doctor had seen earlier in the woods and on the island. The child Rose had seen in her dream.

‘Hello. It’s Jimmy, isn’t it?’

The boy nodded, a frown on his small face. ‘I think so. I used to be. I think I might be something else now. I’m how she remembers me, 148

before they took her away from me.’

The Doctor winced at the child’s directness.

‘They took you away?’

‘They said she was a bad mother. That she couldn’t look after me properly. The monster made her different. The monster in her head. I can feel it in my head too. It’s not very nice.’

The Doctor’s mind raced. ‘This monster,’ he asked, ‘has it been in her head a long time?’

The boy nodded again. ‘She saw it when she was small. She was hiding from the others and she saw it. It hid a bit of itself in her head. It made her do bad things.’

‘Can you show me, show me that memory?’

‘I think so. Mummy’s memories are so muddled these days.’

The little boy took his hand and the Doctor felt a jolt of surprise at the solidness of the touch. He now knew where the controlling part of Balor’s mind was, the intelligence, the dangerous heart. They swept through a dizzying array of images and thoughts, searching for one tiny memory, the shared memory of that terrible day when Balor’s crippled spacecraft had roared over the sea and crashed at Ynys Du.

On the edge of his consciousness he could feel something building, something powerful and vast. Balor, waking from his rest, aware of this child by his side. He concentrated, pushing past the monsters of the children, forcing his way into the minds of Morton and the others, willing them to remember.

There! The memory he searched for flickered into life: frightened children clustered around a burning spacecraft, terrified and exhilarated at the same time. The Doctor felt their fear as Balor crawled his way out of the pit, a mass of flames and fury, felt their pain and confusion as his mind seared into theirs. . .

The cold touch of death swept over him and, with a chill, the Doctor realised that he was experiencing Balor’s fractured memory too. He felt the rage and anger of the creature, its unmitigated hatred, its thrill when a world was crushed in its grasp, its final desperate fight to cling to existence, reaching out to whatever lifeline it could find. .