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Quickly Creed was out of the back door and running past the garage.

The Doctor was running behind him, their feet spraying gravel up from the driveway.

The others were already there, beside the hearse with Benny.

She’d stopped screaming. She was standing back now, moving away from the hearse. The tail-gate of the big black car was hanging open.

Benny backed away, a look of shock on her face.

Redmond and Roz stood staring at her, looking a little uncertain. Then they both drew their guns at once and climbed into the back of the hearse.

A moment later Creed and the Doctor reached Benny.

The Doctor went to her immediately and took her hand.

Creed kept going towards the hearse. There was a fresh morning breeze stirring, and the sharp liquorice smell of warlock was swirling out from the back of the vehicle.

Redmond came backing out of the hearse, straightening up and lowering his gun. He had a disgusted, and slightly disappointed, expression on his face. He looked disdainfully at Benny who stood there with the Doctor holding her hand.

‘It’s nothing. It’s just the old white dog in there. He’s pegged it,’ said Redmond. ‘He’s dead.’

Roz was backing out of the hearse now, also lowering her gun. Creed began to relax again. There was clearly no imminent danger here. Redmond was smiling at Creed. ‘Just the dog,’ he said. ‘That’s all it was.’

‘No!’ said Benny suddenly, angrily wrenching her hand free from the Doctor’s comforting grip. ‘That was not all it was. It was also-’ Benny lurched to a halt.

‘Also what?’

‘Also me,’ said a low, croaky voice.

A shudder went through everyone standing there.

Everyone except the Doctor. They all turned around to stare at the rear of the open hearse.

A naked man with lank red hair was leaning on the tail-gate.

He was pale and gaunt enough to suggest a corpse which had recently crawled out of a coffin inside. But probably the most disturbing thing about his appearance was his face. One moment it would be hideously slack. Then the next, the muscles of his face would be in violent spasm.

After a moment Creed realized that the man was trying to smile at them.

The Doctor was the first to go over to him, and put a reassuring hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘Welcome, back,’ he said. ‘Welcome home, Jack.’

The others approached hesitantly and stared down at the man; pale, gaunt, exhausted, but very much alive he lay shaking in the back of the hearse.

‘He looks like shit.’

Now, Redmond, that’s rather insensitive when you consider that our friend is coming back from years of deep coma. Think of him as an intelligence coming back out of nothingness, like a space traveller descending through endless reaches of the black sky. Or imagine him surfacing from the mind’s deepest oceans.’ The Doctor patted Jack’s shoulder, but now it was like he was slapping him with affectionate camaraderie. ‘A traveller in strange places. What has he seen?’ said the Doctor. ‘What has he experienced?’

‘Could you be a little more enigmatic?’ said Redmond.

‘What the Doctor’s trying to say,’ said Creed, ‘is that Jack has spent a decade or two floating around in a life-support tank.’

The Doctor patted Jack on the back again. The gesture was strangely reminiscent of patting a baby reassuringly on the back. ‘That’s only half the problem,’ he said. ‘Jack’s body may have spent those years floating in a tank, but his mind spent them inside the body of a dog.’

He nodded to the White King. The dog lay sprawled across the floor of the hearse, looking strangely shrivelled in death.

Redmond shook his head. ‘What are you trying to tell me, Doctor? That Jack here was the White King?’

‘Well, you might say he was in the White King.’

‘In the dog?’

‘His consciousness, yes. To put it simply, his mind was inside the dog’s brain.’

‘Well,’ said Redmond. He didn’t seem to have any trouble grasping the concepts the Doctor was presenting.

Instead he seemed to be growing angry. ‘Perhaps,’ he said,

‘Jack would like to tell us just what the hell his consciousness was doing creating