BRYONY WAS SITTING ON the floor of the TARDIS passageway, listening to Putta apparently freaking out through the wall. Now and again there were heavy thumps, or wild shouts, most of which weren’t easy to decipher through the wall, but one of which definitely sounded like ‘You’re ugly!’.

‘Putta! Putta! You really do need to get that fluid. It’s the only thing the Doctor asked us to do…’ But it was no good – the thumps continued, interspersed with more yowling.

Around her the TARDIS was obviously doing what it thought it should in case of dire emergency. The entrance had been sealed – with Putta on the wrong side, or the right side, depending on how you looked at it – and Bryony was being taken care of, after a fashion.

‘I suppose it’s good that you like me…’ The lights dimmed. ‘No, really it is good. I am grateful. I just would prefer to be useful.’ She took a deep breath, wondered if making her frustration obvious was wise and decided – to hell with – that she’d yell anyway, ‘But you’re not letting me be useful!’

The TARDIS ignored her beyond returning the lights to their previous level.

And meanwhile, the passageway was apparently keen to provide for her needs as she’d announced them in the console room. Bryony had wanted food and a bath, so while the kitchen remained the kitchen – generously supplied with the mysterious Maxxt – and was just where it had been earlier, two new doors had appeared where she was sure there hadn’t been doors when she first walked along here. One door concealed an intimidatingly complicated bathroom with a massive tub and a number of large plants overhanging it, none of which she recognised, or felt she could entirely trust if she was undressed. The other new door opened onto a bedroom which had rather more plum-coloured velvet than she would have expected, draping about the place, and layers of Persian rugs underfoot. This wasn’t the cutting-edge space stuff she’d been expecting and she had the strong suspicion that she was being distracted by all this potential comfort so that she wouldn’t begin searching out the source of the cloister bell and at least trying to do something about that.

There were, naturally, lots of brass hand rails in both rooms – not to mention the brass taps, the brass towel rail and the brass bedstead. When she flipped down the top of a little not-walnut bureau in the bedroom, Bryony discovered a wealth of futuristic odds and ends tucked into cubby holes, a plethora of dials and switches, several balls of twine, a small model of something like a leopard, a tin of hard sweets and a yo-yo. The bedroom seemed dusty. It clearly reflected the Doctor’s taste, but either he didn’t use it, or else he didn’t sleep much. The bed – under its layer of dust – was freshly made and inviting. ‘Perhaps you’re a spare. Or you got mislaid.’ It didn’t feel as if these elements, these rooms, were being built from scratch – it was more as if they were being shuffled about to accommodate her by an increasingly nervous vessel accustomed to pleasing a semi-madman from another planet who favoured Earth’s Victorian period, who never tidied up and who thought, in as far as he considered such matters at all, that the ideal guest bedroom would look like an opium den.

When Bryony paced back out of the bedroom she could have sworn that the passageway was smaller, that the area of the TARDIS she was being allowed was contracting.