So we did. Mrs G led us up to the gaily-coloured door of one of the cottages. Was this where she intended Doctor and Mrs Smith to reside?

‘Who lives here?’

‘Oh, names don’t matter here, Doctor,’ she opined. ‘All you need to know is that we only recruit the brightest and the best.’

So saying she threw open the door.

Inside was what we were perhaps expecting to see: an idealised Victorian family. Father and Mother. Standing there as if posing for a photograph. All stiff as mannequins. Smiling. But this was no photographic grouping. They were glowing waxily red and, like Mrs Gillyflower’s stuffed birds, they were under the huge glass dome of a bell jar!

Clara and I turned to run (that’s always best in the circumstances. Run first, think of clever plan later) but we’d been outfoxed. Mrs Gillyflower slammed the front door behind us and, from out of the shadows, swarmed about a dozen of her Pilgrims.

Then everything went very dark.

*

I came to but couldn’t open my eyes. There was a terrible aching and all I could hear was the awful shrieking and clanking of machinery. My stomach lurched as I felt myself swinging forward. It was like being on a fairground ride. I tried to open my eyes but there was steam rising into my face and I couldn’t for the life of me focus. Then I felt myself dropping lower and lower and my feet – bare feet, I’d been stripped to my long johns – met some kind of warm, sticky ooze. Then I dropped further and could feel the stuff rising over my body as though I were being submerged in quicksand. At last I got my eyes open and suddenly saw all.

I was suspended by my arms from a sort of great crane. Clara was next to me, still out cold, and there were lots of others hanging by their arms like washing pegged to a line. They were all physically splendid young people, I have to say, and I obviously didn’t look out of place among them despite being actually, you know, ancient.

Around the great cauldron into which we were being lowered, black-uniformed Pilgrims swarmed like flies. We sank deeper and deeper into the ooze like a row of toy soldiers. My eyes were streaming but I could just make out a row of coffin-like boxes in the room beyond. This was some sort of preservation process – and that was the means of escape! I opened my mouth to cry out but then the crane dropped us again and my head went under and I could feel the ghastly red stuff flooding into me.