‘Missed me?’

‘Lots!’

‘I hate to break up this lovely reunion,’ I said, ‘but the lift’s here.’

And it took us down to the ground level of the strange Mill again where ’Grims was hard at work around the base of the chimney with its lattice of iron struts.

Madam peered towards it from round the edge the crates we was hiding behind. ‘The chimney?’

‘The chimney!’ cried the Doctor. ‘She’s going to poison the air!’

I was spying from my own spot. ‘How?’

And, like I’d cued it up, one of the ’Grims pulled down a big brass lever and lights come on, flooding the whole area and revealing something. Or the bottom of something at any rate. Coal-black and stained with rivulets of rust. A huge great thing, like a gigantic version of something from a pleasure garden – a rocket!

‘With that, I should think,’ muttered Clara.

A staircase ran alongside it, disappearing up into the inside of the chimney.

Two of the Pilgrims was stooped over a bulky shape, covered by a paisley cloth, for all the world like a basket of washing. But a moment later, they’d pulled back the cloth revealing a glass sphere, like a carboy, filled to the brim with a glowing crimson fluid. The venom!

‘All right, you lot,’ whispered the Doctor. ‘I’ve got a plan.’

*

Extract from the Phonographic record of Ada Gillyflower.

I found my way back into the Mill and lay there, sobbing. I must have presented a fearful sight, I regret to say, curled up in a ball like some pathetic child. But that’s how they came upon me.

‘Who’s there? Who is it?’ I cried, stifling my tears.

I heard the sound of footsteps approaching and flinched, a little afraid. Answer came there none, instead I felt my fingers taken in the warm hand of another, lifted and then pressed to a face. It was as good as a signature to me. A face I knew so well.

‘You. It’s you! My Monster. You’ve come back! But you’re—’

‘Warm. And alive. Thanks to you, Ada.’

It was a voice I had never heard before, yet I knew at once it was he. My Monster.

‘You saved me from your mother’s human rubbish tip,’ he continued. ‘I’m the Doctor.’

‘Doctor?’ It sounded strange, this new name. My Monster was a doctor? ‘Doctor … what?’

‘Just the Doctor,’ he said, and there was a smile in his voice. ‘Now, what’s wrong?’

I tried to answer, but my words came out as a ragged cry. ‘She does not want me, Monster! I am not to be chosen.’ I rubbed at my streaming nose and eyes. ‘Perhaps it was my own sin, the blackness in my heart, that my father saw in me. Perhaps that is why, in his drunken rage, he marked me! Like Cain! As ye sow, so must ye reap!’