Giles tried not to speak. If he told the story before it was time to continue it, he would fall off the uncompleted end into that black emptiness from which Jasmine had only just pulled him back.

This was how they “injected” you with sleepy darkness! They forced you to tell an uncompleted story and sent you into the nothingness. All he had to do was keep quiet and that couldn’t happen.

But the physical injection must have held some drug to relax him into a suggestable state. He found the story flowing smoothly from his mouth.

He lived story again. He was strong little Doree who could read minds and make gold bands of energy flow from her hands. Soon he would reach the point where he had stopped before.

The stranger appeared. Doree got out of the pool and took him up to the top of the red rock. Giles found himself paying closer attention to details he hadn’t seen before. He noticed that Tanya Honey was a large black woman, a distinction that Doree simply didn’t make. Parvey looked Hindi and Byll was a tall white man with full lips, butch haircut and a neat beard.

And among the nonentities in the background was a stocky, sunburnt man with a rabbit face who was staring furtively at every naked woman one by one and then looking away. Why did that man seem important to him when he was nobody to Doree? And who on earth was he reminding Giles off? He looked hauntingly familiar.

All the while he smelt Killington’s wild, hungry breath on his face as he lay slumped, speaking the story in a monotone he would never have used for a performance. His hands were deflated balloons in his lap.

Could he move at all? He managed to quiver his right hand. Killington did not notice. That was something, but could it save him? He inched his hand along his lap as the story flowed remorselessly from his mouth.

The Chaos above opened and earth filled the sky. The stranger became Robby, the “I” character from the previous episode. Doree passed out, then woke up and burst in to where they were questioning Robby. When Doree flung gold energy Giles wanted to look at her hands but since Doree didn’t, he couldn’t either.

Hoping against hope, he tried to spot Tiffany in any corner, but there was no sign of her or anyone who looked like her.

Now Doree sat at the bottom of the cellar steps, now Robby came and sat beside her. Now their mental conversation softly ebbed and flowed. Robby said, “It’s like I’m talking to people who need to hear me and at the same time keeping others out who need to not hear me.”

In the waking world, Killington cocked his head to one side. What had he heard? Stories at this Festival came across in more than words and Giles had always been only vaguely aware of his exact words. Under the influence of the drug he could hear nothing at all.

But Killington looked disappointed; was that a good sign? Maybe he heard only that Doree sat bored on top of Cloud Rock, looking at the Chaos and waking for the original “stranger” to wake up.

Giles’s hand reached the edge of his jacket pocket. Did he have anything in there that might help? What has it got in its pocketses…?

The last moment of the story rolled up. Doree clung to Robby and as her empty arms fell together, cried, “Don’t go, I don’t want you to go!” The solid thrummmm vibrated through all of Cloud Rock and Doree fell off the edge into a black sky blazing with stars.

She opened her mouth, sucked in air. (So there was still air!) She saw whatever it was that shocked her beyond anything. Giles made out dim shapes that looked familiar somehow but distorted or inverted, seen from the wrong angle, like a nighttime forest seen upside-down.

A black wall approached from all directions at once. The scream ripped from Doree’s young throat.

And Giles slid through the wall with no Jasmine to pull him out.