Somewhere far away and sunny, someone sat and played gin rummy. The cards were yellow and torn, wafer-thin, and it was hard to become too involved when one's opponent was an orangutan who found more pleasure in eating cards than dealing them.

 Andrews sighed and let his cards flutter out of his hands. He loved the east balcony. Gripping the curling iron rail, gazing with what he hoped to be poetic knowledge at the edge of the sea unfurling into the lazily darkening sky. The flowered cove gently curved outwards on either side of the villa for hundreds of meters, so that only the sea could be seen with any clarity. Andrews often imagined he was in a funnel of eternity,staring out at that sea.

 But inside that sea, things lived. Eating cards, an orangutan lived. Inside the villa, bellowing for dinner, Andrews' mother lived. And inside Andrews' mother, something lived. 

 She assumed he must be working the machine; the disc rose and fell with each rusted groan that had began bellowing just after she ran inside the strange blue box minutes ago. The Doctor had said they were moving, but she wasn't sure she understood that, either. So she just stood quietly, hoping not to interfere with the tall man's spell. The Doctor closed a small door on the wooden mushroom in the center of the chamber with one hand and stepped closer to Leela. Down. Up. Down. Up. She held her breath.

 "Phwoar!" The Doctor jumped backwards and held HIS breath, holding one hand up to his nose like an overgrown schoolboy. "How long are you planning on wearing those things?" he asked.

 Leela picked at her skins, confused. The Doctor looked at her sideways.

 "You know, I never change, either. Well, not in that respect. The secret is in the bath. When was the last time you had a bath?"

 Leela cocked her ear, and for a moment the Doctor was reminded of a dog.

 "A bath? Rub a dub?" The Doctor rubbed his belly and patted his head, before looking sheepish, as if he'd mixed a metaphor in the company of Shakespeare. "Nevermind. I know a fantastic bath in Constantinople. Do you have a towel?" The Doctor opened a panel on the mushroom and flicked a number of switches.

 "This is not the forest." Leela noted dully, almost simultaneously.

 "Well, what did you think moving means?"

 "Boxes can not move."

 "And orangutans can't play cards," the Doctor said, pointing. "How do you do? I'm the Doctor." Andrews blinked, dumbly. "And this is Leela," he remembered.

 Andrews reached into his pocket and produced a severed ear. "You know the black arts!" he screached, pointing at the TARDIS.

 "Well," frowned the Doctor, "things sure get exciting quickly these days."

 "Where's the rest of your mother?"

 "Inside. Inside inside inside inside. My mother's inside. My mother's inside. Inside. Inside my mother."

 The trio walked through the balcony doors and wandered through the house until they found Andrews' mother. She was kneeling over a glass case. The Doctor stopped, stunned. The room was full of ears. Light ears, dark ears. Big ears, small ears. Row upon row of human ears, pinned delicately like fleshy, swollen butterflies. Andrews' mother stood up and closed the case. She dropped the remaining blank labels on the glass counter next to her dinner tray.

 "Mother, this is the Doctor. He's an agent of the black arts! Shsshhshshshhhh!" Andrews dropped to a whisper. "I meant the black arts. The Shadow Directory has ears, you know." He started giggling.

 Andrews' mother peered through her son with brassy red eyes, and spat through moldy, black pins. "Aigstnmottssssed." She reached through the Doctor's curls to feel the Doctor's ears.

 "Nice to meet you," murmured the Doctor, drawing back. "Leela! Follow me." The Doctor walked swiftly backwards through the doors and bumped into a leathery butler. "Pardon me, but I was just running for my life."

 Andrews cursed as Leela crashed through the window and jumped after her.

 "I'm Lynch," the butler said.

 "Let me in!" the Doctor roared. The butler smiled sadly.

 "I can't, sir. No key."

 "Is that Andrews' mother?"

 "Yes. Or at least, she was. She came down with malaria shortly after Andrews returned from the war and hasn't been the same since."

 "Malaria?"

 "That's what the village doctor said." Lynch remembered the crashes from the room. "I've got to get a broom," he sighed.

 The Doctor called irritably after Lynch. "Look, could I get some lemonade?"

 Andrews emerged from a mesh of fronds, a machete in one hand. He looked slightly past Leela, as if he saw something behind her.

 "You cannot fool me! I am a warrior of the Sevateem! There is no-one else here!" She was louder than she'd intended. Andrews advanced, swinging his machete wildly, without the rhythm of attack.

 Leela backed confidently away, knife poised. And fell. For a very long time.

 "I haven't gotten the malaria yet, sir, so it's not likely that I will. Only people seem to get it right away or not at all."

 The Doctor gawped. "You mean you've seen other people like this? In the village?"

 "No sir. They come to the villa. Madam seems to have infected a number of her visitors."

 "There've been other cases?"

 "Not many. I don't go into the village often, so I couldn't honestly say."

 The Doctor harrumphed and walked onto the west balcony.

 "Let me out of here or I'll slit your throat!"

 "That's hardly an incentive, my dear." He wiped his lips with a starched cuff.

 "What will happen to me?"

 "I'm afraid you'll grow old and die here, my dear. Time's tide will smother you."

 "Do you really think there's something in Andrews' mother?" asked the butler.

 "I'm sure of it," replied the Doctor darkly. "But of what nature, and from where? In any event, it's not malaria. At least no strain that I'm familiar with." He emptied the glass over the balcony and listened to the piddle of lemonade on earth far below. "Leela?" he called experimentally. His voice echoed strangely. "How many people live in the village?"

 "About eight hundred people. Why?"

 "Whatever's going on here is almost certainly going to endanger anyone in the area. Where do you think those ears might have come from?" The Doctor gripped the railing a bit tighter. "You know, I've got an awfully bad feeling that I've got the wrong end of the stick here."

 Lynch edged closer. "What do you mean?"

 "What if the thing isn't spreading from Andrews' mother into the village." The Doctor paused. "What if the thing spread from the village into Andrews' mother..."

 TO BE CONTINUED