Every instinct within me told me not to go to the cabin. My body resisted with every nerve, every fibre, every sinew. But, despite that, despite rationality and common sense and all the other things that are supposedly designed to stop us from doing stupid, illogical things, still I went.

Why? Put simply, I felt compelled by overwhelming forces beyond my control. Silly, isn't it? I was drawn to Cabin 672, bodily, like a moth to the flame. I had tried to walk in the opposite direction. Really tried. To get up onto the ship's deck and see if the fresh air and the daylight would help to banish these non-existent ghosts from their haunting of me.

Because I knew, knew for certain, that none of this was in the slightest bit real. At least, not in any sense of reality that I believed I understood.

But every step just seemed to lead me closer, closer, closer to Cabin 672.

Even when I knew I was drawing near to the cabin, I was unable to stop myself. Eventually, with a stony lack of enthusiasm, I found myself at the head of the very corridor that led to the cabin. It was similar to the corridor in which I had experienced the earlier onslaught of visions: a U-shaped trap from which, once ensnared, there was no escape.

I shambled unwillingly. Slowly. My feet dragging through the carpet like those of a small schoolboy on his way to the headmaster's office.

The ship's architecture seemed to mock me and my sorry plight. Taking on almost hallucinatory properties, the corridor elongated, stretched out before me to infinity and beyond. I was accompanied, as I had been all day, by a thumping sound. At first I believed it to be nothing more than the ship's massive steam engines in close proximity to me. But now I deduced, through a process of elimination, that it was the sound of my own heartbeats.

I finally reached the door of Cabin 672. It looked so desperately ordinary. No looming beasts. No entrance-guarding demons. No alien tentacles snaking from under the door. Just a room, like any other room.

That was, until I inspected it more closely.

I placed a hand, somewhat nervously, on the door's brass knob and felt the sensation of thousands upon thousands of tormented souls, screaming at me simultaneously. All urging me to leave this place. To turn, to run and never to return. I removed my hand, quickly, with a startled cry. Looking down at it, I found that it was still shaking. Tingling, as if with the after-effects of an electric shock.

I tried again, this time touching the wood of the door frame rather than the knob. The effect was exactly the same. Indeed, if anything, it was stronger. A terror-inducing ride through dimensions of agony and torture. The voices were all indistinct, but you do not need to be an expert in unknown languages to understand when someone really wants you to know what it is that they are saying. I backed off to the solid comfort of the far wall and stared at the locked door for a long time, thinking about Edgar Allan Poe and The Tell-Tale Heart and dreading what manner of fiend, what monster, what thing could be hidden behind there.

I was trapped in amber. I could not go forward and I could not go back. My legs turned to treacle and I watched, bemused, as they seemed to melt into the floorboards.

I tried to speak, but my tongue was tied. Was this to be my eternal prison too?

A disembodied face appeared in the doorway of Cabin 672. It seemed to drift through the solid matter and, once outside, to congeal, with a sucking sound, into a recognisable shape. Solidity from the mist. Ordinarily, I would have been startled by such a manifestation, impressed even. I considered applauding the trick. But I was getting quite used to such occurrences by now and passed it off with a shrug.

The ghost was berating me for my cowardice.

I stared at the pinched and sour-looking face, and it stared back at me defiantly, eyes wide, mouth leering, a grin of sadistic satisfaction etched upon it. It appeared to be a woman in her forties, wearing severe spectacles and a look of manifest discontent.

'Men are all a bunch of weak and helpless bastards,' she said, angrily. 'Never prepared to make the right decisions. Always willing to look for easy answers.'

I didn't disagree. Indeed, given my present situation, that sounded like a pretty good idea to me.

'I hate you and all your kind and every solitary little thing that you all stand for. All three billion of you in your male Kingdom of Right and Majesty. I spit upon your tarnished, beer-stained throne. What else can we expect from a disgusting collective mass of lowlife, no-conscience gangsters like you? You and your whole sex. I'd throw you in the sea for all the decent world to watch you drown and cheer as the bubbles rise and your thrashing stops. Men with your groping and drooling and enslaving and laughing, indulging the same tired and worn-out misogynist urges until the final second of time.'

'Have you quite finished?' I asked the woman, who merely scowled back at me. Her face, beneath her jet-black hair drawn back in a tight bun, was red, angry and agitated.

Not being human, I didn't feel the need to defend mankind. But, within a blinking, the woman's face was replaced by another. A man with a deep, gaping wound in his neck, livid scarlet against the white of the rest of his manifestation. 'You don't belong here,' he told me. 'No-one belongs here. Except us.'

'Who are you?' I asked again, my voice co-operating with me at last.

'We are many,' he said. 'We are endless. We are we.' I shook my head in confusion. 'We exist,' he continued, 'to tell you what you are doing is wrong, even if it is right. We are the ones who whisper to you in the night as you drift between the waking and the dreaming. We are the spiteful piece of grit in your shoe that cannot be shaken free. We are the lying thieves who steal your peace and quiet and continue to torment you until you can take no more. We are the dirty and unstoppable accusations that cannot be silenced or sued.'

Briefly the angry woman's face reappeared. 'Remember whose fault this all is,' she shouted accusingly. 'Remember our faces when you close your eyes each night and weep your piteous head to sleep. Remember at whose door the blame lies. It's yours.'

'Oh, go away you silly woman,' was all I could say, annoyed that her interruptions for nothing more than spite had stopped the flow of, potentially, some real information. But I felt very satisfied when I said it and it seemed to have the desired effect.

Now there were more faces, dozens of them. And they all said the same thing.

'Go.'

Reluctantly, I went.

Actually, no, that is a lie to which I am now fully prepared to admit. I went with total willingness, glad to be away from these hideous, twisted spirits with their hidden agendas and unspoken identities. Angry, jealous tormentors with no thought for the hurt they caused with their hatred and mockery.

I backed away from the door, slowly at first, and then with purpose. I turned and raced away from Cabin 672 as fast as my legs would carry me, heading for the TARDIS.

My sanctuary.

Keith Topping