The fire is dying down, dying embers casting dancing shadows on the sleeping man. His head is slumped forward, a piece of paper lies in his lap, a pen dangling from his hand. A pair of spectacles lies draped across the arm of the chair. He slumps to the side a little, head now resting against the headrest of his armchair, pale felt supporting his cheek.

He jerks awake, eyes flickering as they open to see the dancing shadows. His dreams… men and boys marching in rows; corpse people walking, cheeks drawn tight into rectus grins; a tide of blood in the Rhine… that unearthly noise…

It takes him a moment, as he blinks the sleep out of his eyes, to realise that the noise is still there. A horrible sort of grinding, as of two great celestial cogs gnashing together, getting louder and louder… and he sees the shadows dancing in their horrible patterns, orange giving way to an otherworldly blue glow.

He turns around.

He yells in alarm.

The box. The blue box. Was that in his dreams? No, and yet he feels some kind of dread emanating from it. Not from the box. He knows, without touching it, without opening the wood panelled doors, that there is something inside. And he knows that if he were to lay a hand upon it, he would die…

The doors open. A head sticks out.

"Right! Barcel-oh."

It is a… man. He feels instinctively that this is not the right word to use, but he can think of nothing else to describe him. The…man frowns behind round black glasses, his hair spiked up at the front. He wears formal attire, a brown pinstriped suit beneath a beige trench coat. At first glance, a respectable gentleman. But he is far too comfortable for the clothes he wears, and he looks around the darkened room not with apprehension, or even apology. The man looks irritated, and his frowns deeper as he sees the other man in the chair.

"Oh, hello," he says cautiously in perfect German… and yet he doesn't. The man in the armchair understands him, hears the words in his native German, but there is something about them…

"Hello?" he manages.

He blinks his eyes, hoping that this is a hallucination or a dream. Prison does strange things to a man, and the election campaigning must have taken his toll. He rubs his eyelids desperately with his fingers, still blinking, but is met with the same sight – the strange man frowning at him from his blue box.

"Sorry to interrupt your…whatever you were doing. Took a wrong turn at the chronological hub… Albuquerque always seems to have that effect on her, poor girl, never figured out why… anyway, if you could be so kind, where are we, and what year is it?"

It is the turn of the man in the chair to frown, but blissful acceptance dawns on him. Of course. This must be another dream. He smiles tentatively.

"It is the twenty sixth of January, nineteen hundred and thirty two. This is Dusseldorf."

The strange man seems to consider this, and then smiles a little, brightening up considerably. "Not too bad, I suppose… just a year off, and a few thousand miles away… actually, that reminds me, I must check up on Winston sometime-"

The other voice, for all the other man's strangeness, was stranger still. The blue box couldn't have been more than a meter wide at its widest, and yet the voice seems to echo, as if reverberating around an enormous cavern. Which was, of course, impossible. The man in the chair puts it down to him still dreaming – impossible things often happen in dreams, inexplicable things.

"Have we arrived at our destination yet, Doctor?"

The voice is higher pitched, and has that same faint background noise to the words, as if what he was hear and what he was registering were quite different to what was being said. It also sounds proud, haughty, used to giving command. Intrigued, he craned his neck to try to peer around the doors.

The strange man grins madly, closing the doors further, rolling his eyes. "Always with the royal "we". Girls, eh?" He said conspiratorially. Turning his head back to… whatever was inside the box, he calls out, his own voice echoing slightly now, "Sorry! I think I crossed the chronohub at the wrong moment – not to worry, just a hop skip and a jump! Next stop, Worlds Fair Chicago!"

The other voice, and the man in the armchair was now certain that it was a woman, said, in tones that were unmistakably those of a leader who has been told something displeasing, "I begin to doubt your claims to knowing how to work this infernal device, Doctor."

The strange man shrugs, flashing him a conspiratorially grin, and then pulls his head back in the door, shutting it behind him. The man in the arm chair hauled himself to his feet, curious, reaching out a hand to brush the wooden panelling of the-

The door opens, the other man sticking his head back out. "Oh, and you'd probably be better off not telling anyone else about this. They'd just think you're mad… which you might be, but the preservation of the timeline and the causal nexus, wibbley wobbley timey wimey, et cetera."

The man from the arm chair snorts in derision. "I am quite resigned to the fact that this is another mad dream," he said, wearily. As if I didn't have enough of them. Go, strange man, be gone from my dreams!"

The man in the box raises a curious eyebrow. "Well, that works too. In fact, it's better all round if you just forget the whole thing ever took place."

The door shuts again, and the man from the chair stands still, bemused. He reaches out his arm again, but there is the noise again… the infernal noise… the noise that haunts his dreams, the ship that sails the stars carrying the lonely god, the ship that banished the darkness that returns…a device glows brighter and fades, glowing and fading, at the top of the box, lighting up the room… the box disappears…

Nothing. The man is alone, staring at an empty room in Dusseldorf on January 26th, 1932.

There is a knock on the door, the door enters, a guard steps in. He clicks his boots together and salutes, his brown cloth and black leather uniform reflecting the glowing embers strangely.

"Mein herr, I thought I heard you cry out!"

The man looks around himself again. The room is as empty as he expected, the shadows flickering and dancing still… he shakes his head.

"It was nothing. Just a bad dream. Return to your post."

The guard salutes again, barking out, "Ja wohl mein herr!"

The man stoops down to pick up the paper from the floor, fallen from his lap. The pen has clattered off somewhere else, perhaps onto the carpet. He feels around with his own boot, finds something small, long and round, and picks it up – his mind flashes: a blue glow, pointed at him as if it were a gun, pain – but no, that was just part of the dream. A memory of things that never happened.

He picks up his spectacles, unfolding the arms and pushing them up to rest on his nose, peering down at the paper, inspecting it critically – excellent. Nothing smudged, no tears, and he has finally decided that the speech will remain unaltered, satisfied with it. His speech is important – tomorrow is the day he delivers a speech to the Industry Club, part of the plan that will soon catapult him into the position of Chancellor. And after that…

Adolf Hitler drifts off to fitful sleep again, his spectacles drooping, his head resting against the headrest. And the Nightmare Child gluts, feasting on dreams of rage and war and fear and hatred…