Garrick signed himself out in the book kept at the front gatehouse of the Prydonian Academy, a surprisingly low-key way to take an afternoon out from his Time Lord school where, among other disciplines, students learnt temporal mechanics and multi-dimensional physics.

His brother was waiting for him beyond the boundaries where school rules didn’t apply. They hugged briefly, both a little aware that hugging was not really a Time Lord ‘thing’.

“Lunch at the Conservatory?” Chrístõ suggested. Garrick had no reason to disagree with the idea. They walked side by side across Rassilon Square to the fashionable restaurant patronised by all the highest families in the Capitol. Chrístõ was rather better known there than his brother, although he didn’t have an account - unlike his wife who was already fully inducted into the Capitol’s social scene by Valena d’Arpexia de Lœngb?rrow in her capacity as the former Lady de Lœngb?rrow.

“You need a good lunch,” Chrístõ said as they looked at the interactive menu. “You’re looking thin, kiddo. Are you eating enough? I’m sure the refectory food was nutritious enough in my day. Mind you, for the first month I was so overwhelmed by the crowds I just grabbed bread and cheese from the side table and ate in the library garden. You’re not doing that, are you?”

“No. the food is fine,” Garrick assured him quickly. “I eat as well as anyone. I’m not really used to all the food being synthesised. But I’m not the only one. Anyone used to rural living feels the same way. Gaius Ussian was sick every night for the first two weeks of term. He’s in the next bed to mine so it wasn’t very nice.”

Chrístõ passed over that anecdote.

“You get on with everyone in your dorm?” he asked. “There’s no….”

“Nobody bullies me,” Garrick was quick to assure him. “Your reputation as a war hero made sure of that. Making friends who DON’T talk about you is the hard bit. But I’m starting to make my own mark, now. I’m doing ‘ok. I’ve even taught some of my friends to say ‘ok’. It really annoys our languages Master.”

Garrick gave a mischievous grin that Chrístõ shared, feeling that it hadn’t really been THAT long since he was at school and things like that were funnier than they might seem to an adult.

Yet something didn’t seem quite right despite the banter. Chrístõ watched his brother carefully. In between sharing details of his first month of boarding school life there were moments when his eyes had a distant and anxious look.

But he said nothing untoward through lunch or as they stepped back into the square and looked around at some of the grandest buildings in the Capitol, including the Citadel, the seat of the Gallifreyan government, containing most of the civil service departments and the great Panopticon itself, where Bills were proposed and debated, sent to committee, sent back, voted on and sometimes actually passed into law.

“I used to spend a lot of my free afternoons in the public gallery listening to debates,” Chrístõ admitted. He saw his brother’s face crinkle into a frown. “Yes, I was boring that way.”

“We… could go to the art museum,” Garrick suggested. “I like the pictures.”

“Anything you like,” Chrístõ admitted. They turned right in front of the great Fountain of Victory, dedicated to the fighters in the Sarre War – a conflict their own father had fought in when he was young.

As they passed the corner of the fountain Garrick suddenly stopped walking. He sat down on one of the marble benches provided for looking at the fountain.

Garrick didn’t look at the fountain. His eyes weren’t really looking at anything at all, and if he hadn’t been one hundred percent Gallifreyan Chrístõ suspected he would be crying.

“Chrístõ… how did you cope with the Cloister Wraiths?” he asked in a quiet, almost choked voice.

“How… what?” Momentarily dumbfounded, Chrístõ sat and grasped Garrick’s hand. “What Cloister Wraiths? There is no such thing. They’re nothing but a scary myth. I had a nursemaid when I was little who was fired for telling me stories about them and keeping me awake at night. They’re not….”

He looked into Garrick’s eyes and knew that SOMETHING was very real to him. He clasped his hand even more tightly with one hand while pressing the other against his brother’s forehead.

“Show me,” he said. “I know you’re frightened and perhaps it is hard to think about it, but show me everything.”

It had begun about a week into the term. At least it was then that Garrick first noticed something was wrong. It was possible that it had been wrong from the very start.

The tyro dormitories were in the top three floors of the east tower of the sprawling main building of the Prydonian Academy. There were two rooms with sixteen boys in each and one with twenty girls. After lights out, they were left to their own devices, put on their honour to obey the rules, stay in their beds and go to sleep with a minimum of noise and mischief.

Garrick had been asleep, but sometime just after the thirteenth hour he woke, aware that somebody else in their top floor dormitory was upset. At first, he thought it was Gaius Ussian being sick again, but Gaius was in the next bed and this sound was further away.

The boy was making acutely painful noises, far worse than Gaius’s stomach trouble. Despite his discomfort the sounds were muffled as if the boy was trying not to disturb anyone else with his distress.

Or as if somebody was stopping him from crying out loud.

Garrick kept very still as he listened. If it was just somebody ill or just having a homesick dream he wouldn’t appreciate having the whole dorm’s attention drawn to it.

And if it was something else….

Well, what could it be? The dormitories were safe. Nobody could get in to attack a student in their sleep. This was the Prydonian Academy, in the heart of the Capitol, where even the weather was under control and crime was almost unheard of. There hadn’t been a murder for at least a century. Whatever he might be able to imagine happened on other planets, less civilised worlds, the kind his brother liked to find adventure on.

His brain carefully revised the split infinitive in the thought while he listened again to the distress of one of his dorm mates and wondered what – if anything - he ought to do about it.

While he was still trying to decide what to do the sounds of distress stopped. There was a strangely hoarse and ragged breath and a heavy noise as if somebody had turned in their bed, then it went very suddenly quiet.

Garrick kept very still, listening intently to the steady breathing of fifteen sleeping boys, holding his own breath to try to distinguish each individual sleeper. One seemed a little quicker and perhaps louder than the others, as if his hearts were beating a little faster and his lungs working that bit harder, but it was still quite normal compared to the sounds he had been hearing before.

Garrick let himself breathe, sounding a little ragged and hoarse himself until he had fully replaced the air in his lungs. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to sleep again.

He slept soundly until the morning bell when he immediately remembered what had happened in the night.

That it HAD happened and was not a very vivid dream was not in doubt. Something HAD happened to one of the boys and he HAD heard it happening.

But which one? As they showered, dressed and filed down to the breakfast refectory nobody seemed unduly tired or distracted. Nobody was sick of injured. The boys all talked of the usual things – the day’s classes, the chances of being smiled at by any of the girls, which teachers they really dreaded or looked forward to having lessons with.

Ordinary conversation that could belong to any group of students in the universe from that book Chrístõ had given him to read – Tom Brown’s Schooldays – to that other Earth classic, Harry Potter.

Nothing wrong.

With a full day of difficult lessons in academic and practical disciplines that he was still getting to grips with, Garrick had too much else to think about to dwell on the night-time mystery. It was only much later, after dark, as the silence of peaceful sleep fell upon the dormitory again, that he set himself to listen for any sound out of place.

He waited, silently recycling his breathing for the maximum forty minutes at a time to which Chrístõ had trained him. He even managed forty-five minutes, once, but it left him so light-headed he didn’t risk it again.

Nothing happened. Everyone in the dormitory slept on peacefully.

Everyone except Garrick.

The next day everyone was fine except for Garrick who had not gone to sleep until well past the thirteenth hour for the second time in a row. He almost got into trouble for not concentrating in temporal physics. He struggled with the essay he had to write in the after-supper Prep hour. He knew he would have to get to sleep early that night, no matter what.

He did so, but some time in the dark of the night he woke and heard the same sounds of distress as he had two nights ago.

He slipped out of bed noiselessly and moved towards the sounds of one of his friends in trouble. His bare feet were muffled in the carpeted floor and his breath was muted.

It wasn’t as dark in the dormitory in the middle of the city as it was in his bedroom on the estate in the rural midst of the southern continent. Even so he could see very little other than the shapes of the beds and cabinets that ought to be there.

Except….

“Except?” Chrístõ asked. The sudden halt in Garrick’s stream of conscious was startling. It was as if something had blocked him from going further.

“I don’t know,” the boy admitted. “I keep trying to recall what I saw… what happened next. I’m sure something DID happen, but every time I try to remember it slips away. All I know for sure is waking up the next morning feeling as if I’d missed something really important.”

Chrístõ thought he had, too, but he left it for now.

“But the next day was the first time I really noticed anything wrong. We were starting elementary telekinesis before lunch, when Kerns Tracolix fainted.”

“Fainted?”

“Really fainted. He came round quickly, but Master Quencess sent him to sick bay. They said he was vitamin deficient. I suppose they know these things. But….”

“It got you thinking again?”

“It got me watching my friends. And I noticed a few more who looked pale and tired. Two of the girls, and one of the boys from the other dorm. Then the next day, and the next… every day, more tyros looked ill. We were all making mistakes in class, struggling to concentrate, feeling tired all the time. We were all sleeping heavily but waking up just as tired as when we went to bed.”

“You’ve all been seen by the medic?” Chrístõ asked.

“He says we’re all just vitamin deficient. He said we should eat more, especially at breakfast and dinner. They put us all on special building up diets in the refectory, and we were allowed to bring special energy drinks into class. They said it was nothing to worry about and not to mention it to our families or even talk about it to older students.”

“The masters told you that?”

“I know… I’m breaking the rules telling you….”

“Don’t worry about that. If anyone tries to punish you for it, they’ll have me to reckon with.”

Garrick looked relieved.

“Are you telling me that you were going to keep all this from me?” Chrístõ asked. “You expected to get something like that past me?”

Garrick sighed deeply.

“I hoped…. I really hoped you would know. I thought… I thought this was something all tyros went through… and you would know how to fight it.”

“No,” Chrístõ told him. “It is not some sort of tyro hazing. You’re NOT supposed to be going through this. And… I’m sorry, but I don’t know what has been causing all this distress. It is NOT cloister wraiths. Where did that idea even come from?”

Garrick shrugged.

“One of the boys said it, I think. Maybe he had a nursemaid like yours. But after it was said… it just got around, and we were all convinced that we were being attacked by Cloister Wraiths. It… made as much sense as anything.”

“Except there truly is no such thing,” Chrístõ insisted.

He was certain of that. On any other world he might have accepted some kind of supernatural creature. He KNEW for a chilling fact that a vampiric race preyed upon unsuspecting travellers in deep space. He had encountered much that was nearly as bad, nearly as inherently evil.

He might even believe there might be wild creatures living deep in the southern plains beyond the bounds of the Oldblood estates or in the depths of the Red Desert.

But he couldn’t believe that anything supernatural stalked the civilised streets of the Capitol. It was just unthinkable.

“That’s what I thought, too,” Garrick said. “How could anything like that be here?”

“I’ll find out,” Chrístõ promised. “Don’t you or any of your friends lose any more sleep over it. Lord Bruchall is Master of Tyros, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” Garrick answered. “But he told us to keep quiet and not tell anyone. If you….”

“Trust me,” Chrístõ told him and wouldn’t say any more. “Anyway, there’s nothing to worry about until after dark. Let’s go to the art museum and then high tea before you have to sign in again.”

Chrístõ remembered Lord Bruchall. He had been Master of Tyros when he came to the Academy and the man was useless enough then. He had done nothing about the cruel bullying that went on in the dormitories at night, not just that inflicted on him, the half-blood with a long dead human mother, but anyone else that the stronger boys might see as victims. Not that anyone would have complained to a Master. Like every boarding school from Rugby to Hogwarts there was an unwritten, unspoken, unthought of rule against that.

But the old fool should have known.

He should have known this time, too, but as successive generations of tyros passed through his ineffectual hands he seemed to become even less aware of what really went on after the lights were turned out at night.

As they pretended to put it all out of their minds and enjoy the art gallery, Chrístõ dismissed the idea of confronting the old fool. It would come to nothing. His plan would need to be more subtle than that.

And it was. Chrístõ didn’t exactly thank the bullies of his tyro years, or the Masters who failed to protect him, but it had been in those unhappy days that he had honed his ability to slip unnoticed in and out and around the dormitory tower.

He got up the side of the building that faced away from the setting sun when it was in full shadow, a climbing feat he hardly rated very highly at all. He waited on the flat roof, his back warmed by the heating vent as the sky darkened above the envirodome that protected the Capitol. After midnight, the thirteenth hour, there would be rain artificially created by the micro-climate control centre in the central tower of the Citadel, but he planned to be indoors by then.

The tyros went to bed by ten. Their lights were put out at half past. At eleven Chrístõ slipped quietly down to the dormitory where most of the boys were sleeping. He knew that Garrick wasn’t. He could feel the boy’s thoughts. He hadn’t actually shared the plan with him, but his brother knew something was going to happen tonight and lay awake in anticipation.

Chrístõ put up his best telepathic shields so that nobody would know he was there, his brother, the other students, any Master doing a spot check, or anything else that might turn up.

It took an exercise in staying alert but inactive that irked him no end, but it was necessary.

A little after the first hour of the morning his patience and diligence paid off.

He saw the creature, grey-faced, snake-like slitted eyes, no nose, just nostrils, a lipless mouth that formed an ‘o’ as it approached the bed occupied by Gaius Ussian, the bed next to Garrick’s.

The creature was wearing a hooded robe, but it pushed it back as it reached for the sleeping boy revealing a bald head with lobeless ears.

“Stop!” Garrick cried out, leaping from his bed. The creature turned towards him and hissed.

“No!” It said in a sibilant voice. “Don’t see me.”

Garrick stepped back, dazed by the hypnotic suggestion. But then Chrístõ stepped forward from the shadows. The creature spoke again, boring into his eyes.

“You’re not Count Dracula,” Chrístõ answered, noting the coincidence of the same words used in Bram Stoker’s novel. “And I CAN see you. What ARE you?”

The creature didn’t answer in words, but he felt it launch a psychic attack. Chrístõ blocked it and stepped closer.

He had half expected the creature to be insubstantial, wraithlike, and was slightly surprised when his hand closed on the cold, clammy, almost rubbery flesh of the creature’s forearm. It lurched, throwing him off and prepared to attack again, but Chrístõ dodged.

“I’m not a kid,” he said. “And I’ve fought filth all over the universe. I’m not scared of you.”

“You cannnn die, sssscared or nnno….” said the creature, again preparing to attack. Chrístõ dodged as the creature lunged then looked up in surprise as it was jerked away from him.

“I see you, too,” Garrick said, wrapping his slender arms around the creature’s neck. “And I remember. You’ve been attacking us… night after night…. Hurting all of us…. And making us forget what you did. But I remember now. I remember it all. I remember…”

“So do I,” cried Gaius Ussian leaping from his bed and facing his nightmare head on. A few moments more saw other boys tumbling from their beds and crowding around Garrick as he gripped the creature around its neck.

“None of us are scared of you,” Gaius Ussian said. “Not now we know what you are… just a THING.”

“A shrivelled thing,” said another of the boys. Chrístõ looked at the creature and realised that it had diminished even as they were confronting it.

“I see,” he said quietly. “I see, now. You feed on fear. That’s what you’ve been doing to these kids…. Newly away at school, worried, homesick, uncertain… you added fear to their vulnerabilities and played them.”

“It’s a nightmare wraith?” somebody said.

“No, not even that,” Chrístõ said in a calm tone. “Don’t give it a name that can be talked about, romanticised. It’s a THING, as one of you already said. Just a thing. Garrick, you can let go now. It’s powerless as long as nobody is scared of it.”

The creature had diminished now until Garrick was a head taller than it. When it had appeared in the dormitory it had been at least seven foot and loomed over its victims. Now there was no reason to fear a straggly, loose-limbed creature that cowed away from them. As it shrunk to the height of the boys’ ankles, Chrístõ plucked it up and stuffed it into a pillow-case. It mewled and complained, struggling to get free, but it was weakening rapidly and was soon still.

“Is it dead?” Garrick asked.

“No. I can still feel its lifeforce.”

“What will you do with it?”

“I’m going to take it to the freighter port. They have quarantine facilities for unauthorised animals. I imagine it slipped onto our world that way. When its species and origin is identified it will be sent back. But you boys don’t have to worry about that. Go on back to your beds and sleep soundly. No need to fear anything except Madame Charr’s ethic classes. But she’s a known quantity of terror. You’ll manage.”

The boys went to their beds, all but Garrick who went up to the roof with his brother.

“Could it have really harmed us?” he asked about the creature. “Could it have killed any of us?”

“It very well might have done if left to feed on you all that way. But… don’t tell the others. Make it seem like a pathetic thing that we got the better of in the end. Laugh it off together. I’ll be going now… back the way I came. I’ll see you next weekend if you like. We can go to a matinee.”

“I’d like that,” Garrick answered. “Look… thanks. I wish I’d told you sooner. I should have trusted you. But….”

“But you thought you couldn’t run to your big brother when things were bad. It might look wimpish?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, I can’t deal with Madame Charr. She’s too much even for me. But any more aliens giving you trouble you can tell me right away. Ok.”

“Ok,” Garrick answered. The two brothers hugged briefly. Hugging was still not a Time Lord thing. Then Chrístõ dropped over the parapet to scale the wall. Garrick watched for a minute then went back to the dormitory that was now cleansed of all but the ordinary fears of a student – ethics class, late homework, bad end of term reports.