'I warn you, things could get very nasty here before they get better.'

 A remote Scottish mansion. Five bickering academics are haunted by ghosts from their past. Reluctantly they offer shelter to The Doctor and his companions Ace and Hex.

 Hex, already troubled by a vivid nightmare, is further disturbed by the nighttime appearance of a whistling, hooded apparition.

 Ace tries to befriend the young housemaid, Sue. Sue knows secrets. She knows why the academics have assembled here, and she knows why they are all so afraid. But Sue's lips are sealed, preferring to communicate through her disturbing toy, Happy the Rabbit.

And then the killing begins. Gruesome deaths that lead The Doctor and his friends to discover the grisly truth behind the academics' plans, and - as the ghosts of the past become ghosts of the present - to recognise that sometimes death can be preferable to life...

 ‘By night, an atheist half-behaves m God’ So said my namesake, the eighteenth-century poet Edward Young. Night is like a virus: it enters minds and warps our sense of reason. By day a distant whistled tune, an isolated churchyard, a bizarre collection of stuffed animals, would be unthreatening. But by night they are to be avoided.

 And attics. Attics are also to be avoided at night. Festering in my attic for 15 years was a script called Night Thoughts, a grisly little horror story about a group of people who cannot escape their past. I had written it in 1989 for Andrew Cartmel, who was then the script editor of Doctor Who. Before we got very far, the BBC cancelled the series and, having decided that the plot could not be reworked into an episode of Casualty, which was Andrew’s next posting, I boxed it up and forgot about it.

 But for a tedious whistling noise which was keeping us awake one night, I might never have rediscovered Night Thoughts. Whilst searching the attic for the source of the noise, I stumbled across the script in an old trunk. Reading it afresh, I found it genuinely spooky. My wife suggested that I resubmit it, and here we are. I never did find the source of that noise. The odd thing was, on top of the attic trunk, I found a rusty old child’s whistle. I could have sworn it felt slightly warm...

 Good night.