After a few moments, they paused to catch their breath. ‘Who are those people?’ asked Mae.

‘I don’t know,’ the Doctor admitted. ‘But they don’t seem very happy to see us.’

Then he heard the crunch of footsteps in the snow behind him and he spun round to see the other members of the gang approaching. They were surrounded.

The Doctor pulled his sonic out of his pocket again and whipped it back and forth. ‘Stay back,’ he warned. ‘I’m not afraid to use this!’ He made to press the button on the handle, then realised there wasn’t a button there at all. He sighed. He hadn’t taken out his sonic screwdriver after all. It was a carrot.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘You’ve got all this snow, and I’ve got a carrot. If it turns out that Mae has three pieces of coal and a top hat in her pocket, maybe we can come to some sort of arrangement …’

He tossed the carrot to the ground where the three nearest of their attackers dropped to their knees to scrabble about for it. The Doctor finally located his sonic screwdriver and held it at arm’s length, its green light illuminating the pale faces of the approaching assailants.

‘Stay back!’ he warned, swinging the sonic from figure to figure. But they continued to shuffle forward, their eyes fixed on the bright emerald glow at its tip.

‘They don’t want to hurt you!’ cried a voice. The Doctor turned. There was a figure standing on top of one of the houses, silhouetted against the gleaming white sky. ‘What do they want?’ he shouted back.

‘Your possessions,’ the figure bellowed. It was a deep voice. A man’s. ‘Give them something of yours and they’ll leave you alone – for a short while at least.’

Keeping the sonic chirping at arm’s length, the Doctor released Mae’s waist and began to root through his jacket pockets with his free hand. Mae pulled the satsuma the Doctor had given her earlier from her skirt pocket. ‘Does he mean like this?’

The Doctor shrugged. ‘Got to be worth a try …’

Mae hurled the piece of fruit over the heads of two of their attackers. Both of them – a man and a woman, dived after it and began to fight over it in the snow.

‘Keep going,’ cried the man from the top of the house.

The Doctor pulled his hand from his pocket and looked down at it. He was clutching a silver fountain pen.

‘What are you waiting for?’ cried Mae. ‘Throw it!’

‘But this is an original Paul E. Wirt pen!’ exclaimed the Doctor. ‘Mark Twain gave it to me after he’d written the first draft of Huckleberry Finn with it. Terrible speller, I had to do a lot of editing before he could submit the manuscript.’

‘Then choose something else!’ bellowed Mae.

Stuffing the pen back into his pocket, the Doctor produced a large key, then a computer mouse, and finally a baseball. The group around them had begun to realise that the sonic wasn’t doing them any harm and they were creeping ever closer. ‘Throw it!’ yelled Mae. ‘Now!’

‘It’s signed by Babe Ruth,’ hissed the Doctor, turning it to display the autograph.

‘I don’t care!’ Mae snatched the baseball from his hand and pitched it hard onto the ground in front of them. Every single one of the attackers fell upon it, grunting and lashing out in an effort to obtain it.

‘This way,’ cried the man. ‘Now!’ He leapt down from the roof of the house, landing nimbly in the soft snow beneath. Then he opened the door to one of the few remaining houses with its windows intact.

The Doctor grabbed Mae’s hand and they ran, dashing past the figure and inside the dwelling.

It was roomier inside than the Doctor had expected, and appeared to be built into the side of the hill behind it. But he didn’t have time to waste in exploring. The man from the rooftop had now opened a metal trapdoor in the centre of the floor and was gesturing for them all to climb down the narrow steps and into the darkness beyond.

Ushering Mae ahead of him, the Doctor did as he was told and was closely followed by their newfound friend. There wasn’t much room at the bottom of the ladder, and both Mae and the Doctor found themselves pressed up against another figure.

‘Hello,’ said the Doctor, holding out a wet hand in the dim light from the room above. But that was quickly cut off as the trapdoor closed with a clunk.

‘Ssshhh!’ instructed the man who had led them into the house. They fell silent, just as the window shattered in the room above. The Doctor could hear footsteps climb in, crunching onto the pieces of broken glass. First just one of their attackers, then a second and eventually too many to distinguish individually.

They lumbered around above them for a few minutes then, with a grunt of frustration, they began to leave the way they had arrived.

‘Well,’ said the Doctor after a few moments of quiet. ‘This is cosy, isn’t it?’ He lit the end of the sonic, bathing them in green light. He still couldn’t see his rescuers properly, but it gave him the opportunity to look around the space they were in. There was a door behind the second man.

‘It’s just the entrance to the lower floor,’ said the man from the roof. ‘I didn’t want to take you any further while the Wanters were up there in case they heard the door creak. These old places aren’t exactly well maintained.’

‘Wanters?’ asked Mae. ‘What are they?’

‘You’ve never heard of Wanters before?’ said the second figure. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Long story,’ said the Doctor. ‘But now that we’re not in danger of being heard, why don’t we go a little further in and make ourselves comfortable?’

The second figure turned and pushed the inner door. As predicted, it creaked loudly as it swung open. By the light of the sonic, the Doctor and Mae could just about make out a long corridor stretching away into the darkness.

‘Hold on,’ said one of the men. ‘There should be an oil lamp here somewhere.’ He struck a match and a light flared into life. The Doctor blinked at the sudden absence of blackness then, when his eyes had adjusted, he turned to thank the two men who had saved Mae and himself.

He stopped, a wide grin splitting his features. ‘Oh, that is just brilliant! Isn’t it, Mae?’

Mae stared at the men. Both of them were dressed in baggy, multicoloured suits, both had white faces and red noses, and both wore shaggy, rainbow wigs. ‘You’re clowns!’ she gasped.

‘Well, of course,’ said the red-nosed figure from the roof. ‘That’s Flip Flop, and I’m Wobblebottom. You were expecting someone other than clowns?’

‘Actually no,’ said the Doctor gleefully. He took Wobblebottom’s hand and pumped it. ‘A journey to a distant ice world in a stolen ambulance and a gang of thieves who fight over a baseball and a satsuma. Why wouldn’t there be clowns waiting to rescue us?’

He turned to get a better look along the corridor. Doors led off from both sides and he tried the first to find a well-appointed bedroom behind it. ‘This is fantastic!’ he beamed. ‘I expect you come down here to get away from the cold weather.’

‘No,’ said Flip Flop matter-of-factly. ‘We come down here to get away from the bear attacks.’

‘Turn around now!’ yelled Clara. ‘We have to go back for them!’ They had left the Doctor and Mae just a few minutes earlier, but had already lost sight of them in the rainstorm. The windscreen wipers thumped back and forth across the glass, but did very little to help visibility.

‘I’m trying to!’ shouted Warren. ‘But there are snowdrifts on either side of us. If I turn here, we’ll just get stuck again, and where will that leave us?’

Clara reached for her door handle.

‘What are you doing?’ cried Warren, grabbing her arm and pulling it away from the door.

‘Going to help the Doctor!’

‘Don’t be stupid! This isn’t a road – we’re just driving over snow and ice. Even if you could find your way back, you’d only run straight into those lunatics who attacked us.’

‘Well, we have to do something.’