Big Finish Folly, Part 163 – Lurkers at Sunlight’s Edge, by Marty Ross
1934: the TARDIS lands on a snowy island off the coast of Alaska – one that wasn’t there four years, three months and six days ago, according to the Doctor. The island is dominated by a vast, twisted citadel. Inside it, the Lurkers lie dreaming. It’s said when they wake the world will end…
Led by the ruthless Emerson Whytecrag, an expedition has come to the citadel to exploit the horrors in its ebon-dark interior. Horrors just like those published in the pages of the pulp magazine Shuddersome Tales, where a hero’s only reward is madness, death… or worse.
Horrors that the Doctor and his companion are about to wake up. (more…)
“The future folds into the past. The homeless hero has fallen. Now begins the time of three tales: The Tale of the Herald, The Tale of the Hidden Woman and The Tale of the Final Speaker. When the last tale is told, all the lights shall fail. The world will end.”
1999: Leaving her infant son behind, a young mother named Cassandra Schofield departs Bolton, seeking a better life amid the lights of London.
October 1854: As the British Army charges into catastrophe in the Crimea, the Minister for War sends Miss Florence Nightingale to take charge of the field hospital at Scutari. But there’s already an angel of mercy working with the wounded at Scutari. A first-rate fellow who’s turned up out of the blue. Goes by the name of Schofield; Thomas Hector Schofield…
Bliss used to be a paradise planet. The Galapagos Islands of space. But when the TARDIS brings the Doctor, Ace and Hex to Bliss, it’s been over-run with ironweed plants, and the air is heavy with the stench of burnt silk and static electricity.
Switzerland, 1926: the Doctor finds himself halfway up an Alpine mountainside, on his way to an exclusive sanatorium for the rich and famous run by the Viennese alienist Ludovic ‘Ludo’ Comfort. In between bouts of electric shock therapy, Ludo’s patients – including faded music hall turn Harry Randall, chess grandmaster Swapnil Khan and Lola Luna, darling of the Weimar cabaret scene – fill their time with endless rounds of Snap!, among other diversions.
In Egypt, archaeologist Howard Carter unearths an ancient secret buried in the Valley of the Kings. On an island of Mendolovinia, a deranged academic attempts to push back the frontiers of the human mind. In war-torn London, a cockney spiv takes possession of a bizarre alien object. And in a military bunker in the cold heart of Antartica, the strangest and deadliest of the Doctor’s many enemies lies in wait… 
“This whole wedding is like making a nuclear bomb with half the instructions missing!”
On the human colony planet Nocturne, there is suffering and blight, tragic symptoms of an ages-old war. Never the less, Nocturne is also one of the Doctor’s favourite places in all of time and space, because it is here that a late, great flowering of human art – the High Renaissance – is taking place.
It is 1917 and the Doctor, Hex and Ace find themselves in a military hospital in northern France. But the terrifying, relentless brutality of the Great War that wages only a few miles away is the least of their concerns.
Big Finish Folly 