by Dave Rudden
‘Made by a company called Marburg Plastic. See?’
She points at a little stamp.
At this point, she waits. She always waits. Anke is small, and she is thin, and her voice is nothing more than the rasp of wheatgrass, but she is, in her own way, a performer.
‘Except that this company does not exist. It never has. Marburg has never had a plastic factory. I went there. I researched. This pipe is machine-made, mass-produced. There should be thousands. But I can find no others like it. No factory. No employees. No records. Nothing but this pipe, sticking out into the world.’
The next plinth has another white silk square, and on it sits a coin.
‘I hate this one,’ Anke says quietly.
The coin has a double-headed eagle on one side, and the face of Adolf Hitler on the other. The date on it reads 1954.
‘Do you begin to see?’
The third plinth holds a metal sphere, covered in a grid of circuitry.
‘I don’t know what this is,’ Anke confesses. ‘It was sent to me by a British collector. He found it in his garden.’
The card reads Toclafane.
‘He could not explain to me how he knew the word,’ Anke says. ‘It was just in his head. No memory. No context. Just floating, unsupported. Like a nightmare.’
The fourth exhibit is a cameo painting of Napoleon on a stegosaur.
It is at this point that Anke pauses, as if suddenly aware that without explanation these are just confusing little trinkets, and that the relics that are the obsession of her life can so easily come across as nothing more than junk.
‘Other museums … normal museums, hold relics. Pieces of the past. Evidence of lives and cultures lived.’
She indicates the twelve plinths.
‘I think these are relics of other pasts. Pasts that never happened. A factory. A regime. An invasion, by creatures not of this Earth. Alternate histories. Now, all that remains of them are these exhibits, poking out into our timeline like a foot from out of a duvet. Glimpses into the might-have-been.’
Anke rubs at her temple, and rushes through the final exhibits quickly, though when she reaches the twelfth exhibit, she says nothing about it at all.
‘Look around if you like. I do not have a gift shop.’
Later, the ancient landline on Anke’s desk begins to ring. Anke has never married and has no family. Only one person ever calls her.
‘Anke! Hello!’
The caller is young, and English, and speaks so quickly that his words trip over each other. Wherever he is, there is something very loud happening. Anke can hear deep booms and roars, the fierce blart and crackle of electricity. There are other voices too – mechanical snarls that sound more like the tread of tanks than anything that could come from a human throat.
++ EXTERMINATE ++
‘Oh, do shut up! Can’t you see I’m on a call!’
The caller does not always sound young. Sometimes, he sounds old, and archly frustrated, or kind and faintly amused. Sometimes he sounds Scottish, growling like an idling engine. Once, when the caller rang, they sounded female, which might have confused Anke, except for the fact that she owns a museum for impossible things. It takes a lot to confuse Anke.
No matter what the caller sounds like, Anke always recognizes their voice.
‘I tell you again,’ she says. ‘You cannot come here. You cannot take my exhibits away.’
There is a roaring crackle down the line, static or fire or snarling beasts, and Anke instinctively jerks her head away.
‘Anke,’ the caller says. ‘Listen – these things you’ve collected. They’re symptoms. Signs that something’s wrong. If you’d just let me study them –’
She looks around at the exhibits. Very few are valuable, in any understandable sense. And yet, she would lose none of them, even the coin.
Her gaze lingers on the twelfth plinth the longest.
‘Goodbye, Doctor,’ Anke says, and hangs up the phone.
The next day, the masks arrive.
It was a bad night for the exhibits. It always is, after the Doctor calls. The shard of impossibly ancient crystal from a place called Mordeela trembled and fizzed on its silk. The black tuxedo bowtie rustled against itself like a frightened snake. The pages of Adelaide Brooke’s biography have again gone blank, as if unsure what the famous astronaut’s end should be. Anke sat up with them – speaking to them, soothing them – and when she woke up there was a box outside her door.
She places the picture frame back on the twelfth plinth, and brings the box inside.
People often send things to Anke to be assessed. Old photographs. Newspaper articles about alien invasions that the newspapers themselves say they never wrote. Blood tests that prove the British royals are werewolves. Nearly all of them turn out to be worthless.
Inside the box are two masks. The note with them reads: Worn by a long-forgotten cult who worshipped impossibility and contradiction.
Anke lifts the masks out carefully. The first is male and made of silver. The second is female, and gold. The faces they depict would be beautiful, if not for a certain subtle quirk to their features. A … slyness. A dispassionate cruelty. Like trickster gods from an old myth.
They make Anke uneasy.
Summer turns to winter. The stream of tourists slows. Anke begins work on a plinth from the masks. It is hard work, and she takes many breaks, carving an old log to create the shape she sees in her head. It is foolishness, she knows, but when she places the masks upon it she imagines they are pleased with her work. Spirits, receiving tribute.
In the evenings, she makes minute adjustments to her cue cards, and tries to find any mention of a cult who might have worn such masks, or any clues as to who might have sent them to her. Anke has reached the end of her life’s savings. It is likely that the masks will be the last exhibit she ever owns.
One night in November, the Doctor calls again. This time, the sounds of battle are fiercer, and the voice is smooth and rich. There is a touch of the pirate in it, or the poet, and Anke, dry and scowling, cannot help but imagine what the man behind it looks like.
‘Anke! Doctor here. I need you to –’
‘I have told you,’ Anke snaps. ‘These exhibits are mine. I protect them.’
‘There are fractures in time, Anke. Someone is causing time to skip, like a needle on a record. These things you have collected – they’re … canaries. Canaries in a coal mine. Proof that something is wrong. That dark times are coming.’
‘Proof,’ Anke says. The word comforts her. She had hoped … ‘Then I must keep them safe. From everybody. From you.’
‘Listen to me. Those relics are like thorns poking into our reality. Keeping all of them together might cause a tear. A fracture. Something could come through, Anke, and I don’t know what that might be.’
The masks gleam in the corner of the room.
‘Good,’ Anke snaps, and hangs up the phone.
Christmas Day in Verbier is white and red and stubbornly evergreen. The ringing of bells echoes off the mountain and, as always, Anke eats her modest Christmas dinner at her little kitchen table, trying not to look at the extra place she has set. Twenty years. It has been twenty years.
Next year, I will not set it, she thinks, as she thought the year before. Next year.
That night, a storm breaks over the mountain. The first crash of thunder is so loud that Anke is out of her bed before her bones remember they are old. Lightning cracks the sky, bright enough to leave a memory of itself in her eyes, bright enough that it slices through the swirling snow.
It is not the thunder that woke her, Anke realises.
The phone is ringing.
She staggers downstairs, shrugging on her housecoat. Another peal, and Anke has to grab the bannister to keep from falling. The thunder feels like it is shaking the house apart and yet, despite the apocalyptic crash and roar, the artificial chirp of the phone cuts through.
By the light of slashing lightning, Anke picks her way
through the darkness. The wind has broken a window, and now snow is piling beneath it. Plinths have toppled in the gale. Flakes of white are everywhere. The tapestries have fallen off the wall.
My exhibits. My treasures.
She runs to the twelfth plinth, and it is only when the battered old photo frame is safe in her hand that she crosses to her desk and answers the phone.
‘Anke?’
It is not a voice he has heard before, and yet she knows immediately who it is.
‘Doctor?’
‘Not anymore,’ the voice says. It is an old voice, deep and warm as a mine, rich as Christmas and twice as kind. ‘Now, I’m really more of a curator. Like you, Anke. And you must listen to me now, because we do not have much time.’
Anke looks down at the photo in her hand.
‘I have made mistakes, Anke. I have been arrogant. I have thought only I knew the answers. That only I could fix things. A bad time. A dark time. The things you have collected, they’re evidence of that. Glimpses into dead timelines. Fragments of the never-was.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Anke says, though she does. She has thought of little else these last twenty years.
The argument. The storm, so much like tonight. The way he ran out the door. The way he ran from her. He vanished, vanished so completely that she began to distrust her own memory, until the photo in her hand was the only evidence that there was a gap in her heart where a person should be.
‘I don’t understand either,’ the Curator says. ‘Not all of it. It’s always a mess when more than one of me gets involved. I changed things. Anke, I worry that in doing so I opened a door. That I might have let something in.’
‘That’s why I keep them,’ Anke whispers. Snow is melting into the photo in her hand. ‘I thought … I thought maybe if I collected all these things, then he might come back too.’
There is a noise behind her. Anke turns, and the lightning cracks the darkness in two.
She sees that the masks are not on their plinths any more. They are not on their plinths, but they have not fallen. Instead, they hang in the air, the way another museum might hang its masks from wires.
There are no wires here. The masks hang exactly at head-height. As if being worn by people she cannot see.
It is the most frightening thing Anke has ever seen in her life.
‘Anke,’ the voice in her ear whispers, as the thunder booms and the lightning howls and the masks slowly begin to turn towards her, their cruel smiles shining wide. ‘Do you know what a paradox is?’
ENJOYED
THE WINTERTIME PARADOX?
Explore another incredible collection of Doctor Who stories from the masterful Dave Rudden in:
TWELVE ANGELS WEEPING
Turn the page for a preview of Daleks and destruction …
DALEKS
THE THIRD WISE MAN
It was in the first year of the Time War, though we did not call it that at the time. We were not to know what it would become.
Indeed, it was only much later that we realised it would be a war at all. For too long, we believed it a simple series of skirmishes, similar to the clashes along the raw border of the time field separating us from the wretched and primitive races of the universe. It was in those patrols that I gained my captaincy, piloting one of our few Battle TARDISes against the aliens foolish enough to seek our technology, or those who simply blundered into the constellation of Kasterborous and the Seven Systems – our home.
We Time Lords are jealous of our secrets. We must be. We do not seek to preserve our way of life simply for ourselves. We do it because only we are advanced enough to wield the power that we do. Anything else would be catastrophe. I am convinced of it, even now, as the younger races’ awe of us has been lost and our enemies hammer at our doors.
In a way, that is what this entire war has been about.
The Daleks came for us in that first year, and we did not see it as war. We saw it as pest control. They amassed in their millions, and rather than face them as equals on the battlefield we simply detonated the nearest star and consumed their entire fleet in fire. Such was our power. Such was our arrogance.
War is poison. We wished to demonstrate this to the Daleks, to sicken them with might, dissuade them from challenging us. There are battlefields on Gallifrey from before the Stellar Age where the fighting was so fierce that the ground ran with blood and the soil was sown with arrowheads like seeds. There are places war has poisoned so completely that nothing will ever grow again.
Shock and awe. Those were our watchwords in that first year, when we were buoyed and comforted by knowing that we were the most superior, that we were better defended and that, at the end of it all, we simply had more time to respond than any other race.
We did not understand our enemy. For all our knowledge, we knew nothing.
The Daleks were indefatigable. They were remorseless. Everything we did, every attempt to scare or reason with or deter them was met with the pathological, twitching hatred with which they draw every breath. We learned this after Spiral Furl, when Harlan Castellos turned the death of his TARDIS into an electromagnetic extinction event and Daleks fell from the sky like hail. We learned it after the first volleys of the Anything Gun crumpled space–time like fire consuming parchment. We learned it as battle overturned the universe like a child raking dirt, and the lesser races squirmed and died like worms exposed in our wake.
You cannot intimidate a Dalek. You cannot frighten them.
I will speak now of the Nightmare Child.
It was supposed to be a small battle. There had been silence along many fronts for weeks now, and there was hope blooming on Gallifrey that perhaps the new generation of Battle TARDISes had proven our superiority. There were those on the High Council who still believed that the attacks were simply Daleks being Daleks, and not steps on the way to all-out war. ‘One more battle,’ they counselled. One more crushing defeat, and the little monsters would flee.
I was in the Scaveline system, investigating some intercepted Dalek communications. My own TARDIS led a strike-force – even then, the military language felt strange to me – of a hundred recently grown battleships. Scaveline’s star was a white dwarf, struggling against its own weight to stay in the heavens. I remember wondering, as we emerged in the system, whether any of the planets had ever been inhabited.
Curiosity was not a trait that the Time Lords ever encouraged. What need had we for it? Everything in the cosmos was there, waiting – every time, every moment – and we could observe it all as completely as we desired.
‘All ships are in-system,’ my lieutenant, Orlock, murmured at my side. ‘Awaiting orders.’
We were not a warrior people. We had never had to be. Belligerence had gone the way of curiosity, because all of time and space was ours. Our tiny contingent of warships (of which I commanded a significant portion) were stretched thin across space, and many were still adolescent and untested.
No TARDIS takes to war with relish. I knew it pained some of those under my command. TARDISes were not ships, were not dumb beasts of burden or mere transports across the heavens; they were our allies and our compatriots, and we did them a disservice.
I mourn them still.
We inched through the Scaveline system, scanners at maximum. General practice during manoeuvres in uncivilised space was to take the form of ships designed by lesser races – a way to hide our own advancement, or a tactic to create confusion in our enemies. A competent commander can make much use of a moment’s hesitation. For a Time Lord, a moment is an eternity.
However, such tactics fared abysmally against these new, frenzied Daleks. The simplicity that had once been a flaw in the Daleks became in war a hideous strength: they simply opened fire on every ship, no matter its origin.
My own Type 94 had therefore taken the form of interstellar debris: a slowly spinning chunk of rock made pale and shimmering with ice. Its interior was designed after the manner of an old observatory – a spherical space w
ith seats on gimbals so that my crew could swing from console to console, and myself on a central leather chair. The entire arrangement looked rather like the model of a solar system, with the console our gleaming, silver sun.
‘Scouts,’ I murmured, knowing my TARDIS would relay my words to every other ship in the fleet. ‘Range forward, pattern nocturne.’
Pattern nocturne: caution. The less-armoured Type 90s and 91s peeled off and dematerialised. Some ranged out into the system, rendered invisible by their chameleon circuits, and others darted into the timestream to scan the approaching seconds for peril. It may seem strange, the idea that our foes were not immediately detectable, but a star system is a gigantic place, even to craft such as ours. There are many ways to hide. Much of space warfare is not attacking or defending, but simply finding your enemy before they find you.
‘Sir, this is Scout Circle Eight. No sign in the system’s western quadrant.’
‘Sir, Scout Circle Three reporting. No Dalek presence five minutes from your now.’
Strange. There was a psychotic honesty about the Daleks. They never encrypted their communications, never used stealth, never fled from battle even against terrible odds. There was a desperate, crazed need to them – either something inherited from their mad creator, or a behavioural side effect of being just a few tatters of flesh smeared over the trigger of a gun.
That was why I took the risk I did, my fingers dancing over the communications relay that connected me to my fleet.
‘Pattern daylight. Show yourselves so that we may draw them out and end this. Scout Circles Three and Eight, loop back round and cover our retreat.’
‘Yes, sir. How far?’
‘A day. But be sure to stay hidden.’
‘Understood. Should we establish a position in the future as well?’
‘Negative,’ I responded. Not until I know what happened here. Not until I can be sure they’re not waiting for us.
Scaveline continued its turgid spin. I stretched in my chair, one eye on the scouts’ reports. The fleet hovered awkwardly on the system’s edge. I could not help but check and recheck the space–time co-ordinates, though the idea of a TARDIS getting lost was ludicrous. As the long silence stretched, I began to stupidly hope that the High Council had been right. Maybe this war was no war. Maybe for once in their pitiful, cyborg lives the Daleks had admitted that they were not the superior beings in the galaxy.