He suspected the old men at the bar belonged to the women in the fishmonger’s. The publican called them Old Owen and Young Dai, and Old Owen was – inevitably – just a little bit younger than Young Dai. They eyed his suit with a weary sort of irritation, the sort of disregard old men everywhere reserve for younger men – or at least for men who appear to be younger – and when he ordered a lemonade and sat in the corner sucking noisily through a straw they didn’t seem to think much more about him. They were rather busy, actually, disparaging the newly arrived Mr Heidt, who was evidently hot stuff in Jonestown and had a weather station on his lawn. Neither Young Dai nor Old Owen, it seemed, had much truck with meteorology. They had a good friendship, he thought. Old friends together, and doubtless their wives were like that too and the four of them gabbed and grumbled and no one was lonely. Wouldn’t do to get old and lonely.
Stone walls, dark wood, horse brasses. No jukebox, no television, not even a pool table. Just places to sit and a bar and somewhere what seemed like a pretty good kitchen. That was something he liked about the twentieth century. Quite a few other bits of it were pretty awful, but pubs were properly pubby, with pub grub and chunky glasses to drink out of, and whole families came in on Sundays for lunch. He pondered. Jonestown. People. TARDIS. Pub. Lemons. He liked lemons. They made you make funny faces when you bit them, and a very, very long way in the future there was a really amazing planet where they’d evolved into people and lived in harmony with a variety of hyper-intelligent bee. Evolution. Thousands and thousands of years of tiny changes could turn little burning sparks of chemistry into people, into monsters and angels and even human beings. It happened everywhere. You went to an empty planet, took your eye off it for a billion years, came back and, boom, there it was: life. Stinky, slooshy, complex, amazing life. It always found ways to surprise you. Or maybe that was because it happened in time, and he didn’t always pay much attention to how time looked from the inside.
The universe was brilliant. Every last, ridiculous nook and corner. He loved it. Even this bit, although this bit was slightly alarming because, well, there was a leftover war machine trying to open the TARDIS like a bag of soup. Or an oyster. Or a tin of golden syrup. Amazing how sticky those got. Lemon and golden syrup, though, there was a combination which could blow your socks off. Taste supernova. He –
And then, for no reason at all, everything changed.
Over by the fireplace was a metal silhouette of a chicken, technically a cockerel. He had dismissed it at first as a bit of ordinary pub bric-a-brac, but now he saw that it wasn’t and it riveted his attention. It was a weathervane, or, rather, it was part of one. Affixed to the feet of the cockerel – he was a proud enough sort of fellow, strutting his two-dimensional stuff across a cast-iron cornfield – were a set of metal gears, and a drive shaft went off at right angles and then, presumably, up the chimney. Very unusual arrangement. Unique, even. And now there was a creaking and groaning and the shaft started to turn, yawing one way and then the other, and the cockerel spun around and around, and the grumbling and joshing in the pub faded away.
The man calling himself Jones looked at them: grave, unhappy faces and concealed fear. They’d built the weathervane to tell them something, and they didn’t enjoy seeing it work. Bad news, then. Bad enough that they didn’t complain about it. No one said anything at all.
Everyone watched the cockerel go around and around as if it was really important. And he was pretty sure they were right. Never underestimate the value of local knowledge – especially when the locality in question is a Welsh village in a polydimensional quasi-space in the fractal layers of a time machine. Old Time Lord proverb. Aeons old, if he remembered to pop back to the early days of the universe and say it out loud once this was all over, and he was definitely going to make a mental note about that. He might go and say it to that Cro Magnon alpha.
He could feel a funny sort of pressure all around him, knew the TARDIS was letting him know she wasn’t happy, that she was under attack. This is what it feels like to be her.
The chicken slowed, wobbled, and then pointed firmly east.
‘Storm coming, then,’ Owen said into the quiet.
‘Likely,’ Dai agreed.
The publican looked up from the till. ‘Good storm?’ he asked hesitantly. ‘Proper storm, I mean?’
There was a longish pause.
‘Likely not,’ Dai said.
The publican swallowed and sighed. ‘No, I suppose not.’
The old men looked at one another. ‘Could be it’s time to take the girls home,’ Owen said.
Dai nodded. ‘Could be.’
They waved to the publican and shuffled out, and with them, discreetly, the rest of the pub. The man calling himself John Jones blew air into his cheeks.
‘Nice puzzles,’ he called to the publican. ‘This one really had me going for a bit.’
‘Oh, those. We got them free. Mr Heidt’s just come, you see. Wants to make an impression. Glad someone likes them. Most of my regulars are a bit less sure, I’m afraid.’
‘Well, new ideas.’
‘Quite so, sir. Begging your pardon, but I might close up, sir, pretty soon, if it’s all the same to you,’ the publican said hopefully to him when they were alone in the saloon bar. ‘Don’t want to be a bother. I expect you’ve got somewhere to stay close by, have you?’
‘Oh, yes. Of course. Wouldn’t do to be out in a storm, would it?’
‘No, sir,’ the publican agreed. ‘No, it wouldn’t. Very wise, I must say.’
‘Mind you, I quite like a wander in the rain. Thunder and lightning, even. Exciting. Move slowly, don’t build up a charge, it’s perfectly safe, isn’t it?’
The publican looked away. ‘I gather it might be, under normal circumstances, yes. Very nice. Romantic, even.’
‘But?’
‘But I can’t say as these are exactly normal circumstances, sir. Not precisely.’
‘But you’d rather not explain.’
‘No, sir.’
‘You look like a bloke I used to know. Soldier. I never explained anything to him, either. Now I see why he always found it so annoying. Really not going to tell me anything at all?’
‘I can’t say as I’d know how to begin.’
‘As a matter of interest: which direction is your Mr Heidt’s house? Just wondering, I won’t bother him.’
The publican glanced eastwards. ‘I don’t know as it would be right to say, sir. Irresponsible, you see. You should get home.’
‘But if I said I was going for a stroll, didn’t need an umbrella…’
‘I’d heartily urge you not to dally, sir. I really would.’
‘Oh, I never dally,’ he said. ‘I wander, I deviate, I go off on tangents and sometimes circumambulate; I occasionally shilly-shally, dawdle or potter. I procrastinate, ratiocinate, and from time to time I do actually get lost. But I never dally. Bad for the brain.’
And he walked out into the gathering storm.
*
There was indeed a dark cloud looming out towards the east, a pendulous monster grumbling and growling to itself, and he could feel the psychic backwash already. Your average rainstorm tasted of mountains and seas, of the anticipation of drenched laundry and of crops raised and eaten. It was a real old lifecycle smorgasbord. The right sort of storm could make you feel alive and perky and even frisky. And soggy, obviously. But this one had none of that easy nature, no goodwill, no lightness. It reeked of smashing things flat, of pounding them into nothingness.
Say one thing for Dai and Owen, say this: they knew a bad’un when they saw it.
The first bolt of lightning flickered, stark nacreous white cracking from cloud to cloud. Then another, and a moment later the thunder from the first. But no rain. No water. Nothing which would nurture, just a warm, gritty wind and the prickle of electricity – and a boiling, metallic fury he could feel in his gums.
He smacked his lips and ran his tongue over his teeth, then walked across the cobble
s towards it. The storm seemed to be over the town and yet it was right here, in the street. There was a shape in it, in the dust and the clouds and the roiling shadows. A man-shape, if a man kept blowing himself out like the flame of a candle.
‘There you are,’ he murmured, into the wind. ‘But what are you?’
The answer, when it came, was very loud and blew him all the way back down the street.
*
Christina de Souza could hear the storm blowing up outside her windows, and she smiled and hunkered down in her chair. There was nothing more pleasant than being inside when the weather outside was bad, hearing the rattle of the casements and knowing that however rotten it got out there it was safe in here.
There were no more tasks left in the day. She could sit and read her book – a most disreputable detective story – and later she would make herself dinner and enjoy some music on the radio. Solitude was not loneliness, and she never really felt alone, anyway. She turned the page. She was reasonably sure that Aaron Catton would survive his latest encounter with the Iron Fist Gang, but at the moment his situation definitely seemed perilous. She wondered what his family thought about his line of work, and whether his parents ever wished he’d just marry the curvaceous Jessica Jarvis who worked on the news desk at the City Paper and choose a less perilous profession. Surely, they must. She turned the page.
The front door slammed open – really slammed, she could hear the doorknob crunch the plaster of her hallway wall – and then the wind roared in, a real gale force like nothing she’d ever known. The geegaws on her mantelpiece shuddered, toppled and flew off. The china dog shattered on the floor. She heard windows banging elsewhere in the house, shattering, and bangs and crashes as more of her possessions fell destructively to Earth, and then John Jones was staggering into her parlour, barrelled along by a vicious torrent of air which seemed almost to be just for him. The house shook as if struck, and she realised as all the lights went out that it had been, that her home had actually been struck by lightning, and then it was struck again and she could smell burning, then and again and again.
PAH! PAH! POMMMM!
A windowpane cracked, and then another, and Jones shouted ‘Run!’
‘My house!’ she objected, as he grabbed for her hand. She batted him off.
He dropped down beside her, spoke fast and very earnestly. ‘It’s on fire and in a minute it will be more on fire and then so will we. Really, Christina: you need to run!’
‘It’s all I have!’
‘I’ll get you another one!’
He hauled her out of the chair, and abruptly she was flying down the corridor to the back door, almost literally flying, and behind her the chair was lit actinic white and then it was gone, burned to ash by lightning, and she could see – it was impossible, and absurd, but she could see the actual storm inside her house and chasing them down the corridor, a faceless, twisting snarl of hateful energy reaching out like an arm.
She could feel her hair lifting on her body, felt her clothes spark, and knew that was what happened just before you were hit.
They were nearly at the garden door. She couldn’t imagine how it would do them any good.
She wondered whether what happened next would hurt. She thought, probably, that it would.
Jones – and she was pretty sure this was somehow all his fault – reached into his jacket and produced a short, glowing stick of metal and pointed it at the door. She heard the lock click, saw him reach out for the handle.
She looked back, and saw a snake of white light reach out for her, but strangely slowly, as if time was stopping and she could just step outside.
He opened the door.
And drew her through into somewhere which was not her garden. It was… big. She felt an eerie sense of space and scale. The walls were segmented like a circus tent, and each segment was bordered by buttresses of metal or of something else, something which looked as if it had grown there. Coral? Was there a giant coral reef in her garden now? What about planning permission? There’d be the most terrible row.
He closed the door smartly, and she heard the howl of the storm, the dull impact against the other side of the door, and knew with absolute certainty that there was no way it was coming in here. Not through that door. She reached out and touched it. Cool and metallic. There were discs on it, or shields, which buzzed under her fingertips.
She looked around, and there he was, ruffled but composed, sprawled on a pile of hats. Not just a pile. A dune, she thought, like in the desert. There were modern hats in the most rakish style, Scotch bonnets and metal helmets which ought to be on a knight, and some strange hats which were only hats because they clearly went on your head.
On his head.
‘Who are you, really?’ she said.
He smiled brightly. ‘I’m the Doctor,’ he said, as if that explained everything.
*
They climbed across a small mountain of shoes. The air smelled of salt water, and she thought about coral again. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.
‘The TARDIS,’ he said. ‘Storeroom 90. Well, we were always in the TARDIS. But this is where I keep all my old clothes.’
‘Right,’ she said, patiently, ‘and where is my garden?’
He looked back at her, helped her up onto a stack of brogues.
‘My garden?’ she persisted. ‘Which is what is usually behind that door.’
‘It’s where it always is. Which isn’t quite as simple as you might think.’
She didn’t think any of this was simple. There was a door over the next rise, though, and she slid down behind him. ‘If you open that, is there going to be a storm on the other side? Will we die?’
‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, probably not. Well, I don’t think so. Well.’ He frowned, whipped out the metal thing again. ‘Sonic screwdriver.’ He pointed it at the door, peered at it. ‘No,’ he said more confidently. ‘No.’
‘And what was that back there?’
‘Storm. Nasty one.’
‘Which came into my house.’ She scowled at him. ‘I’d like the truth, please.’
‘All right. Mobile discorporate mechanico-temporal intelligence manifesting in a semi-stable combat aspect with limited power reserves.’ He opened the door, and stepped through. ‘You don’t get many of those to the pound. A lot like your bacon and eggs, by the way.’
She understood the words, most of them, but the combination made no sense at all.
‘Limited?’ she demanded.
‘Yes. Well, everything’s limited. Almost everything. But this is more limited than most things. As in, limited energy. Comprehensibly so. A few days, maybe, at this rate.’
‘Well, that must be good.’
He looked dubious. She realised she could hear a sort of endless, low-level groaning, as if she were in an old submarine, far below the surface of the sea. Too far below. And then the noise again, without the fury but with a sort of patient inevitability which was almost worse.
Pah pah pom.
He looked up abruptly with a sort of awful anticipation, then shook his head when the sound died away, as if he was being silly. ‘Not the storm. Temporal sheer. For now, anyway.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘Hmm? No. That’s disastrous.’ He hesitated, rubbed his ribs. ‘Ow. We just lost navigation. And the first-floor kitchen. Well. There goes Christmas dinner.’
She was about to point out that she had no idea what that meant, that Christmas was months away, that his ribs couldn’t possibly tell him anything of the kind. And then, as she saw what was in the next room, she said, ‘Oh.’
‘On the upside,’ he said, ‘if it hadn’t been a limited construction, I could never have used the TARDIS safety system to get us back into the central phase nexus. On the downside, temporal sheer inside and outside the TARDIS. Well, that and… Are you all right?’
She was staring at the room. The floor. The walls. Technically it was a lot like the last one, with the same alarmingly unfamiliar curves
and colours. But it was also not the same at all, because it did not contain clothes.
‘What… what’s this?’
‘Storeroom 89.’
‘And these are really… diamonds?’
‘Mm. Yes. I did say I’d get you another house.’ He filled one pocket. Millions of pounds, she thought. Millions and millions and millions and… She folded her arms so as not to reach out and grab a great handful. He looked at her curiously, and she flinched as he poked the screwdriver thing in her direction. It tickled. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Harmless.’ She wondered if he meant her. ‘Hmm. Come on. Just through here.’
He led the way, and she followed in his steps, absurdly worried about crushing the shining points of light beneath her feet.
The next door opened into a metal corridor, and he led her unerringly left, right, down, up some stairs and then they were in an arched, circular room with a strange central machine, and he seemed to relax.
‘Console room,’ he said. ‘We’re safe here. For now, anyway.’
‘Who are you?’ she demanded again.
‘Actually, that’s not the question,’ he replied. ‘The real question is: who are you? Because you’re not Christina de Souza, I know that.’
‘I certainly am!’
‘Not so much. I’ve met Christina de Souza. Saved the world with her. And she kissed me.’ She jolted up, outraged. He raised a hand. ‘That’s exactly what I mean! You’re not her. She’d have gone all sultry and pouty when I said that. And a room full of diamonds? The Christina I know would be asking if she could borrow a sack. Well, she’d have nicked a sack, if I had a sack. Which I do. Thousands of them. Storeroom 104.’ He watched her.
She didn’t say ‘Where’s that?’ and knew he’d been wondering if she would.
Doctor Who: Keeping Up with the Joneses Page 2