For a long breath they all frowned and then laughed with each other.
But neither Putta nor Bryony laughed for quite as long as the twins or looked quite as carefree as they went indoors.
INSIDE THE COTTAGE, ALL seemed rather calmer than it had been before. The many, many tea things and many, many crumbs had been cleared away and, as Julia said contentedly, most of the stains would be removable. ‘A little butter here and there is the sign of a really excellent tea gathering…You must come again. Perhaps tomorrow…’
The Doctor was nowhere to be seen, although his hat was lying on the floor beside his empty armchair. Bryony thought it seemed almost as remarkable without him under it as it did when it was keeping his hair in check.
Suddenly, Bryony had a strange feeling. It was the kind of prickle at the back of the neck which her early ancestors might have experienced when a both angry and stealthy mammoth was creeping up behind them to tread on precious and fragile things – things like their heads. ‘Um…Is the Doctor about?’
Mrs Fetch nodded absently. ‘Yes, dear. He just popped to the bathroom…a few moments ago…Perhaps longer…I was tidying. Gentlemen need so much more maintenance than ladies, don’t they?’
Bryony wasn’t quite sure what this meant, but she was pretty certain that the Doctor wasn’t overly concerned with his personal appearance. She was just about to comment on this when she heard – along with everyone else – a loud cry. And then a much louder cry. It sounded like someone in horrible agony, like someone in despair.
As Bryony sprang forward to do something about this and Putta sprang backwards to prevent himself getting into trouble or being injured, the door at the end of the passageway battered open and the Doctor half staggered out. ‘Ah,’ he said. Ah…’ His expression suggested that he had been to places no being should have to see and that he was very tired. ‘Ah.’
Bryony held out her arms to him as he banged along the corridor and it became clear to everyone that he was completely drenched.
At which point he shook his head like an extremely tall dog, spattering Julia Fetch’s carefully hand-printed wallpaper with daubs and splashes of water. Then he straightened and beamed at them – very much like a dog which has rolled in something terrible and wants to get a biscuit and tickled ears for being so clever. ‘I feel much better now,’ he announced. ‘Remarkably refreshed, I’d say. At least I think I do…’ He shook Julia Fetch’s hand and then kissed it, a small torrent of water dripping from his sleeve as he did so. ‘But there may be a slight problem with your plumbing. Although I do appreciate enthusiasm, even in bathroom fittings…’ His shoulders seemed to flinch briefly and he motioned Putta and Bryony towards the door without meeting their eyes. ‘Must head off now…places to do and things to meet…’ He left heavy and dark wet footprints across the newly cleared carpet as he retrieved his hat and slapped it down on top of his soaked hair. ‘Lovely tea, everyone. Charming and delightful. ‘He gently shook Xavier’s hand. ‘Really the best I’ve had in centuries.’ And then he shook Honor’s hand. ‘A pleasure to meet you.’ After that he loped to the door, dripping as he progressed. ‘Well, come on, then.’ He span round, sending more trails and lumps of water in all directions and then was outside before Putta and Bryony could also say their goodbyes and hurry after him. ‘We don’t have all day, you know. We may have very much less than all day…’
Bryony left the cottage with Putta, refusing a generous offer of extra cucumber sandwiches for the journey back across the golf course. As she passed the delightfully perfect garden and walked out into the wonderful afternoon, she knew that all was not as it should be. She had that mammoth-creeping-up-behind-you-with-long-violent-tusks-and-big-bad-thoughts feeling, even more strongly than before. Something was definitely wrong.
AND AROUND ARBROATH THE afternoon was passing rather peculiarly for a number of people. In a restaurant on Ladyloan, staff found themselves amazed by the rapid appearance of dozens of famished visitors well after the lunch hour. Each of the customers demanded macaroni cheese and a pot of tea. It wasn’t so much the order that was peculiar – macaroni cheese was always popular – it was more that the crowd of visitors all forked and spooned their meals in exactly the same rhythm, very rapidly until everything was gone. Then they sat in complete silence, motionless and looking puzzled.
Mr and Mrs Potter, up on a visit from Solihull, were walking round the local Woolworths quite contentedly until – as observers would confirm – Mrs Potter turned to her husband and started to throw handful after handful of pick ’n’ mix sweets at him while shouting, ‘Don’t you dare think that about Sandra Billington!’
At this, Mr Potter had stared at her and then slowly begun laughing helplessly between bouts of shouting, ‘You never did hide it! I always knew you hated my mother. And I hated her, too! She was a dreadful woman! And so are you! Good grief, I’ve married my mother!’ He then started catching some of the missiles raining down on him and then jamming his mouth full of pineapple cubes, fizzy cola bottles, white mice, strawberry bonbons and other treats.
And meanwhile, American tourists Martha and Paul Cluny, along with their son Paul Junior, were visiting Saint Vigeans and what Martha called ‘the quaint little cottage museum’ that housed a small but lovely collection of carved Pictish stones. The stones had been moved here from the Saint Vigeans church after Victorian renovations.
Their guide – who they hadn’t strictly asked to guide them and who may only have been an overenthusiastic local, it was hard to be sure – told them about the legend that the village church of Saint Vigeans was held suspended over a vast underground lake. In the underground lake there was supposed to be a kelpie, or a demon, or something else unpleasant which might or might not have constructed the building out of sandstone while being enslaved.
The guide didn’t clearly explain by whom the monster was enslaved and although this kind of missing detail didn’t annoy his parents, it really did irritate Paul Junior. He was easily irritated. He was eleven and thoroughly tired of being called the same thing as his father. Or not even that – on some occasions he was just ‘Junior’. It was humiliating. And he felt it indicated a lack of imagination on his parents’ part. Paul, by contrast, had a great deal of imagination. When he was older he was going to have himself legally renamed – probably as Dirk, or Zandor. He didn’t think that Akron Ohio (which is where he lived) had too many Dirks or Zandors.
The Cluny family were also told that, for a while, the congregation of Saint Vigeans would stay away from services for fear of the kelpie, or demon, or unpleasant thing’s curse. What the curse might involve also wasn’t made too clear.
This made Martha Cluny smile indulgently because she already understood that her husband came historically from a strange and superstitious people and this just confirmed how weird his ancestors must have been and explained why he could never keep his den tidy and always injured himself doing simple chores. For some reason, her husband didn’t – as was usual – find her smile endearing, or mistake it for an expression of affection. In fact, he got quite shirty with her and wandered off to study some of the carvings by himself, in great detail – because he knew this would annoy her, because she was still jet-lagged and didn’t enjoy historical activities as much as he did.
While his parents went into a huff with each other, Paul stared at the back of the vast, impressive Drosten Stone. It was carved with the images of strange beasts: perhaps a bear, a dog, a wild boar: and an oddly caped figure holding a bow and arrow. There were also intricately winding knots carved there – as if someone had woven threads of stone together into patterns, or signs, or messages.
It made Paul feel dizzy, but also was oddly wonderful, to simply stare at the patterns and then into the patterns. As he stared, the carvings began to shimmer and then to ooze gently across the ancient, pitted surface. This didn’t worry him – it made him feel very calm, in fact. It almost like dreaming in a very safe place with his eyes wide open – and his mind wide open,
too.
Then gently, a tendril of stone dabbed against his right thumb, as if it was shy and trying to say hello – as if it liked him. This was when he realised that, somehow, he had placed his hand on to the stone. He hadn’t noticed himself touch it and this was perhaps partly because the stone was as warm and familiar-feeling as his own hand.
He smiled and, across his thinking, strolled the exciting and inspiring sentence ‘You are the jewel at the heart of the universe.’ This made him feel spectacularly happy. Nobody called Junior would be anywhere near the heart of the universe – it would have to be Zandor from now on.
His hand softly, gradually, began to sink into the surface of the stone and, as he watched it do so, he thought this was exactly the right thing to be happening. For no reason he could identify, he was absolutely sure that if he was with the Drosten and the Drosten was with him, then everything would be wonderful for ever.
‘Paul…’ His mother’s voice jabbed in from apparently very far away. ‘Paul James Cluny, I am speaking to you.’
He began to think that setting his forehead against the stone would be the best idea yet and the sandstone rippled and glittered, right where he could tell it wanted him to lean.
And then, as generations of mothers have throughout human history, Paul James Cluny’s mother did indeed yell. ‘You stop that this minute!’ And he felt a sharp tug at his shoulder.
‘What…?’
‘Don’t you say what to me, young man. You say I beg your pardon if you know what’s good for you. I swear, sometimes you are exactly like your father.’ And she allowed a picture of hairy men running about in primitive clothing and not having invented civilised cookery to wander across her thinking.
Paul Jnr was slightly disorientated and seemed to have lost something very important. He even peered around him and down at the ground in case the something had fallen out of his pockets. He couldn’t exactly recall what he’d been doing for the last few minutes, or when he had walked over to this part of the small museum – it wasn’t exactly the kind of place you could get lost inside…He sighed and became a touch more like his usual self. He looked about, enjoying being unimpressed – this was just the kind of dump your no-use mom and dad would drag you to, because they hated you and didn’t want you to have a really cool name.
As he was led off in mild disgrace, Paul Jnr began to enjoy something more like his customary resentments and daydreams for the future. But, just as the museum door was about to close behind him, he shivered. It was as if some monumentally large intelligence had flexed and turned in deep, deep water. It was as if the intelligence had swum up and looked right into him. He shivered again and – although he regretted this as soon as he did it – Paul James Cluny Junior took hold of his mother’s hand.
THE DOCTOR WAS TALKING. He loved talking, adored it. When you were in real trouble, it was one of the better options. Many beings in the universe would opt for running away, which he felt wasn’t an exciting or interesting enough choice for a bold and handsome time-travelling genius. Many more beings, on finding themselves in stressful circumstances, would try to kill other beings, or at least hit them, lock them up, or otherwise make them very miserable. In the long run – and time travellers know a great deal about the long run – the Doctor knew this kind of thing didn’t really work. And as someone who had wide experience of all manner of futuristic and primitive weapons trying to kill him, not to mention being hit, locked up and bullied, he felt it wouldn’t be all that possible for him to indulge in such things himself. So he talked. Just occasionally he ran away to think about what he needed to do before he ran back again. But mainly he talked.
Today he felt, in all of his bones, that running away and never coming back was his only option.
This was why he was talking so hard.
He had, since he left the cottage with his three companions, talked about the late designs of Leonardo da Vinci, the arrangements of streets in Cologne and the volcanic instability of the Yellowstone Caldera. He attempted to enjoy using words like basaltic magma and rhyolitic magma, which would normally entertain him no end.
It wasn’t working, though. The Doctor was more frightened than he ever had been.
Worse than that – he couldn’t locate the reason why. He knew the reason was out there, but he just couldn’t find it. There were now whole areas of his memory that had apparently been made inaccessible. When he turned his concentration towards them, he felt as if he was trying to scale a very tall cliff made of highly polished marble. Or else as if he was being rocked to sleep.
At which point – preceded by a jolt of intense pain – another savage thought pounced into the Doctor’s reeling head.
HELLO
YOU ARE THE DOCTOR
I AM I
HELLO DOCTOR
Whatever it was, it now knew his name.
BRYONY WASN’T ABSOLUTELY SURPRISED when the Doctor suddenly flopped to his knees. Although she didn’t know him very well, she realised that it was odd and very noticeable if a man with such wide, striking and trustworthy eyes, a man who liked people so much, didn’t meet your gaze even once as you walked along. It was probably also a bad sign if he talked nonsense at great speed, as if someone had a gun to his head and was ordering him to gabble. And it was also probably a really terrible sign if his scarf looked somehow depressed. Actually, his kneeling rapidly on to the turf at the edge of the eighth green was the only thing he’d done in ages that made a bit of sense. ‘Doctor? Doctor, are you all right?’
‘He’s fallen over,’ Putta told her, as if she might not have noticed.
‘I can see that,’ she snapped, regretting it slightly when Putta flinched. ‘Doctor? Are you OK?’
‘Oh, absolutely.’ Those large, trustworthy eyes peered sadly up at her, plainly in pain. ‘I take an interest in golf course grass varieties. It’s a kind of hobby.’ He ran his large fingers through the grass leaves, as if he were calming the fur of a large, uneasy animal. ‘This is a mixture of creeping red fescue and velvet bentgrass.’ It was clear that he was attempting to smile, but all that his face could manage was something half-formed and lonely. ‘The peculiar thing is that I don’t remember even knowing the rules of golf before now…I have the distinct impression that yesterday I was entirely baffled by what could possibly be appealing about repeatedly knocking away and then retrieving and then dropping into a hole and then retrieving a small white sphere across various reproductions of a common Scottish coastal habitat. I mean, it’s not as dreadful a pastime as collecting bandan eggs…’ He glowered at Putta and became himself again for an instant.
But then the Doctor subsided again, almost seeming to shrink as he continued, ‘Not that one can’t alter one’s hobbies – no need to get in a rut, as they say. As someone must have said…’
When Bryony took the Doctor’s hand, her consciousness was immediately filled beyond its capacity with a torrent of images and emotions: a Victorian policeman looking stunned by something near his feet, a magnificent sunset involving two suns, slender azure-leaved trees arching overhead while uniformed creatures with insect-like faces swung out of them on glistening ropes and then – for a breathless instant – a swirling tunnel of silver, blue, black, brown, this urgent rush of light and speed and…time…it was time, too…time was pouring and leaping up around her and she was falling into it…
‘UMM, THAT IS…IF you’re both going to fall over…’ Putta was now sitting on the grass between the woozy Bryony and the groggy Doctor. ‘It’s not a very interesting game. It makes about as much sense as golf…’ Although he was delighted to be able to gaze into Bryony’s face with devoted concern, he hadn’t a clue how to help her – or, for that matter, the Doctor. ‘I mean…Please feel better…’ His knowledge that he was useless in a crisis of any kind – and this did look very much like a crisis – meant he was feeling sweaty and nauseous as a result. ‘Get better…Please…I have a Medipac in my, um…’ He didn’t like being on the golf course – moving across it quic
kly was bad enough…sitting on it reminded him of feeling alien teeth closing around his ankles.
‘Space ship…space man…’ mumbled Bryony and half-smiled at him.
This made Putta’s heart – which was in any case significantly larger than an average human being’s – swell with affection.
Bryony emerged a little more from her dream state and started to look extremely concerned. ‘He’s a Time Lord. The Doctor is a Time Lord.’
This was both disappointing and weird. Although she’d said it with great assurance, Putta knew she was wrong and couldn’t even work out how an Earth woman had heard of such exalted and terrifying beings. Time Lord probably meant something else on Earth – possibly someone who made sure you didn’t spend too long on golf courses. This came especially to mind because Putta could see a group of four pastel-clad golfers approaching them in what might be something of a bad mood. They were giving him – even from a distance – the impression that lying about on the tidily mown areas of the grass wasn’t encouraged. ‘Ah…I think we should get up now. That is, if either of you think that, too…’
‘He’s a Time Lord.’ Bryony’s voice was ringing with wonder, pure amazement. Then this faded and she simply looked puzzled and a bit mugged.
‘Yes, you said that. Only he can’t be. Time Lords don’t wander about tedious little planets like this…I mean to say…lovely little planets like this…They don’t wander about at all – they…well, they sit in judgement, or…urn, think wise thoughts and wear robes…Look at him. He wouldn’t even know how to put on a robe.’
‘You start on the outside and work your way in,’ the Doctor groaned. ‘And much good all the robe-wearing and thinking does them – useless lot.’ He sat up gingerly, holding his head. ‘Yes, I am a Time Lord.’
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