by Steve Cole
‘Anyway, I’d better go or I’ll be late for school. I hope this message gets to you someday. When you need it most.’
With a final smile, Susan’s image flickered, then evaporated. The Doctor stared at the empty space for a very long time. Seconds, at least. Then she snapped into action, scrolling through the endless list of titles, unsure where to begin. ‘Crisis on Poosh’, ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, ‘Attack of the Postmen’, ‘The Timelash’, ‘100,000 BC aka An Unearthly Child aka The One in the Stone Age’.
‘Intelligent labelling system’s a bit random,’ thought the Doctor, her finger hovering over the activation button. Finally, she made her selection – and pressed PLAY.
The TARDIS console pinged again. Result! The custard creams had been replenished! The Doctor eagerly plucked one from the dispenser and settled back to watch hazy images form on the screen.
As she chewed, she decided she’d FaceTime Graham, Ryan and Yaz later, but for now she was happily distracted with the gift that Susan had left behind: an endless supply of stories; a comfort blanket of fond memories and old friends.
And a reminder.
That she was never, ever alone.
11
The Shadow Passes
by Paul Cornell
The Doctor had brought them to Calapia for its rural charm, beautiful weather and magnificent ruins. The Calapians, she’d told Yaz, were ‘a wonderful bunch, throw a party at the drop of a hat, six heads, lots of hats’. She’d also said they didn’t like to talk about the ruins, and a bit later she’d added that she’d never figured out why, two facts which Yaz had placed in the drawer in her head marked, ‘Well, I hope that doesn’t bite us in the bottom’.
Calapia had turned out to be as advertised: rural; charming; beautiful and magnificent. But the Calapians had been nowhere to be found. As Yaz and her friends had explored the buildings in one of the planet’s major cities – buildings which looked like they’d had people in them yesterday, people who’d left and carefully locked their doors behind them – Yaz had thought to herself that that mental drawer of hers got opened a lot. That there wasn’t actually a lot left in there, because most of the things that she’d suspected would bite her and her friends in the bottom actually had.
She’d been thinking that when Graham had found the sign. It had said, the letters wobbling a little in the way that indicated the TARDIS was translating for them, ‘This way to the shelters’.
‘Am I overreacting,’ Graham had said, ‘or is that just a tiny bit worrying?’
Which was how they’d ended up in a bare room, one hundred feet underground, sitting in a circle, with the names of famous people stuck to their foreheads.
The Calapian who’d opened the door of the shelter when they’d knocked on it had been shocked to find there were still tourists who didn’t know about the Death Moon that passed over the planet every 64 years. They had quickly ushered the Doctor and friends inside and had assigned them a room. They’d asked if they had any hats and had seemed pleasantly surprised when they hadn’t. Hat storage alone, they’d said, was taking up a whole corridor down here.
‘How long’s it going to be? I mean, this is a moon, that’ll come and go in a night, yeah?’ Ryan had asked.
The Calapian had looked awkward on all six of its faces. Then it had told them they would be down here for three of their Earth weeks. There were only minutes before the passage would begin. They had had no hope of getting back to the TARDIS.
‘Brilliant,’ the Doctor had said, a word which had been completely at odds with the sort of words Yaz had been about to utter. It hadn’t matched the looks on the faces of Graham and Ryan either. ‘Three weeks of indoor games! Result!’
It had become clear almost immediately that the Doctor, though she liked the idea of indoor games, didn’t actually know the rules of many. She’d had in her pocket a chess set, and she could play that, except she insisted on making individual noises for each piece when she moved. She’d also had a travel set of a game she insisted was really called ‘Scaribble’, despite what it said on the box, because that was how they pronounced it on a planet the name of which she couldn’t herself pronounce. They’d tried to play that first, but the Doctor kept putting down letter tiles which formed the names of places and beings she’d known, or just to make a pattern on the board. Then she’d rearrange other people’s tiles to suit that pattern and after half a day of that Graham had declared he was going on strike. He went to find the facilities, and came back reporting that, to everyone’s relief, things in that department were much like they were at home.
So the Doctor had asked them what they’d like to play. Ryan had played the game with the names stuck on foreheads at parties when he was younger, and if there was one thing the Doctor had in her pockets it was pens, as well as a handy gadget that could manufacture something like paper. ‘Except it decays into compost after a day. Or if it doesn’t it becomes, you know, highly explosive.’
Which was how they’d come to be all sitting in that circle.
From where she was, Yaz could see that the Doctor had a note reading ‘Lewis Capaldi’ stuck to her forehead, Graham had ‘Mel and Sue’ and Ryan had ‘Theodoric the Great’. She, of course, had no idea what was stuck to her own forehead. Though whatever it was clearly delighted Ryan and Graham, who’d come up with it between them.
‘All right,’ said Ryan. ‘So, am I… alive?’
The Doctor looked alarmed. ‘D’you think you might not be?’
‘Is this person alive?’ Ryan pointed to his piece of paper.
‘Wait, when is this?’ said Graham. ‘I mean, when is now? ’Cause we’ll have to put down a rule to mean—’
‘Is this person,’ continued Ryan, ‘alive in 2020?’
‘That’s a terrible impersonation,’ said the Doctor.
‘What?’
‘Of him on the piece of paper. You sound nothing like him.’
‘Ah,’ said Graham, nudging Ryan, ‘it’s a him.’
Ryan pointed again at the piece of paper and paced his next sentence like there was a social media handclap between every word. ‘I don’t know who I am.’
‘Bit soon for that,’ said the Doctor, ‘we’ve only been here one day.’
It ended up being one of the longest party games Yaz had ever taken part in. Or maybe it just felt that way. Following Ryan’s painful discovery of the history of the late Roman empire and a bit of confusion about what the word ‘goth’ meant in that context, Graham’s correct guess about how he could be two people at once, and the Doctor’s anecdotes about playing the triangle for the ‘lovely Scottish lad and his dad’, Yaz decided to make a serious attempt to deduce whose name she was wearing. ‘Am I a woman?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Ryan and Graham quickly and immediately.
Yaz glanced over to see the Doctor open and close her mouth, as if deciding not to say something. Yaz wasn’t sure she’d ever seen the Doctor make that decision before.
‘OK. Am I famous?’
‘Yeah, pretty much,’ said Ryan and Graham but, again, the Doctor looked as if she had a problem with that but didn’t quite want to voice it.
That, thought Yaz, was unique. Unique was where answers lived. One of her criminology lecturers had said that. Who wasn’t the Doctor sure about? To the point where she wasn’t even willing to commit to them being a particular gender? Oh. She pointed at the Doctor. ‘I’m you,’ she said.
Ryan and Graham shouted in defeat, and the Doctor smiled an enormous smile, like sunshine through clouds.
Shortly after, the Doctor fixed all their phones so they could follow stuff from home and added lots of games to them too, though a lot of them didn’t make much sense. The prospect of being shut up in here with her slowly changed from, as Ryan had put it in a whisper, ‘like being stuck in a lift with a bee’ to something a lot more relaxing. Yaz watched, fascinated, as she changed how she acted, almost every hour, just happening to start telling a relaxing, funny story as the night ar
rived, or turning out her pockets to find miniaturised books. Every now and then she would take herself off for a brisk walk around the room with one or the other of them when they needed to vent or just needed the exercise.
At one point, a small automated device arrived, carrying a basic meal of local fruit and what turned out to be a sort of bread. The Doctor used the sonic screwdriver to confirm they could eat it. Yaz noticed her sizing them all up as they did so, while they talked about what they’d do when they got home, a frown on her face, as if just for a second they’d disappointed her.
A little later that same day, Yaz joined the Doctor on one of her walks. She wanted to share what she’d observed. ‘I thought you said you were socially awkward?’ she said. ‘’Cause I’m not seeing that right now.’
The Doctor looked worried. ‘I am. Often. Seriously. But this is a task. I’m good at tasks. Thanks for noticing. Don’t tell the others. I don’t want them to start seeing me doing it. Or they’ll get tired too.’
‘You made yourself annoying so we’d feel relieved when you stopped.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Did that without thinking about it. Relief that summat’s better than you thought it would be will get you through a day or so of awfulness. I learned that at Woodstock.’
‘Do you do that a lot?’
‘What, go to 1960s hippy rock festivals? No. Never again. The mud. The poetry. The nudity. Or was that the Somme?’
‘I mean make yourself look smaller than you are.’
The Doctor’s face gurned as it only did when her brain was wrestling with something she didn’t particularly enjoy considering. ‘S’pose. I used to like it when people underestimated me, but in this body it’s a bit rubbish, because when I go “Aha!” and I want people to stop underestimating me, they just keep right on underestimating me.’
Yaz felt that. ‘We don’t do that, though. None of us. I sometimes think if we could see all you were, at once, it’d be too much. We couldn’t deal.’
The Doctor looked bashful and pleased all at the same time, which was another of Yaz’s favourite looks of hers. ‘Well, I certainly can’t. I’m a bit too much for me. I’m more than I knew about. Still processing all that. I sometimes think that’s why I change personality instead of just making my body younger. I need to switch myself off and on again so I can handle all the memories, so a lot of it feels like it happened to someone else. I get a different perspective on what I’ve done. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. There’s this girl in a mirror. Where I put her. That doesn’t suit who I am now. When we get out of here… Oh, this is getting deep and meaningful, isn’t it?’ Yaz was about to say that was fine, but the Doctor swung to include the others, suddenly pulling another surprise from her pockets. ‘Balloon animals!’
Graham raised his hand, which was half a request and half an order for the Doctor to halt. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘about where that meal came from. I think we should go find some Calapians and say thanks.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ryan, ‘see if we can help out.’
And there on the Doctor’s face, Yaz saw that enormous smile again.
And so the days passed in balloon animals and yoga and karaoke and also in learning all sorts of things about what Calapians liked to do, as the Doctor and her friends cooked and distributed alongside them.
On the last night of the passing of the Death Moon, everyone in the shelter came together and ate and was quiet, and all those heads lowered in remembrance of what had gone and those who’d been lost. The heads of the Doctor and her friends were lowered with them.
Yaz felt, by the end of it, that she’d had a rest, honestly, physically and spiritually. Something had been proven to her in isolation. The Doctor saw that look on her face as they waited for the big doors to open. ‘In the midst of death,’ she said, so gently that only Yaz could hear it, ‘we are in life. Together.’
The doors opened and they stepped out into the daylight. Graham and Ryan grabbed each other and laughed.
Yaz took a deep breath. And the air was good.
12
Shadow of a Doubt
by Paul Cornell
In the ruins of Andromeda, I found a mirror from old Earth. It had survived far longer than a mirror should. It was made of interesting and suspicious materials. I kept it in my tent. One night, in the mirror appeared a little girl with a balloon. I had good reason to be afraid. I’d known a girl like that. I’d been hunted by a girl like that. But this wasn’t quite her. And she didn’t seem frightening. There was something broken about her. She asked me if I was him. I’d have replied with something cutting, but she looked so sad in that moment. She told me that he, or often she, had kept visiting her, once a year, forever. There had been the old one with all the hair. He had been the worst. There had been the one I travelled with. He had been the worst too. There had been the thin white aristocrat and the one who couldn’t walk and the one with the red hair who thought he was the last. But they’d kept coming. They always asked the same question. They asked her if she was sorry. She’d tried so many different things. She’d asked them how she could be sorry for a story that had happened many times in many ways. She hadn’t even been present for all of them. She could see that from inside the mirror. They’d told her they were a story that had happened many times in many ways and they would not excuse her. All she had to do was say sorry. But she could not bring herself to. She told me she was incapable of it. But the look in her eye when she said it made me not believe it. She asked me to let her out, then. She asked me to do what he would not. As I often have. I asked her if she was sorry for what she did to me. She tried to tell me that was a different her. I said that was a story I’d heard before. I said she’d lived far longer than she should have and had learned nothing. I returned the mirror to the ruins where he would find it. I came back that way a few years later and it had gone. I don’t know if she ever got out. Perhaps he returned her, in the end, to where he found her. To all the places he’d found her. Long ago, in an English spring.
13
Shadow in the Mirror
by Paul Cornell
I don’t know how long I was in the mirror for. Centuries, at least. I saw the Doctors on a regular basis. They found me no matter what mirror I was exploring that day. Some of them didn’t even seem to remember much about me. But they had always demanded I say sorry. They said they’d release me if I did. I always refused. Because I wasn’t sorry. Then they went away.
Until one day a new Doctor found me. She hadn’t visited me before. She had a swoop of blonde hair and a great seriousness about her, despite the fact that she wore a costume with a rainbow across her chest that said she liked to entertain children. On her lapel she wore a badge of a white poppy. ‘So the red-headed Doctor was wrong,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t the last.’
She told me she didn’t know about that. But that one rule, perhaps the only solid rule, of being the Doctor was that Doctors didn’t know much about themselves. She said she had come here to break another rule, a rule about crossing her own future, about changing decisions her other selves had made and were going to make. Because she thought it was a rule that should be broken. She’d been locked in with some friends somewhere. She’d considered her sins. She’d decided there were several sicknesses in her that needed curing. She asked me if I still wanted to get out.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But if you’ve come to gloat, you should know I haven’t suffered. I’ve been to every mirror in the universe and I’ve frightened many children. I will not bow to you. I will not say sorry. Ever.’
She said she understood that. That in many ways it was her own fault that myself and my family had killed so many people.
That made me scream at her. ‘What I did wasn’t up to you!’
She told me what I already knew, that if she released me from the mirror I’d have a life of days or weeks, my normal lifetime, starting again from the point where it had been suspended.
‘I still want to get out,’ I said.
‘But I will not say sorry. My family did what they needed to do. What they were born to do. If you let me out I’ll keep on killing lesser beings and then you’ll have that on your conscience too.’
She asked me if I knew what mercy was. I wouldn’t reply. She said then that mercy had nothing to do with fairness. That mercy set fairness aside and said there was no getting even, no balancing the scales. There was only deciding against pain. There was only being kind to yourself by being kind to others. She said she didn’t need me to be sorry.
And she took a big hammer from her pocket.
I jumped back from the mirror as she smashed it. She smashed it time after time, smashed it into a million pieces. Then she held out her hand to me. The expression on her face was stern, not welcoming. She said something about this being an end to bad luck.
I didn’t take her hand. But I did step out of the mirror.
She said there was nothing on this world. That was why she’d come to free me here. She took me to her TARDIS. She stayed looking determined as she operated the controls. She watched me in case I touched anything. I was shaking inside, trying to deal with my freedom, hoping against hope this wasn’t some further twist on her revenge.
When the doors opened, there was my home. There were the spires and the great spiral troughs. There were my people, linking in the great chains, sunning themselves on the rocks in their natural form.
She told me to get out. She told me that I wouldn’t have time to leave this place before the end of my natural life. That I would be free to live and die as I should have in the first place. That she had made this decision for me and for herself and for all her other selves.
I stepped out of the doors. I was really there. Really home. I didn’t understand why she’d done that. I still don’t. I was furious at her for having this power over me. As my people are always angry because of the historical injustices perpetrated against us. I was about to turn and release my balloon to eat her face.