Chapter 3
400 Years of the Doctor
The dungeon was dark and square and cold, and has stayed in my memory, like a trap. Every door I have stepped through since, every corner I have turned, I still expect the walls of that chamber to close around me again. If that seems fanciful, think about this: from the moment I arrived there, I knew I was destined to return. My future stood in front of me, twice over. Even if, somehow, I managed to escape, if I found my way to the TARDIS and tore across the galaxies, if I ran to the limits of the universe and hid in the darkest void, in time my path would take me back to this spot, and to these men I was destined to become. I knew this place would be my prison, not just today, but in time, and time again.
I am writing this account so that perhaps, finally, I can leave it behind.
I made that journey from Richmond to the Tower three times. Or rather I made it once, and saw it through three different pairs of eyes. The first time, thrown in the back of the cart, sitting opposite my two future selves, I found it all but intolerable. Had my hands not been tied, I might have taken my own life—by throttling the pair of them.
At first Bow Tie was mercifully quiet; just sitting there, with a big smile that on most faces would have suggested a light concussion—or at any rate, would have encouraged one from anyone with a free hand—while Tweedle-dumber shot glance after glance at him, before finally saying: ‘You’re very quiet.’
‘They tied his hands,’ I explained to him, and to my surprise he laughed.
‘Bad habit,’ said Bow Tie, ‘laughing at your own jokes,’ before laughing at his own joke.
‘I saw the wink,’ said Daddy’s Suit. ‘You winked at the vortex. What was that?’
‘Non-verbal communication,’ replied Bow Tie. ‘You should try it.’
One could only agree.
‘It was a wink, an actual wink. I know what a wink means, especially when it’s me winking. Except I don’t know what it means, what did that wink mean? Do you have a plan?’
‘Yeah, might have a plan.’
There followed a rapid-fire, twenty-minute conversation covering the merits of plans, the dangers of revealing your plans too early, the option of pretending to have a plan and hoping that something will come up that you can pretend was your plan all along, the need for this particular plan to be clarified as soon as possible, a reminder that just possibly the driver of the cart might overhear the plan, and a request from the driver to keep it down a bit.
‘Look, I like plans,’ hissed Daddy’s Suit in an only slightly lower voice. ‘Love a plan, me, I’m made of plans. But I’d really like to know what this plan is, because in case you haven’t noticed, we’re all about to get our heads cut off!’
‘At which point,’ I said, ‘is there the slightest chance either of you will stop talking?’ They looked affronted at me. ‘Because I’m putting in a request,’ I continued, ‘not to be on the next spike.’
Within two hours, we had arrived at the tower and been marched to a dungeon deep beneath it. Once inside, Thomson and Thompson lost no time in wasting it. Daddy’s Suit started running round the walls, in what looked like an entirely pointless attempt at parkour, while Bow Tie scrabbled around on the floor for a while, before finding a rusty old nail, which he showed to me with all the delight and pride of a small child who had found a dead mouse in a milk bottle.
I turned and hammered on the door. ‘You can’t lock me up with these two!’ I heard myself yelling, ‘I’ll take the beheading straight away—tell them I’m ready now, I’ll have the whole thing off!’ I was hardly surprised at the lack of an answer.
There was now a scraping from behind me. I turned to see that Bow Tie was busy scratching away at the wall with the nail he’d found. The other one stood at his shoulder, cocking his head in puzzlement. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘It’s the plan.’
‘What plan?’
‘The office plan,’ said Bow Tie.
There was a look of dawning understanding on the other one’s face. ‘Oh, that’s clever! Wish I’d thought of that.’
‘You will think of that!’ and the two of them started laughing together. I turned back to the door, and took refuge in analysing it with my screwdriver. Daddy’s Suit was at my side in a moment.
‘Sonic won’t work on that,’ he said. ‘Too primitive.’
‘Maybe we should ask for a more sophisticated lock, so we can break out,’ piped up Bow Tie.
‘I am investigating alternatives,’ I said, ‘to listening to you two. Apparently there aren’t any.’
‘Okay, let’s sum up, shall we?’ I could hear those ridiculous tennis shoes now pacing the floor. ‘The Queen of England is now a Zygon, but that’s not what interests me. You know what interests me? You!’ I didn’t look round, but I could sense his eyes on me. ‘You, Grandad.’
I continued working at the door. I could guess what was coming. He was pacing again.
‘So here’s the thing. This is where I’m supposed to be. Tracking Zygons in Elizabethan England, this is my part of the timeline, my patch. Then that vortexy thing opens up and basically my past and my future get dumped on my head. Very Christmas Carol. But why?’
I started a deep-level scan of the door, mostly so I had a reason not to look at him.
‘I’m asking you why, Grandad?’
The scraping had stopped. I sensed both pairs of eyes on my back but I didn’t turn. ‘Why don’t you ask your little playmate. He’s not supposed to be here either,’ I said.
‘Nah. Me and Chinny, we were surprised. But you showed up already looking for us. You knew it was going to happen. Who told you?’
‘Don’t you remember?’
‘Oi!’ came a plaintive voice. ‘Chinny?’
‘Course I don’t remember. Our timeline is tied in a knot in this room, our memories are all over the place. You know how this works. Selective amnesia. You meet yourself, you don’t retain any memories till the trigger event repeats.’
‘Chinny?’ repeated Bow Tie.
‘Mate, you do have a chin on you.’
‘Well, that’s something to look forward to.’
‘I’m booking the extra shaving time.’
‘This door,’ I said. ‘There’s a way through it, you know.’
‘Don’t change the subject, I’m trying to ask you a question.’
‘I’m trying to get through a door. Three of us contained in one space over time could cause some very nasty anomalies.’ I turned to them, braced for their stares. ‘I could trigger an isolated sonic shift among the molecules—in theory, the door would disintegrate.’
‘You’d have to calculate the exact harmonic resonance of the entire door at a sub-atomic level,’ said Bow Tie, and it struck me that he didn’t seem quite so young any more. ‘Even with the sonic, it would take years.’
‘No,’ I corrected him, ‘it would take centuries.’ I activated the screwdriver. ‘Might as well get started. It might help to pass the timey-wimey.’
They exchanged glances, then Bow Tie returned to his work, whatever it was, and Daddy’s Suit resumed his endless prowling round the room.
In my hand, the screwdriver buzzed—the calculations were beginning. Centuries, I thought! Hopeless! I sighed and watched the other two for a moment. ‘Timey-wimey,’ I repeated. ‘Do you have to talk like children? What is it that makes you so ashamed of being a grown-up?’
Daddy’s Suit stopped pacing. Bow Tie stopped scraping. Two pair of eyes turned on me, and the look they gave me, across the room, across the hundreds of years that stood between us, left me in no doubt as to their answer: me. I was the source of their shame.
‘The way you both look at me,’ I said. ‘What is that? I’m trying to think of a better word than dread.’
Their expressions didn’t change, and in the silence that followed, and lengthened, I started to wonder about the look they were seeing on my face. What did these troubled young men see, as I looked back at them? How was my
face answering the fear in theirs? How could I be so terrifying?
Many years would pass before I would understand.
That look of dread stayed clear in my mind, in the years following my first visit to the dungeon. My memory of the conversation fluctuated over time (I have greater clarity now) but the image of those two angry young men, staring at me, hating me from my own future, never dimmed. Sometimes that dread-filled stare would find me again, but only when I was unwise enough to stand in front of a mirror. Even regeneration, and a new face, didn’t lessen the judgement in my eyes. One night I smashed every mirror in the TARDIS, trying to escape the accusation in my own gaze, but, as any time traveller knows, the past is never over. The tangle of the timelines had erased much of my memory, but the important details stood clear. I had left that dungeon, I had returned to the barn, and standing there alone, I had murdered them all. And as my world screamed and died, I had walked out of the fire, impossibly alive. It didn’t matter how many mirrors I broke, that dungeon stood waiting in my future, and one day I would have to face my own judgement again.
I flew round space and time, like a maniac. I smiled and laughed and whirled, and hoped no one would see through my disguise. I helped where I could, I fought where it counted and I made peace happen wherever I walked. I saved life after life, and I knew I was trying to make up for every one I’d taken. More than anything, I was trying not to count how many children had been on Gallifrey that day.
There were times when I thought I was obsessed. Once, I rode the TARDIS through a supernova to save a robot clown, and then spent a week trying to restore its higher brain functions. All it ever did was sit there intoning ‘How do I look?’ over and over again.
‘Better than I do, mate,’ I said. I set it loose in the corridors of the TARDIS, and went looking for someone else to rescue. I knew that everything I did was in penance for the crimes I had committed, but I also knew that nothing would ever be enough.
My memories of the dungeon grew fainter over time—for a while I could barely remember how I’d got there, or how I’d left—but I never lost sight of a single, unalterable fact: one day, I’d be going back.
My second journey to the Tower, felt very different from the first. This time I sat on the other side of the cart, and studied myself, sitting opposite—I didn’t look like someone to inspire dread, not in that moment anyway. I looked old and tired; a battle-weary soldier, I thought, in the twilight of his war. But then his fierce old eyes met mine, and I turned quickly away.
‘You’re very quiet,’ I said to Future Boy, sitting next to me, smiling away in his bow tie.
‘They tied his hands,’ snapped the old soldier. As he said those words, I remembered sitting there saying them, and then I remembered being surprised by a laugh from my future self, who had been sitting exactly where I was sitting now, and I laughed because, some days, time travel just doesn’t know how to behave itself, and the old soldier looked at me, surprised by my laughter.
Boy Wonder looked offended, and we began a stupid argument about plans. I didn’t really listen to what either of us were saying—I’d have another chance, after all—instead I found myself studying this future version of me. When I’d sat on the other side of the cart, I’d thought he was a bumbling oaf. Up close, he was still a clown, but not all the time. When he frowned he was a petulant nine-year-old, but when he smiled you noticed his eyes. It was as if he found the universe infinitely cruel, but was too gentle to mention it. Sitting there next to him, I wondered how I looked through those sad old eyes, and how long it would be before I found out.
The moment the dungeon door closed on us, I began an inspection of the walls. I told myself I was assessing the stone density through a controlled series of light impacts, but really I was just keeping moving, suppressing my terror at finding myself back here—the prison of past and future; the dungeon of time and again. I had forgotten the sharp stale smell, the scuttling rats, the sound of constant dripping.
Boy Wonder was now snuffling about the floor, looking for something, and the old man was yelling at the door, about having his beheading rescheduled. Had that happened last time? Yes, I remembered it now. Fragments of the past were surfacing, but never till their time came: when the conversation began it was as if each word spoken, each glance exchanged, lit up in my memory, but only as it came round again, so that every passing instant became ancient the second it arrived. When the question was finally spoken, I felt like I’d been waiting a lifetime.
‘The way you both look at me,’ came my own voice from long ago. ‘What is that? I’m trying to think of a better word than dread.’ Finally, so many years later, I saw myself standing there: I was small and frail, and afraid. I’d expected a stone-faced general, not this. And yet, looking back at myself, I still felt all the dread I remembered seeing on my face, and I was starting to understand why.
‘It must be really recent for you,’ I said, to break the silence.
‘Recent?’ he asked.
I frowned at him, my memory flickering. Dimly, I knew he’d come here from the barn, from the last day of the Time War … but when exactly? Was this the forgotten aftermath of the explosion I had somehow survived?
‘The Time War,’ said Boy Wonder from behind me. ‘The last day. The day you killed them all.’
I shot the kid a look. ‘The day we killed them all.’
‘Same thing,’ he replied.
‘It is not the same thing,’ I told him. My words kept bouncing round the walls, and I realised I’d shouted. Boy Wonder was looking at me oddly. I wondered what he was feeling, and how long it would be before I felt it too. ‘How recent?’ I said, turning back to the old man. ‘The last day, the end of the Time War. I’m asking how recent that was for you.’
‘I don’t talk about it,’ he said.
‘You’re not talking about it,’ I pointed out. ‘There’s no one else here.’
He fell silent and looked at the floor, so I left him to it. The kid had nearly finished scratching the string of numerals into the wall. It was a good plan, I’d give him that.
‘Did you ever count?’ The old man had found a bench at the side of the room, and he was sitting now. His gaze rested on the floor and his voice was low.
‘Count what?’ asked Boy Wonder.
‘The children.’ The dungeon must have been cold from the moment we arrived, but this was the first time I’d felt it. ‘Did you ever count how many children were on Gallifrey that day?’
There was a silence. And as it grew in the room, I had a faint memory what I was about to say. Dimly, I remembered rage and shouting—my own face, staring in disbelief. But which face?
The silence dripped and scuttled and paced.
I was an old man, sitting, staring at the floor, waiting for an answer I never wanted to hear.
I was pacing the same floor, many years later, willing myself to speak, and failing.
Far in the future, I stood frozen at a wall, with an old nail in my hand, and numerals scratched into the stone in front of me.
Still I didn’t speak. I knew I was about to answer, and after that a storm would break—but how could I bring myself to say those words?
‘Did you ever count?’ asked River Song, a few years later, as we picnicked with the old Gods. I was doing a magic trick with a chicken leg, just to irritate Thor.
‘Long story,’ I said, ‘Have you hidden my Converse?’
‘No, but seriously, did you ever count them?’ she asked again, a few years after that, in the Underwell of Jim the Fish.
‘What have you done with all my bow ties?’ I demanded.
‘Sweetie, please just tell me,’ she asked for the twentieth time in over a hundred years. ‘Did you ever count?’ We were in the TARDIS workshop, for an evening of basic maintenance and kebabs. She was assisting me by doing all the work, and prodding me with a stick when she needed something passed to her.
‘Does it matter?’
‘Obviously.’
‘Wh
y obviously?’
‘Because you don’t talk about it.’
‘Ow!’
‘Zeus Plugs.’
‘I already gave them to you.’
‘Those are castanets.’
‘I had to adapt them for an emergency party with Madame de Pompadour. How’s he doing?’
The robot clown’s hands were twitching, as he lay on the bench, but the lights hadn’t come on in his eyes.
‘There are no higher brain functions to restore,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a very basic children’s therapy bot.’
‘Ow!’
‘Madame de Pompadour?’
‘Jealous?’
‘Of course I’m jealous. Keep your hands off her.’
‘Okay, so a children’s therapy bot …’
‘Popular on the outer colonies, for a while. Children would tell them stories they were too afraid to tell adults.’
‘And what would the bots do?’
‘Take the pain away, according to the manual.’
‘But it just wanders about, asking how it looks.’
‘Yeah, it’s got locked in its last therapy session. I’m trying to release it from a looping subroutine.’
‘Who gets their therapy from a bot?’
‘People who aren’t as lucky as you.’ She gave me the usual stare. ‘People who don’t have someone like me. Any bad memories you want to share, sweetie?’
‘I found two of my bow ties cut in half.’
She gave me another in her selection of looks, and resumed working on the bot. Only River could rewire neural interfaces crossly.
‘What we will we do with it when you’ve fixed it?’ I asked, after a few minutes’ silence.
‘Drop it off somewhere it might be needed, I suppose.’
‘Good idea.’
‘Tell you what else is a good idea.’ She carried on soldering, didn’t look up. ‘Don’t. Don’t ever count how many children were on Gallifrey that day. And if you’ve already counted, do your very best to forget about it.’
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