by Neil Gaiman
‘Good question. Where’s Rory? Also, where’s seven billion other people?’ he asked.
‘I want my Rory.’
‘Well, wherever the rest of them are, he’s there too. And you ought to have been with them. At a guess, neither of you were ever born.’
Amy looked down at herself, checking her feet, her legs, her elbows, her hands (the squiggly whatsit glittered like an Escher nightmare on her wrist; she dropped it on to the control panel). She reached up and grasped a handful of auburn hair. ‘If I wasn’t born, what am I doing here?’
‘You’re an independent temporal nexus, chronosynclastically established as an inverse …’ He saw her expression, and stopped.
‘You’re telling me it’s timey-wimey, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said seriously. ‘I suppose I am. Right. We’re here.’
He adjusted his bow-tie with precise fingers, tipping it to one side rakishly.
‘But, Doctor. The human race didn’t die out in 1984.’
‘New timeline. It’s a paradox.’
‘And you’re the paradoctor?’
‘Just the Doctor.’ He adjusted his bow-tie back to its earlier alignment and stood up a little straighter. ‘There’s something familiar about all this.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t know. Hmm. Kin. Kin. Kin … I keep thinking of masks. Who wears masks?’
‘Bank robbers?’
‘No.’
‘Really ugly people?’
‘No.’
‘Halloween? People wear masks at Halloween.’
‘Yes! They do!’ He flung his arms wide in delight.
‘So that’s important?’
‘Not even a little bit. But it’s true. Right. Big divergence in time stream. And it’s not actually possible to take over a Level 5 planet in a way that would satisfy the Shadow Proclamation unless …’
‘Unless what?’
The Doctor stopped moving. He bit his lower lip. Then: ‘Oh. They wouldn’t.’
‘Wouldn’t what?’
‘They couldn’t. I mean, that would be completely …’
Amy tossed her hair, and did her best to keep her temper. Shouting at the Doctor never worked, unless it did. ‘Completely what?’
‘Completely impossible. You can’t take over a Level 5 planet. Unless you do it legitimately.’ On the TARDIS control panel something whirled and something else went ding. ‘We’re here. It’s the nexus. Come on! Let’s explore 1984.’
‘You’re enjoying this,’ said Amy. ‘My whole world has been taken over by a mysterious voice. All the people are extinct. Rory’s gone. And you’re enjoying this.’
‘No, I’m not,’ said the Doctor, trying hard not to show how much he was enjoying it.
The Brownings stayed in the hotel while Mr Browning looked for a new house. The hotel was completely full. Coincidentally, the Brownings learned, in conversation with other hotel guests over breakfast, they had also sold their houses and flats. None of them seemed particularly forthcoming about who had bought their houses.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ he said after ten days. ‘There’s nothing for sale in the town. Or anywhere around here. They’ve all been snapped up.’
‘There must be something,’ said Mrs Browning.
‘Not in this part of the country,’ said Mr Browning.
‘What does the estate agent say?’
‘Not answering the phone,’ said Mr Browning.
‘Well, let’s go and talk to her,’ said Mrs Browning. ‘You coming with, Polly?’
Polly shook her head. ‘I’m reading my book,’ she said.
Mr and Mrs Browning walked into town, and they met the estate agent outside the door of the shop, putting up a notice saying ‘Under New Management’. There were no properties for sale in the window, only a lot of houses and flats with Sold on them.
‘Shutting up shop?’ asked Mr Browning.
‘Someone made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,’ said the estate agent. She was carrying a heavy-looking plastic shopping bag. The Brownings could guess what was in it.
‘Someone in a rabbit mask?’ asked Mrs Browning.
When they got back to the hotel, the manager was waiting in the lobby for them, to tell them they wouldn’t be living there much longer.
‘It’s the new owners,’ she explained. ‘They’re closing the hotel for refurbishing.’
‘New owners?’
‘They just bought it. Paid a lot of money for it, I was told.’
Somehow, this did not surprise the Brownings one little bit. They were not surprised until they got up to their hotel room, and Polly was nowhere to be seen.
4
‘1984,’ mused Amy Pond. ‘I thought somehow it would feel more, I don’t know. Historical. It doesn’t feel like a long time ago. But my parents hadn’t even met yet.’ She hesitated, as if she were about to say something about her parents, but her attention drifted. They crossed the road.
‘What were they like?’ asked the Doctor. ‘Your parents?’
Amy shrugged. ‘The usual,’ she said, without thinking. ‘A mum and a dad.’
‘Sounds likely,’ agreed the Doctor much too readily. ‘So, I need you to keep your eyes open.’
‘What are we looking for?’
It was a picturesque little English town, and it looked like a little English town as far as Amy was concerned. Just like the one she’d left in 2010, with a village green and trees and a church, only without the coffee shops or the mobile-phone shops.
‘Easy. We’re looking for something that shouldn’t be here. Or we’re looking for something that should be here but isn’t.’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘Not sure,’ said the Doctor. He rubbed his chin. ‘Gazpacho, maybe.’
‘What’s gazpacho?’
‘Cold soup. But it’s meant to be cold. So if we looked all over 1984 and couldn’t find any gazpacho, that would be a clue.’
‘Were you always like this?’
‘Like what?’
‘A madman. With a time machine.’
‘Oh, no. It took ages until I got the time machine.’
They walked through the centre of the little town, looking for something unusual, and finding nothing, not even gazpacho.
Polly stopped at the garden gate in Claversham Row, looking up at the house that had been her house since they had moved here when she was seven. She walked up to the front door, rang the doorbell and waited, and was relieved when nobody answered it. She glanced down the street, then walked hurriedly round the house, past the rubbish bins, into the back garden.
The French window that opened on to the little back garden had a catch that didn’t fasten properly. Polly thought it extremely unlikely that the house’s new owners would have fixed it. If they had, she’d come back when they were here, and she’d have to ask, and it would be awkward and embarrassing.
That was the trouble with hiding things. Sometimes, if you were in a hurry, you left them behind. Even important things. And there was nothing more important than her diary.
She had been keeping it since they had arrived in the town. It had been her best friend: she had confided in it, told it about the girls who had bullied her, the ones who’d befriended her, about the first boy she had ever liked. She would turn to it in times of trouble, or turmoil and pain. It was the place she poured out her thoughts.
And it was hidden underneath a loose floorboard in the big cupboard in her bedroom.
Polly tapped the left French door hard with the palm of her hand, rapping it next to the casement, and the door wobbled, and then swung open.
She walked inside. She was surprised to see that they hadn’t replaced any of the furniture her family had left behind. It still smelled like her house. It was silent: nobody home. Good. She hurried up the stairs, worried she might still be at home when Mr Rabbit or Mrs Cat returned.
On the landing something brushed her face – touched it gently, like a thread, or a cobweb. She loo
ked up. That was odd. The ceiling seemed furry: hair-like threads, or thread-like hairs, came down from it. She hesitated then, thought about running – but she could see her bedroom door. The Duran Duran poster was still on it. Why hadn’t they taken it down?
Trying not to look up at the hairy ceiling, she pushed open her bedroom door.
The room was different. There was no furniture, and where her bed had been were sheets of paper. She glanced down: photographs from newspapers, faces blown up to life-size. The eyeholes had been cut out already. She recognised Prince Charles, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul, the Queen …
Perhaps they were going to have a party. The masks didn’t look very convincing.
She went to the built-in cupboard at the end of the room. Her Smash Hits diary was sitting in the darkness, beneath the floorboard, in there. She opened the cupboard door.
‘Hello, Polly,’ said the man in the cupboard. He wore a mask, like the others had. An animal mask: this was some kind of big black dog.
‘Hello,’ said Polly. She didn’t know what else to say. ‘I … I left my diary behind.’
‘I know. I was reading it.’ He raised the diary. He was not the same as the man in the rabbit mask or the woman in the cat mask, but everything Polly had felt about them, about the wrongness, was intensified here. ‘Do you want it back?’
‘Yes please,’ Polly said to the dog-masked man. She felt hurt and violated: this man had been reading her diary. But she wanted it back.
‘You know what you need to do, to get it?’
She shook her head.
‘Ask me what the time is.’
She opened her mouth. It was dry. She licked her lips, and muttered, ‘What time is it?’
‘And my name,’ he said. ‘Say my name. I’m Mister Wolf.’
‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ asked Polly. A playground game rose unbidden to her mind.
Mister Wolf smiled (but how can a mask smile?) and he opened his mouth so wide to show row upon row of sharp, sharp teeth.
‘Dinner time,’ he told her.
Polly started to scream then, as he came towards her, but she didn’t get to scream for very long.
5
The TARDIS was sitting in a small grassy area, too small to be a park, too irregular to be a square, in the middle of the town, and the Doctor was sitting outside it, in a deckchair, walking through his memories.
The Doctor had a remarkable memory. The problem was, there was so much of it. He had lived eleven lives (or more: there was another life, was there not, that he tried his best never to think about) and he had a different way of remembering things in each life.
The worst part of being however old he was (and he had long since abandoned trying to keep track of it in any way that mattered to anybody but him) was that sometimes things didn’t arrive in his head quite when they were meant to.
Masks. That was part of it. And Kin. That was part of it too.
And Time.
It was all about Time. Yes, that was it …
An old story. Before his time – he was sure of that. It was something he had heard as a boy. He tried to remember the stories he had been told as a small boy on Gallifrey, before he had been taken to the Time Lord Academy and his life had changed forever.
Amy was coming back from a sortie through the town, looking for things that might have been gazpacho.
‘Maximelos and the three Ogrons!’ he shouted at her.
‘What about them?’
‘One was too vicious, one was too stupid, one was just right.’
‘And this is relevant how?’
He tugged at his hair absently. ‘Er, probably not relevant at all. Just trying to remember a story from my childhood.’
‘Why?’
‘No idea. Can’t remember.’
‘You,’ said Amy Pond, ‘are very frustrating.’
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor happily. ‘I probably am.’
He had hung a sign on the front of the TARDIS. It read:
SOMETHING MYSTERIOUSLY WRONG?
JUST KNOCK! NO PROBLEM TOO SMALL.
‘If it won’t come to us, I’ll go to it. No, scrap that. Other way round. And I’ve redecorated inside, so as not to startle people. What did you find?’
‘Two things,’ she said. ‘First one was Prince Charles. I saw him in the newsagent’s.’
‘Are you sure it was him?’
Amy thought. ‘Well, he looked like Prince Charles. Just much younger. And the newsagent asked him if he’d picked out a name for the next Royal Baby. I suggested Rory.’
‘Prince Charles in the newsagent’s. Right. Next thing?’
‘There aren’t any houses for sale. I’ve walked every street. No For Sale signs. There are people camping in tents on the edge of town. Lots of people leaving to find places to live, because there’s nothing around here. It’s just weird.’
‘Yes.’
He almost had it now. Amy opened the TARDIS door. She looked inside. ‘Doctor … it’s the same size on the inside.’
He beamed, and took her on an extensive tour of his new office, which consisted of standing inside the doorway and making a waving gesture with his right arm. Most of the space was taken up by a desk, with an old-fashioned telephone and a typewriter on it. There was a back wall. Amy experimentally pushed her hands through the wall (it was hard to do with her eyes open, easy when she closed them), then she closed her eyes again and pushed her head through. Now she could see the TARDIS control room, all copper and glass. She took a step backwards, into the tiny office.
‘Is it a hologram?’
‘Sort of.’
There was a hesitant rap at the door of the TARDIS. The Doctor opened it.
‘Excuse me. The sign on the door.’ The man appeared harassed. His hair was thinning. He looked at the tiny room, mostly filled by a desk, and he made no move to come inside.
‘Yes! Hello! Come in!’ said the Doctor. ‘No problem too small!’
‘Um. My name’s Reg Browning. It’s my daughter, Polly. She was meant to be waiting for us, back in the hotel room. She’s not there.’
‘I’m the Doctor. This is Amy. Have you spoken to the police?’
‘Aren’t you police? I thought perhaps you were.’
‘Why?’ asked Amy.
‘This is a police call box. I didn’t even know they were bringing them back.’
‘For some of us,’ said the tall young man with the bow-tie, ‘they never went away. What happened when you spoke to the police?’
‘They said they’d keep an eye out for her. But, honestly, they seemed a bit preoccupied. The desk sergeant said the lease had run out on the police station, rather unexpectedly, and they’re looking for somewhere to go. The desk sergeant said the whole lease thing had come as a bit of a blow to them.’
‘What’s Polly like?’ asked Amy. ‘Could she be staying with friends?’
‘I’ve checked with her friends. Nobody’s seen her. We’re living in the Rose Hotel on Wednesbury Street right now.’
‘Are you visiting?’
Mr Browning told them about the man in the rabbit mask who had come to the door a fortnight ago to buy their house for so much more than it was worth, and paid cash. He told them about the woman in the cat mask who had taken possession of the house …
‘Oh. Right. Well, that makes sense of everything,’ said the Doctor, as if it actually did.
‘It does?’ said Mr Browning. ‘Do you know where Polly is?’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘Mister Browning. Reg. Is there any chance she might have gone back to your house?’
The man shrugged. ‘Might have done. Do you think –?’
But the tall young man and the red-haired Scottish girl pushed past him, slammed shut the door of their police box, and sprinted away across the green.
6
Amy kept pace with the Doctor, and panted out questions as they ran.
‘You think she’s in the house?’
‘I’m afraid she is. Yes. I’ve got a sort of an idea. Something I heard when I was a boy. A sort of a cautionary tale. Look, Amy, don’t let anyone persuade you to ask them what the time is. And if they do, don’t answer them. Safer that way.’
‘You mean it?’
‘I’m afraid so. And watch out for masks.’
‘Right. So these are dangerous aliens we’re dealing with? They wear masks and want you to ask what time it is?’
‘It sounds like them. Yes. But my people dealt with them so long ago. It’s almost inconceivable …’ He looked worried.
They stopped running as they reached Claversham Row.
‘And if it is who I think it is, what I think it – they – it – are … there is only one sensible thing we should be doing.’ The worried expression vanished as rapidly as it had appeared on his face, replaced by an easy grin.
‘What’s that?’
‘Running away,’ said the Doctor, as he rang the doorbell.
A moment’s silence, then the door opened and a girl looked up at them. She could not have been more than eleven, and her hair was in pigtails. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘My name is Polly Browning. What’re your names?’
‘Polly!’ said Amy. ‘Your parents are worried sick about you.’
‘I just came to get my diary back,’ said the girl. ‘It was under a loose floorboard in my old bedroom.’
‘Your parents have been looking for you all day!’ said Amy. She wondered why the Doctor didn’t say anything.
The little girl – Polly – looked at her wristwatch. ‘That’s weird. It says I’ve only been here for five minutes. I got here at ten this morning.’
Amy knew it was somewhere late in the afternoon. Without thinking, she said, ‘What time is it now?’
Polly looked up, delighted. This time Amy thought there was something strange about the girl’s face. Something flat. Something almost mask-like …
‘Time for you to come into my house,’ said the girl.
Amy blinked. It seemed to her that, without having moved, she and the Doctor were now standing in the entry hall. The girl was standing on the stairs facing them. Her face was level with theirs.