The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  As long as the Time Lords existed, the Kin would be in their prison, and the rest of the Universe would be safe. That was how it was, and how it always would be.

  And if anything went wrong, then the Time Lords would know. Even if, unthinkably, any of the engines failed, then emergency signals would sound on Gallifrey long before the prison of the Kin returned to our time and our Universe. The Time Lords had planned for everything.

  They had planned for everything except the possibility that one day there would be no Time Lords, and no Gallifrey. No Time Lords in the Universe, except for one.

  So when the prison shook and crashed, as if in an earthquake, throwing the Kin down, and when the Kin looked up from its prison to see the light of galaxies and suns above it, unmediated and unfiltered, and it knew that it had returned to the Universe, it knew it would only be a matter of time until the question would be asked once more.

  And, because the Kin was careful, it took stock of the Universe they found themselves in. It did not think of revenge: that was not in its nature. It wanted what it had always wanted. And besides . . .

  There was still a Time Lord in the Universe.

  The Kin needed to do something about that.

  II.

  ON WEDNESDAY, ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD POLLY Browning put her head around her father’s office door. vDad. There’s a man at the front door in a rabbit mask who says he wants to buy the house.”

  “Don’t be silly, Polly.” Mr. Browning was sitting in the corner of the room he liked to call his office, and which the estate agent had optimistically listed as a third bedroom, although it was scarcely big enough for a filing cabinet and a card table, upon which rested a brand-new Amstrad computer. Mr. Browning was carefully entering the numbers from a pile of receipts onto the computer, and wincing. Every half an hour he would save the work he’d done so far, and the computer would make a grinding noise for a few minutes as it saved everything onto a floppy disk.

  “I’m not being silly. He says he’ll give you seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds for it.”

  “Now you’re really being silly. It’s on sale for a hundred and fifty thousand.” And we’d be lucky to get that in today’s market, he thought, but did not say. It was the summer of 1984, and Mr. Browning despaired of finding a buyer for the little house at the end of Claversham Row.

  Polly nodded thoughtfully. “I think you should go and talk to him.”

  Mr. Browning shrugged. He needed to save the work he’d done so far anyway. As the computer made its grumbling sound, Mr. Browning went downstairs. Polly, who had planned to go up to her bedroom to write in her diary, decided to sit on the stairs and find out what was going to happen next.

  Standing in the front garden was a tall man in a rabbit mask. It was not a particularly convincing mask. It covered his entire face, and two long ears rose above his head. He held a large, leather, brown bag, which reminded Mr. Browning of the doctors’ bags of his childhood.

  “Now, see here,” began Mr. Browning, but the man in the rabbit mask put a gloved finger to his painted bunny lips, and Mr. Browning fell silent.

  “Ask me what time it is,” said a quiet voice that came from behind the unmoving muzzle of the rabbit mask.

  Mr. Browning said, “I understand you’re interested in the house.” The FOR SALE sign by the front gate was grimy and streaked by the rain.

  “Perhaps. You can call me Mister Rabbit. Ask me what time it is.”

  Mr. Browning knew that he ought to call the police. Ought to do something to make the man go away. What kind of crazy person wears a rabbit mask anyway?

  “Why are you wearing a rabbit mask?”

  “That was not the correct question. But I am wearing the rabbit mask because I am representing an extremely famous and important person who values his or her privacy. Ask me what time it is.”

  Mr. Browning sighed. “What time is it, Mister Rabbit?” he asked. The man in the rabbit mask stood up straighter. His body language was one of joy and delight. “Time for you to be the richest man on Claversham Row,” he said. “I’m buying your house, for cash, and for more than ten times what it’s worth, because it’s just perfect for me now.” He opened the brown leather bag, and produced blocks of money, each block containing five hundred—“count them, go on, count them”—crisp fifty-pound notes, and two plastic supermarket shopping bags, into which he placed the blocks of currency.

  Mr. Browning inspected the money. It appeared to be real.

  “I . . .” He hesitated. What did he need to do? “I’ll need a few days. To bank it. Make sure it’s real. And we’ll need to draw up contracts, obviously.”

  “Contract’s already drawn up,” said the man in the rabbit mask. “Sign here. If the bank says there’s anything funny about the money, you can keep it and the house. I’ll be back on Saturday to take vacant possession. You can get everything out by then, can’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mr. Browning. Then: “I’m sure I can. I mean, of course.”

  “I’ll be here on Saturday,” said the man in the rabbit mask.

  “This is a very unusual way of doing business,” said Mr. Browning. He was standing at his front door holding two shopping bags, containing £750,000.

  “Yes,” agreed the man in the rabbit mask. “It is. See you on Saturday, then.”

  He walked away. Mr. Browning was relieved to see him go. He had been seized by the irrational conviction that, were he to remove the rabbit mask, there would be nothing underneath.

  Polly went upstairs to tell her diary everything she had seen and heard.

  ON THURSDAY, A tall young man with a tweed jacket and a bow tie knocked on the door. There was nobody at home, and nobody answered, and, after walking around the house, he went away.

  ON SATURDAY, MR. Browning stood in his empty kitchen. He had banked the money successfully, which had wiped out all his debts. The furniture that they had wanted to keep had been put into a moving van and sent to Mr. Browning’s uncle, who had an enormous garage he wasn’t using.

  “What if it’s all a joke?” asked Mrs. Browning.

  “Not sure what’s funny about giving someone seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds,” said Mr. Browning. “The bank says it’s real. Not reported stolen. Just a rich and eccentric person who wants to buy our house for a lot more than it’s worth.”

  They had booked two rooms in a local hotel, although hotel rooms had proved harder to find than Mr. Browning had expected. Also, he had had to convince Mrs. Browning, who was a nurse, that they could now afford to stay in a hotel.

  “What happens if he never comes back?” asked Polly. She was sitting on the stairs, reading a book.

  Mr. Browning said, “Now you’re being silly.”

  “Don’t call your daughter silly,” said Mrs. Browning. “She’s got a point. You don’t have a name or a phone number or anything.”

  This was unfair. The contract was made out, and the buyer’s name was clearly written on it: N. M. de Plume. There was an address, too, for a firm of London solicitors, and Mr. Browning had phoned them and been told that, yes, this was absolutely legitimate.

  “He’s eccentric,” said Mr. Browning. “An eccentric millionaire.”

  “I bet it’s him behind that rabbit mask,” said Polly. “The eccentric millionaire.”

  The doorbell rang. Mr. Browning went to the front door, his wife and daughter beside him, each of them hoping to meet the new owner of their house.

  “Hello,” said the lady in the cat mask. It was not a very realistic mask. Polly saw her eyes glinting behind it, though.

  “Are you the new owner?” asked Mrs. Browning.

  “Either that, or I’m the owner’s representative.”

  “Where’s . . . your friend? In the rabbit mask?”

  Despite the cat mask, the young lady (was she young? Her voice sounded young, anyway) seemed efficient and almost brusque. “You have removed all your possessions? I’m afraid anything left behind will become the property of th
e new owner.”

  “We’ve got everything that matters.”

  “Good.”

  Polly said, “Can I come and play in the garden? There isn’t a garden at the hotel.” There was a swing on the oak tree in the back garden, and Polly loved to sit on it and read.

  “Don’t be silly, love,” said Mr. Browning. “We’ll have a new house, and then you’ll have a garden with swings. I’ll put up new swings for you.”

  The lady in the cat mask crouched down. “I’m Mrs. Cat. Ask me what time it is, Polly.”

  Polly nodded. “What’s the time, Mrs. Cat?”

  “Time for you and your family to leave this place and never look back,” said Mrs. Cat, but she said it kindly.

  Polly waved good-bye to the lady in the cat mask when she got to the end of the garden path.

  III.

  THEY WERE IN THE TARDIS control room, going home.

  “I still don’t understand,” Amy was saying. “Why were the Skeleton People so angry with you in the first place? I thought they wanted to get free from the rule of the Toad-King.”

  “They weren’t angry with me about that,” said the young man in the tweed jacket and the bow tie. He pushed a hand through his hair. “I think they were quite pleased to be free, actually.” He ran his hands across the TARDIS control panel, patting levers, stroking dials. “They were just a bit upset with me because I’d walked off with their squiggly whatsit.”

  “Squiggly whatsit?”

  “It’s on the . . .” He gestured vaguely with arms that seemed to be mostly elbows and joints. “The tabley thing over there. I confiscated it.”

  Amy looked irritated. She wasn’t irritated, but she sometimes liked to give him the impression she was, just to show him who was boss. “Why don’t you ever call things by their proper names? The tabley thing over there? It’s called ‘a table.’ ”

  She walked over to the table. The squiggly whatsit was glittery and elegant: it was the size and general shape of a bracelet, but it twisted in ways that made it hard for the eye to follow.

  “Really? Oh good.” He seemed pleased. “I’ll remember that.”

  Amy picked up the squiggly whatsit. It was cold and much heavier than it looked. “Why did you confiscate it? And why are you saying confiscate anyway? That’s like what teachers do, when you bring something you shouldn’t to school. My friend Mels set a record at school for the number of things she’d got confiscated. One night she got me and Rory to make a disturbance while she broke into the teacher’s supply cupboard, which was where her stuff was. She had to go over the roof and through the teachers’ loo window . . .”

  But the Doctor was not interested in Amy’s old school friend’s exploits. He never was. He said, “Confiscated. For their own safety. Technology they shouldn’t have had. Probably stolen. Time looper and booster. Could have made a nasty mess of things.” He pulled a lever. “And we’re here. All change.”

  There was a rhythmic grinding sound, as if the engines of the Universe itself were protesting, a rush of displaced air, and a large blue police box materialized in the back garden of Amy Pond’s house. It was the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

  The Doctor opened the TARDIS door. Then he said, “That’s odd.”

  He stood in the doorway, made no attempt to walk outside. Amy came over to him. He put out an arm to prevent her from leaving the TARDIS. It was a perfectly sunny day, almost cloudless.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything,” he said. “Can’t you feel it?” Amy looked at her garden. It was overgrown and neglected, but then it always had been, as long as she remembered.

  “No,” said Amy. And then she said, “It’s quiet. No cars. No birds. Nothing.”

  “No radio waves,” said the Doctor. “Not even Radio Four.”

  “You can hear radio waves?”

  “Of course not. Nobody can hear radio waves,” he said, unconvincingly.

  And that was when the voice said, ATTENTION VISITORS. YOU ARE NOW ENTERING KIN SPACE. THIS WORLD IS THE PROPERTY OF THE KIN. YOU ARE TRESPASSING.

  It was a strange voice, whispery and, mostly, Amy suspected, in her head.

  “This is Earth,” called Amy. “It doesn’t belong to you.” And then she said, “What have you done with the people?”

  WE BOUGHT IT FROM THEM. THEY DIED OUT NATURALLY SHORTLY AFTERWARDS. IT WAS A PITY.

  “I don’t believe you,” shouted Amy.

  NO GALACTIC LAWS WERE VIOLATED. THE PLANET WAS PURCHASED LEGALLY AND LEGITIMATELY. A THOROUGH INVESTIGATION BY THE SHADOW PROCLAMATION VINDICATED OUR OWNERSHIP IN FULL.

  “It’s not yours! Where’s Rory?”

  “Amy? Who are you talking to?” asked the Doctor.

  “The voice. The one in my head. Can’t you hear it?”

  TO WHOM ARE YOU TALKING? asked the Voice.

  Amy closed the TARDIS door.

  “Why did you do that?” asked the Doctor.

  “Weird, whispery voice in my head. Said they’d bought the planet. And the, the Shadow Proclamation said it was all okay. It told me all the people died out naturally. You couldn’t hear it. It didn’t know you were here. Element of surprise. Closed the door.” Amy Pond could be astonishingly efficient, when she was under stress. Right now, she was under stress, but you wouldn’t have known it, if it wasn’t for the squiggly whatsit, which she was holding between her hands and was bending and twisting into shapes that defied the imagination and seemed to be wandering off into peculiar dimensions.

  “Did they say who they were?”

  She thought for a moment. “ ‘You are now entering Kin space. This world is the property of the Kin.’ ”

  He said, “Could be anyone. The Kin. I mean . . . it’s like calling yourselves the People. It’s what pretty much every race-name means. Except for Dalek. That means Metal-Cased Hatey Death Machines in Skaronian.” And then he was running to the control panel. “Something like this. It can’t occur overnight. People don’t just die off. And this is 2010. Which means . . .”

  “It means they’ve done something to Rory.”

  “It means they’ve done something to everyone.” He pressed several keys on an ancient typewriter keyboard, and patterns flowed across the screen that hung above the TARDIS console. “I couldn’t hear them . . . they couldn’t hear me. You could hear both of us. Aha! Summer of 1984! That’s the divergence point . . .” His hands began turning, twiddling and pushing levers, pumps, switches, and something small that went ding.

  “Where’s Rory? I want him, right now,” demanded Amy as the TARDIS lurched away into space and time. The Doctor had only briefly met her fiancé, Rory Williams, once before. She did not think the Doctor understood what she saw in Rory. Some days, she was not entirely sure what she saw in Rory. But she was certain of this: nobody took her fiancé away from her.

  “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 onto 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 b
ow tie to its earlier alignment, 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.”

  “Hallowe’en? People wear masks at Hallowe’en.”

  “Yes! They do!”

  “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 previous residences.

  “It’s ridiculous,” he said, after ten days. “There’s nothing for sale in town. Or anywhere around here. They’ve all been snapped up.”

  “There must be something,” said Mrs. Browning.