The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  The Doctor reached out his hand and pulled off the mask from the Kin.

  The Doctor could see beauty where humans could not. He took joy in all creatures. But the face of the Kin was hard to appreciate.

  “You . . . you revolt yourself,” said the Doctor. “Blimey. It’s why you wear masks. You don’t like your face, do you?”

  The Kin said nothing. Its face, if that was its face, writhed and squirmed.

  “Where’s Amy?” asked the Doctor.

  “Surplus to requirements,” said another, similar voice, from behind him. A thin man, in a rabbit mask. “We let her go. We only needed you, Doctor. Our Time Lord prison was a torment, because we were trapped in it and reduced to one of us. You are also only one of you. And you will stay here in this house forever.”

  The Doctor walked from room to room, examining his surroundings with care. The walls of the house were soft and covered with a light layer of fur. And they moved, gently, in and out, as if they were . . . “Breathing. It’s a living room. Literally.”

  He said, “Give me Amy back. Leave this place. I’ll find you somewhere you can go. You can’t just keep looping and re-looping through time, over and over, though. It messes everything up.”

  “And when it does, we begin again, somewhere else,” said the woman in the cat mask, on the stairs. “You will be imprisoned until your life is done. Age here, regenerate here, die here, over and over. Our prison will not end until the last Time Lord is no more.”

  “Do you really think you can hold me that easily?” the Doctor asked. It was always good to seem in control, no matter how much he was worried that he was going to be stuck here for good.

  “Quickly! Doctor! Down here!” It was Amy’s voice. He took the steps three at a time, heading towards the place her voice had come from: the front door.

  “Doctor!”

  “I’m here.” He rattled the door. It was locked. He pulled out his screwdriver, and soniced the door handle.

  There was a clunk and the door flew open: the sudden daylight was blinding. The Doctor saw, with delight, his friend, and a familiar big blue police box. He was not certain which to hug first.

  “Why didn’t you go inside?” he asked Amy, as he opened the TARDIS door.

  “Can’t find the key. Must have dropped it while they were chasing me. Where are we going now?”

  “Somewhere safe. Well, safer.” He closed the door. “Got any suggestions?”

  Amy stopped at the bottom of the control room stairs and looked around at the gleaming coppery world, at the glass pillar that ran through the TARDIS controls, at the doors.

  “Amazing, isn’t she?” said the Doctor. “I never get tired of looking at the old girl.”

  “Yes, the old girl,” said Amy. “I think we should go to the very dawn of time, Doctor. As early as we can go. They won’t be able to find us there, and we can work out what to do next.” She was looking over the Doctor’s shoulder at the console, watching his hands move, as if she was determined not to forget anything he did. The TARDIS was no longer in 1984.

  “The dawn of time? Very clever, Amy Pond. That’s somewhere we’ve never gone before. Somewhere we shouldn’t be able to go. It’s a good thing I’ve got this.” He held up the squiggly whatsit, then attached it to the TARDIS console, using alligator clips and what looked like a piece of string.

  “There,” he said proudly. “Look at that.”

  “Yes,” said Amy. “We’ve escaped the Kin’s trap.”

  The TARDIS engines began to groan, and the whole room began to judder and shake.

  “What’s that noise?”

  “We’re heading for somewhere the TARDIS isn’t designed to go. Somewhere I wouldn’t dare go without the squiggly whatsit giving us a boost and a time bubble. The noise is the engines complaining. It’s like going up a steep hill in an old car. It may take us a few more minutes to get there. Still, you’ll like it when we arrive: the dawn of time. Excellent suggestion.”

  “I’m sure I will like it,” said Amy, with a smile. “It must have felt so good to escape the Kin’s prison, Doctor.”

  “That’s the funny thing,” said the Doctor. “You ask me about escaping the Kin’s prison. That house. And I mean, I did escape, just by sonicing a doorknob, which was a bit convenient. But what if the trap wasn’t the house? What if the Kin didn’t want a Time Lord to torture and kill? What if they wanted something much more important. What if they wanted a TARDIS?”

  “Why would the Kin want a TARDIS?” asked Amy.

  The Doctor looked at Amy. He looked at her with clear eyes, unclouded by hate or by illusion. “The Kin can’t travel very far through time. Not easily. And doing what they do is slow, and it takes an effort. The Kin would have to travel back and forward in time fifteen million times just to populate London.

  “What if the Kin had all of Time and Space to move through? What if it went back to the very beginning of the Universe, and began its existence there? It would be able to populate everything. There would be no intelligent beings in the whole of the SpaceTime Continuum that wasn’t the Kin. One entity would fill the Universe, leaving no room for anything else. Can you imagine it?”

  Amy licked her lips. “Yes,” she said. “Yes I can.”

  “All you’d need would be to get into a TARDIS, and have a Time Lord at the controls, and the Universe would be your playground.”

  “Oh yes,” said Amy, and she was smiling broadly, now. “It will be.”

  “We’re almost there,” said the Doctor. “The dawn of time. Please. Tell me that Amy’s safe, wherever she is.”

  “Why ever would I tell you that?” asked the Kin in the Amy Pond mask. “It’s not true.”

  VII.

  Amy could hear the Doctor running down the stairs. She heard a voice that sounded strangely familiar calling to him, and then she heard a sound that filled her chest with despair: the diminishing vworp vworp of a TARDIS as it leaves.

  The door opened, at that moment, and she walked out into the downstairs hall.

  “He’s run out on you,” said a deep voice. “How does it feel to be abandoned?”

  “The Doctor doesn’t abandon his friends,” said Amy to the thing in the shadows.

  “He does. He obviously did in this case. You can wait as long as you want to, he’ll never come back,” said the thing, as it stepped out of the darkness, and into the half-light.

  It was huge. Its shape was humanoid, but also somehow animal (Lupine, thought Amy Pond, as she took a step backwards, away from the thing). It had a mask on, an unconvincing wooden mask, that seemed like it was meant to represent an angry dog, or perhaps a wolf.

  “He’s taking someone he believes to be you for a ride in the TARDIS. And in a few moments, reality is going to rewrite. The Time Lords reduced the Kin to one lonely entity cut off from the rest of Creation. So it is fitting that a Time Lord restores us to our rightful place in the order of things: all other things will serve me, or will be me, or will be food for me. Ask me what time it is, Amy Pond.”

  “Why?”

  There were more of them, now, shadowy figures. A cat-faced woman on the stairs. A small girl in the corner. The rabbit-headed man standing behind her said, “Because it will be a clean way to die. An easy way to go. In a few moments you will never have existed anyway.”

  “Ask me,” said the wolf-masked figure in front of her. “Say, ‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ ”

  In reply, Amy Pond reached up and pulled the wolf mask from the face of the huge thing, and she saw the Kin.

  Human eyes were not meant to look at the Kin. The crawling, squirming, wriggling mess that was the face of the Kin was a frightful thing: the masks had been as much for its own protection as for everyone else’s.

  Amy Pond stared at the face of the Kin. She said, “Kill me if you’re going to kill me. But I don’t believe that the Doctor has abandoned me. And I’m not going to ask you what time it is.”

  “Pity,” said the Kin, through a face that was
a nightmare. And it moved toward her.

  THE TARDIS ENGINES groaned once, loudly, and then were silent.

  “We are here,” said the Kin. Its Amy Pond mask was now just a flat, scrawled drawing of a girl’s face.

  “We’re here at the beginning of it all,” said the Doctor, “because that’s where you want to be. But I’m prepared to do this another way. I could find a solution for you. For all of you.”

  “Open the door,” grunted the Kin.

  The Doctor opened the door. The winds that swirled about the TARDIS pushed the Doctor backwards.

  The Kin stood at the door of the TARDIS. “It’s so dark.”

  “We’re at the very start of it all. Before light.”

  “I will walk into the Void,” said the Kin. “And you will ask me, ‘What time is it?’ And I will tell myself, tell you, tell all Creation, Time for the Kin to rule, to occupy, to invade. Time for the Universe to become only me and mine and whatever I keep to devour. Time for the first and final reign of the Kin, world without end, through all of time.”

  “I wouldn’t do it,” said the Doctor. “If I were you. You can still change your mind.”

  The Kin dropped the Amy Pond mask onto the TARDIS floor. It pushed itself out of the TARDIS door, into the Void.

  “Doctor,” it called. Its face was a writhing mass of maggots. “Ask me what time it is.”

  “I can do better than that,” said the Doctor. “I can tell you exactly what time it is. It’s no time. It’s Nothing O’Clock. It’s a microsecond before the Big Bang. We’re not at the Dawn of Time. We’re before the Dawn.

  “The Time Lords really didn’t like genocide. I’m not too keen on it myself. It’s the potential you’re killing off. What if one day there was a good Dalek? What if . . .” He paused. “Space is big. Time is bigger. I would have helped you to find a place your people could have lived. But there was a girl called Polly, and she left her diary behind. And you killed her. That was a mistake.”

  “You never even knew her,” called the Kin from the Void.

  “She was a kid,” said the Doctor. “Pure potential, like every kid everywhere. I know all I need.” The squiggly whatsit attached to the TARDIS console was beginning to smoke and spark. “You’re out of time, literally. Because Time doesn’t start until the Big Bang. And if any part of a creature that inhabits time gets removed from time . . . well, you’re removing yourself from the whole picture.”

  The Kin understood. It understood that, at that moment, all of Time and Space was one tiny particle, smaller than an atom, and that until a microsecond passed, and the particle exploded, nothing would happen. Nothing could happen. And the Kin was on the wrong side of the microsecond.

  Cut off from Time, all the other parts of the Kin were ceasing to be. The It that was They felt the wash of nonexistence sweeping over them.

  In the beginning—before the beginning—was the word. And the word was “Doctor!”

  But the door had been closed and the TARDIS vanished, implacably. The Kin was left alone, in the Void before Creation.

  Alone, forever, in that moment, waiting for Time to begin.

  VIII.

  The young man in the tweed jacket walked around the house at the end of Claversham Row. He knocked at the door, but no one answered. He went back into the blue box, and fiddled with the tiniest of controls: it was always easier to travel a thousand years than it was to travel twenty-four hours.

  He tried again.

  He could feel the threads of time raveling and reraveling. Time is complex: not everything that has happened has happened, after all. Only the Time Lords understood it, and even they found it impossible to describe.

  The house in Claversham Row had a grimy FOR SALE sign in the garden.

  He knocked at the door.

  “Hello,” he said. “You must be Polly. I’m looking for Amy Pond.” The girl’s hair was in pigtails. She looked up at the Doctor suspiciously. “How do you know my name?” she asked.

  “I’m very clever,” said the Doctor, seriously.

  Polly shrugged. She went back into the house, and the Doctor followed. There was, he was relieved to notice, no fur on the walls.

  Amy was in the kitchen, drinking tea with Mrs. Browning. Radio Four was playing in the background. Mrs. Browning was telling Amy about her job as a nurse, and the hours she had to work, and Amy was saying that her fiancé was a nurse, and she knew all about it.

  She looked up, sharply, when the Doctor came in: a look as if to say “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

  “I thought you’d be here,” said the Doctor. “If I just kept looking.”

  THEY LEFT THE house on Claversham Row: the blue police box was parked at the end of the road, beneath some chestnut trees.

  “One moment,” said Amy, “I was about to be eaten by that creature. The next I was sitting in the kitchen, talking to Mrs. Browning, and listening to The Archers. How did you do that?”

  “I’m very clever,” said the Doctor. It was a good line, and he was determined to use it as much as possible.

  “Let’s go home,” said Amy. “Will Rory be there this time?”

  “Everybody in the world will be there,” said the Doctor. “Even Rory.”

  They went into the TARDIS. He had already removed the blackened remains of the squiggly whatsit from the console: the TARDIS would not again be able to reach the moment before time began, but then, all things considered, that had to be a good thing.

  He was determined to take Amy straight home—with just a small side trip to Andalusia, during the age of chivalry, where, in a small inn on the road to Seville, he had once been served the finest gazpacho he had ever tasted.

  The Doctor was almost completely sure he could find it again . . .

  “We’ll go straight home,” he said. “After lunch. And over lunch, I’ll tell you the story of Maximelos and the three Ogrons.”

  A Lunar Labyrinth

  2013

  We were walking up a gentle hill on a summer’s evening. It was gone eight thirty, but it still felt like midafternoon. The sky was blue. The sun was low on the horizon, and it splashed the clouds with gold and salmon and purple-gray.

  “So how did it end?” I asked my guide.

  “It never ends,” he said.

  “But you said it’s gone,” I said. “The maze.”

  I had found the lunar labyrinth mentioned online, a small footnote on a website that told you what was interesting and noteworthy wherever you were in the world. Unusual local attractions: the tackier and more manmade the better. I do not know why I am drawn to them: stoneless henges made of cars or of yellow school buses, polystyrene models of enormous blocks of cheese, unconvincing dinosaurs made of flaking powdery concrete and all the rest.

  I need them, and they give me an excuse to stop driving, wherever I am, and actually to talk to people. I have been invited into people’s houses and into their lives because I wholeheartedly appreciated the zoos they made from engine parts, the houses they had built from tin cans, stone blocks and then covered with aluminum foil, the historical pageants made from shop-window dummies, the paint on their faces flaking off. And those people, the ones who made the roadside attractions, they would accept me for what I am.

  “We burned it down,” said my guide. He was elderly, and he walked with a stick. I had met him sitting on a bench in front of the town’s hardware store, and he had agreed to show me the site that the lunar labyrinth had once been built upon. Our progress across the meadow was not fast. “The end of the lunar labyrinth. It was easy. The rosemary hedges caught fire and they crackled and flared. The smoke was thick and drifted down the hill and made us all think of roast lamb.”

  “Why was it called a lunar labyrinth?” I asked. “Was it just the alliteration?”

  He thought about this. “I wouldn’t rightly know,” he said. “Not one way or the other. We called it a labyrinth, but I guess it’s just a maze . . .”

  “Just amazed,” I repeated.
>
  “There were traditions,” he said. “We would start to walk it the day after the full moon. Begin at the entrance. Make your way to the center, then turn around and trace your way back. Like I say, we’d only start walking the day the moon began to wane. It would still be bright enough to walk. We’d walk it any night the moon was bright enough to see by. Come out here. Walk. Mostly in couples. We’d walk until the dark of the moon.”

  “Nobody walked it in the dark?”

  “Oh, some of them did. But they weren’t like us. They were kids, and they brought flashlights, when the moon went dark. They walked it, the bad kids, the bad seeds, the ones who wanted to scare each other. For those kids it was Hallowe’en every month. They loved to be scared. Some of them said they saw a torturer.”

  “What kind of a torturer?” The word had surprised me. You did not hear it often, not in conversation.

  “Just someone who tortured people, I guess. I never saw him.”

  A breeze came down toward us from the hilltop. I sniffed the air but smelled no burning herbs, no ash, nothing that seemed unusual on a summer evening. Somewhere there were gardenias.

  “It was only kids when the moon was dark. When the crescent moon appeared, then the children got younger, and parents would come up to the hill and walk with them. Parents and children. They’d walk the maze together to its center and the adults would point up to the new moon, how it looks like a smile in the sky, a huge yellow smile, and little Romulus and Remus, or whatever the kids were called, they’d smile and laugh, and wave their hands as if they were trying to pull the moon out of the sky and put it on their little faces.

  “Then, as the moon waxed, the couples would come. Young couples would come up here, courting, and elderly couples, comfortable in each other’s company, the ones whose courting days were long forgotten.” He leaned heavily on his stick. “Not forgotten,” he said. “You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you. Even if the brain has forgotten, perhaps the teeth remember. Or the fingers.”