Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (28 page)

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.

“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 said:

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 in the town. 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 with 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 and pushed her head through the wall. 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 came 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 last week 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 the door of their police box, and sprinted away across the green.

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. Look, Amy, don’t let anyone persuade you to ask
them
the time. 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 ask you what time it is?”

“It sounds like them. Yes. But my people dealt with them, so long ago. It’s almost inconceivable . . .”

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.”

“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’s 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. 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.

“What are you?” asked Amy.

“We are the Kin,” said the girl, who was not a girl. Her voice was deeper, darker, and more guttural. She seemed to Amy like something crouching, something huge that wore a paper mask with the face of a girl crudely scrawled on it. Amy could not understand how she could ever have been fooled into thinking it was a real face.

“I’ve heard of you,” said the Doctor. “My people thought you were—”

“An abomination,” said the crouching thing with the paper mask. “And a violation of all the laws of time. They sectioned us off from the rest of Creation. But I escaped, and thus we escaped. And we are ready to begin again. Already we have started to purchase this world . . .”

“You’re recycling money through time,” said the Doctor. “Buying up this world with it, starting with this house, the town . . .”

“Doctor? What’s going on?” asked Amy. “Can you explain any of this?”

“All of it,” said the Doctor. “Sort of wish I couldn’t. They’ve come here to take over the Earth. They’re going to become the population of the planet.”

“Oh, no, Doctor,” said the huge crouching creature in the paper mask. “You don’t understand. That’s not why we take over the planet. We will take over the world and let humanity become extinct simply in order to get you here, now.”

The Doctor grabbed Amy’s hand and shouted, “Run!” He headed for the front door—

—and found himself at the top of the stairs. He called, “Amy!” but there was no reply. Something brushed his face: something that felt almost like fur. He swatted it away.

There was one door open, and he walked towards it.

“Hel
lo,
” said the person in the room, in a breathy, female voice. “
So
glad you could come, Doctor.”

It was Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of Great Britain.

“You
do
know who we are, dear?” she asked. “It would be such a
shame
if you didn’t.”

“The Kin,” said the Doctor. “A population that only consists of one creature, but able to move through time as easily and instinctively as a human can cross the road. There was only one of you. But you’d populate a place by moving backwards and forwards in time until there were hundreds of you, then thousands and millions, all interacting with yourselves at different moments in your own timeline. And this would go on until the local structure of time would collapse, like rotten wood. You need other entities, at least in the beginning, to ask you the time, and create the quantum superpositioning that allows you to anchor to a place-time location.”

“Very
good,
” said Mrs. Thatcher. “Do you
know
what the Time Lords said, when they engulfed our world? They said that as
each
of us was the Kin at a different moment in time, to kill any one of us was to commit an act of genocide against our whole species. You cannot kill
me,
because to kill me is to kill
all
of us.”

“You know I’m the last Time Lord?”

“Oh
yes,
dear.”

“Let’s see. You pick up the money from the mint as it’s being printed, buy things with it, return it moments later. Recycle it through time. And the masks . . . I suppose they amplify the conviction field. People are going to be much more willing to sell things when they believe that the leader of their country is asking for them, personally . . .
and eventually you’ve sold the whole place to yourselves. Will you kill the humans?”

“
No
need, dear. We’ll even make reser
va
tions for them: Greenland, Siberia, Antarctica . . . but they
will
die out, nonetheless. Several billion people living in places that can barely support a few thousand. Well, dear . . . it
won’t
be pretty.” Mrs. Thatcher moved. The Doctor concentrated on seeing her as she was. He closed his eyes. Opened them to see a bulky figure wearing a crude black and white face mask, with a photograph of Margaret Thatcher on it.

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.