Doctor Who: Nothing O'Clock: Eleventh Doctor: 50th Anniversary (2 page)

‘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 goodbye to the lady in
the cat mask when she got to the end of the garden path.

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
impatiently 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 got confiscated. One night she got me
and Rory to make a disturbance while she broke in to the
teachers’ 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 schoolfriend’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
materialised 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 perfect 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 could remember.

‘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 a gentle voice
said,
Attention, visitor. 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 that the … the Shadow
Proclamation said it was all OK. 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. Limited telepathic broadcast, but
only on human frequencies. Hmm.
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 didn’t 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 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.

‘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.