Doctor Who: Nothing O'Clock: Eleventh Doctor: 50th Anniversary (3 page)

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
looked 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.

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.

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.

‘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 have 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 the United Kingdom.

‘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 consists of only 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 on 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.’