Doctor Who: Nothing O'Clock: Eleventh Doctor: 50th Anniversary (4 page)

‘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 in time,
using the same money over and over, 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 big important things, places that belong to the country,
not to an individual, 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
full-faced 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
above him. ‘You will be imprisoned until your life is done. Age
here, regenerate here, die here, again and again. 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 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
doorhandle.

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 crocodile 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. By which,
you mean, 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 forth in time fifteen million
times just to populate London.

‘But 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 space–time continuum that
weren’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.’

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 dematerialises.

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 towards 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
on to 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 you 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 non-existence 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.

The young man in the tweed
jacket walked round 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
ravelling and re-ravelling. 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.