Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning - Short Fictions and Disturbances

‘It’s ridiculous,’ he said, after ten days. ‘There’s nothing for sale in 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 in the hotel much longer.

‘It’s the new owners,’ she explained. ‘They are 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.

IV

‘Nineteen eighty-four,’ 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 little English town, and it looked like a little English town as far as Amy was concerned. Just like the one she’d left, 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 around the house, past the rubbish bins, into the back garden.

The French window that opened onto the little back garden had a catch that didn’t fasten properly. Polly thought it extremely unlikely that the house’s new owners had 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.

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.

Polly 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 befriended her, about the first boy she had ever liked. It was, sometimes, her best friend: 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 taken away. 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.

She went up the stairs. 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, blown up to life-size. The eyeholes had been cut out already. She recognised 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 grey 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, 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.

‘Dinnertime,’ he told her.

Polly started to scream then, as he came towards her, but she didn’t get to scream for very long.

V

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 deck chair, 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.