Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning - Short Fictions and Disturbances

‘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.

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 alligator 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. 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 forward in time fifteen million times just to populate London.