Doctor Who: Keeping Up With the Joneses (2 page)

‘Yes. Christina. Of course, you are. Hello, Christina! Very nice to meet you, I’m—’

‘John Jones,’ she said, saving him the trouble.

He smiled again, and it was like the sun coming up.

‘Welcome,’ she said, and he smiled again as if that was a pleasant surprise as well.

When he’d eaten his eggs, he announced his intention of going out for a walk. ‘Unless there’s a bus?’

‘No, no bus.’

‘No big red bus? They go like the clappers, buses. Sometimes it seems they’re just flying. Through the traffic, obviously. Bus lanes.’

She shook her head, thinking again that he was a very odd person.

At the door, he turned. ‘Thank you, Christina de Souza,’ he said.

While she was washing the plates, she suddenly wondered how he had known her unmarried name. But it was unsettling, so she consigned it to the place where she kept all unsettling thoughts, the enormous dark lake in her mind’s eye. It was a lonely spot, green and bare and silent, and she let things slip below the oily waters and then they didn’t bother her again.

Still, it was odd.

*

He left the inexplicable house and its unbelievable occupant and went for a walk along the implausible street, peering at unfeasible doorknockers and improbable geraniums, and above all at the impossible people: here, there and everywhere. This was, indisputably, the TARDIS. He could feel it, knew it the way you know you’re wearing shoes, and the wind was sweet with the faintest scent of coral and anti-polarised neutrons – and something else, like peat or wet wallpaper, the smell of Jonestown.

The TARDIS contained any number of things – literally, any number, think of a number and that was the right number, then think of another number which was astronomically different and that was the right number too, because that was what a TARDIS was, a place where ordinary numbers broke down and conventional notions did not apply – but it emphatically did not contain a thriving market town with really good bacon and eggs and Christina de Souza running a boarding house. Lady Christina, cat burglar to the aristocracy, thief of museum pieces – well, all right, they had that in common – a woman who could barely look at something beautiful without pinching it. She would have been perfect, just perfect if she’d been born a couple centuries earlier. All those English queens… they’d have loved her. And Catharine of Aragon. Ooh, and Reinette de Pompadour. Now those two could have made some trouble… Christina de Souza on the TARDIS. That was something he would have noticed. Probably when things started to go missing.

Except that here he was, in the TARDIS, in the main street, and it was all physically real. Except again, if it was real, where was the flying bus? And why didn’t she know who he was?

And, rather more important: was the whole thing about to implode into a final and appalling nothingness which would devour him and the TARDIS and leave a gaping hole in the universe which nothing would ever entirely fill? That had seemed to be what the temporal mine was aiming for. Which did not explain what he was doing here, not even a bit.

He couldn’t hear the noise from all that temporal sheer any more – assuming that was what he’d been hearing when he was back out there in the console room and not in here in Jonestown – but that didn’t mean the TARDIS wasn’t still under attack. So, the agenda: find the problem, fix the problem, don’t get imploded. Did we tick the box marked ‘Yes, please, the deadly time-space catastrophe’? Not in the slightest.
Allons
not even a little bit
y
in that direction, at all.

But the agenda would have to include making sure Jonestown didn’t get imploded either. He didn’t let other people pay for his salvation. Not ever again.

So he wandered and peered at things. He peered at the fishmonger’s – the old lady behind the counter gave him a happy smile and whispered something approving he didn’t quite hear but which got a lot of giggles from the other old ladies in a queue for kippers. He thought he recognised one of them from somewhere, but he felt that about lots of people. It was a consequence of spending hundreds of years drifting through time: faces got a bit recurrent. There’d been a flautist in Basingstoke who was the spitting image of Ivan the Terrible. But still, Jonestown seemed very full of echoes, of people he almost knew. Christina de Souza and all.

He saluted the jellied eel counter and wandered out. Ooh, there was a pub. Nice pub. It was roomy, dim, and rather comfy. He lolled on a chair, feeling the wood and the cushion. Very nice. Great smell: wood and detergent and fresh flowers and old cloth. Varnish and polish. There was a box of games by the window, games he didn’t know how to play. He knew how to play pretty much every game ever made. But these, no. They were by Heidt & Co of Jonestown. Puzzles. He experimented with one for a while. It puzzled him for longer than he would have expected, until he realised it had two halves and you had to solve them at the same time, and then the pieces came apart in his hands. Lovely. He looked around.

He suspected the old men at the bar belonged to the women in the fishmonger’s. The publican called them Old Owen and Young Dai, and Old Owen was – inevitably – just a little bit younger than Young Dai. They eyed his suit with a weary sort of irritation, the sort of disregard old men everywhere reserve for younger men – or at least for men who appear to be younger – and when he ordered a lemonade and sat in the corner sucking noisily through a straw they didn’t seem to think much more about him. They were rather busy, actually, disparaging the newly arrived Mr Heidt, who was evidently hot stuff in Jonestown and had a weather station on his lawn. Neither Young Dai nor Old Owen, it seemed, had much truck with meteorology. They had a good friendship, he thought. Old friends together, and doubtless their wives were like that too and the four of them gabbed and grumbled and no one was lonely. Wouldn’t do to get old and lonely.

Stone walls, dark wood, horse brasses. No jukebox, no television, not even a pool table. Just places to sit and a bar and somewhere what seemed like a pretty good kitchen. That was something he liked about the twentieth century. Quite a few other bits of it were pretty awful, but pubs were properly pubby, with pub grub and chunky glasses to drink out of, and whole families came in on Sundays for lunch. He pondered. Jonestown. People. TARDIS. Pub. Lemons. He liked lemons. They made you make funny faces when you bit them, and a very, very long way in the future there was a really amazing planet where they’d evolved into people and lived in harmony with a variety of hyper-intelligent bee. Evolution. Thousands and thousands of years of tiny changes could turn little burning sparks of chemistry into people, into monsters and angels and even human beings. It happened everywhere. You went to an empty planet, took your eye off it for a billion years, came back and, boom, there it was: life. Stinky, slooshy, complex, amazing life. It always found ways to surprise you. Or maybe that was because it happened in time, and he didn’t always pay much attention to how time looked from the inside.

The universe was brilliant. Every last, ridiculous nook and corner. He loved it. Even this bit, although this bit was slightly alarming because, well, there was a leftover war machine trying to open the TARDIS like a bag of soup. Or an oyster. Or a tin of golden syrup. Amazing how sticky those got. Lemon and golden syrup, though, there was a combination which could blow your socks off. Taste supernova. He –

And then, for no reason at all, everything changed.

Over by the fireplace was a metal silhouette of a chicken, technically a cockerel. He had dismissed it at first as a bit of ordinary pub bric-a-brac, but now he saw that it wasn’t and it riveted his attention. It was a weathervane, or, rather, it was part of one. Affixed to the feet of the cockerel – he was a proud enough sort of fellow, strutting his two-dimensional stuff across a cast-iron cornfield – were a set of metal gears, and a drive shaft went off at right angles and then, presumably, up the chimney. Very unusual arrangement. Unique, even. And now there was a creaking and groaning and the shaft started to turn, yawing one way and then the other, and the cockerel spun around and around, and the grumbling and joshing in the pub faded away.

The man calling himself Jones looked at them: grave, unhappy faces and concealed fear. They’d built the weathervane to tell them something, and they didn’t enjoy seeing it work. Bad news, then. Bad enough that they didn’t complain about it. No one said anything at all.

Everyone watched the cockerel go around and around as if it was really important. And he was pretty sure they were right. Never underestimate the value of local knowledge – especially when the locality in question is a Welsh village in a polydimensional quasi-space in the fractal layers of a time machine. Old Time Lord proverb. Aeons old, if he remembered to pop back to the early days of the universe and say it out loud once this was all over, and he was definitely going to make a mental note about that. He might go and say it to that Cro Magnon alpha.

He could feel a funny sort of pressure all around him, knew the TARDIS was letting him know she wasn’t happy, that she was under attack.
This is what it feels like to be her.

The chicken slowed, wobbled, and then pointed firmly east.

‘Storm coming, then,’ Owen said into the quiet.

‘Likely,’ Dai agreed.

The publican looked up from the till. ‘Good storm?’ he asked hesitantly. ‘Proper storm, I mean?’

There was a longish pause.

‘Likely not,’ Dai said.

The publican swallowed and sighed. ‘No, I suppose not.’

The old men looked at one another. ‘Could be it’s time to take the girls home,’ Owen said.

Dai nodded. ‘Could be.’

They waved to the publican and shuffled out, and with them, discreetly, the rest of the pub. The man calling himself John Jones blew air into his cheeks.

‘Nice puzzles,’ he called to the publican. ‘This one really had me going for a bit.’

‘Oh, those. We got them free. Mr Heidt’s just come, you see. Wants to make an impression. Glad someone likes them. Most of my regulars are a bit less sure, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, new ideas.’

‘Quite so, sir. Begging your pardon, but I might close up, sir, pretty soon, if it’s all the same to you,’ the publican said hopefully to him when they were alone in the saloon bar. ‘Don’t want to be a bother. I expect you’ve got somewhere to stay close by, have you?’

‘Oh, yes. Of course. Wouldn’t do to be out in a storm, would it?’

‘No, sir,’ the publican agreed. ‘No, it wouldn’t. Very wise, I must say.’

‘Mind you, I quite like a wander in the rain. Thunder and lightning, even. Exciting. Move slowly, don’t build up a charge, it’s perfectly safe, isn’t it?’

The publican looked away. ‘I gather it might be, under normal circumstances, yes. Very nice. Romantic, even.’

‘But?’

‘But I can’t say as these are exactly normal circumstances, sir. Not precisely.’

‘But you’d rather not explain.’

‘No, sir.’

‘You look like a bloke I used to know. Soldier. I never explained anything to him, either. Now I see why he always found it so annoying. Really not going to tell me anything at all?’

‘I can’t say as I’d know how to begin.’

‘As a matter of interest: which direction is your Mr Heidt’s house? Just wondering, I won’t bother him.’

The publican glanced eastwards. ‘I don’t know as it would be right to say, sir. Irresponsible, you see. You should get home.’

‘But if I said I was going for a stroll, didn’t need an umbrella…’

‘I’d heartily urge you not to dally, sir. I really would.’

‘Oh, I never dally,’ he said. ‘I wander, I deviate, I go off on tangents and sometimes circumambulate; I occasionally shilly-shally, dawdle or potter. I procrastinate, ratiocinate, and from time to time I do actually get lost. But I never dally. Bad for the brain.’

And he walked out into the gathering storm.

*

There was indeed a dark cloud looming out towards the east, a pendulous monster grumbling and growling to itself, and he could feel the psychic backwash already. Your average rainstorm tasted of mountains and seas, of the anticipation of drenched laundry and of crops raised and eaten. It was a real old lifecycle smorgasbord. The right sort of storm could make you feel alive and perky and even frisky. And soggy, obviously. But this one had none of that easy nature, no goodwill, no lightness. It reeked of smashing things flat, of pounding them into nothingness.

Say one thing for Dai and Owen, say this: they knew a bad’un when they saw it.

The first bolt of lightning flickered, stark nacreous white cracking from cloud to cloud. Then another, and a moment later the thunder from the first. But no rain. No water. Nothing which would nurture, just a warm, gritty wind and the prickle of electricity – and a boiling, metallic fury he could feel in his gums.

He smacked his lips and ran his tongue over his teeth, then walked across the cobbles towards it. The storm seemed to be over the town and yet it was right here, in the street. There was a shape in it, in the dust and the clouds and the roiling shadows. A man-shape, if a man kept blowing himself out like the flame of a candle.

‘There you are,’ he murmured, into the wind. ‘But what are you?’

The answer, when it came, was very loud and blew him all the way back down the street.

*

Christina de Souza could hear the storm blowing up outside her windows, and she smiled and hunkered down in her chair. There was nothing more pleasant than being inside when the weather outside was bad, hearing the rattle of the casements and knowing that however rotten it got out there it was safe in here.

There were no more tasks left in the day. She could sit and read her book – a most disreputable detective story – and later she would make herself dinner and enjoy some music on the radio. Solitude was not loneliness, and she never really felt alone, anyway. She turned the page. She was reasonably sure that Aaron Catton would survive his latest encounter with the Iron Fist Gang, but at the moment his situation definitely seemed perilous. She wondered what his family thought about his line of work, and whether his parents ever wished he’d just marry the curvaceous Jessica Jarvis who worked on the news desk at the City Paper and choose a less perilous profession. Surely, they must. She turned the page.