Doctor Who: Keeping Up With the Joneses (3 page)

The front door slammed open – really slammed, she could hear the doorknob crunch the plaster of her hallway wall – and then the wind roared in, a real gale force like nothing she’d ever known. The geegaws on her mantelpiece shuddered, toppled and flew off. The china dog shattered on the floor. She heard windows banging elsewhere in the house, shattering, and bangs and crashes as more of her possessions fell destructively to Earth, and then John Jones was staggering into her parlour, barrelled along by a vicious torrent of air which seemed almost to be just for him. The house shook as if struck, and she realised as all the lights went out that it had been, that her home had actually been struck by lightning, and then it was struck again and she could smell burning, then and again and again.

PAH! PAH! POMMMM!

A windowpane cracked, and then another, and Jones shouted ‘Run!’

‘My house!’ she objected, as he grabbed for her hand. She batted him off.

He dropped down beside her, spoke fast and very earnestly. ‘It’s on fire and in a minute it will be more on fire and then so will we. Really, Christina: you need to run!’

‘It’s all I have!’

‘I’ll get you another one!’

He hauled her out of the chair, and abruptly she was flying down the corridor to the back door, almost literally flying, and behind her the chair was lit actinic white and then it was gone, burned to ash by lightning, and she could see – it was impossible, and absurd, but she could see the actual storm inside her house and chasing them down the corridor, a faceless, twisting snarl of hateful energy reaching out like an arm.

She could feel her hair lifting on her body, felt her clothes spark, and knew that was what happened just before you were hit.

They were nearly at the garden door. She couldn’t imagine how it would do them any good.

She wondered whether what happened next would hurt. She thought, probably, that it would.

Jones – and she was pretty sure this was somehow all his fault – reached into his jacket and produced a short, glowing stick of metal and pointed it at the door. She heard the lock click, saw him reach out for the handle.

She looked back, and saw a snake of white light reach out for her, but strangely slowly, as if time was stopping and she could just step outside.

He opened the door.

And drew her through into somewhere which was not her garden. It was… big. She felt an eerie sense of space and scale. The walls were segmented like a circus tent, and each segment was bordered by buttresses of metal or of something else, something which looked as if it had grown there. Coral? Was there a giant coral reef in her garden now? What about planning permission? There’d be the most terrible row.

He closed the door smartly, and she heard the howl of the storm, the dull impact against the other side of the door, and knew with absolute certainty that there was no way it was coming in here. Not through that door. She reached out and touched it. Cool and metallic. There were discs on it, or shields, which buzzed under her fingertips.

She looked around, and there he was, ruffled but composed, sprawled on a pile of hats. Not just a pile. A dune, she thought, like in the desert. There were modern hats in the most rakish style, Scotch bonnets and metal helmets which ought to be on a knight, and some strange hats which were only hats because they clearly went on your head.

On his head.

‘Who are you, really?’ she said.

He smiled brightly. ‘I’m the Doctor,’ he said, as if that explained everything.

*

They climbed across a small mountain of shoes. The air smelled of salt water, and she thought about coral again. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

‘The TARDIS,’ he said. ‘Storeroom 90. Well, we were always in the TARDIS. But this is where I keep all my old clothes.’

‘Right,’ she said, patiently, ‘and where is my garden?’

He looked back at her, helped her up onto a stack of brogues.

‘My garden?’ she persisted. ‘Which is what is usually behind that door.’

‘It’s where it always is. Which isn’t quite as simple as you might think.’

She didn’t think any of this was simple. There was a door over the next rise, though, and she slid down behind him. ‘If you open that, is there going to be a storm on the other side? Will we die?’

‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, probably not. Well, I don’t think so. Well.’ He frowned, whipped out the metal thing again. ‘Sonic screwdriver.’ He pointed it at the door, peered at it. ‘No,’ he said more confidently. ‘No.’

‘And what was that back there?’

‘Storm. Nasty one.’

‘Which came into my house.’ She scowled at him. ‘I’d like the truth, please.’

‘All right. Mobile discorporate mechanico-temporal intelligence manifesting in a semi-stable combat aspect with limited power reserves.’ He opened the door, and stepped through. ‘You don’t get many of those to the pound. A lot like your bacon and eggs, by the way.’

She understood the words, most of them, but the combination made no sense at all.

‘Limited?’ she demanded.

‘Yes. Well, everything’s limited. Almost everything. But this is more limited than most things. As in, limited energy. Comprehensibly so. A few days, maybe, at this rate.’

‘Well, that must be good.’

He looked dubious. She realised she could hear a sort of endless, low-level groaning, as if she were in an old submarine, far below the surface of the sea. Too far below. And then the noise again, without the fury but with a sort of patient inevitability which was almost worse.

Pah pah pom.

He looked up abruptly with a sort of awful anticipation, then shook his head when the sound died away, as if he was being silly. ‘Not the storm. Temporal sheer. For now, anyway.’

‘Oh, good.’

‘Hmm? No. That’s disastrous.’ He hesitated, rubbed his ribs. ‘Ow. We just lost navigation. And the first-floor kitchen. Well. There goes Christmas dinner.’

She was about to point out that she had no idea what that meant, that Christmas was months away, that his ribs couldn’t possibly tell him anything of the kind. And then, as she saw what was in the next room, she said, ‘Oh.’

‘On the upside,’ he said, ‘if it hadn’t been a limited construction, I could never have used the TARDIS safety system to get us back into the central phase nexus. On the downside, temporal sheer inside and outside the TARDIS. Well, that and… Are you all right?’

She was staring at the room. The floor. The walls. Technically it was a lot like the last one, with the same alarmingly unfamiliar curves and colours. But it was also not the same at all, because it did not contain clothes.

‘What… what’s this?’

‘Storeroom 89.’

‘And these are really… diamonds?’

‘Mm. Yes. I did say I’d get you another house.’ He filled one pocket. Millions of pounds, she thought. Millions and millions and millions and… She folded her arms so as not to reach out and grab a great handful. He looked at her curiously, and she flinched as he poked the screwdriver thing in her direction. It tickled. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Harmless.’ She wondered if he meant her. ‘Hmm. Come on. Just through here.’

He led the way, and she followed in his steps, absurdly worried about crushing the shining points of light beneath her feet.

The next door opened into a metal corridor, and he led her unerringly left, right, down, up some stairs and then they were in an arched, circular room with a strange central machine, and he seemed to relax.

‘Console room,’ he said. ‘We’re safe here. For now, anyway.’

‘Who are you?’ she demanded again.

‘Actually, that’s not the question,’ he replied. ‘The real question is: who are you? Because you’re not Christina de Souza, I know that.’

‘I certainly am!’

‘Not so much. I’ve met Christina de Souza. Saved the world with her. And she kissed me.’ She jolted up, outraged. He raised a hand. ‘That’s exactly what I mean! You’re not her. She’d have gone all sultry and pouty when I said that. And a room full of diamonds? The Christina I know would be asking if she could borrow a sack. Well, she’d have nicked a sack, if I had a sack. Which I do. Thousands of them. Storeroom 104.’ He watched her.

She didn’t say ‘Where’s that?’ and knew he’d been wondering if she would.

*

The woman who certainly wasn’t Christina de Souza was taking all this rather quietly, he thought. He had given her the basic class in time travel, the TARDIS, and himself, and she had just nodded as if each new idea just explained something she’d always wondered about. When something came along which would really worry someone else, she just dropped it into some sort of silence in her mind and it went down and away and that was that.

It was a useful trait, he supposed, but it made her a bit less satisfying to be around. He rather liked having people shriek and goggle when they saw the TARDIS. Granted, she hadn’t seen the outside and then the inside, which was the real shocker for most of his passengers, but the console room itself was still worth a goggle. More than one. The last TARDIS, bounded but infinite, travelling through time and space with the last of the Time Lords. It’s got to be worth a second look, surely.

So if she wasn’t Christina de Souza, who was she? The scans from the sonic had been a bit vague. Yes, she was human, in that she was human-shaped and made up of tiny bits of biological material working in close cooperation to produce a functioning organism, and she wasn’t a clone or a memory, but she was also not Earth-human, she didn’t have all the muck from red meat and burned fossil fuels and really dodgy nuclear technology. So why did she look like Christina, who had never actually been inside the TARDIS? And why did she think she was Christina? That wasn’t biological. And then again, she seemed to be a lot younger than she appeared. A lot a lot, if you believed the sonic – which he did, because sonics don’t lie – but only sort of, because time was a bit compressed and messy in the TARDIS at the moment, and one man’s week was another man’s millennium.

She was talking. Oh, and he was answering. Multitasking. Very fashionable, but he probably ought to pay attention to his mouth in case it said anything it shouldn’t.

‘So you’re a time traveller.’ She was still getting her head around that.

‘Time Lord. Lord of Time. Yes.’

‘How can you be a Lord of Time?’

‘Well. How can you be a Lord of anything?’

‘You conquer it and stand on top of it waving a stick,’ she said tartly.

‘Right. Yes. That’s… clearly we didn’t do that. At all. That’s primitive mammalian behaviour, and we were the most advanced race in the universe.’

‘So who did you go to war with? Who could possibly stand up to you?’

‘Oh, the Daleks. They were technologically advanced but really… nasty.’

‘And the Time Lords were nice?’

He thought about that. ‘On balance, no.’

‘But the Daleks made this thing, this temporal mine. Because it tried to destroy you.’

‘Um.’ She was giving him that look again, the one which said he wasn’t fooling her, the one she had dished out when he tried the psychic notepaper and she just saw… paper. He sighed. ‘I don’t know. They might have. Or not. By the end of the war… well, we’d stolen so much of their technology and they’d stolen so much of ours, there wasn’t much to choose between us, science wise. And half of these things got captured and subverted and put back out there, then recaptured and deprogrammed and put somewhere else, even the mine probably doesn’t know what side it’s on any more. And it shouldn’t be here at all. Look,’ he pointed at the display above the zoomifier, realising belatedly that she couldn’t read it. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘this is the temporal substrate. Think of it as being like an Emmental cheese. Lots of holes. And we took a single hole and we put it somewhere else and locked it there for ever.’

‘Another cheese?’

That was a ridiculous way of looking at it. He rather approved. ‘Yes. A very small, perfectly isolated cheese which can never be eaten, and which will exist in its own perfect moment after this universe and the next one and the one after that have boiled away into dust.’

She nodded.

He went on. ‘This thing has somehow escaped from that cheese and ended up back in ours, and now it’s broken, and it’s trying to do what it’s programmed to do. Sort of.’

‘Can you stop it?’

‘Definitely. Probably definitely. I’m the Doctor.’

‘How?’

‘Thhhhhat sometimes takes a bit longer. Comes to me in flashes.’

‘And what about Jonestown?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What about Jonestown? What is it? Where did it come from? The mine’s broken. Well, old. Old and bit weird. It’s supposed to suck the TARDIS into a decohering singularity and shut the door for ever.’

‘Make another cheese and keep you there.’

‘No. Cheese. No, it’s… Yes, all right. A really nasty, terrifying cheese which is slowly consuming itself and everything around it until even the rind just boils away you’re left with nothing, not even the space where a cheese used to be. But that’s not what it’s doing. It’s trying to tear the TARDIS apart and implode her. You can’t do that with a TARDIS. There are safety features. Because if you did, you’d take about four per cent of the observable universe with you. So it’s like trying to open a jam jar with blancmange… except if you could get the interior space of a jam jar to start filling up with blancmange… sooner or later that would make a big bang.’ An actual Big Bang, but there was no point going into that. ‘So the question is, is Jonestown part of the attack? Which is why who you are is really important. Because if Jonestown is part of the mine, then so are you.’

He peered at her, and wondered whether she’d suddenly turn into something strange and terrifying.

She didn’t.

Still didn’t.

Didn’t.

Didn’t.

Apparently wasn’t going to.

Well, that was a relief.

And definitely not a disappointment, at all.

*

Of course she was the real Christina de Souza. She knew her own life perfectly. She had been born in this town, grown up, gone elsewhere and fallen unwisely and gloriously in love, lost her husband, and come home to be small and calm and to live through her days of sorrow.