Doctor Who: Keeping Up with the Joneses

by Nick Harkaway

  ‘Not safe after dark.’

  ‘No, indeed, not. Not safe, at all.’

  ‘Bad weather?’

  ‘Oh!’ Her small, dark eyes peered out from beneath flabby brows. She looked like a blackbird scouting for worms. ‘I know what you mean. Clever boy. No, not that. Not for years. No, it’s different now.’

  ‘Different how?’

  Her face set stubbornly. ‘It’s just not safe. Not safe at all. And I hold it’s all this new thinking is the problem.’

  ‘Mr Heidt.’

  ‘I didn’t say that, did I? Naming no names. But he’s very modern. I don’t think we need modern, here.’

  The Doctor pressed, but she either wouldn’t or couldn’t say any more. He escorted her to the door and garnered an introduction to the two crones by the door, both of whom were on Christina’s list of Nasty Old Women because they’d been unkind about her after Simon had died. They didn’t approve of going out in the evening, or new people, or modern things. They also didn’t take much to the Doctor. One of them called him a Fancy London Boy. He retreated.

  ‘That went well,’ Christina murmured to him.

  ‘Pffaww,’ he agreed. ‘They’re a pair! They don’t like anything. They don’t even like the dachshund. Who doesn’t like dachshunds? They’re little parcels of dog-shaped goodness. I’ve known Jalabite Hegemon ships give up conquest and start little farmsteads just so they can have happy dachshunds. Everyone likes dachshunds, everywhere in the universe. Well, except on Bithmorency. People there got into a war with a refugee column of evolutionarily advanced dachshund supersoldiers fleeing the destruction of their homeworld. The wire-haired marines took out an entire town – two hundred thousand dead. And it was a tragic misunderstanding. The dachshunds only stopped to ask for some biscuits, automated defence systems fired on them. There’s a lesson: never give control of your space weapons to an unsupervised machine.’ He shrugged, and she found herself nodding: schoolboy error.

  She reclaimed control of her head, and they sat and ate scones. The pub began to empty out.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Well, it’s a pub, isn’t it? Steak and kidney pie, ploughman’s lunch, pint of your finest. The evening crowd should be coming in. But they’re not. They’re staying home.’

  She felt a prickle between her shoulder blades, as if she was being watched by an unfamiliar cat. ‘What, everyone?’

  ‘Even him.’ He pointed. There was no one behind the bar. ‘Popped upstairs and never came back down. It was like this last time, as well.’

  ‘Last time?’ She glared at him.

  ‘Yes. I came here just before your house burned down.’

  She glared at him. ‘You mean this is where the cloud monster limited combat thing found you? Are you looking for trouble?’

  ‘No. Yes.’ She kept glaring until he explained. ‘No, the cloud thing was in the street. Yes, I am slightly looking for trouble because that’s always where the answers are. Aaaand I’ve found it.’ He pointed.

  She looked over towards the fireplace. There was a weathervane on the mantle, old and made of iron. It must have been there since the village was built. Town. City. Whatever. She wondered what a weathervane could possibly tell you in a tiny suburb of a great city, surrounded by tall buildings. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Well, it’s moving, which is what it did before.’

  ‘When you burned my house down.’

  ‘That was the cloud.’

  ‘Which was chasing you.’

  ‘Shsh! Watch!’

  ‘It’s a weathervane. There must be a top bit on the roof.’

  ‘Yeah. But before it was just a weathervane. Now it’s got that little man on top of it.’

  She peered at the wrought iron. Sure enough, one end of the arrow was topped by a tiny, running figure making a gangling escape.

  ‘Doctor,’ she said.

  ‘And the question is, what’s he running from? What’s at the other end of the arrow?’

  She couldn’t see. The far end of the vane was still in shadow. But she knew something he apparently didn’t.

  ‘Doctor—’

  ‘Because if we knew that, we might know what’s about to happen. Mind you, where would be the fun in—’

  She heard the wind sigh, felt the change in the air. He must have felt it just before somehow. The weathervane twitched, creaked.

  ‘Doctor!’ she slammed her hand down on the table.

  ‘What?’ he looked startled that she’d interrupted.

  ‘The little man!’

  ‘What about him?’

  The weathervane swung sharply around, and at the far end of the arrow was a vast, hulking shape in black iron, a silhouette from a bad dream, twisted and horrible. Then it swivelled back again, and the little man stood out against the light of a candle.

  ‘It’s you!’ she told him, and saw, halfway along the length of the vane at the hinge point, the tiny figure of a woman caught between, and knew it was herself.

  The first footstep shuddered through the silence, heavy enough to shake the floor and the walls.

  Pah pah POM.

  The Doctor gave a cry and buckled sharply over his stomach, then gritted his teeth and surged to his feet, pulled her along with him. ‘Christina, run!’

  The footsteps were impossibly enormous. They seemed to shake everything, even the sky. She didn’t move.

  Pah pah POM.

  ‘It must be huge!’ she said.

  ‘The vibration isn’t physical,’ he said, ‘it’s temporal. Each impact is transmitted through time. That thing out there isn’t just walking. It’s banging on the door. Or maybe the roof. Of the TARDIS, which from in here is the entirety of creation. She can’t tell me the way she usually would so she’s sharing her pain. That was the entire aquarium level vaporised. I can feel dead fish in my gall bladder. All right? So, yes, it’s a very loud noise. Now, did I say “run”?’

  The door exploded into pieces, and she just had time to recognise the figure from the weathervane. She’d been right. It was huge.

  She ran.

  *

  He threw himself forward just as a terrible hand flattened the table where they’d been sitting, and said ‘Run!’ again, because people very often didn’t unless you reminded them. Not-Christina ran. So did he. He felt something touch his shoulder, like a puff of air, and knew his suit would need sewing, heard the fabric part as razors plucked, missed his skin by just that much.

  ‘Back door!’ he shouted. Everywhere had a back door. That was a given. In some places it could be rather hard to find, but in a pub, generally speaking, it was through the kitchen and out into the –

  There was no back door in the kitchen, just a white wall. He turned, thinking hard.

  Christina grabbed hold of a butcher’s trolley by the door, a thick wooden block for the Sunday roast on thick rubber wheels so it could go from table to table, and dragged him down onto it, then kicked them off from the sink unit with both feet. The monster bellowed furiously as they skidded past beneath a grasping arm. For an instant, he looked up into its ugly, misshapen face. Stared into vast, mad eyes.

  It said, very clearly: ‘Time Lord.’

  He wasn’t sure if it was an accusation or a plea.

  The butcher’s block hit the frame of the kitchen door hard and tumbled over, spilling them to the floor, and they ran back into the saloon and out of the pub.

  *

  ‘Where do we go?’ Christina demanded.

  ‘It’s your town!’

  ‘It’s your monster!’

  They almost fell around the corner, up the street and away.

  ‘How is it my monster?’

  ‘It said, “Time Lord”!’

  ‘Maybe it’s just well informed!’

  She didn’t have time to argue with that, no doubt the thing would come out of the pub very shortly and try to eat them or whatever it had in mind. She wondered if he ever thought there w
asn’t time to argue. He seemed to overthink everything, all the time, to argue it out like –

  It was infectious. It was insane and infectious and now she was doing it, just like him. No, no, no, and absolutely: no. She ran on, leading the way.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he shouted after her, and when she didn’t answer he followed, as she had known he would. He had to assume she knew what she was doing because she lived here, and if she didn’t he still had to go with her in order to save her. She felt footfalls behind her, knew the thing was coming after them, and she derived a brief moment of satisfaction from the thought that at least he was following her rather than the other way around; the sinister weathervane had been wrong about that.

  The footfalls were uneven, as if the thing was limping and dropping to one hand to pull itself along. Pah pah POM. Pah pah POM. Run, run, run. She wondered what that room looked like now, the one he had called the console room. Alarms and red lights, she thought, and tortured metal, the way she imagined a submarine at too great a depth. Pah pah POMMM.

  Behind her the Doctor was pointing the sonic screwdriver, making adjustments and muttering: ‘Complex structure derived from the same basic components, electron physiognomy – ooh, you beauty! Partially stabilised matrix attached to—’ and then he had to stop, and duck, and roll in the gutter to get away from a clutching hand. He was mad. Mad and dangerous to know. She looked around, saw a car, went to it. She had no idea how it worked, she’d never driven one. The window was open a crack and that was enough to get in, then she found her hands weaving wires together. It was an old model and not very secure – old? Not 1959 old, not as old as her – and the engine started. She stamped down, the car lurched, hurtled forwards. She flung open the passenger door.

  ‘Get in!’ she yelled, and was moving again before he was properly seated, felt something land on the roof, a fist driving the back left corner of the car flat against the rear seat.

  ‘What is that thing?’ she demanded, shouting over the sound of the car’s engine.

  ‘Same as the storm,’ he shouted back. ‘Lower energy configuration, more sophisticated, still only semi-stable. Where are you going?’

  ‘Away!’

  ‘Good for starters. After that we need a plan.’

  ‘I don’t have one! Do you?’

  ‘No. Yes, always. Plan. Plan plan plan. We need a probabilistic confinement system, pin it down and ask it questions.’

  ‘I’ll settle for killing it!’

  His face changed, and for a moment she could hear him perfectly, as if the wind stopped, as if everything stopped for his response. ‘I don’t kill things.’

  ‘Of course you do! You said you did.’

  ‘I said I had. I have. And, all right, yes, I do when I can’t think of anything else, but that’s my failure. That’s when I get it so badly wrong I don’t have any other options! I’m not doing it any more. Not here. Not today. Today I’m going to get it right. I’m going to win one clean. All right?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Will you help me? Will you help me make this be all right?’

  ‘Yes! Fine! Whatever! How?’

  He clenched his teeth. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Well, think! What about whatever you did last time? Can you get us away?’

  ‘Yes. Maybe. It might be able to follow. But if it didn’t it would still be here. The people wouldn’t be safe. And it might change again by the time we got back, into something more dangerous.’

  ‘Last time it was a storm! Now it has a body. You said it was a lower energy thingummy!’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you see? It’s less physically destructive because it’s more intelligent. It doesn’t need to be a storm any more. It can think. Well, a bit. It’s not just an energy form any longer, not just an electrical anomaly, it’s got a—’ He stopped. ‘Where’s the fire station?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re a genius. In the dictionary, under “genius”, little picture of you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not so much under “quick on the uptake”, though.’

  ‘Oi!’

  ‘Well!’

  ‘Oi!’

  ‘All right, I’m sorry! Fire station?’

  ‘That way!’

  ‘Then that’s where we’re going!’ He reached over and grabbed the wheel, spun the car, and they careered through the narrow streets. ‘Have you got a phone?’

  ‘How would I possibly have a phone in a car?’ she said, then understood. ‘Oh, you mean a mobile one. No.’ But there was one in a side pocket of the car. He gave another of those funny looks as if she’d done something strange, then dialled.

  ‘Arwen Jones? It’s the Doctor. Yes. Yes, we met this morning. I’m fine, how are you? Well, that would be lovely. I – Yes. Yes, I would absolutely love a tour. In fact, we’re on our way over now. Well, yes, there was something – Yes. Sort of an emergency, actually. Yes. Yes. Well, no, not a fire. But if you’ve got the old hoses – yes. Yes, exactly. Well, I’m a bit – Well, no, I – Well, that would be lovely – Yes. Great.’

  He took the phone away from his ear, stared at it. ‘She says I owe her dinner.’

  Christina couldn’t help it. She sniggered.

  As they rounded the corner and saw the fire station, she was sure everything was going to be all right. She slowed the car and the Doctor jumped out, heading for the main doors, where three old-style fire engines were already growling into life beside the new Heidt Industries sonics. She felt the glow of a job well done. And then she heard – felt – the vast, impossible vibration of the monster’s tread, and even from this distance she saw his face twist in alarm.

  She turned in her seat and there it was, man-shaped but warped and seeming to inflate, features rippling with fury, and she knew – knew, this time, not hoped or feared but absolutely understood – that it would catch him before he got to the fire station and put whatever plan he had into action. So she shoved her right foot down on the accelerator pedal and turned the wheel and locked the handbrake at the same time, slewed the car round on the spot and charged it directly towards the thing as it galloped forwards. Behind her, the Doctor was shouting and running after her, and she thought: ‘Idiot.’

  And then there was a strange, weightless moment and the world rotated and twirled. She saw the monster, and the ground, and both of them were getting further away, and then she understood that she had been picked up, flung like a toy across the square. She was not weightless, but her weight kept shifting. It was odd. Disorientating. Interesting. And she knew she was about to land again. That would probably be bad. It would hurt. She tried to remember if it was best to tense to protect your spine or go slack and let the safety restraints do their job. Couldn’t. Saw the ground coming up very fast.

  The impact arrived and it was so much bigger than anything had ever been before. She saw the dashboard crumpling, saw the engine burst up towards her, felt a strange, pinching impact in her chest.

  *

  The Doctor watched it happen. He stared at the monster and at Arwen Jones and the firemen, and was somehow caught in a timeless space between. Not timeless in any way he could engineer. Just timeless because it was so, so bad. Only a few seconds earlier, he had told her: Today I’m going to win one clean.

  He felt like a fool.

  He ran to the car, and saw, and looked away. Saw the monster, saw it seeing him. It didn’t seem to be celebrating. He was glad about that, because he knew if it had been he would have destroyed it utterly, would have taken it out of the world at any cost. But it just stood there. It looked almost embarrassed. Then the moment passed and it sneered.

  He called back to Arwen Jones. ‘Get ready,’ he said. ‘When it’s close enough, turn on the hoses. Make a triangle like a sheep pen. Then bring them inwards and soak it!’

  The monster charged. The Doctor turned on his heel and sprinted back towards the fire station. It was close behind him, huge hand reaching down, the same hand which had lifted Christina�
�s car like a balsa wood model. He wondered if today was that day, if he’d wake up different, wake up someone else who remembered him fondly. A new Doctor. He wondered if he’d approve. Would he be more gentle? That might not be so bad. More vengeful? He hoped not. Maybe he’d be a girl. That was distantly possible. Never been a girl. The Corsair had been a girl for a while. New perspective. Confuse people. Keep life interesting.

  He slowed, and saw the fire crews staring, knew it was right behind him, right at his back. He felt it lean down, breathe on his neck. It said, ‘Doctor.’ He heard the huge mouth open and realised it was actually going to swallow him. Not entirely sure how well regeneration would work in that situation. Never tried it. Doubt it would be enjoyable.

  A straight white line shot over his head and took the monster in the face, and then another, and another: the hoses. He was close enough. Modern pumping systems. Ice cold water, like a laser. The outermost jet yawed across to strike a claw as it plunged toward him, warding it off, and he had to slide under the stream to avoid being blasted back towards his enemy. He arrived at Arwen Jones’s feet in a heap.

  ‘I told you not to do that!’ he said. ‘I told you to wait!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Notice how I didn’t listen to you?’ She broke off, shouted to the right-hand crew. ‘Bring it around! Fence it!’ And then back to him: ‘I don’t take orders, least of all from random men who are about to be eaten. In general, I give orders, you see, in so far as I believe in them at all. Does that bother you?’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ he said, and she grinned.

  There was a bright blue flash, and a rich, searing crackle, and he jumped up. He had not been wrong about this, at least: the monster was still electrical enough, malleable and nebulous enough, that a relentless deluge of water was enough to scramble it, destroy the coherent field which held it together.

  It was melting.

  He watched as it bubbled and screamed, electricity snapping around its legs and arms, and when it was small enough the jets of water knocked it clean over on its back. It looked like nothing so much as a tiny, angry old man with an ugly face.