Doctor Who

by Russell T Davies

  They morphed into giant blades.

  His hands became broad, flat, plastic skin-coloured blades, twice the size of a shovel. Mickey took a swing at the Doctor—the blades looked sharp, like they could slice a man in two—but the Doctor dodged the swing and leapt forwards.

  He put Mickey in a headlock and tugged and tugged and tugged.

  Snap!

  Mickey’s head came off.

  The man at the next table screamed and fainted.

  Everyone was watching now, astonished, Rose staring in horror at Mickey’s head in the Doctor’s hands.

  The body stayed standing, the neck ending in a flat, smooth oval like a decapitated mannequin. But then the separated head grinned up at the Doctor—it was still alive! The head said, ‘Don’t think that’s gonna stop me.’ And then it whistled to its own body. ‘Over here!’

  The headless body jolted into action, its shovel-blade hands swinging wildly, chopping a chunk of plaster out of a pillar. Rose looked at the Doctor and he was grinning, like this was some sort of fun. She ran to the fire alarm, smashed the glass—part of her thinking, I’ve always wanted to do this—and she yelled, ‘Out! Get out! Everyone out!’

  The alarm whooped, and people ran, screaming, customers and staff alike, but the headless Mickey-body seemed to hear Rose, swung in the direction of her voice, lashing out. She leapt back, just in time.

  ‘Over here!’ called the Doctor, and he started to run. Was he yelling at her or the Mickey-thing? Whichever, she ran after him. She wasn’t going to let him out of her sight.

  Behind her, the decapitated plastic Mickey swung and chopped, tables splintering into pieces, crockery flying, glasses smashing, as it staggered blindly after them. The Doctor and Rose ran into the kitchen.

  Waiters and cooks were standing around, wondering if the fire alarm was just a test, when the Doctor burst in, holding a living head. The head barked at them, like a rabid dog. Rose followed, still yelling, ‘Get out, all of you! Out!’ But the staff only jolted into action when the crazy, clumsy, violent headless thing battered its way into the kitchen, swinging, chopping, staggering, sending pots and pans flying as it blundered in pursuit.

  The Doctor and Rose ran down a corridor—he grinned at her and said, ‘Nice to see you, by the way! How’s your mum?’—and they pushed their way out of a fire door.

  They ran into a small, gated yard, yellow security lights glaring against the night, the walls lined with bins and stacked with pallets and crates, and there, standing in the middle of the yard …

  The blue box.

  That old, battered, chunky hut that the Doctor seemed to take everywhere with him. No use to them now—Rose spun around to see the Doctor holding Mickey’s head in the crook of his left arm, his foot jamming the fire door shut, whirring that metal stick to lock the push bar.

  Wham! The fire door shook, but held. On the other side, headless Mickey clattered and stamped like a trapped bull. Mickey’s head called out, ‘Come and get me!’ Then it glared with fury as the Doctor clamped his left hand over its mouth to shut it up.

  Rose watched, horrified, as bang, bang, bang, the fire door began to buckle. Those chopper-blade-hands would slice through in seconds. She remembered how the Doctor had stopped the plastic arm, back in the flat. ‘Can’t your whirring-thing stop him?’

  He held up the metal stick. ‘Sonic screwdriver,’ he said proudly. ‘But I’ve used it once, the plastic’s recalibrated, won’t work twice.’

  Great! She ran to the yard’s heavy double-gates. They were padlocked and chained with bolts studded into the floor. She pulled up the bolts, pushed at the gates. They gave, but only slightly, not enough to open. ‘Give me a hand,’ she yelled at the Doctor.

  ‘No, we’re fine,’ he said. Why was he so calm? He was standing in the middle of the yard, holding a screwdriver and a decapitated head, happy as can be, watching the fire door with that stupid smile.

  Crack! One of headless Mickey’s blades sliced through.

  Rose yelled at the Doctor, ‘Open the gate!’ She grabbed hold of the padlock. ‘Use your screwdriver!’

  ‘Naah,’ said the Doctor, and he sauntered happily towards the blue box. ‘Tell you what, let’s go in here.’ He pushed open one of the panelled doors—it creaked, it was so rickety—and stepped inside, slamming the door shut behind him. As if that would protect him! Like a child thinking he can hide by holding his hand in front of his face.

  Crack! The second blade-hand sliced through.

  Rose looked around, terrified. The walls were too high, with barbed wire at the top.

  Rip! A big chunk of fire door went flying, and headless Mickey could be seen through the gap, blundering and thrashing about.

  ‘Doctor,’ she shouted! ‘You can’t hide inside a wooden box!’ That stupid hut was so flimsy, the shovel-hands would chop it into matchsticks. ‘Doctor!’ What was he doing, just standing in that tiny little space like an idiot?

  Police telephone, said a panel on the door. Pull to open. Too late now! She only had seconds to spare.

  Chop, chop, chop, the fire door was almost gone.

  And now, she was furious. If she was going to die, right here and now, at the age of 19 in a dirty yard behind a cheap pizzeria, she was going to give the Doctor a good punch first.

  So she ran into the box.

  10

  Inside the Box

  She ran into a cavern.

  She ran into a vault.

  She ran into a cathedral.

  She ran into a huge space, a vast dome, with the Doctor standing at its centre, the grinning lord of an impossible realm.

  It was like being plunged underwater, the sudden pressure in her head, and Rose thought, simply, No! and ran back out again.

  Into the yard. The same old yard. With headless Mickey still chopping away at the fire door.

  She looked back at the blue box. She’d left the door open and she could see, in the gap between door and jamb, that huge, strange space reaching far beyond, with the Doctor somehow in the distance, a small figure, a good twenty metres away and yet within a box that stood beside her, no deeper than a metre in itself.

  Headless Mickey began to kick away the last of the wood.

  But she had to run around the box, a full circle, counting all four corners, one, two, three, four, but no, it was a straightforward solid box, no tricks, no traps, but how?

  Wham! The final scraps of fire door went flying and the headless Mickey staggered into the yard, shovel-blade hands flailing as it blundered murderously towards her.

  There was nothing else she could do.

  She ran back inside the box.

  She slammed the door shut, and then stayed facing it, because that was easier than looking at the space behind her. She flinched as she heard headless Mickey reach the doors, and hit them. The flimsy wood, painted white on the inside, shuddered, and yet … that was all. A simple shudder. The noise from outside was muffled and distant.

  ‘The assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn’t get through that door,’ said the Doctor. ‘And believe me, they’ve tried.’

  Okay, she thought, now I’ve got to turn around.

  So she did.

  The Doctor’s blue box was bigger on the inside than on the outside.

  Much bigger. Hugely so.

  She was standing on a metal ramp surrounded by curved walls arching upwards, studded with hexagons. What she’d thought was a dome was more of a sphere; she could look down, through the metal mesh at her feet, to see the curve completing far below in one vast circle. The whole interior was weathered, rusting, bruised, and yet humming with life, as though huge engines were brooding somewhere beyond the walls. The skin of the sphere was supported by weird buttresses, shaped like … coral? Yes, she could smell ozone, like the seaside, though this was a coral glowing with internal light.

  The metal ramp at her feet was part of a suspended walkway leading to the centre of the sphere, to the Doctor. He stood in front of a sculpture, a coral mushroom
out of which a glass pillar containing tubes of light soared up to the roof and down to the depths, like a linchpin holding the entire globe together. The Doctor had his arms folded, feet set apart in a classic pose of masculine supremacy, looking down at her.

  And yet the most important thing was this: the Doctor had a copy of her boyfriend’s head plugged into the sculpture. He’d attached wires to run from Mickey’s forehead to a panel below. The head was still alive, eyes darting from the Doctor to Rose.

  ‘You must have a lot of questions,’ said the Doctor, to Rose.

  The Mickey-head answered instead. ‘Not really. Seen all this before. Seen better than this! You lot brought a war crashing down on our civilisation, d’you think we don’t remember?’

  The Doctor lost his tough-guy pose, muttered a quick sorry, and leapt to the sculpture—it was more of a desk, really, a work-desk, a cluttered circular console that hadn’t been tidied for years. He stabbed buttons and pulled a big red lever. ‘Hold on a tick, we don’t need laughing boy.’

  Mickey’s head said, ‘I’m gonna do more than—’ but then he froze, and his eyes glazed over. Reduced to inanimate plastic.

  ‘Right, where were we?’ said the Doctor, and returned to that superior folded-arms position, facing Rose.

  She stared at him.

  He stared back.

  Rose controlled her breathing. Calm down, don’t lose it. She looked up at the vaulted roof. Back at the wooden doors. Down to the depths below. Back up to the Doctor and that shaft of shining glass at the heart of the room.

  Where to start?

  She thought of Clive. Clive and his long-dead dad, Clive who’d give anything to be here right now, and she was glad she’d met him. Perhaps he’d prepared her, a little.

  So.

  ‘It’s bigger on the inside,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘It’s alien.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Are you alien?’

  ‘Yes.’ But then he added, ‘Is that all right?’ A kindness in his voice.

  That pose, she thought, the folded arms, the boots, the frown, that’s just striking an attitude. He’s more than that.

  She said, ‘I’m fine, yeah,’ and tried to smile.

  ‘It’s called the TARDIS,’ he said. ‘This thing. It’s an acronym, T.A.R.D.I.S. It stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space.’

  And then Rose burst into tears. She was ashamed, but couldn’t help it, the whole thing surging up inside her. ‘Sorry,’ she gulped. ‘I’m sorry.’

  But he was weird, this Doctor. Kind one minute, and yet, when she cried, he stared like a scientist considering an ant. ‘Culture shock,’ he said. Almost like he was glad. ‘Natural reaction, for a human. It does your head in, seeing technology like this.’

  He was arrogant, he was alien, and he was an idiot. ‘I’m thinking of Mickey, not you,’ she said, furious. ‘Did they kill him? If they copied him, did they kill him? Is he dead?’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Doctor, crestfallen. ‘I didn’t think of that.’

  ‘You didn’t think? He’s my boyfriend and they copied him and you didn’t even think? You just waltzed in and pulled off his head. Like it’s funny. And now you’re just going to let him melt?’

  ‘Melt?’

  The Doctor followed her eyeline, to see Mickey’s head melting into a plastic ooze, sinking down into the desk. Rose sobbed out loud, like she was seeing him die.

  ‘No, no, no,’ yelled the Doctor, and he started stabbing buttons like a madman. Rose ran up the walkway—it clattered and shook, this place felt like it had been bolted together in a hurry—to give the Doctor a shove. ‘Save him!’ she said, the head suddenly so precious.

  ‘I’m trying,’ said the Doctor, flicking a row of blue glass switches. But the head lost its integrity, spreading out into a thick, sticky pool. One of Mickey’s eyeballs remained—the one that had fallen into the soup—to give them a final tomatoey glare, and then it dissolved.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Rose.

  ‘Not quite,’ said the Doctor. He ran around the console, eyes bright, like a mad musician, trying this button, that button, any button. Rose looked closer; the desk had six sides, full of control panels, some sophisticated, some antique, with levers improvised out of bottle-openers and hammers, paperweights in place of dials, toy soldiers and scissors and curling tongs duct-taped to switches to hold them down.

  Designed by a mad geek wizard child, she thought. Whatever this place once was, the Doctor has pimped it.

  He worked feverishly but glanced at her every now and then. It occurred to her: he’s loving this, he’s just waiting for me to ask what he’s doing. So she didn’t. She wiped her eyes and stood there.

  The Doctor blinked first. He said, ‘I’m trying to track the signal. There might still be a trace. From the head, to whoever’s controlling it.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, but when she thought of the head, she thought of Mickey, and she had to hold back that horror. She was inside an alien sphere with a man from another world, and she had to concentrate on getting out of here alive. She could grieve for Mickey later, but not now. ‘So, who are you? What sort of alien?’

  ‘Doesn’t really matter,’ he said, and kept working.

  ‘It does to me. You must have a name. A species.’

  ‘I said, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Then why won’t you tell me?’

  He ignored her, picking up two pieces of equipment, a bicycle pump and a trimphone, and wiring them together.

  ‘So this … TARDIS. Is this like your home? I mean, is this where you live?’

  ‘No. Not really. I’d much rather go outside. I just bunk down in here, now and then.’

  ‘What, d’you take it with you, then? Wherever you go? Has it got wheels or something?’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  She looked down the walkways, three of which disappeared through dark arches set into the walls, leading off to God-knows-where. ‘And is it just you? Are there more of you? Have you got a team? Or staff?’

  No reply. He kept working.

  She said, ‘Why are you such hard work?’

  ‘I had a bad day.’

  ‘No worse than mine!’

  He looked up, eyes blazing. ‘No, I had a very bad day. I had the worst day of all. I lost everything. I lost everyone. I lost myself. In one single moment, gone. And I have survived since then, very nicely, without a little human standing at my side going yap-yap-yap, so if you don’t mind, shut up.’

  She was outraged. ‘You wanted me to ask questions!’

  ‘I did not!’

  ‘You did! You love it!’

  But then he suddenly yelled, ‘Gotcha!’ and slammed down a row of levers.

  The entire room lurched. Like a ship in a storm, an enormous storm, the entire sphere pitching at 45 degrees. Rose grabbed hold of the desk—the Doctor was already holding on tight, grinning—and then the whole internal space rolled back in the opposite direction. Then it swung back again, tilting so radically that the desk became almost vertical, Rose holding on to it like a climbing-wall, the pillar of light above her swooping down to the horizontal, before everything tilted left, and then violently right. It was like being trapped in the middle of a gyroscope.

  And the air was filled with that noise she’d heard back on the estate, that deep, aching, echoing grind, rising and falling, but massive now, like metal wailing in pain.

  The Doctor yelled with excitement, ‘We’re following the signal!’

  Rose held on tight, wondering what the hell this looked like from the outside, in the yard of that pizzeria—was the blue box rocking to and fro? On the spot? Like some stupid toy?

  Then the Doctor yelled, ‘No!’ He had a rubber mallet in his hand – it was chained to the console, standard kit, for him – and he battered the desk, bang-bang-bang! But whatever he was doing, it was too late. ‘Lost it,’ he groaned and the see-sawing stopped, the huge sp
here settling to a halt, the grinding noise echoing away.

  ‘I lost the signal,’ said the Doctor, ‘but we must be close,’ and he raced down the walkway to the wooden door, yanked it open and ran out.

  Rose yelled, ‘You can’t go out there! It’s not safe!’ The headless Mickey-killer-shovel-hands was still outside in the yard, the Doctor would get chopped to death!

  She ran down the ramp and hurtled outside.

  11

  War Stories

  Rose hurtled out of the box and onto the Embankment.

  Not the yard.

  The Embankment.

  Beside the Thames.

  The middle of London, at night, close to Westminster Bridge. She could see the Houses of Parliament further down the road, and opposite, across the black river, the London Eye. And right beside her, there it stood, that blue wooden box, almost smug in its simplicity.

  They’d moved. The box had moved.

  It had moved miles, in seconds, and again she felt that dizzying sensation as she caught her breath, her body trying to cope with the change from interior to exterior, the sheer impossibility of the Doctor’s machine.

  She looked at his TARDIS, her head buzzing with questions. And the Doctor had that look, that little smile, like he was just waiting to deign to answer her. But sod that. She could work it out for herself. She’d seen the TARDIS on the estate, and she’d seen it gone, therefore …

  ‘It disappears,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t fly, does it? There’s no way it flies cos we’d see it. It must sort of disappear there and reappear here, like it kind of … warps.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Doctor, disappointed. ‘That’s exactly right.’

  ‘But what’s happening back there? At the pizza place? There’s a mad headless thing on the loose.’

  ‘No, it would’ve melted with the head.’

  She thought of the body dissolving, the last vestige of her boyfriend, and she felt a surge of horror in her heart, the enormity of it. Mickey. Lovely Mickey Smith, with his smile and his mates and his daft yellow Beetle, the only boy who’d buy a car because it was funny, not because it was cool. And it hurt so much, to see the chain of his family across the decades, Odessa, Jackson, Rita-Anne, now Mickey, all gone.