by Gary Russell
The face morphed again, this time into one far better suited to the voice it possessed.
Lined, but seemingly through years of smiling rather than age, it was not unpleasant. It reminded the Doctor of one of the lecturers back at the Prydon Academy - it had that same worn look, yet it was a face that spoke tomes about its wisdom, its experience.
And spoke nothing of its intent.
The Doctor decided not to dwell on Rallon for now - if he was truly lost to them, it was something he would have to deal with later, a matter for his conscience. Right now, he needed to return himself and Millennia to their stolen TARDIS where they would be safe again.
‘Pragmatic as always, Doctor,’ said the man, who had clearly been reading his thoughts. ‘But sadly, not an opportunity available to you.’
He held out his hand - in the palm was the TARDIS, shrunk to a couple of inches high. He closed his fist around it and shook it. When he opened his hand again, the TARDIS had been replaced by a pair of dice.
‘Let me show you around,’ he said, and dropped the dice on the table. ‘Double six,’ he said, without actually looking. ‘Oh, that means we start ...’
‘... Here.’
The Doctor and Millennia were standing in a huge room in which everything was made of wood. The floor, walls and ceiling, with supports and beams, all wood. Chairs, tables, wardrobes and cupboards, even a small lamp: everything was natural pine.
Hanging on the walls were toys, clumped together like badly arranged flowers. Every conceivable toy from every conceivable civilisation. Dotted among them were masks and kites - and rolling pictures with blue, green or red goo slopping about with their gravity-inspired movements.
Every so often there were clocks - some of their origins were so diverse as to be unimaginable. They told the time in it variety of ways, differing methods for differing time measurements. The sounds they made as they clicked and ticked combined to form a bizarre symphony of regulated noises, simultaneously soothing and jarring.
The floor was littered with tables of different sizes and shapes. Although they were all made of pine, they were carved in a variety of different styles. On top of them were dolls’ houses, table-top video games and platoons of tin soldiers set on relief maps. The sheer variety of objects was , phenomenal, and despite their numbers, the room did not seem overcrowded. Indeed, it was sometimes difficult to focus on the walls and work out where it ended.
The grey couple, George and Margaret, stood by a set of arched wooden doors, impassively staring forwards.
Scattered around the floor was a series of pine buccaneer chests and, to one side, the small lacquered table with the mah-jong set.
The Doctor did his best to seem unimpressed. ‘Is this the best you can do? Simple transference? My people could do this when...’
‘... the universe was still young.’ The mandarin was now seated on a Chinese, black-lacquered wood chair with a high back, its legs and rear decorated with a silver embossed willow pattern. ‘Oh, yes, I know all the rhetoric, Doctor, believe me. Unlike the Time Lords - oh sorry, Gallifreyans - I don’t use mechanical means. I do it by the force of will.’
And he gave the Doctor a look that dared him to try and answer that.
Which was a mistake - the Doctor always took up dares.
‘Even so, I’m still amazed that, if you can do such things, this is the best scenario you could come up with. Where are we?’
‘Allow me to formally introduce myself. I am the Toymaker.
And this, my friends, is my toyshop. My celestial toyshop.’
‘You sell toys?’
The Toymaker shook his head. ‘No, Doctor. I make them.
Or adapt them, at least.’
He snapped his fingers and, with an audible click, each of the buccaneer chests unlocked and their lids rose up. A variety of toys began climbing out of them. From one came a troop of clockwork soldiers. From another emerged soft toys including teddy bears, fluffy rabbits and Spanish golliwogs.
And from a third came dolls in a variety of sizes and shapes.
Others disgorged everything from string puppets to action figures, plus a never-ending supply of trains, cars, planes and boats, mostly carried by the other toys.
Again, the Toymaker snapped his fingers and everything stopped moving. Then, as one, all the toys turned to face him and, as best they could, bowed or curtsied.
‘My friends,’ he beamed, ‘there are some new people come to play with you. Who wants the first game?’
Two of the blue-jacketed clockwork soldiers marched forward.
‘Excellent choice. Doctor, Millennia, please meet Captains Bimm and Bamm.’
The Doctor watched as the two clockwork soldiers grew until they were the same size as him.
‘My soldier friends here want to test your mettle, Doctor.
Find out if you have what it takes.’
‘Takes to do what?’
‘Why, join us of course.’ The Toymaker snapped his fingers again. George and Margaret reached out in unison and each pulled open one of the arched doors. Into the room came a man-shaped robot with a monitor on its chest. On the monitor was a readout, a countdown.
‘My Magic Robot here will go with you. Enjoy your fun. Oh, and Doctor, you have four minutes to beat Bimm and Bamm.
Good day.’
As the Doctor was being led away by the robot and the clockwork soldiers, he looked back at Millennia. She was terrified.
George and Margaret were beside her, still nonchalantly looking bored.
‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ the Toymaker was saying. ‘I’m sure the Doctor will win and then I will have lost and you won’t be trapped here any longer.’
But the Doctor did not believe a word of it.
The Doctor was unsurprised to find himself magically in another location.
It was a huge muddy field, dotted with just a few trees.
Ropes hung from some of their branches and there was a canvas tunnel in a far corner. A broken cannon was lying on its side in another and, every so often, pennants were stuck in the ground. Five were burgundy, five blue.
On the furthest side of the field, the toy robot stood.
Waiting.
‘The object,’ said a voice in the Doctor’s ear, ‘is to get your opponent’s flags back to your base.’
The speaker was a gruff, rotund man in his forties, wearing the same army clothes as the clockwork soldiers. But this man was human. He held out a hand.
‘No bad feelings, what? Topping day for it, though. Name’s Bamm. Captain Bill Bamm. Pleased t’meet you, Doctor.’
‘Oh rather, and my name is Captain Bimm. Ben Bimm.’ The Doctor whirled around to find that the other toy was now a lean, angular man. ‘That’s your base over there, what.’ He was pointing to the broken cannon. ‘Ours is the trees by that gate. Equidistant, y’see?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Trouble is, Captains, there are two of you and only one of me, which seems a tad unfair, hmmm?’
The two soldiers looked at each other. ‘Lawks, Captain’
Bamm, what shall we do?’
‘Don’t know, Captain Bimm. I s’pose we could give the poor blighter two of our flags as a sort of advantage.’
‘Oh yes, Captain Bamm, that would be rather decent of us.’
The Doctor saw that two of the blue flags were now sticking out of the front of his cannon. ‘Why, thank you,’ he said sardonically. ‘That’s most generous.’
‘Tsk tsk, Doctor.’ The Toymaker’s voice boomed from all around them, making the two soldiers quake. ‘Be grateful.’
‘Grateful? grateful? And just why should I be grateful to you, sir, eh?’ The Doctor looked straight up into the sky. ‘You kidnap my friends and me, you claim to have murdered Rallon and now you expect me to tromp around in a field getting my robes wet and dirty, just to amuse you! Why, I say to you why, should I go along with all this?’
‘Because, Doctor,’ said a voice, suddenly harsh, in his ear,
�
��of this!’
The Toymaker was beside the Doctor, hovering just a few inches above the ground, his own robe unlikely to get dirty.
In his hand, he held a small water-filled dome. A tiny sculptured city lay inside it, covered in snow. ‘It’s called a snowstorm, Doctor,’ he said. ‘All I have to do is shake it and watch what happens.’ The Toymaker shook the dome vigorously and the snow whipped up and around, then fell back on the city. ‘Recognise it?’
The Doctor snorted as if disinterested, then took a look.
‘The Capitol... ‘
‘That’s right, Doctor. Your home on Gallifrey. Oh, and look who has come for a visit.’
The Doctor saw a tiny, minuscule figure pop into existence and start to move. He stared hard and, after a few seconds, recognised it.
‘Millennia... ‘
‘Oh, so it is,’ laughed the Toymaker and shook the snowstorm again. ‘Now, that’ll be bad enough for anyone, Doctor, but, should you refuse to play...’ He drew back his arm as if to dash the snowstorm against a tree.
‘All right,’ snapped the Doctor. ‘And if I win? Do we go home?’
‘Home?’ The Toymaker laughed. ‘It will be a long time before you see anything called ―home‖ again, Doctor. You are my guests here. For a long time. A very long time. But, if you beat the captains here, you will at least remain alive.’
The Doctor suddenly felt very cold. He had not anticipated this.
He had thought the Toymaker irreverent, wily and almost playful. Spoilt. But now he saw the truth. The Toymaker was the personification of sheer malevolence, evil given form.
The truth was that he was facing a foe as ancient as the universe itself - probably older, in fact. And he simply didn’t have the knowledge or experience to fight him.
The Toymaker smiled more broadly. ‘That’s right, Doctor.
Fighting me is pointless, but you’re still going to. Because like all the ephemeral beings that populate this ridiculous cosmos, you want to live, want to find a shred of hope where there is none. So, play my games, Doctor, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll stay out of my toyshop and be the first person ever to beat the Celestial Toymaker.’
And he vanished along with the snowstorm.
‘But I sincerely doubt it,’ were his parting words.
The Doctor looked at the two soldiers, who were shuffling around, trying not to catch his eye.
‘No point, old chap, in trying to stop him.’
‘Oh no, indeed not, what?’
The Doctor frowned. ‘You’re not toys, are you?’
The captains looked at each other and shrugged. ‘We don’t know. ‘We vaguely remember fighting in a war once, then meeting the Toymaker in somewhere called no-man’s-land... but maybe we’ve always been his toys. Maybe he made us and we just think we were once human,’ said Bimm.
‘Or maybe we think we’re toys who think we were men,’
Bamm said.
‘Or maybe we’re men who think we’re toys who think we were men who think -’
The Doctor held his hand up. ‘Enough. Perhaps if we joined forces, fought against him instead of for him... ‘
Bamm suddenly gasped, then went flying backwards through the air with a cry as if a giant, invisible hand had flicked him over.
When Bimm and the Doctor found him, they too gasped.
Lying in the mud was a small clockwork soldier, his arms and legs twisted and broken, his tiny tin head snapped off and lying a few inches away.
Bimm looked at the Doctor, terrified. ‘I think that’s your answer, Doctor, what? We fight, old man. To the death. For king and country.’
Millennia sat huddled in the snow, trying to find warmth in one of the nooks and crannies that dotted the walls of the Capitol.
‘Doctor? Rallon?’ She had been calling for what seemed to be hours now. But no one had come to her rescue. George and Margaret had brought her here, through the double doors from the toyshop. But as soon as she had felt the biting wind, seen the snow, they had simply faded away again.
So she had walked for hours through the snow, but although the place she was in looked like the Capitol, it wasn’t. The walls were plastic, not rock. The snow was synthetic rather than frozen water.
It was, however, freezing cold. She tugged her Prydonian robes around her, throwing off the skullcap so that she could hide her face under the flowing garments and letting her naturally long hair hang down freely. She began sucking a strand of it. A comfort move, from her childhood.
She had not seen another living soul. This was one of the Toymaker’s traps, of that she was sure.
So she sat and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And...
The Doctor was trying to run as fast as he could. He had already thrown away his heavy university robes, and was dressed in just a white collarless shirt and a pair of breeches and boots. All were caked in thick mud. He had managed to get two blue flags back to his cannon, but Bimm had three of his burgundy ones by the copse of trees.
He was exhausted - the Prydon Academy trained you for the mind, not for the body. Certainly, there were physical exercises to stay reasonably fit - but few involved countless journeys around muddy fields, climbing ropes, running through canvas tunnels to evade capture, protecting flags and trying to steal more, all at once. Worse still, the muddy field was slowing him down - each step was becoming more akin to traipsing through quicksand.
On the other side, the toy robot stood impassively, its chest monitor recording, with a series of coloured blobs, who had which pennants in their base.
The Doctor watched as Bimm gained a fourth pennant.
Only one more and the game was his. Even one on one, as the Doctor had wanted, the soldier/toy was more competent.
This was not good enough. If losing this game was all that life on Gallifrey taught him, then a new syllabus was needed. He would have to use his brain. The distance between pennants and bases was reasonably similar. And it couldn’t just come down to endurance - Bimm was obviously the victor there. He was trained for this.
Therefore, the Doctor was left with a third option - to take Ben Bimm out of the game completely.
He looked down at the ground - his boots were sinking into the mud - run over once too often, it was getting very boggy indeed. And Bimm was wearing big, black boots that were probably heavier than his own.
The Doctor turned his attention to a tree nearby. Ropes were hanging from it and he quickly undid two of them. He hurried back to his cannon, tied the end of one rope around the wheels and tugged the other end towards the canvas tunnel.
No! It wasn’t long enough. He quickly tied the second rope to the first and the other end to the tunnel. Now he had a crude tripwire which, to be honest, only a blind man in the dark could miss.
Which was exactly what the Doctor wanted. He staggered back through the mud to the tree and hoisted himself into the branches, selecting the lowest, longest one that would support his weight.
To get the Doctor’s pennants, Bimm normally ran directly from the cannon to the tunnel - now he’d have to go around, suspecting a trap.
Which it was.
Sure enough, Bimm came running with the last burgundy pennant, saw the rope and stopped. He scratched his chin -
yes, the two ends were taut but apart from tripping him, what purpose did it serve?
Shrugging, he decided to be cautious. He circled around the rope - and promptly stood exactly where the Doctor wanted him: in the muddy area. The Doctor gripped his branch tighter. He needed Bimm to get a tad closer.
Bimm was heaving himself through the mud - which was climbing over the top of his boots and seeping through the face-holes. Each step took more effort.
And he realised what was happening. He might have walked into the trap, but at least he understood that it was one!
Angrily, he tried to pull his feet out of the mud, but it was difficult - and the Doctor had to act now. With a yell to throw Bimm off guard
, the Doctor dropped from the branch, right on to his back, pushing them both face down on the muddy ground.
The Doctor rolled aside immediately, scrabbling away from the clawing mud, grabbed his pennant from Bimm’s hands and broke it over his knee. Then, ignoring his own base, he ran to Bimm’s camp and grabbed the other burgundy pennants, snapping them one after the other and hurling ‘
the bits in different directions.
Mature it might not be, he thought. But it was satisfying.
He looked back. Bimm had heaved himself up, but his feet were firmly stuck in the mud now and the more he roared with anger and twisted and turned, the more stuck he became, as first one boot then the other sank completely. The Doctor ignored Bimm’s plight and dashed, breathless and out of condition, his hearts pounding, to where the last of Bimm’s blue pennants lay. He grabbed it and ran back to his camp.
‘Victory!’ he yelled.
‘You cheated,’ said the Toymaker, suddenly floating in the air above the trees.
‘No I didn’t. I laid a trap.’
‘You broke his flags. Unfair.’
The Doctor dropped to his knees, completely exhausted. ‘I still won,’ he gasped. ‘I did what you wanted and I won.’
‘Cheating, Doctor? Is that all you will be good for in life?’
And the Doctor found himself back in the toyshop, dripping mud and bits of grass everywhere.
As one, every doll, teddy bear and other toy in the room turned their heads to look at him.
He could feel the malevolence radiating from them and took a step back.
He felt his heel press on something and looked down. The broken clockwork soldier that had once been Captain Bamm was there. He bent down and scooped the bits up, trying to refasten the head, but the tin neck was badly twisted.
