“Don’t be silly, love,” said Mr. Browning. “We’ll have a new house, and then you’ll have a garden with swings. I’ll put up new swings for you.”
The lady in the cat mask crouched down. “I’m Mrs. Cat. Ask me what time it is, Polly.”
Polly nodded. “What’s the time, Mrs. Cat?”
“Time for you and your family to leave this place and never look back,” said Mrs. Cat, but she said it kindly.
Polly waved good-bye to the lady in the cat mask when she got to the end of the garden path.
III.
THEY WERE IN THE TARDIS control room, going home.
“I still don’t understand,” Amy was saying. “Why were the Skeleton People so angry with you in the first place? I thought they wanted to get free from the rule of the Toad-King.”
“They weren’t angry with me about that,” said the young man in the tweed jacket and the bow tie. He pushed a hand through his hair. “I think they were quite pleased to be free, actually.” He ran his hands across the TARDIS control panel, patting levers, stroking dials. “They were just a bit upset with me because I’d walked off with their squiggly whatsit.”
“Squiggly whatsit?”
“It’s on the . . .” He gestured vaguely with arms that seemed to be mostly elbows and joints. “The tabley thing over there. I confiscated it.”
Amy looked irritated. She wasn’t irritated, but she sometimes liked to give him the impression she was, just to show him who was boss. “Why don’t you ever call things by their proper names? The tabley thing over there? It’s called ‘a table.’ ”
She walked over to the table. The squiggly whatsit was glittery and elegant: it was the size and general shape of a bracelet, but it twisted in ways that made it hard for the eye to follow.
“Really? Oh good.” He seemed pleased. “I’ll remember that.”
Amy picked up the squiggly whatsit. It was cold and much heavier than it looked. “Why did you confiscate it? And why are you saying confiscate anyway? That’s like what teachers do, when you bring something you shouldn’t to school. My friend Mels set a record at school for the number of things she’d got confiscated. One night she got me and Rory to make a disturbance while she broke into the teacher’s supply cupboard, which was where her stuff was. She had to go over the roof and through the teachers’ loo window . . .”
But the Doctor was not interested in Amy’s old school friend’s exploits. He never was. He said, “Confiscated. For their own safety. Technology they shouldn’t have had. Probably stolen. Time looper and booster. Could have made a nasty mess of things.” He pulled a lever. “And we’re here. All change.”
There was a rhythmic grinding sound, as if the engines of the Universe itself were protesting, a rush of displaced air, and a large blue police box materialized in the back garden of Amy Pond’s house. It was the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century.
The Doctor opened the TARDIS door. Then he said, “That’s odd.”
He stood in the doorway, made no attempt to walk outside. Amy came over to him. He put out an arm to prevent her from leaving the TARDIS. It was a perfectly sunny day, almost cloudless.
“What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” he said. “Can’t you feel it?” Amy looked at her garden. It was overgrown and neglected, but then it always had been, as long as she remembered.
“No,” said Amy. And then she said, “It’s quiet. No cars. No birds. Nothing.”
“No radio waves,” said the Doctor. “Not even Radio Four.”
“You can hear radio waves?”
“Of course not. Nobody can hear radio waves,” he said, unconvincingly.
And that was when the voice said, ATTENTION VISITORS. YOU ARE NOW ENTERING KIN SPACE. THIS WORLD IS THE PROPERTY OF THE KIN. YOU ARE TRESPASSING.
It was a strange voice, whispery and, mostly, Amy suspected, in her head.
“This is Earth,” called Amy. “It doesn’t belong to you.” And then she said, “What have you done with the people?”
WE BOUGHT IT FROM THEM. THEY DIED OUT NATURALLY SHORTLY AFTERWARDS. IT WAS A PITY.
“I don’t believe you,” shouted Amy.
NO GALACTIC LAWS WERE VIOLATED. THE PLANET WAS PURCHASED LEGALLY AND LEGITIMATELY. A THOROUGH INVESTIGATION BY THE SHADOW PROCLAMATION VINDICATED OUR OWNERSHIP IN FULL.
“It’s not yours! Where’s Rory?”
“Amy? Who are you talking to?” asked the Doctor.
“The voice. The one in my head. Can’t you hear it?”
TO WHOM ARE YOU TALKING? asked the Voice.
Amy closed the TARDIS door.
“Why did you do that?” asked the Doctor.
“Weird, whispery voice in my head. Said they’d bought the planet. And the, the Shadow Proclamation said it was all okay. It told me all the people died out naturally. You couldn’t hear it. It didn’t know you were here. Element of surprise. Closed the door.” Amy Pond could be astonishingly efficient, when she was under stress. Right now, she was under stress, but you wouldn’t have known it, if it wasn’t for the squiggly whatsit, which she was holding between her hands and was bending and twisting into shapes that defied the imagination and seemed to be wandering off into peculiar dimensions.
“Did they say who they were?”
She thought for a moment. “ ‘You are now entering Kin space. This world is the property of the Kin.’ ”
He said, “Could be anyone. The Kin. I mean . . . it’s like calling yourselves the People. It’s what pretty much every race-name means. Except for Dalek. That means Metal-Cased Hatey Death Machines in Skaronian.” And then he was running to the control panel. “Something like this. It can’t occur overnight. People don’t just die off. And this is 2010. Which means . . .”
“It means they’ve done something to Rory.”
“It means they’ve done something to everyone.” He pressed several keys on an ancient typewriter keyboard, and patterns flowed across the screen that hung above the TARDIS console. “I couldn’t hear them . . . they couldn’t hear me. You
