The French window that opened onto the little back garden had a catch that didn’t fasten properly. Polly thought it extremely unlikely that the house’s new owners had fixed it. If they had, she’d come back when they were here, and she’d have to ask, and it would be awkward and embarrassing.
That was the trouble with hiding things. Sometimes, if you were in a hurry, you left them behind. Even important things. And there was nothing more important than her diary.
Polly had been keeping it since they had arrived in the town. It had been her best friend: she had confided in it, told it about the girls who had bullied her, the ones who befriended her, about the first boy she had ever liked. It was, sometimes, her best friend: she would turn to it in times of trouble, or turmoil and pain. It was the place she poured out her thoughts.
And it was hidden underneath a loose floorboard in the big cupboard in her bedroom.
Polly tapped the left French door hard with the palm of her hand, rapping it next to the casement, and the door wobbled, and then swung open.
She walked inside. She was surprised to see that they hadn’t replaced any of the furniture her family had taken away. It still smelled like her house. It was silent: nobody home. Good. She hurried up the stairs, worried she might still be at home when Mr. Rabbit or Mrs. Cat returned.
She went up the stairs. On the landing something brushed her face—touched it gently, like a thread, or a cobweb. She looked up. That was odd. The ceiling seemed furry: hair-like threads, or threadlike hairs, came down from it. She hesitated then, thought about running—but she could see her bedroom door. The Duran Duran poster was still on it. Why hadn’t they taken it down?
Trying not to look up at the hairy ceiling, she pushed open her bedroom door.
The room was different. There was no furniture, and where her bed had been were sheets of paper. She glanced down: photographs from newspapers, blown up to life-size. The eyeholes had been cut out already. She recognized Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul, the Queen . . .
Perhaps they were going to have a party. The masks didn’t look very convincing.
She went to the built-in cupboard at the end of the room. Her Smash Hits diary was sitting in the darkness, beneath the floorboard, in there. She opened the cupboard door.
“Hello, Polly,” said the man in the cupboard. He wore a mask, like the others had. An animal mask: this was some kind of big gray dog.
“Hello,” said Polly. She didn’t know what else to say. “I . . . I left my diary behind.”
“I know. I was reading it.” He raised the diary. He was not the same as the man in the rabbit mask, the woman in the cat mask, but everything Polly had felt about them, about the wrongness, was intensified here. “Do you want it back?”
“Yes please,” Polly said to the dog-masked man. She felt hurt and violated: this man had been reading her diary. But she wanted it back.
“You know what you need to do, to get it?”
She shook her head.
“Ask me what the time is.”
She opened her mouth. It was dry. She licked her lips, and muttered, “What time is it?”
“And my name,” he said. “Say my name. I’m Mister Wolf.”
“What’s the time, Mister Wolf?” asked Polly. A playground game rose unbidden to her mind.
Mister Wolf smiled (but how can a mask smile?) and he opened his mouth so wide to show row upon row of sharp, sharp teeth.
“Dinnertime,” he told her.
Polly started to scream then, as he came towards her, but she didn’t get to scream for very long.
V.
The TARDIS was sitting in a small grassy area, too small to be a park, too irregular to be a square, in the middle of the town, and the Doctor was sitting outside it, in a deck chair, walking through his memories.
The Doctor had a remarkable memory. The problem was, there was so much of it. He had lived eleven lives (or more: there was another life, was there not, that he tried his best never to think about) and he had a different way of remembering things in each life.
The worst part of being however old he was (and he had long since abandoned trying to keep track of it in any way that mattered to anybody but him) was that sometimes things didn’t arrive in his head quite when they were meant to.
Masks. That was part of it. And Kin. That was part of it too.
And Time.
It was all about Time. Yes, that was it . . .
An old story. Before his time—he was sure of that. It was something he had heard as a boy. He tried to remember the stories he had been told as a small boy on Gallifrey, before he had been taken to the Time Lord Academy and his life had changed forever.
Amy was coming back from a sortie through the town.
“Maximelos and the three Ogrons!” he shouted at her.
“What about them?”
“One was too vicious, one was too stupid, one was just right.”
“And this is relevant how?”
He tugged at his hair absently. “Er, probably not relevant at all. Just trying to remember a story from my childhood.”
“Why?”
“No idea. Can’t remember.”
“You,” said Amy Pond, “are very frustrating.”
“Yes,” said the Doctor, happily. “I probably am.”
He had hung a sign on the front of the TARDIS. It said:
SOMETHING MYSTERIOUSLY WRONG? JUST KNOCK! NO PROBLEM TOO SMALL.
“If it won’t come to us, I’ll go to it. No, scrap that. Other way round. And I’ve redecorated inside, so as not to startle people. What did you find?”
“Two things,” she said. “First one was Prince Charles. I saw him in the newsagent’s.”
“Are you sure it was him?”
Amy thought. “Well, he looked like
