“The dawn of time? Very clever, Amy Pond. That’s somewhere we’ve never gone before. Somewhere we shouldn’t be able to go. It’s a good thing I’ve got this.” He held up the squiggly whatsit, then attached it to the TARDIS console, using alligator clips and what looked like a piece of string.
“There,” he said proudly. “Look at that.”
“Yes,” said Amy. “We’ve escaped the Kin’s trap.”
The TARDIS engines began to groan, and the whole room began to judder and shake.
“What’s that noise?”
“We’re heading for somewhere the TARDIS isn’t designed to go. Somewhere I wouldn’t dare go without the squiggly whatsit giving us a boost and a time bubble. The noise is the engines complaining. It’s like going up a steep hill in an old car. It may take us a few more minutes to get there. Still, you’ll like it when we arrive: the dawn of time. Excellent suggestion.”
“I’m sure I will like it,” said Amy, with a smile. “It must have felt so good to escape the Kin’s prison, Doctor.”
“That’s the funny thing,” said the Doctor. “You ask me about escaping the Kin’s prison. That house. And I mean, I did escape, just by sonicing a doorknob, which was a bit convenient. But what if the trap wasn’t the house? What if the Kin didn’t want a Time Lord to torture and kill? What if they wanted something much more important. What if they wanted a TARDIS?”
“Why would the Kin want a TARDIS?” asked Amy.
The Doctor looked at Amy. He looked at her with clear eyes, unclouded by hate or by illusion. “The Kin can’t travel very far through time. Not easily. And doing what they do is slow, and it takes an effort. The Kin would have to travel back and forward in time fifteen million times just to populate London.
“What if the Kin had all of Time and Space to move through? What if it went back to the very beginning of the Universe, and began its existence there? It would be able to populate everything. There would be no intelligent beings in the whole of the SpaceTime Continuum that wasn’t the Kin. One entity would fill the Universe, leaving no room for anything else. Can you imagine it?”
Amy licked her lips. “Yes,” she said. “Yes I can.”
“All you’d need would be to get into a TARDIS, and have a Time Lord at the controls, and the Universe would be your playground.”
“Oh yes,” said Amy, and she was smiling broadly, now. “It will be.”
“We’re almost there,” said the Doctor. “The dawn of time. Please. Tell me that Amy’s safe, wherever she is.”
“Why ever would I tell you that?” asked the Kin in the Amy Pond mask. “It’s not true.”
VII.
Amy could hear the Doctor running down the stairs. She heard a voice that sounded strangely familiar calling to him, and then she heard a sound that filled her chest with despair: the diminishing vworp vworp of a TARDIS as it leaves.
The door opened, at that moment, and she walked out into the downstairs hall.
“He’s run out on you,” said a deep voice. “How does it feel to be abandoned?”
“The Doctor doesn’t abandon his friends,” said Amy to the thing in the shadows.
“He does. He obviously did in this case. You can wait as long as you want to, he’ll never come back,” said the thing, as it stepped out of the darkness, and into the half-light.
It was huge. Its shape was humanoid, but also somehow animal (Lupine, thought Amy Pond, as she took a step backwards, away from the thing). It had a mask on, an unconvincing wooden mask, that seemed like it was meant to represent an angry dog, or perhaps a wolf.
“He’s taking someone he believes to be you for a ride in the TARDIS. And in a few moments, reality is going to rewrite. The Time Lords reduced the Kin to one lonely entity cut off from the rest of Creation. So it is fitting that a Time Lord restores us to our rightful place in the order of things: all other things will serve me, or will be me, or will be food for me. Ask me what time it is, Amy Pond.”
“Why?”
There were more of them, now, shadowy figures. A cat-faced woman on the stairs. A small girl in the corner. The rabbit-headed man standing behind her said, “Because it will be a clean way to die. An easy way to go. In a few moments you will never have existed anyway.”
“Ask me,” said the wolf-masked figure in front of her. “Say, ‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ ”
In reply, Amy Pond reached up and pulled the wolf mask from the face of the huge thing, and she saw the Kin.
Human eyes were not meant to look at the Kin. The crawling, squirming, wriggling mess that was the face of the Kin was a frightful thing: the masks had been as much for its own protection as for everyone else’s.
Amy Pond stared at the face of the Kin. She said, “Kill me if you’re going to kill me. But I don’t believe that the Doctor has abandoned me. And I’m not going to ask you what time it is.”
“Pity,” said the Kin, through a face that was a nightmare. And it moved toward her.
THE TARDIS ENGINES groaned once, loudly, and then were silent.
“We are here,” said the Kin. Its Amy Pond mask was now just a flat, scrawled drawing of a girl’s face.
“We’re here at the beginning of it all,” said the Doctor, “because that’s where you want to be.
