“Open the door,” grunted the Kin.
The Doctor opened the door. The winds that swirled about the TARDIS pushed the Doctor backwards.
The Kin stood at the door of the TARDIS. “It’s so dark.”
“We’re at the very start of it all. Before light.”
“I will walk into the Void,” said the Kin. “And you will ask me, ‘What time is it?’ And I will tell myself, tell you, tell all Creation, Time for the Kin to rule, to occupy, to invade. Time for the Universe to become only me and mine and whatever I keep to devour. Time for the first and final reign of the Kin, world without end, through all of time.”
“I wouldn’t do it,” said the Doctor. “If I were you. You can still change your mind.”
The Kin dropped the Amy Pond mask onto the TARDIS floor. It pushed itself out of the TARDIS door, into the Void.
“Doctor,” it called. Its face was a writhing mass of maggots. “Ask me what time it is.”
“I can do better than that,” said the Doctor. “I can tell you exactly what time it is. It’s no time. It’s Nothing O’Clock. It’s a microsecond before the Big Bang. We’re not at the Dawn of Time. We’re before the Dawn.
“The Time Lords really didn’t like genocide. I’m not too keen on it myself. It’s the potential you’re killing off. What if one day there was a good Dalek? What if . . .” He paused. “Space is big. Time is bigger. I would have helped you to find a place your people could have lived. But there was a girl called Polly, and she left her diary behind. And you killed her. That was a mistake.”
“You never even knew her,” called the Kin from the Void.
“She was a kid,” said the Doctor. “Pure potential, like every kid everywhere. I know all I need.” The squiggly whatsit attached to the TARDIS console was beginning to smoke and spark. “You’re out of time, literally. Because Time doesn’t start until the Big Bang. And if any part of a creature that inhabits time gets removed from time . . . well, you’re removing yourself from the whole picture.”
The Kin understood. It understood that, at that moment, all of Time and Space was one tiny particle, smaller than an atom, and that until a microsecond passed, and the particle exploded, nothing would happen. Nothing could happen. And the Kin was on the wrong side of the microsecond.
Cut off from Time, all the other parts of the Kin were ceasing to be. The It that was They felt the wash of nonexistence sweeping over them.
In the beginning—before the beginning—was the word. And the word was “Doctor!”
But the door had been closed and the TARDIS vanished, implacably. The Kin was left alone, in the Void before Creation.
Alone, forever, in that moment, waiting for Time to begin.
VIII.
The young man in the tweed jacket walked around the house at the end of Claversham Row. He knocked at the door, but no one answered. He went back into the blue box, and fiddled with the tiniest of controls: it was always easier to travel a thousand years than it was to travel twenty-four hours.
He tried again.
He could feel the threads of time raveling and reraveling. Time is complex: not everything that has happened has happened, after all. Only the Time Lords understood it, and even they found it impossible to describe.
The house in Claversham Row had a grimy FOR SALE sign in the garden.
He knocked at the door.
“Hello,” he said. “You must be Polly. I’m looking for Amy Pond.” The girl’s hair was in pigtails. She looked up at the Doctor suspiciously. “How do you know my name?” she asked.
“I’m very clever,” said the Doctor, seriously.
Polly shrugged. She went back into the house, and the Doctor followed. There was, he was relieved to notice, no fur on the walls.
Amy was in the kitchen, drinking tea with Mrs. Browning. Radio Four was playing in the background. Mrs. Browning was telling Amy about her job as a nurse, and the hours she had to work, and Amy was saying that her fiancé was a nurse, and she knew all about it.
She looked up, sharply, when the Doctor came in: a look as if to say “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”
“I thought you’d be here,” said the Doctor. “If I just kept looking.”
THEY LEFT THE house on Claversham Row: the blue police box was parked at the end of the road, beneath some chestnut trees.
“One moment,” said Amy, “I was about to be eaten by that creature. The next I was sitting in the kitchen, talking to Mrs. Browning, and listening to The Archers. How did you do that?”
“I’m very clever,” said the Doctor. It was a good line, and he was determined to use it as much as possible.
“Let’s go home,” said Amy. “Will Rory be there this time?”
“Everybody in the world will be there,” said the Doctor. “Even Rory.”
They went into the TARDIS. He had already removed the blackened remains of the squiggly whatsit from the console: the TARDIS would not again be able to reach the moment before time began, but then, all things considered, that had to be a good thing.
He was determined to take Amy straight home—with just a small side trip to Andalusia, during the age of chivalry, where, in a small inn on the road to Seville, he had once been served the finest gazpacho he had ever tasted.
The Doctor was almost completely sure he could find it again . . .
“We’ll go straight home,” he said. “After lunch. And over lunch, I’ll tell you the story of Maximelos and the three Ogrons.”
A Lunar Labyrinth
2013
We were walking up a gentle hill on a summer’s evening. It was gone eight thirty, but it still felt like midafternoon. The sky was blue. The sun was low on the horizon, and
