Doctor Who: Nothing O'Clock: Eleventh Doctor: 50th Anniversary by Neil Gaiman Read Free Book Online

1
    The Time Lords built a Prison.
     They built it in a time and place that are both unimaginable to
     any entity who has never left the solar system in which it was
     spawned, or who has only experienced the journey through time,
     second by second, and that only going forward. It was built just
     for the Kin. It was impregnable: a complex of small rooms (for
     they were not monsters, the Time Lords – they could be merciful,
     when it suited them), out of temporal phase with the rest of the
     Universe.
    There were, in that place, only
     those rooms: the gulf between microseconds was one that could
     not be crossed. In effect, those rooms became a universe in
     themselves, one that borrowed light and heat and gravity from
     the rest of Creation, always a fraction of a moment away.
    The Kin prowled its rooms, patient
     and deathless, and always waiting.
    It was waiting for a question. It
     could wait until the end of time. (But even then, when Time
     Ended, the Kin would miss it, imprisoned in the micro-moment
     away from time.)
    The Time Lords maintained the
     Prison with huge engines they built in the hearts of black
     holes, unreachable: no one would be able to get to the engines,
     save the Time Lords themselves. The multiple engines were a
     fail-safe. Nothing could ever go wrong.
    As long as the Time Lords existed,
     the Kin would be in their Prison, and the rest of the Universe
     would be safe. That was how it was, and how it always would
     be.
    And if anything went wrong, then
     the Time Lords would know. Even if, unthinkably, any of the
     engines failed, then emergency signals would sound on Gallifrey
     long before the Prison of the Kin returned to our time and our
     universe. The Time Lords had planned for everything.
    They had planned for everything
     except the possibility that one day there would be no Time
     Lords, and no Gallifrey. No Time Lords in the Universe, except
     for one.
    So when the Prison shook and
     crashed, as if in an earthquake, throwing the Kin down; and when
     the Kin looked up from its Prison to see the light of galaxies
     and suns above it, unmediated and unfiltered, and it knew that
     it had returned to the Universe, it knew it would only be a
     matter of time until the question would be asked once
     more.
    And, because the Kin was careful,
     it took stock of the Universe they found themselves in. It did
     not think of revenge: that was not in its nature. It wanted what
     it had always wanted. And besides …
    There was still a Time Lord in the
     Universe.
    The Kin needed to do something
     about that.

2
    On Wednesday, eleven-year-old
     Polly Browning put her head round her father’s office door.
     ‘Dad, there’s a man at the front door in a rabbit mask who says
     he wants to buy the house.’
    ‘Don’t be silly, Polly.’ Mr
     Browning was sitting in the corner of the room he liked to call
     his office, and which the estate agent had optimistically listed
     as a third bedroom, although it was scarcely big enough for a
     filing cabinet and a card-table, upon which rested a brand-new
     Amstrad computer. Mr Browning was carefully entering the numbers
     from a pile of receipts on to the computer, and wincing. Every
     half an hour he would save the work he’d done so far, and the
     computer would make a grinding noise for a few minutes as it
     saved everything on to a floppy disk.
    ‘I’m not being silly. He says
     he’ll give you seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds for
     it.’
    ‘Now you’re really being silly.
     It’s only on sale for fifty thousand pounds.’
And we’d be lucky to get that in
     today’s market
, he thought, but did not
     say. It was the summer of 1984, and Mr Browning despaired of
     finding a buyer for the little house at the end of Claversham
     Row.
    Polly nodded thoughtfully. ‘I
     think you should go and talk to him.’
    Mr Browning shrugged. He needed to
     save the work he’d done so far anyway. As the computer made its
     grumbling sound, Mr Browning