Trigger Warning

‘I’ve heard of you,’ said the Doctor. ‘My people thought you were—’

‘An abomination,’ said the crouching thing with the paper mask. ‘And a violation of all the laws of time. They sectioned us off from the rest of Creation. But I escaped, and thus we escaped. And we are ready to begin again. Already we have started to purchase this world . . .’

‘You’re recycling money through time,’ said the Doctor. ‘Buying up this world with it, starting with this house, the town . . .’

‘Doctor? What’s going on?’ asked Amy. ‘Can you explain any of this?’

‘All of it,’ said the Doctor. ‘Sort of wish I couldn’t. They’ve come here to take over the Earth. They’re going to become the population of the planet.’

‘Oh, no, Doctor,’ said the huge crouching creature in the paper mask. ‘You don’t understand. That’s not why we take over the planet. We will take over the world and let humanity become extinct simply in order to get you here, now.’

The Doctor grabbed Amy’s hand and shouted, ‘Run!’ He headed for the front door –

– and found himself at the top of the stairs. He called, ‘Amy!’ but there was no reply. Something brushed his face: something that felt almost like fur. He swatted it away.

There was one door open, and he walked towards it.

‘Hello,’ said the person in the room, in a breathy, female voice. ‘So glad you could come, Doctor.’

It was Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of Great Britain.

‘You do know who we are, dear?’ she asked. ‘It would be such a shame if you didn’t.’

‘The Kin,’ said the Doctor. ‘A population that only consists of one creature, but able to move through time as easily and instinctively as a human can cross the road. There was only one of you. But you’d populate a place by moving backwards and forwards in time until there were hundreds of you, then thousands and millions, all interacting with yourselves at different moments in your own timeline. And this would go on until the local structure of time would collapse, like rotten wood. You need other entities, at least in the beginning, to ask you the time, and create the quantum superpositioning that allows you to anchor to a place–time location.’

‘Very good,’ said Mrs Thatcher. ‘Do you know what the Time Lords said, when they engulfed our world? They said that as each of us was the Kin at a different moment in time, to kill any one of us was to commit an act of genocide against our whole species. You cannot kill me, because to kill me is to kill all of us.’

‘You know I’m the last Time Lord?’

‘Oh yes, dear.’

‘Let’s see. You pick up the money from the mint as it’s being printed, buy things with it, return it moments later. Recycle it through time. And the masks . . . I suppose they amplify the conviction field. People are going to be much more willing to sell things when they believe that the leader of their country is asking for them, personally . . . and eventually you’ve sold the whole place to yourselves. Will you kill the humans?’

‘No need, dear. We’ll even make reservations for them: Greenland, Siberia, Antarctica . . . but they will die out, nonetheless. Several billion people living in places that can barely support a few thousand. Well, dear . . . it won’t be pretty.’ Mrs Thatcher moved. The Doctor concentrated on seeing her as she was. He closed his eyes. Opened them to see a bulky figure wearing a crude black-and-white face mask, with a photograph of Margaret Thatcher on it.

The Doctor reached out his hand and pulled off the mask from the Kin.

The Doctor could see beauty where humans could not. He took joy in all creatures. But the face of the Kin was hard to appreciate.

‘You . . . you revolt yourself,’ said the Doctor. ‘Blimey. It’s why you wear masks. You don’t like your face, do you?’

The Kin said nothing. Its face, if that was its face, writhed and squirmed.

‘Where’s Amy?’ asked the Doctor.

‘Surplus to requirements,’ said another, similar voice, from behind him. A thin man, in a rabbit mask. ‘We let her go. We only needed you, Doctor. Our Time Lord prison was a torment, because we were trapped in it and reduced to one of us. You are also only one of you. And you will stay here in this house forever.’

The Doctor walked from room to room, examining his surroundings with care. The walls of the house were soft and covered with a light layer of fur. And they moved, gently, in and out, as if they were . . . ‘Breathing. It’s a living room. Literally.’

He said, ‘Give me Amy back. Leave this place. I’ll find you somewhere you can go. You can’t just keep looping and re-looping through time, over and over, though. It messes everything up.’

‘And when it does, we begin again, somewhere else,’ said the woman in the cat mask, on the stairs. ‘You will be imprisoned until your life is done. Age here, regenerate here, die here, over and over. Our prison will not end until the last Time Lord is no more.’