It was dark on the square where the Doctor had emerged, to a part of a city that should already have been destroyed. Clearly it was late – long after eight o'clock – but the world in front of her looked like it still existed.
Not much of it was conscious, though: curtains were drawn and shops were closed. Only one place looked open when she scanned the square— a shop painted in bright neon colours, somehow managing to look gaudy in the darkness.
The Doctor came up to the shop, interested despite herself. In flashing letters on the windows were the words INVEST IN YOUR FUTURE: BUY YOUR OWN SKULL, and she was thrown by that despite all the odd things she'd seen. Just when you thought you had a handle on the universe, it always found something new to strain your mind.
Her spoon had told her this place shouldn't be here. She'd expected the rubble of a broken world, not a shop that'd sell you your own skull. But she was nothing if she wasn't adaptable. Perhaps there'd be answers inside.
She pushed open the door and a bell tinkled happily. Shops always had bells in places as strange as this.
The room inside was small enough that it could almost fit into a real police box. There was a tiny carpeted space for customers, then row upon row of skulls crammed onto shelves. The colour scheme was strangely upbeat and the shopkeeper seemed to be, too. Nonetheless, his eyes gave him away. A skull could never entirely hide its brain.
"Good to see you," he said, beaming unconvincingly. "We don't often get people shopping at this hour."
"It's a wonder you've got anyone at all, in the circumstances," said the Doctor. "End of the world must be running late. Can't get the staff, in these planet destroying machines." Unless it's like the book says, of course. That time is an illusion"—
"I never liked that book!" said the man. "It's depressing."
"Yes, it is!" said the Doctor excitedly. "And nobody ever says. Maybe you see it, then, what nobody else here does."
"I've found my own interests, right enough," said the shopkeeper. "I'm much happier with a good, old-fashioned skull. It's too morbid for me, that science fiction nonsense."
"Ah," said the Doctor. "Right."
She looked politely at the skulls on the shelves for a moment.
"Has anyone told you your planet's extremely strange?" she said in a conversational way.
The man shrugged. "I mostly talk shop when people come here," he said. "Ask if they want to handle the merchandise. It's not the same, 'till it's your own skull that you're holding. It's a very interesting process to get your skull in your own hands. Takes some cutting-edge temporal engineering"—
"I'm sure," said the Doctor. "It sounds pretty pricey to me. I've had a lot of skulls, and I doubt you'd do a discount for the set."
"Owning someone else's isn't the same," said the shopkeeper as he misunderstood her. "That's what I didn't understand until I got mine."
He nodded to the skull just beside his till, which wore the same pink baseball cap as him.
"That's it right there," he said. "You can tell because of the hat."
"Of course," said the Doctor. "I assumed you just sold those hats here, because I'm an enormous idiot. But I now see that of course they imply this skull is in fact your own."
"It is," said the man proudly.
"Good. I'm an alien, you know?"
"No!" laughed the man. "Then no wonder you think we're all strange. We don't get many tourists to our world."
"It's a hard place to find. But in the mad old bit of the universe I'm from, there's not much that'd be more morbid than owning your own skull."
"I don't see why. It exists, doesn't it? So I wasn't vapourised by a dome. It all worked out fine, just as we knew it would"—
She heard it for the first time, then. The note of panic in his voice, like he was pleading with her. The one her patients used when she'd been on the wards, when she'd had to tell them the lump in their chest was fatal.
She was the Doctor first and a doctor second, but at the end of the day she was still a qualified psychiatrist. In a situation like this, it might be an idea to psychiatrise.
"You're scared", she said softly. "All of you are."
"I'm not," said the man. "I've got my skull!"
"I get it!" said the Doctor. "The stories you've told of your lives, they can't contain that dome and what it means. So you're holding onto something else; it's the only way you can carry on. But it isn't working, is it? The skulls aren't quite enough to stop the fear."
"They are too!" said the shopkeeper. "It wasn't me who had the idea. They had them in the world the book was from— a long time ago, before it was even written. Skulls on their desks, so they'd never once forget. Remember you will die."
"Yes," said the Doctor. "But that's not what you're saying at all"—
"Of course it is!" cried the man. "However bad things seem, you have to hold onto something. Remember that you'll die, after a good long life, remember how you'll leave behind a skull. It doesn't just stop. It can't, not when it's us."
"That's not what it meant," said the Doctor. "Everything here, it's not what any of it means."
"And what makes you so sure of that?"
"Because I don't think I'm what I mean anymore, either. Everything here, it's wrong, but without getting through it there's no way back to it being right. And I think you're so calm"–
She swallowed.
"Because you're all far more scared than you've ever been."
The man looked at her desperately, eyes sunk into a skull that was still alive.
"Please don't make me think it," he said. "Don't make me go there. Thinking that, losing the future. It'd be the most awful thing."
The Doctor shook her head. "It's the not thinking that's worse. When you act like nothing's wrong, stop seeing what it really means. So you find yourself with a doomsday over your head, and all you can think to to is quote its jokes. And what's almost as bad," she went on, "when you do that it's not even very funny."
"Of course we joke," said the man very quietly. "What else do we have, if we aren't even able to laugh?"
"You have me," said the Doctor. "Whatever happens now, I promise that you will have me. I'm not sure I can stop it; there might be no hope left at all. But whatever happens you have to know that I am going to try."
"Nobody's trying," said the man. "Nobody knows where to even begin."
"Well, that's as maybe. But I'm the Doctor. I'm qualified in this sort of thing.
She looked around at the skulls, whose owners lived nonexistent lives. They were symbols of hope, but the hope had gone taut like a weight: the fear at the heart of it growing until the whole thing was too heavy to bear. Where there was death, there was hope. But if you couldn't look right at the both of them, then you might soon see neither at all.
"It's not real," she said. "The future they're from doesn't happen. It's broken, all a trick. But then there's a part of you knew that knew that already."
The shopkeeper wasn't speaking, or looking towards her eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't want to take hope away. But I don't know where to go, and to keep going… I need someone able to see."
The man's jaw clenched tight against his grief.
"It's ten o' clock," he said in the end. "So if all you said was true, and this place should never be real. To get to anything that was true, you'd have to go"—
"Backwards," said the Doctor. "That's the heart of it, isn't it? The man at eight 'o clock should be buried back in time. But he never really died, and somehow he's different now."
"You can't turn away," said the man. "It doesn't work if you do. I know that, at least, when it comes to facing fear."
"No," said the Doctor. "We have to move forwards, even if we go backwards too.
"I'm already dead," said the shopkeeper. "Aren't I?"
"Yes," said the Doctor. "And no. Logic here… it's a bit like a dream. Everything is true, and nothing is."
"But I'm not the one that does the waking up," said the man.
The Doctor looked at him like he was drowning far away, and moved to hug him before she left.
"Not that," said the shopkeeper. "I hate contact. Just take a skull; doesn't have to be your own. To remember me once you're done. As a memento."
"I won't need that," she said sadly. "Whoever I can't save, even in a dream. You have to know that I always remember. And also, yeah"—
She looked up at the grinning skulls.
"I remember that I'll die," she said.
She shuffled backwards awkwardly, not quite knowing how to say goodbye. But as she began the shadows on the skulls grew longer, and the eyes of the storekeeper narrowed to points of light. Everything was different shades of black, slowly darkening away to nothing at all.
Sometimes in dreams a moment comes when you know where you are isn't real, and after that happens the whole world begins to dissolve. The Doctor felt like that as she took out her scalpel again, frantically slashing an opening as the place she was in faded away. For a moment everything was gone, then she was safe.
It felt strange to become the realest thing in a world.