30
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
"For what?"
"You were right. I attract trouble. I used to think it was just random, but…" he was interrupted by a coughing fit which included a disturbing amount of blood, "it's me. I love trouble. And the TARDIS knows it. That's why we get monsters, explosions and spaceships instead of chips. I'm sorry."
He was expecting her to rant, to rave. Instead, she smiled. "Don't you ever listen to your own little speeches?" she asked him. "I went into that police box and I came out someone totally different cos of all the crazy things we've seen and done. I wouldn't swap my time with you for anything. And I bet anyone in my place would say the same thing."
Just like that, the weight of all those he'd lost over the years seemed to lift from him. He sat up, with some difficulty, her hands supporting him all the way. "Oh, are we still on that island?" he said, touching his bandages and wincing, "I thought that one with the numbers and the crazy French girl was bad…"
"We're going for your ship," PC Plum told him. The Daisy Bus was again full to the rafters with the usual suspects, save Penny and Suzy.
"Yeahhhh!" Spencer agreed, from somewhere on the floor. "Thirty-fourteen minutes!"
"We tried this. There's some sort of cloaking technology operating that I can't penetrate," the Doctor reminded them.
"Ah," came Archie's tremulous voice, as he raised a finger. "I, ah, I believe I might be able to help there..."
31
"I can't believe this," Rose stated flatly.
They were assembled in the large, empty field as before. Less than ten minutes remained before they'd all become mindless child-zombies again. And their great hope, their one chance, lay in the Doctor's hands.
"Here goes," he said, and raised the forcefield-lowerer device.
Made entirely from yoghurt pots.
Alone perhaps amongst the rest, when Archie's body and mind were being hi-jacked, he didn't thrash around immovably for help, didn't scream silently behind unresponsive lips. He considered. He had come to Balamory a rich man, inventor of an anti-virus program back when such things were relatively new on the IT horizon. He had made an almost instant fortune from the commercial rights to the code. He had no interest in the city, in the jobs that computer firms threw at him.
He moved here for the peace and the quiet and the chance to think. And when the mind control had begun, he had found himself reinvented as Archie the Inventor, who knew how things were done, and who could make absolutely anything. Granted, all he ever seemed to make were clip-clop puppets and crudely drawn magic boxes with 'secret' access flaps you could drive a 4x4 through, but what it proved to him was that the roles they had been assigned were based upon their own personalities.
If this being had the power to rewrite reality, to hide entire towns and puppet entire populations in order to create personas to appeal to his inner child – no, children – then, Archie reasoned, the creations themselves had to have some power in this world created for them. After all, his puppets and magic boxes always worked. Why shouldn't a dimensional space-time phase-shifting forcefield disseminator made entirely of yoghurt pots?
For someone whom he'd shot repeatedly in the back at pointblank range, the Doctor had looked at him with a profound mixture of gratitude and respect upon hearing this reasoning.
"Nothing's happening," Miss Hoolie observed.
"Maybe it's the wrong flavour yoghurt," Edie suggested dryly.
Like Rose, she had been less than convinced by Archie's plan. The Doctor had already surmised that Edie seemed to have little patience for anything she couldn't drive or boss into submission.
"Or maybe you haven't turned it on," Archie said, in a how could you be so silly tone of voice. He plucked the device from the Doctor's hands, gave the left-most pot a twist, and aimed-
More than one child-unfriendly word escaped the lips of the watchers.
The world's biggest playhouse had just popped into existence. Ten storeys high, two hundred feet across, it towered over them, an Acropolis of flimsy cloth and clear-plastic windows.
Spencer, swaying like a tree in a typhoon, looked up at the playhouse and then down at the bottle he was carrying. His mouth opened, then closed. "Bah," he said disgustedly, flinging the bottle away.
The Doctor consulted his sonic screwdriver once again. The TARDIS' signal flashed loud and clear and strong, straight ahead. He whooped for sheer joy. "It's there!"
They poured forward, through cathedral-tall entrance doors of polythene, PC Plum's order to advance as needless as it was heartfelt.
"Matty! Tyler!" Miss Hoolie called out, as they spread out beyond the doors. Inside, the playhouse was laid out like a cross between a palace and an adventure playground. Chandeliers hung above huge coloured ball pits. Almost every patch of springy, play-safe marble-effect floor either squeaked or played nursery rhymes as they walked upon it.
And before them, huge brightly-coloured escalators wound their way up from the entrance hall, snaking up to adjoining corridors, looping and swerving over one another like mini rollercoasters. The thum, thum, thum sound of escalator motors lapped at their ears, mixing with the discordant symphonies of a hundred different children's melodies.
"Oh…" Rose said simply, lost for words.
"Bloody hell," Edie breathed.
"Incredible. Dali meets Sesame Street," the Doctor said wonderingly, jumping from side to side and playing Chopsticks on the floor as he did so.
"How does he have all this power?" Rose asked, dumbstruck.
"He can bend reality with his mind," the Doctor replied, "all Therkans could. But I've never seen it done to this level before…"
"We don't have time," PC Plum snapped. "Which way?"
"Come on everyone! This way!" Josie cried, stepping onto the blue escalator. Archie's desperate lunge to stop her missed by inches.
There was an electric crackle and a horrible sound, like balloons popping. For a moment the lights seemed to dim and the music to fade, and when the lights came up-
"Where did she…" Rose said faintly.
"She's gone," the Doctor said, numb.
As seconds went by, they froze in place, and might have stayed that way for too long if Miss Hoolie hadn't stepped forward. She strode to the nexus point of the escalators before anyone could stop her, turned. "Coloured," she said, pointing, "coloured for us. Look."
She stepped onto the green escalator. "No!" PC Plum gasped, but by the time he had taken steps forward he could see already that she was right, and unharmed.
"What are you all waiting for?" she shouted down to them, and began to vault the steps three at a time.
Spurred on by her example, the remainder split into their colour groups and charged up the matching escalators, leaving only the Doctor and Rose behind and the red and yellow escalators unoccupied.
Rose glanced down at herself. She was still wearing the bright red top she'd been sporting since the beginning. She glanced at the Doctor, who read her expression. "I don't know," he replied.
"Behind you!" Archie's voice cried out from above. "The floor!"
Starting with the entranceway and spreading like a cancer, the multicoloured patchwork floor was dissolving into nothingness. There was no way to tell if the bottomless pit yawning up was real or imaginary. Rose didn't plan to find out. She leapt onto the red escalator, bracing herself as best a person can for disintegration, and found only solidity and slow upward movement.
But the Doctor...
"You're not yellow!" she said desperately.
He grinned at her, but there was little amusement within the smile. "Don't worry," he said, stepping onto the yellow escalator without harm, "he wants me to get there intact."
Close enough to touch, she smiled at him, before they both began to make up ground on the others still ascending above. Rose risked a glance below when she judged herself to have moved up enough, and wished she hadn't. Oblivion was rising, and rising fast.
"Looks like we're going to the penthouse," the Doctor panted, as the yellow escalator swooped over hers. She was disturbed to see him so out of breath; she suspected that his fitness levels were far beyond those of normal humans, but then for a guy bleeding from three bullet holes, he was doing commendably well.
The escalators terminated up ahead on a landing, all seven meandering paths converging so they were side-by-side before merging into the landing's surface itself. Miss Hoolie and PC Plum were already there. Edie and Spencer joined them.
Rose, the Doctor and Archie were the last remaining. Archie's cheeks were as red as rubies from the exhertion. He looked ruefully across at Rose as they reached the levelling-out section, grateful for the climb stopping. "Always hated these things," he revealed, "used to think as a child that I was going to-"
"Don't say it!" the Doctor erupted, but it was too late.
Rose saw Archie's body twitch. Then again. She wondered what was happening and then realised with horror - he was trying to move his legs.
And he was failing.
Ahead, the escalator thum, thum, thummed into a small opening, with the landing coming in a half-step above it.
"Oh God no oh please God no - " Archie began to gibber incoherently, bending and pulling frantically at his legs and feet, trying something, anything to make them move before-
Everyone moved to help him at the same moment.
All of them much too late.
Archie had time to turn and Rose saw clearly the utter terror in his eyes in the instant before, with a grinding and a sucking noise she would remember too long after, his entire body was sucked impossibly and completely into the mechanism.
"Archie...oh dear God in heaven, Archie!" Edie screamed, sobbing on her knees inches from where it had happened, her hand outstretched, now to nothing.
Rose leapt off her escalator. The Doctor did the same. She was never more relieved to feel her legs move from beneath her at her command. By the time they impacted the landing, however, much of the strength had gone from them through sheer shock.
PC Plum was looking down. "We can't stay here," he stated, trying to sound matter-of-fact about the small matter of the house being sucked into the void less than twenty feet below.
"Just so y'know, this is the worst hangover cure ever invented," Spencer stated, putting the palms of his hands against his temple and pressing, hard, as if he hoped to erase the world.
Coloured lights began running in a straight line overhead, on the ceiling, which doubled as the floor of the landing above their heads. They ran to a series of perfectly circular holes in the wall, each barely big enough to admit a person crawling. Above each was a child's drawing.
The Doctor was the first to reach them. "Drawings of us," he said.
"Where do they go? Are we just supposed to climb in there? We don't know where they go!" Edie protested, her words running together. She was losing it. "After what happened to Archie-"
"We stay here, we die," the Doctor said mildly. He pointed wordlessly to a hole above which had been daubed a crude stick figure of a blue person driving a yellow circular blob.
Rose began to search for hers as, around her, the others identified their own. PC Plum sought a nod from the Doctor before plunging in. He got one, and vanished into the hole. Miss Hoolie was next. Muttering darkly, Spencer took his turn and was swallowed by the blackness.
"Find yours?" the Doctor asked her.
Rose put her hand over a picture of a girl standing next to a man standing next to a box. There was a very large, very pink heart prominently displayed between the girl and man. "Yes," she said, marvelling that she found the time to be embarrassed even at a time like this.
She, the Doctor and Edie paused at the entrances to their tunnels. Edie shot her a look full of despair and terror, and Rose feared for her in that moment.
In the next, she was into the darkness.
32
That they have come so far, so quicky - remarkable. I had never suspected them capable of such things, and yet I have walked abroad within their minds for many years now.
In the bleak expanses I have created, one of their minds is crazed with terror above the others. It shines to me like a beacon, its naked fear harking back to the pureness of childhood certainties about things lurking in dark places. Children, I have learned, do not fear that there are monsters in the dark.
Children know there are monsters in the dark.
What they fear, what they wake up soaked in sweat having dreamt, is that one day their turn will come.
I reach out and make someone's dream come true.
33
"What is it?" Alison's reflection asked her, quirking her head to one side. "You look all scrunched up. You've got that scrunched-up face going on."
Edie raised her eyebrows, horrified. "Scrunched-up face?!" she repeated, deeply offended.
She saw Alison walk over to her in the mirror, but decided to close her eyes and allow herself to scent her lover's approach, her neck to feel the soft kiss Alison planted there.
"Still my gorgeous," Alison whispered. "So what is it? We've got half an hour before the ferry arrives so whatever it is, make it quick..."
"Just remembering a dream," Edie replied, her eyes still closed.
"Bad?"
"Yes," she admitted.
Her eyes were closed. That explained the darkness. Because her eyes were closed. Ergo, darkness. She had wanted to close them.
But it was a lie. Her eyes were open, open and staring, wide and terrified, and the darkness was all around her, and Alison and her kisses long gone. There was only her, and the darkness.
No. Another lie.
Something was here with her. Something moving. Something close. It breathed wetly, hotly ahead of her, and behind her too, as only monsters can. But she knew that this monster had been waiting for her all along. It was her time.
Her choking scream echoed through the tunnels, and then was gone.
34
Light. Rose almost wept with relief. Her knees ached, her neck ached, but she pushed onward, scurrying through the tunnel as that blessed speck of light up ahead grew bigger. Her mind, ever the traitor, conjured up all kinds of noises and scenarios – what if she heard something behind her, now? What if it caught up with her and dragged her back into the black with her questing fingertips mere inches from safety?
What if I shut the hell up, she thought determinedly, and kept going until she was able to clamber down and out of her own personal little hellhole.
Miss Hoolie and PC Plum were embracing, briefly, out of sheer relief to still be here no doubt. Spencer was standing a little way apart, glowering but there, reassuring somehow in his big bright orange clothes and white coveralls.
"Doctor?"
"Here," he answered from her right, to her immense relief. He had just reached the end of his own tunnel and, wincing still with his wounds, was able to step down with her assistance.
"Edie…?" Miss Hoolie asked, her voice not containing much hope.
The Doctor shook his head.
"There are only five tunnels," Rose said. "How can there only be five? We went into six."
"He knew she'd never make it all the way," the Doctor replied.
"He's picking us off one by one!" Spencer moaned, throwing his hands up in despair. "Don't any of you understand that? We're all gonna die!"
Rose took in their new surroundings. Somehow despite crawling in what had felt like a straight line, which should have seen them go right through the massive walls of the play house, they had instead ended up a few more levels and on the opposite end of the structure. She walked to the edge of the landing and looked downward. Oblivion was ascending still.
Spencer was still in the throes of all-out panic. "I give up!" he cried suddenly to the house at large. "I want to go back to Balamory! I'll paint my stupid pictures and play my tunes for you, ok? Just don't let me die in this place – please…"
The holes they had emerged from vanished. One reappeared a moment later. Rather than darkness, it displayed a view of Balamory, of the field in which the play house stood. The smell of the countryside poured through, the sounds.
"Portal…" Spencer whispered.
Above the portal, the number 5 appeared. It clicked to 4 as they watched. Then to 3.
"Spencer, NO!" PC Plum roared, and grabbed the other man by the arm. They wrestled desperately. Rose expected the Doctor to help, but he only watched, a strange vacancy in his face.
3 became 2. 2 became 1 and a half. Then 1 and a quarter.
"Sorry Plummy," Spencer retorted, twisting Plum's arm with his own until the larger man was forced to release him. "Don't wanna be late!"
He stepped through the portal, and in one awful moment of realisation it came to him that the view of the field he had seen was coming from above it. An awful long way above it.
And yet he hung there. Hung there and was actually able to turn, nine storeys up, three feet from the portal and the horrified faces watching him, the arms reaching for him.
"Why don't I fall?" he said, and promptly dropped like a stone.
The sound of a human body becoming a broken, boneless ruin far below carried up to the onlookers.
Rose could hardly process anything now. Sounds, voices seemed to come to her as if she were underwater. She was aware of the Doctor approaching her, his mouth moving, but her ears and her brain just didn't seem to be getting along right now.
"Doctor!" PC Plum was shouting. "We don't have any time! Where do we go now? What do we do?"
They were on a landing not connected to any of the others below. There were no tunnels, no arrows, nothing but twenty square feet of isolated surface separating them from the rising tide of nothing, now little more than ten feet below.
"We're here!" the Doctor cried. "You can shoot us, trick us, brainwash us, but you don't dare face us? You, a soldier of Therka? A veteran of the Time War? Afraid?" he snorted in derisive laughter. "Is this what your people died for? So you could go and invent playtime for yourself? You're pathetic!"
The rising dark was upon them, was practically underfoot, when it stopped its advance.
"I'm back," Rose said, unsteadily. She clutched the Doctor for support and yes, because it felt good. "Did I miss anything?"
"Just me taunting the alien who holds our lives in his hands like playthings."
"Oh," she said, and paused to consider this. "Good. In fact – " and she stepped forward herself and cupped her hands to her mouth, to his amazement and pride, "it's ABOUT TIME SOMEONE TOLD YOU EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE! YOU HAVE ALL THIS POWER, ALL THIS FREEDOM, AND YOU SIT HERE AND MAKE THESE PEOPLE'S LIVES A MISERY BECAUSE YOU'RE SULKING YOU NEVER GOT ATTENTION AS A CHILD? GROW UP, YOU BABY!"
Satisfied, but still seething with rage, she stepped back.
"You were actually listening earlier when I told you all that?" the Doctor hissed.
"Course."
He never got a chance to add anything further. In the centre uppermost ceiling of the play house, a huge iris opened. An escalator seemed to grow right before their eyes, connecting to the end of the platform on which they stood, stretching upward through the iris above.
"Looks like you got his attention," PC Plum said.
"I'll get his attention," Miss Hoolie said as she stepped first onto the escalator, her husband a step behind her, "I'll kill him."
"Sounds like a plan," the Doctor commented, as they followed.
35
"What's the story in Balamory!" Miss Hoolie asked brightly.
"Sing Balamory with me!" PC Plum said cheerfully.
"I think I'm going to be sick," Miss Hoolie said, as she turned over the doll of herself in her hands. She pressed the stomach of the doll again and, rather than the doll spouting a phrase, she herself briefly assumed a vacant doll-like stare before pronouncing with enthusiasm, "Who's coming to visit us at the Balamory nursery today?"
They had stepped off the summit of the escalator moments before, into a mountain of toys. Dolls of the townspeople were everywhere. Edie's Daisy Bus had its own radio controlled models. There were miniature models of Balamory town itself. Picture books. Jigsaws. It was an absolute deluge of Balamory-themed goods of every conceivable size, shape and description.
"This is how he views us?" PC Plum asked, though it wasn't really a question at all.
The Doctor simply nodded. "He's turned you, your neighbours, your entire town, into his own private childhood toy set. Anything that didn't fit with that, he erased."
"Not erased, Doctor," a new voice corrected him. It had originated from through the toy mountain. There was something distinctly odd about it, but Rose pushed that aside for the moment as the four of them scrambled over the toys, with Miss Hoolie and PC Plum occasionally forced to spout nonsense as their foot pressed the stomach of their doll doppelganger.
At the other side of the toys was a huge television screen, fully thirty feet high and fifty feet wide. The huge display was split up into hundreds of smaller feeds, each one showing a portion of the island, the town, even inside houses and rooms.
In front of this huge screen were two things. The first was the TARDIS. Rose had to restrain the urge to throw herself down the remainder of the toy hill and scramble to its wonderfully familiar squat blue shape, scramble inside and lock the door shut against the universe until she and she alone decided to open it again. It was home to her now, home in a way that her room in her Mum's flat hadn't been for years. She was past caring or feeling guilty about that just now.
And the second-
He sat a in a chair hooked up to the instrumentation. He was humanoid, as so many of the galaxy's citizens seemed to be. A tube protruded from somewhere within the chair and ran into the corner of his mouth. Fluid was transferring through it. He was thin, painfully so, and his skin was blue-ish grey, whether as a result of his alien origins or his condition she couldn't tell.
But what stopped PC Plum and Miss Hoolie in their tracks as they charged toward him, fuelled by rage, was not his frailty.
It was that he was no more than six years old.
"Who are you?" PC Plum demanded, when his voice returned enough for him to trust it to speak.
"When I was birthed, I was given the designation HYT102," the boy replied. He had the voice of a normal six-year-old. That was what had bothered Rose earlier.
"Catchy," the Doctor commented. "But what do you call yourself now?"
"I like…Philip," the little figure said, after a pause. "It is nice. And normal."
"You're just a child," Miss Hoolie said, disbelieving. She was in a very confusing place emotionally. She had stored up a gigantic, cathartic mass of hatred and vengeance for unleashing upon this being, hatred borne out of her love for her sons, and yet now she was confronted with a child who looked not unlike Matty. Her hatred had nowhere to go. She felt dizzy.
"He's making himself look like a child, Kerrie," Plum guessed, taking a step forward. "Look at the powers he has. The things he can do. It's a trick."
"No," the Doctor said softly. "He's Therkan. Bred for war. From birth they accelerated his mental development, made him an adult in his mind. But the physical bodies remain normal."
Philip inclined his head, smiled faintly. "I was a decorated war pilot by my second year. Dalek weaponry was designed against large-scale ships. We were perfect for tiny craft that could evade their fire."
Try as she might, Rose couldn't get the image of a two-year-old piloting a starfighter out of her mind. "But you drifted here for years," she spoke up, "and you've been controlling the people for years. You should look older."
"Bred for war," Philip echoed the Doctor's words, bitterness evident in his tone. "Not for life. We were not expected to live beyond six years, except for those of us captured. So our bodies are designed to break down after six years," his voice was hollow with anger, "by then, we will have served our purpose ."
"Why?" PC Plum asked. "Why did you do this to us?"
"You took away my sons," Miss Hoolie said.
"Yes. I was jealous. Why should they live this life in this paradise and I have lived mine? Where is the justice? All I had was power, the power in my ship, the powers of my race. I used those powers to create what I never was given. My childhood. Taken from the minds of children like Matty and Tyler. How I have made you is how they see you. And to watch it, again and again – oh!" and that thin, blue-veined mouth smiled with pleasure. "It is marvellous. It is wonderful. I have lived on far beyond my body's date for breaking down because of that gift."
"You feed on it," Rose said, nauseated. "You're an innocence vampire."
"As you wish," Philip shrugged. "But it is not enough. I can feel my body is close to death. And then, like a children's wish, you dropped from the sky, Doctor. With your TARDIS' power…" that frail body shivered with anticipation, "Balamory is just the beginning."
PC Plum was trembling with rage. He cast a desperate look at Rose and the Doctor and she could guess the source of his torment – more than anything, he wanted to raise his fists and plough right through this figure of malevolence, strike it again and again and try to excise some of the years of hurt and loss it had caused. But he couldn't hurt a child. He just couldn't.
"I was there," the Doctor said. "I was there when Therka fell. They made me watch."
"You're lying. I was in your mind. As you saw my life, so I did yours."
"Time Lords aren't so simple to read. Try again," the Doctor pressed.
Philip was silent for a moment. Only for a moment. The Doctor gasped a little and took a step backward. Rose moved to help him but he waved her away, clutching his temple. Philip, meanwhile, had gone even paler than usual. His thin blue chest, covered with simple red cloth, began to flutter as his breathing became sporadic.
The play house around them began to change. The walls melted away to blackness, but not the rising oblivion that had threatened them; this was space, flecked with stars, . The toyroom / video room they were standing in became the bridge of a starship.
A starship full of Daleks.
She turned involuntarily, her first instinct to grab the Doctor, to run, to scream. As she turned however to begin her flight her arm and torso passed through a Dalek who was cantering from the upper tier of the bridge to the lower.
"What's happening?" poor Miss Hoolie wailed.
"It's a memory, I think," Rose assured her. "We're inside a memory." Miss Hoolie and PC Plum were clinging for dear life to one another.
In addition to the Daleks, another newcomer had joined the complement. He was older than the Doctor, with blonde curly hair and a rotund figure. Right at this moment he was flanked by two Daleks and facing the black Dalek, wearing an air of impetuous defiance that seemed so-
"That's you, isn't it?!"
Hands still at his temple, eyes closed, the Doctor could only manage a nod.
The scene around them seemed to jerk into life, as if someone had just pressed the 'play' button.
"YOU WILL WIT-NESS THE SUP-REM-ACY OF THE DA-LEK RACE ONCE A-GAIN, DOC-TOR!"
The Doctor – not her Doctor, but still unmistakably him (it was something in the eyes) folded his arms and yawned theatrically, unimpressed. "For a supreme race you still seem awfully obsessed with gloating and showboating," he observed. "Not exactly supreme behaviour."
Despite everything, Rose found herself beginning to smile. Did he ever change all that much?
"YOU WILL BE LEFT A-LIVE TO TAKE THE MESS-AGE OF WHAT YOU SEE TO-DAY TO THE TIME LORDS! THE DA-LEKS ARE A-WARE OF THEIR ATT-EMPT TO EXT-ERM-IN-ATE US FROM TIME! WE CON-SIDER THIS AN ACT OF WAR!"
Now the other Doctor did look up. Something made Rose glance from him to her Doctor as the other spoke, and she felt a chill as she realised both Doctors were speaking in perfect unison, although only the past Doctor's voice was audible.
"War?" he said. "You would go to war with the Time Lords?" and he began to laugh. "You wouldn't stand a chance. What they asked me to do before – it was a secret operation. Low-key. We're not meant to 'interfere' with time," his derisive expression betrayed what he thought of that mantra, "but if you come after us...if you dared to…" he smiled, smugly, in the kind of way she'd seen her own Doctor go after the Prime Minister with such righteous anger only recently, "you'll know what true power is."
The scene seemed to freeze again. Her own Doctor spoke now, his eyes still closed. It was his voice that resounded through the memory.
"I was wrong of course," he said, softly, regretfully. "I was so sure of my people's power that I was arrogant. I called the Daleks out. I mocked them. I beat them at every turn until they poured their anger at me against my whole planet, my people. Against the universe."
Ahead of them, through the viewing screen on the starship's bridge, the most beautiful planet Rose had ever seen hung in space. Though surrounded by enormous Dalek ships and what she guessed were smaller Therkan vessels – how many piloted, she wondered in a faintly ill way, by super-advanced toddlers? – the planet was magnificent. The oceans were a deeper shade than Earth's, the continents varying between a peerless pastel of greens, reds and here and there, faint spines of grey and white where mountain ranges soared upward.
"My home," Philip said in that childish voice of his. A little boy lost.
"It began here," the Doctor said, "it began with Therka."
Philip began to cry.
The scene resumed.
"WRONG A-GAIN, DOC-TOR!" the Black Dalek intoned in response. Though it was hard to read emotion into Dalek pronouncements – they seemed to veer from all-out fire-and-brimstone hatred and hellfire to merely insanely angry – the creature seemed particularly vehement. "IT IS YOU WHO WILL SEE TRUE PO-WER!"
After that, it scarcely seemed to matter what was said. Rose had vague recollections afterward of the Doctor and his future (echo-self?) pleading, cajoling, trying everything. Nothing worked, and when the Dalek fleet converged above the planet and began to pound it, everyone fell silent, save the faint sobbing of Philip in his life-support chair.
It was not immediate. It was not one huge laser blast that lanced the planet apart, scorched it like a tumour. That would have been clean and quick and not the Dalek way at all.
No, Therka was driven apart slowly. The seas boiled. The Daleks kept firing. Infernos raged on the landmasses, joined, became an almost-encompassing planetary blanket of flame. The Daleks kept firing. She could see the planet begin to shiver, the tectonic plates groaning under the strain. Worse, whether through accident or design there were some portions of the planet the Daleks left untouched. She could visualise being on one of those brief oases of life, watching and feeling your homeworld be pulverised around you, knowing you had no escape, no way out. Waiting for death from the skies, only to be swallowed by the ground below as the crust imploded.
Philip gave a rasping, drawn-out gasp, and the memory collapsed around them just as the planet had. They were back in the play house's penthouse suite, with a mountain of toys at their back and the huge television before them.
"Your homeworld was destroyed by monsters," the Doctor said gently. "You're not one. Prove it."
Philip raised his head, and Rose knew things were going to be bad.
"You," he said, his eyes locked on the Doctor.
The Doctor seemed to register that he had made a misjudgement. The sureness drained from his face, and Rose saw genuine fear surface within him, something which scared her in turn.
"They destroyed my planet because of you. To send a message to you."
The Doctor staggered backwards, pale and shaking, his hands scrabbled to his chest. It wasn't fear, she realised, at least not entirely. It was pain. Philip's eyes were gleaming, glittering with tears and an inner power that was now crushing the life from the Doctor.
"Stop it! You're killing him!" Rose cried, trying to move forward. Trying to move. Failing. Miss Hoolie and PC Plum found themselves similarly immobile.
The Doctor was under no such limitations. He was free – free to fall to his knees, free to bleed from his ears, his nose, as his mind was squeezed in a psychic grip so strong that he should have been unconscious long since. He knew that part of that power coming his way was designed to keep him awake, allow him to fully experience the agony.
"I hate you," Philip said, "I hate you hate you hate you HATE YOU!!!"
The Doctor began to shriek, just as he had done in the nursery. Rose knew in her heart that this time there would be no awakening, no healing.
"I will have the childhood I should have had," he went on, "I will have laughter, and fun, and clip-clop puppets. And I will have…a Mummy and Daddy."
He turned to Miss Hoolie and PC Plum. That's why they were kept alive, Rose realised, seeing the implications sink in to both.
But to her disbelief, Miss Hoolie smiled. It was the first real smile Rose had seen her give, and it lit up her face. "Son," she choked in joy, in disbelief.
Rose's heart sank further. Philip's control had extended once again.
"Mummy," Philip replied gleefully.
"She wasn't talking to you."
Rose turned instinctively to face the new voice, only then realising that she had the power to move. On the giant video wall behind Philip, the individual portions of the screen that had previously shown scenes from around the island where changing.
Filling up with people.
One of them stood out immediately. He was a small boy of no more than four or five, but he had the look of his father about him. He was directly in the centre of the video wall, taking up a fair percentage of the space there. He glared down at Philip.
"Matty," Miss Hoolie choked. "Matty, oh God…where are you? Are you OK?"
"I'm fine Mam," Matty replied. His voice was sure, precise, not that of a four year old. "Tyler is here with me."
On cue, another portion of the video wall changed beside him, to show an adorable little toddler's face. "MAMMY!" he squawked in that toddler-squeal of delight. "DA!"
Tears streamed freely down Miss Hoolie's face. Freed too of her paralysis, she and PC Plum rushed forward as Rose moved back, and at the same time she reached the Doctor, they reached Philip in his chair. There was murderous intent in PC Plum's eyes.
"Don't, Da," Matty said. It was enough to stay his hand.
"Go away!" Philip screamed up at the faces, more and more of which were filling up every available square of space. "Go away, all of you! You don't belong!"
"He got rid of us all," an man in his mid-thirties spoke. "We're the forgotten. The ones who didn't fit with his little paradise."
"Johnny?" PC Plum said, astonished.
"Is my Suzy there?" a much older man demanded to know. He peered down at them short-sightedly from his pixellated prison. "Is she alright, my Suzy? Tell her I'm coming back! Did she marry someone else? Did she wait? She'd better have!"
"Jim McCormack, I don't believe it," PC Plum said.
It was Matty's turn to speak again. His eyes remained fixed on the figure in the life-support chair. "It's over. Let us go and leave this place, this planet, and die in peace."
"No!" Philip screamed back. "No, no I won't! You can't make me!" they could see him straining, trying to re-assert the psychic and telekinetic control he had enjoyed only moments before, but to no avail. All of the faces stared at him, accusing, demanding. "I'm older than you!" he screamed.
The slap rang out long and loud.
Miss Hoolie withdrew her hand. There was utter silence. A red handprint was fresh on Philip's left cheek. His fingers slowly came up to touch the skin, his eyes wide and disbelieving.
"That is enough," she said.
"You-"
"Listen to me," she cut him off. "I worked with children every day. I had two of my own. And despite what they told you and what they did to you, they might have made you able to fly starships and whatever but they did not age you, because you behave like every child I've ever seen who didn't get his own way. You rage and you scream and you cry. There's nothing like a child's anger, believe you me. Nothing comes close to that level of pure rage. You just happen to be a child with the power behind you to make people suffer for the times you're in a tantrum. So let me tell you this, Philip – you didn't miss your childhood. You're still living it, because you're still a child. You never stopped being one. And let me tell you something else as well – none of us do. Not until we decide that we're ready. And sooner or later you have to be – you can't stay forever in childhood. You've got to move on, got to use it to decide what kind of adult you're going to be. Otherwise, what's the point?"
"I missed you, Mam," Matty said softly.
She spared a second to smile up at her son before returning to her task. "Do you know what happens to little boys who always get what they want? They never grow up. If we never learn how to deal with disappointment, with sadness, if we're never told why we can't always eat sweeties, then do you know what we become?"
"What?" Philip asked.
"Daleks," the Doctor answered.
Philip flinched as if physically struck.
"I don't want to be a Dalek," he said. "I want to be a good boy."
And just like that, the play house began to fold up on itself, a card house collapsing from the top down, the walls and the floors and the televisions and toys becoming two-dimensional, vanishing into the space between.
Within moments they stood in that field in which it had all began, the four of them and Philip.
And the others.
"Matty! Tyler!" PC Plum and Miss Hoolie cried simultaneously.
"Mam! Dad!" the boys replied, equally in harmony. Rose felt tears sting her eyes as she watched the four of them come together so quickly and forcefully she half-expected to hear an audible thump. PC Plum picked up Matty and his wife scooped up little Tyler and they spun and hugged and both boys were kissed over and over again, for reassurance and love and to double-check that this moment was actually real.
"Well now," another voice sounded from her right, "that was rather exciting all in all, eh?"
She turned. "Archie!" she squealed with delight and ran to embrace the man who had shot the Doctor not two hours and a lifetime ago.
"Hey, I'm alive too," Spencer noted as they hugged. "Ah, whatever…"
Edie was hunting through the crowd. She couldn't see…where was-
"Still my gorgeous?"
Her heart skipped. She turned, and there she was. "Alison," she managed, before they were together. It was only when she'd emerged from the kiss, performed right in front of a good percentage of the former population of Balamory town, that she realised something.
"Oh," she said, "I was in the closet, wasn't I?"
"Was is right," growled Jim McCormack ominously, and there was a moment's tension before he cracked a huge gotcha grin. "Holy Jesus Edie, everyone knew! You're not the only gay in the vill-age you know!"
"Got something to tell us, Jim?" PC Plum called, to general uproar.
"Aye – I've been without my good lady wife for God knows how long, so let me tell ye right now – the shop'll be closed for at least tomorrow!"
"Er, about your shop, Jim-" Archie began, looking suddenly extremely guilty.
In the face of the outpouring of emotion around her, which had more to do with shock and relief at being alive, being free as it did with anything else, Rose looked for the Doctor. She found him a little way away, with Philip beside him. The boy-
"He's dying," the Doctor said simply. "I thought someone should be with him."
She placed a hand on his shoulder, could feel his gratitude radiating up to her, and it was enough.
A little way away, Miss Hoolie saw.
Philip's chest rose and fell shallowly, irregularly now. "Can't we bring him somewhere? Get him help?" Rose said, gesturing to the TARDIS.
The Doctor shook his head. "It's a miracle he's lived this long," he replied simply.
"Thank you," Philip gasped up at them.
"You're welcome," Rose said automatically, though she was at a loss as to what for.
"He wasn't talking to you."
It was Miss Hoolie – no, scratch that. It was Kerrie. She had not said that last unkindly, but she had it firmly nonetheless. She knelt down between them to better speak to Philip in the life-support chair.
One by one, the people of Balamory fell silent as they watched Kerrie speak to the alien that had stolen their lives, stolen their lovers and children and homes and their very selves. They watched her speak softly, and slowly.
They watched her lean forward and kiss him, once, on the cheek.
They watched him smile.
And they watched as his chest stopped its gentle rise and fall.
Kerrie rose after a while, and bade her family to come to her, and they did and she embraced them.
"Let's go home," she said.
36
"I'm telling you, Mr Connors."
Mr Connors scowled down the phone, for all the good it did him. He was the sort of man to scowl down phone lines, though. Whatever joker this was, he had about five seconds more of being employed by Ordnance Survey.
"You're telling me," he said, "that an entire island – fully populated, naturally – off the coast of Scotland has just appeared during your survey."
"No, sir. Not appeared. Reappeared."
"Ah," Mr Connors said, as if this made everything clear. "Of course! Because those sort of things happen all the time! What's tomorrow? Brigadoon turns up, opens strip club? Motto: not just her clothes that'll vanish!"
He put the phone down. Magic islands. Magic mushrooms more like it...
It was only the beginning.
37
Balamory was, as Rose had already seen once before, well able to party when the mood took it. Thankfully on this occasion the festivities remained within the realm of a PG certificate - possibly because the children were back, possibly because now the "spell" (the word had stuck, despite the Doctor's protests) had been lifted from the island, people came to the conclusion en masse that what happened during down times was perhaps best kept in the past. Securely locked away. Forever. And ever.
It was a wonderful place. Rose had never been among happier, more grateful people. Parents had been reunited with children, husbands with wives, siblings embraced for the first time in years. The forgotten people had returned, and no-one would ever be forced to make mountains out of yoghurt pots ever again. Everyone could go back to being miserable about lack of money, rubbish weather and the price of a pint; but nowhere on Earth right at this moment would you find people doing it with bigger smiles on their faces.
Rose and the Doctor sat with Archie on a small stone wall outside the Balamory pub, The Covenanters (until fairly recently, the Balamory Lego Museum). It was packed to the rafters inside, children and all.
"A lot of them will go, of course," Archie said. "For now I think everyone is enjoying the freedom and the reunion and all that, but..." he looked out across the bay, "...too much has happened. There'll be a ferry along before long I should think, now we're back in the world again. I expect quite a few will leave the island and not come back."
"What about you?" Rose asked him.
"Me?" he looked at her, as if surprised she would ask. "Oh no, I'll stay. This is my home. Besides," and he grinned affably, "I am a man of science. I can't let something like this happen under my nose and just up sticks and leave now, can I."
The Doctor made no comment. He was looking down the hill toward the bay, but not at the water itself. In a small field at the entrance of town, a tiny graveyard lay.
One of the graves freshly dug.
"Make sure..." the Doctor said, and then trailed off. He tried again. "Make sure that no-one..."
Archie nodded. "No-one will," he promised. "And if they do, they'll have PC Plum and myself to answer to. It'll be well tended and well kept, as long as I'm here."
The door to the pub opened. Suzy and her Jim - well, the most appropriate word would have been staggered from the interior, but a kinder person might simply settle for emerged.
"Doctor! Rose! Archie!" Suzy called, extremely unsteadily merrily. "Happy Hogmanay!"
"It's August 3rd Suzy," Archie replied mildly, "we checked with the mainland earlier, remember?"
"All I know is we've missed at least three Hogmanays!" Jim cackled, making to lean on the wall. Only the Doctor's lightning reflexes prevented him from going over. "Time to start catchin' up, eh!"
"So long as you have my New Scientist in the shop - I've missed at least thirty back issues," Archie said, mock-sternly. He had been, to put it rather mildly, pleased to discover upon everyone's return to town that the shop was back and not a smoking ruin caused by an awry rocket.
Suzy waved an airy hand as they walked away. "You'll have to talk to our Penny," she called back, "she's running the shop. As of today! She's gonna organise ya all right!" and she dissolved into laughter, leaning on her husband's shoulder for support.
They watched as they wound a meandering path down the hill.
"Back to reality," Archie said. "Such as it is."
"One thing I want to know," Rose piped up. She simply couldn't wait any longer for this. It had been eating at her for hours.
"Yes?" the Doctor and Archie both answered. A look was exchanged between them.
"Why did his power fade? At the end, when everyone appeared on the video screen...he tried to control everyone, and he couldn't. Why not?"
"He was trying to control the TARDIS," the Doctor answered. "But he thought it was a machine. It's not. It's a sentient being, and it has more power than he could have ever hoped to control. Some small fraction of that power went into allowing the people he'd trapped to manifest themselves. He could have still destroyed them, though. Kerrie saved us with that little speech she made."
"So the TARDIS and Kerrie saved us at the end.." Rose said thoughtfully, before turning to Archie, "and it was your yoghurt-pot force-field deactivator that let us get in there to face him in the first place."
"Yes, I suppose it was," Archie said. He'd caught the telltale wink she threw at him.
Rose turned back to the Doctor. "So what, exactly, did you do?"
"What?!" he spluttered.
"Well, apart from get shot," she conceded.
"Saving your life!" the Doctor returned, indignant in the extreme.
"And almost get your brain burned out through psychic manipulation," Archie added. He paused for maximum effect. "Twice."
"Et tu, puree?! I don't have to stand for this...!"
The ebb and flow of their bickering voices carried gently on the twilight breeze, over the coloured houses of the town (some soon to be whitewashed, some not), over the happy couple of Suzy and her Jim, over the harbour, open for business, open to the world. Some small part of it carried to the cemetery by the coast road.
All was still there.
At last, all was peaceful.
38
"This looks like your stop," Edie said, as the bus bumped gently to a halt beside a familar police box.
They dismounted. So did Edie, and practically everyone else who could find the space to squeeze in. Quite a few were nursing heads. It had been a hell of a night at The Covenanters.
PC Plum stepped forward first. He was doing a lot of that, it seemed.
"Thank you," he said. "Thank you for everything."
"A pleasure," the Doctor beamed in response, pumping his hand.
"If you ever find yourself in Scotland again," Suzy proclaimed, after hugging them both fiercely, "you just tell people, you're from Balamory. This is your home away from home now, d'you hear?"
Rose smiled and nodded. "I'd like that," she said, and was amazed to find that she was telling the truth. In less than a day on Balamory she'd been shot at, chased by a bus full of insane mind-controlled child-zombies wielding RPGs and almost swallowed by oblivion in a ten-storey Wendy House.
She had a brief flash of razor-bladed Christmas trees and killer mannequins.
My God, she thought. It really IS a home away from home.
"What will you do now?" the Doctor asked.
The townspeople looked at each other. Something was brewing.
"We're going to Vegas!" Spencer whooped.
"What, all of ya? How can you afford that?" Rose asked.
More looks amongst each other.
"Fundraising," Kerrie Hoolie said.
39
"Er, Mr Jameson?"
Mr Jameson looked up from his newspaper at the nervous assistant at his door. "Yes?" he said with a politeness he didn't necessarily feel. He hated interruptions at lunch.
"I have someone on the line, sir...ah..."
"Yes...?" he said again, this time with the undercurrent of impatiencemore evident.
The assistant seemed to shrug as if to say what the hell. "She's wondering if the BBC would be interested in purchasing ready-made locally-produced childrens television. Apparently the...the ah, island she lives on has been filming it as a sort of...project."
Mr Jameson frowned. "Ready-made?" he repeated doubtfully, taking a sip of his coffee. "How much of it is there?"
Again, that what the hell shrug. "Over three hundred episodes."
"What?"
40
"You're sure?" the Doctor asked again.
Archie took one last long look around the TARDIS' interior. He was on the verge of tears. "I can't," he said, in a small little-boy voice, as if unable to grasp what he was saying, "I just...not now. But..." and he grabbed the Doctor's jacket by the arm, "one day, you'll look back in on me. Promise?"
"Count on it," the Doctor promised.
Moments later, with Archie's fingernails practically leaving grooves in the TARDIS door, the last of the goodbyes from the assembled crowd outside shut off abruptly as the Doctor closed the doors.
He looked at Rose. They breathed out as one, long and luxuriously. Rose didn't know whether to burst out laughing or into tears. She settled for neither.
"Ever think what our lives would be like if someone made a childrens TV show out of us?" she asked him.
"Oh, I'd imagine we'd have farting aliens…"
"…yeah, and be chased down corridors by monsters like in Scooby Doo," she chuckled.
"Off we go?" he said.
"Just one thing," she replied.
"Yes?"
"Back when I had the heart of the TARDIS within me...when I used it to destroy the Daleks. I don't remember everything about that, but one thing I said sticks with me."
He was way ahead of her. "The Time War Ends," he said, unable to meet her eyes.
"But I was wrong, wasn't I? It's not over. There are going to be others like Philip, like you, out there. Maybe other Daleks too."
"I don't know, Rose."
"Don't you?"
He didn't answer.
Seconds later the TARDIS vanished from Balamory and from Earth, leaving behind all except that question, which hung in the air, a smile on a Cheshire Cat.
THE END