Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor

IF YOU ENCOUNTER ANY TYPOS, CONTINUITY ERRORS OR PLOT HOLES, PLEASE CLOSE AND RE-OPEN THE BOOK.

We are about to return to the Doctor in the National Gallery, who (if you can remember that far back in the future) had been called out by the military intelligence organisation known as UNIT, on the sealed orders of Her Majesty Elizabeth I—a woman we now realise was more intimately acquainted with the Doctor than history generally records. But you know what history is like, it’s so easily embarrassed.

Now I can see a few of you looking uncomfortable, and one of you has just thrown the book across the room. Please give warning when you’re feeling inclined to do that, I nearly dropped the pen. I suspect you worry about the vulgar light in which this book is presenting a cherished historical icon, renowned as the most famous virgin who ever lived, but I would remind you that the popular assumption of complete chastity and purity is almost certainly ill founded—after all, he had a granddaughter.

Now! To the gallery! The Doctor is standing in front of a painting of the Time War, with the sealed orders of his former—oh, what shall we call her?—playmate?—in his hand. Those of you who want to pop back and refresh your memories, please do so now. Oh, there they all go, dashing off. Stampeding like a comfort break. Please be careful, flicking the pages like that, I’m getting a draught in here. And stay away from Chapter Nine, if you happen across it. All in good time, as the old fool himself would probably say.

One last warning before we resume. As you will have seen, at the end of the last chapter, we are now entering the area of the narrative where more than one iteration of the Doctor is active simultaneously. Now it is common among students such as yourselves to refer to the Doctors by number—the seventh Doctor, say, or the third Doctor—but of course he never does this himself. The Doctor thinks of himself only as the Doctor, whatever face he’s wearing, so these papers can only refer to him that way—even when there is more than one Doctor present in a given sequence. To clarify: you are about to read material where multiple participants have the same name and are the same person, and it will be up to you to work out which one is talking or being talked about from the contextual evidence.

So please pay close attention, as we proceed to the next of the Doctor Papers, Chapter Twelve, The Leap of the Doctor.

Chapter 12 The Leap of the Doctor

‘That’s impossible,’ Clara Oswald was saying. ‘How’s it doing that?’ She had stepped forward to the painting, and now raised a hand to touch its surface. ‘It’s an oil painting,’ she continued, ‘in 3D!’

I pulled myself together to answer her. ‘Time Lord art,’ said the Doctor, straightening his bow tie. ‘Bigger on the inside, a slice of real time, frozen.’

She was rocking from side to side in front of the picture, watching the buildings turn against the glowering sky. It was like looking down on a burning city, through a window—but the flames were frozen, and the window stood on an easel in the middle of a room. ‘You don’t even need those funny glasses,’ she marvelled.

‘He was there,’ said the Doctor.

‘Who was there?’

‘Me.’

Clara looked at him. ‘Doctor?’

‘The other me. The one I don’t talk about.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Clara, and glanced at Kate.

‘You’re not being clear, Doctor,’ said Kate. ‘Are you referring to yourself or someone else?’

Yeah, easy question, if you’re a tiny little human with a ten-minute life span and one face. He felt himself recoil from his own anger. Where had that come from him? He’d closed the door on all that rage a very long time ago. Keep it calm and clear, Doctor!

‘I’ve had many faces,’ he explained, ‘many lives.’

Kate nodded. ‘Yes, I know, we all know that. Regeneration. You have had a number of forms and faces.’

‘Lives,’ he insisted. ‘But I don’t admit to all of them. There’s one life, one face, I’ve tried very hard to forget.’

There was a squeak from the side of the room. He glanced round. The girl in the long scarf was staring at him in what looked like panic.

‘Yes, well, my colleague here is the expert on your faces,’ said Kate. ‘She’s become quite obsessed about numbering them, so if you’re about to pop a new one in, I think she’d have preferred to know before she got the tattoos.’

The girl went as red as a Zygon, and she looked so quickly at the floor the Doctor wondered if the rush of blood to her face had toppled her head forwards.

Zygons? Why was he thinking about Zygons?

‘Okay,’ Clara was saying, the brisk schoolteacher again. ‘So this is a painting of the Time War, and you were there with a different face—you’ve told me the story, I know what you did—but it was ages ago. Why’s this coming up now? Why have we been brought here to look at a painting?’

Ages ago! despaired the Doctor. Oh, Clara! When you’re a time traveller, nothing is ever ages ago.

‘We didn’t,’ Kate was replying. ‘The painting serves only as Elizabeth’s credentials. Proof that the letter is indeed from her. It’s not why you’re here.’

The Doctor had almost forgotten the envelope in his hand. He looked at it—the stiff, dusty paper, the ancient wax seal. Elizabeth! How had he left it with her? He had a vague sense that he hadn’t behaved well, and that she was probably cross with him. He had bumped into her much older self at the Globe Theatre once, and she’d attempted to have him killed. But then that wasn’t a first for her, and in truth a lot of his old friends did that when he called round. Winston Churchill had personally dug a pit for him, but then he loved a bit of gardening.

He ripped open the envelope, and unfolded the letter. Her handwriting was as clear and firm as the level blue gaze in his memory.

By order of HM Queen Elizabeth.

My dearest love, I hope the painting known as Gallifrey Falls will serve as proof that it is your Elizabeth who writes to you now. You will recall that you pledged yourself to me as a protector of my Kingdom. It is in this capacity that I have appointed you as Curator of the Under Gallery, where deadly danger to England is locked away. Should any disturbance occur within its walls, it is my wish that you be summoned. God speed, gentle husband.

He quickly folded the letter away before Clara could read the last word. Husband? He’d always had a vague sense that he’d probably married Elizabeth at some point, but it had been a busy life, and he was bit unsure as to why or when. He wondered if it was a happy marriage, but then realised the chances were slim, given that he hadn’t seen her for several centuries, and she was dead.

He looked to Kate. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Easier to show you,’ she said. She nodded to the soldiers standing guard on the painting, and started to lead the way out of the room. Clara was already following her, and as the Doctor turned to do the same, he noticed another of the UNIT personnel—a scientist, going by the white coat—frowning in puzzlement at the screen of his mobile phone. Clearly he’d just answered it, and now seemed to be staring in disbelief at the caller ID. The Doctor would barely have registered this, if the scientist hadn’t then looked up directly into his face, stared at him for a moment in seeming shock, before turning quickly away. As the Doctor headed after the others, he heard the scientist talking into his phone. His voice was low and urgent, with a faint Irish accent, but it carried down the long, cavernous corridor: ‘But that’s not possible, sir,’ came the scientist’s voice. ‘He’s right here.’

‘I’m a schoolteacher,’ said Clara, suddenly crashing across his thoughts, as usual.

‘I know. I know that. Did I know that? I’m sure I knew that.’

‘I’m good at reading handwriting. Even upside down.’

‘Good, great, I’m glad you shared that. So long as we’re discussing rare skill sets, when it comes to the pogo stick—’

‘Husband!’ said Clara.

Oh! thought the Doctor. They walked along in silence for a moment, but he knew she wouldn’t let it lie.

‘Husband,’ she repeated. ‘Queen Elizabeth the First called you husband.’

‘Yeah, she did, didn’t she? I think that’s probably just a term of affection sometimes.’

‘No, it absolutely never is. Not even in marriages. Are you married?’

‘I may have been. I’ve been around a bit, Clara, I’m probably married to lots of people, it happens,’ he said, and made a dismissive hand gesture, to suggest that the occasional marriage was really no more than a parking ticket, and a moment later heard a vase smash behind him. He really had to get his peripheral movements under control.

‘But to her, though?’

‘Oh, to her, to him, to who-knows. Sometimes the conversation just gets out of control. I think I’m even married to Jack Harkness, but there were a lot of people in the room at the time, it was hard to keep track.’

‘Jack who?’

‘He’ll get around to you.’

Ahead of them, Kate was opening a pair of doors and, as she stood aside to wave them in, the Doctor found himself coming to a halt. Whatever he had expected to see in the room, it hadn’t been this.

The eyes were as lethal and blue as ever, the hair still a tangle of red, and she hadn’t aged a day. The smile he’d known so well wasn’t there, but looked as though it might arrive any second, and as usual, she wasn’t giving anything away. He straightened his bow tie, sent a silent message to his quiff to behave itself, and took a moment to shine his shoes on the backs of his trouser legs, as he had always done when entering the presence of his wife, Elizabeth I of England.

‘Is that her?’ Clara was asking. Usually she had no sense of occasion, but this time she had the decency to whisper. He contained himself to a brisk little nod. ‘Who’s the skinny bloke?’

In the shadows behind Elizabeth, stood a youngish, sharply featured man who seemed somehow familiar. There was a look of presumption about his eyes that annoyed the Doctor intensely, so he sent what he hoped was a very similar look right back.

Kate had stepped forward. She now reached across the Queen, clicked something behind the frame, and Elizabeth and the skinny stranger swung out of sight as the whole painting hinged open like a door.

Cold air and the smell of damp stone spilled from behind the painting, and the room seemed to darken, as if the light was being drained into the open doorway that was now revealed. Just visible was the beginning of a stone staircase leading sharply down, into the distant glimmer of torchlight.

‘Welcome,’ Kate said, ‘to the Under Gallery.’

‘The what?’ Clara asked.

‘In the reign of Elizabeth the First, certain artworks were deemed too dangerous for public display.’

‘Nothing changes,’ said Clara. ‘People always lock up art.’

Kate had passed them both electric torches, and now clicked on one of her own. ‘In the case of this particular gallery, they had a reason,’ she said, stepping into the dark. ‘They had to stop it getting out.’

‘The universe was born alive,’ said the Doctor, answering Clara’s question, as they crunched down the second flight of stone steps, ‘but it could only become aware of itself by developing sensors across its surface, known as life forms—that’s us—each of which suffers a temporary delusion of separate identity during data collection—that’s what we call consciousness—but in reality has no more individual existence than the hairs on your forearm when they tell you there’s a draught—’

‘I was asking,’ said Clara, as they descended yet more steps, ‘about you and Elizabeth.’

‘You said begin at the beginning.’

‘Not the beginning of the universe.’

‘You didn’t specify.’

‘You’re just trying to waste time. You’re avoiding the subject.’

‘Ah, that’s exactly where you’re wrong,’ he said. ‘You can’t waste time, because the passage of time is an illusion caused by the permanent discrepancy between your memory and your circumstances across all the simultaneously experienced moments of your life. Is that noise bothering anyone else?’

‘What noise?’ Kate asked, turning from in front of them. But the Doctor just frowned and shook his head, and they began crunching down the steps to the next level.

Each deeper layer of the Under Gallery seemed darker and colder than the one before. As they descended, it became clear that the purpose of this place was not display but containment. All the statues were bound and sheeted—the muffled shapes of reaching hands and straining faces looming in their torch beams—and the paintings were all hung face to the wall, some with warnings printed on the back. One of them read, DO NOT TURN WHILE ALONE. Everywhere there were glass-fronted cabinets, tall as wardrobes, with bars and padlocks. Clara had shone her torch in a few of them. In one she saw racks of green daggers whose blades seemed to reflect her eyes back at her whatever angle she was looking from. In another there were rows of skulls that looked human but each with only one central eye socket above the grinning teeth. There were shelves of thick, bulging books bound shut with twine, a few with nails driven into the spines and dark stains crusting round the punctures. She looked in a mirror that only showed the back of her head, and as she turned away from it, sensed her own face in the glass turning to watch her go. Suddenly in her torch beam, there was a cabinet crammed to bursting with mummified rats, their claws and teeth splayed against the glass doors. As she recoiled a step, the rat mass seemed to twitch.

They descended another staircase, and she noticed more and more of the cabinets stood open and empty, as if they’d been ransacked.

‘Some of the stuff has been moved elsewhere,’ explained Kate.

‘Where?’ asked Clara, flashing her torch across a few of them. There was a letter B chalked on the door of every emptied cabinet.

‘And by whose authority?’ added the Doctor.

‘The Curator.’

‘I thought I was the Curator.’

‘It’s complicated. You’re never here, the job had to be split.’

‘Among whom?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘Really,’ protested the Doctor, ‘is that noise not bothering anyone else?’

‘Well perhaps if you told us what noise?’ said Clara. ‘Or alternatively, what you were up to with Elizabeth the First, and why she calls you husband.’

He came to a halt, looked at them impatiently for a moment, then started walking on the spot. Crunch, crunch, crunch. ‘The crunching. The crunchy crunch-crunching. Can’t anyone else hear crunching?’ He directed his torch beam at the floor. ‘Forgive an enquiring mind,’ he said, ‘but what have we been walking in?’

In the light of their torches, they saw that the floor was covered with what looked grit or sand. Kate sighed. ‘Well I’m terribly sorry if our housekeeping isn’t up to your standards, Doctor …’

‘That’s the thing about being a curator, you can’t turn your back for a minute.’ The Doctor was kneeling on the floor now, running a handful of grit, through his fingers. ‘Dust,’ he mused. ‘Dust made of stone.’

‘You mean sand,’ said Clara.

‘Stone dust. Dust, or powder, composed entirely of tiny particles of different varieties of rock.’

‘Yeah, sand.’

‘Sand!’ declared the Doctor, as if he’d just invented the word.

‘Do you think it’s important?’ Kate asked.

‘Dunno. But in twelve hundred years, I’ve never stepped in anything that wasn’t.’ He licked a little of the grit from his finger, sloshed it round his mouth, then tried a little more.

‘Can you tell something from the taste?’ asked Clara.

‘No, just peckish.’ He straightened up, flashed his torch beam behind him. The girl in the long scarf startled back from the light. ‘You,’ he said. ‘Are you sciencey or soldiery?’

Self-consciously, she straightened her white coat. ‘Yes,’ she husked, and the Doctor thought if her eyes got any wider, they would fill the lenses of her spectacles.

‘She’s science,’ said Kate from behind him. ‘And she’s brilliant.’

‘Good, science and brilliant are my favourite words. Do you have a name?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Great, I’ve always wanted to meet someone called Yes, that’s also my favourite word. If your name is already Yes, it’s going to save a lot of time when I make suggestions.’

‘Her name is Osgood, her IQ is through the roof, and if you patronise her again I will cut you off at the bow tie,’ said Kate.

‘Osgood is now my new favourite word. Osgood, could you get this stone dust analysed. Tell me what it’s made of, tell me everything.’

‘Yes!’ she said, before adding, ‘Yes!’ and then, ‘Yes!’

‘I can see why they call you that.’

‘Doctor!’ warned Kate, then turned to Osgood. ‘Get a team here, fast as you can, analyse the stone dust, sand, whatever it is.’

‘Yes,’ said Osgood, still staring at the Doctor. She was taking big whooping breaths, which bounced the spectacles on her nose, and the Doctor found himself pleasantly reminded of the TARDIS engines.

‘Inhaler!’ snapped Kate.

Osgood jammed her inhaler in her mouth, and hurried off, back the way she’d come.

The Doctor watched her disappear into the shadows, wondering why he made her so nervous, and if there was anything he could say to relax her. ‘Great to meet you, Osgood!’ he called after her, in his most reassuring voice. ‘I’d love to see your tattoos some time!’

There was a squeak from the darkness, and the crash of a collision.

‘This way,’ said Kate, with the determined calm of a woman who had successfully not punched someone. ‘We’re nearly there.’

‘Nearly where?’ asked the Doctor as he and Clara followed.

‘This is the deepest level. Most of the stuff above was added later. Some of it is nonsense—fairground hoaxes, a lot of it, and some frankly lunatic attempts at censorship.’ They had rounded a corner, and Kate was now shining her torch on what looked like a bank vault door, which stood slightly ajar, slicing a wedge of yellow light across the floor. ‘But down here is the original purpose of Elizabeth’s Under Gallery.’

‘Hence the updated security?’ asked Clara.

‘Quite so. The maintenance of the seal on this door, in all its incarnations down the centuries, is the longest-standing executive order in England. It was guarded throughout the London Blitz by an entire platoon of soldiers, permanently stationed here.’

Clara frowned. ‘So why’s it open?’

‘That’s what we were wondering.’

‘So it wasn’t you who opened it then?’

‘It was found this way.’

‘Was anything taken?’ The Doctor spoke from a few feet behind them. Kate looked round, to see him bent over at a cabinet, peering inside with his torch.

‘Nothing is missing. Only damaged.’

‘What, someone broke in and just vandalised?’ asked Clara.

‘Essentially.’

‘Vandalised what?’ said the Doctor. As he spoke, he’d buzzed his screwdriver at the cabinet doors. They swung open and he pulled something from inside.

‘Doctor,’ sighed Clara. ‘You don’t need another fez.’

The Doctor ignored her. He turned the battered old hat over and over in his hands, his face troubled, as if haunted by a memory.

‘Why would you lock up a hat?’ he asked.

‘I told you, there’s an awful lot of nonsense down here, it’s probably nothing.’

‘Nothing …’ repeated the Doctor, thoughtfully. Then he caught Clara’s worried stare, grinned, and popped the fez on his head. ‘What do you think?’

‘You don’t need another one, you’ve got four in the TARDIS.’

‘I can’t wear those, they’re presents from Tommy. How do I look?’

‘Like an idiot.’

‘Ker-ching!’

‘If I can drag you back to the current moment,’ Kate said, ‘and the reason you’re actually here.’ She gestured to the vault door. ‘You wanted to know what had been vandalised?’ She led the way inside.

In contrast to the rest of the Under Gallery, the room was white, well lit, and almost empty. A modest selection of paintings hung on the walls, these ones facing out in the normal way. They were perfectly ordinary landscapes for the most part, and only two things made them unusual in any respect. One was that in every case, the glass in the frames had been smashed, and lay in fragments on the floor. The other, Clara didn’t notice until she stepped forward.

‘They’re 3D,’ she said. ‘Like the one upstairs.’

‘Time Lord art,’ confirmed the Doctor. ‘Or at rate, art made by the same technology, though these seem to be Earth landscapes. Elizabethan period, probably. Part of the same collection as Gallifrey Falls?’ he asked Kate.

She shook her head. ‘Gallifrey Falls is the personal property of the Curator.’

‘You mean me?’

‘It’s complicated. These are from the private collection of Elizabeth the First. No information on how they came into her possession. On her personal order, they were stored first underneath Richmond Palace, then moved here for greater security, in 1826. By Royal command, they are to be stored under lock and key as long as England exists, and shown to no one. They can’t even be mentioned in written material. The paintings you are looking at have officially not existed since 1562.’

‘And now someone’s broken in and just smashed the glass?’ said Clara.

‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m afraid that’s not what happened at all.’ He looked at Kate. ‘Is it?’

‘It doesn’t seem that way no.’

‘Look at the glass, Clara. I think you’ll find it’s interesting.’

Clara frowned, bent to the look at the fragments on the floor. ‘Why? Because it’s broken?’

‘No. Because of where it’s broken from. Look at the shatter pattern. The glass on all these paintings was broken from the inside.’

‘How’s that possible?’

‘Lots of ways, none of them good. Is there a theory, Kate?’

‘Not a theory, exactly, but there’s an anomaly. As you can see, all the paintings are landscapes—no figures of any kind.’

‘Okay, yes. So?’

‘There used to be.’ Kate had pulled her phone from her pocket. On the screen, she showed them photographs of the paintings they could see on the wall. Although they were the same landscapes, in the photographs, there were distant figures scattered across them.

Clara’s eyes went to the glass on the floor. ‘Something came out of the paintings,’ she said.

‘A lot of somethings,’ said the Doctor. He stepped to the vault door and buzzed it with his screwdriver. ‘This door was forced from the inside. From in here.’

‘Yes, that’s what we thought too.’

‘This wasn’t a break-in. It was a break-out.’ He turned his frown on Kate. ‘I presume you’ve searched this place?’

‘There’s nothing here that shouldn’t be. And nothing has got out of the building—that would set off every alarm in UNIT HQ.’

The Doctor’s eyes found Clara’s and it was one of those moments where the air seemed to crackle. ‘So whatever came out of the paintings is still down here. In the dark. With us.’

‘We’ve done a complete sweep, there are no hostiles present.’

‘There’s an awful lot of sand.’

‘Are you suggesting the sand is hostile?’

‘No, it’s sand. It’s inert, in no way alive, just rock particles.’ He was pacing up and down now, drumming his fingers on the top of his fez. ‘But it’s everywhere, everywhere, everywhere! You’re missing the point, Kate!’

‘What point?’

‘No idea, I’m missing it too. Clara, what’s the point?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Great, now Clara’s missing the point. Could everybody stop missing points all the time!’

The first thing he noticed was the fez flying from his head and tumbling across the floor. The second was the sand in the corridor outside whipping into the air. He bounded out of the room, and straight into a wind that now battered and buffeted through the gallery. At first it smelled of old wood in a desert, but a moment later it was an English forest in spring.

He turned towards its source, already knowing what he would see. He was aware of Kate and Clara coming to join him. They were probably staring too, but he didn’t turn to check.

‘What is it?’ Clara was asking.

Not now, thought the Doctor. Please don’t come for me now, I’m busy!

‘Doctor, are you going to tell us what that is?’ asked Kate. ‘Or don’t you know?’

Clara was stepping forward, curious. The Doctor took hold of her arm and stepped her back from the swirling vortex of light and clouds now filling the other end of the corridor. It was just hanging there, turning in silence, as it had in the barn a long time ago, and then later above him in the forest.

‘Doctor?’ Clara was saying. But memories were flashing through his head, blotting out the present. Rose Tyler in the barn. But that wasn’t right, she’d never been on Gallifrey. Two Elizabeths in a forest. But why were there two of her? He didn’t remember that. And now a man was crashing down out of the sky, right at his feet. Who was this banana-faced idiot, laughing at him?

‘Doctor!’ Clara’s voice.

‘Sorry,’ he said, trying to force himself to concentrate. ‘It’s just … my past, I think.’

‘Your past?’

‘Yes. It’s playing up.’ Hang on, he’d said that before. He’d said those exact words before, in a very similar conversation. When, though, when, when?

Kate was talking now, her voice rising. ‘Doctor, can at you least theorise on what this is—I am responsible for all UNIT personnel on site. Is it do with the paintings?’

‘No,’ he replied, ‘this is something else.’ Fragments of memory were surfacing now. Details, glimpses. Not everything, but enough to know that whatever was about to happen, it was huge.

‘Clara, fetch me that fez,’ he said, before becoming aware of the look he was receiving and fetching it himself. He stood in front of the vortex, as if hypnotised by it. It seemed to him that the other two might still be talking, but it was so hard to focus now. He wondered how he ever managed to hear anyone with all these memories banging away in his head.

‘Doctor!’ Oh, that was Clara again. ‘Doctor, are you okay?’

‘Excuse me, both,’ he replied, smiling. ‘This is where I come in.’ And he wound back his arm, and threw the fez as hard as he could. It spun down the vortex and was sucked out of existence, with an electric crack and a whiff of ozone. But where had it landed? The past, certainly, but which past? The barn? The forest? Both perhaps, but how? Clara and Kate were still talking, but they sounded miles behind him now; the silent vortex drowned out everything, buzzing in his hair, humming in his blood. This vortex had been following him for hundreds of years. He couldn’t exactly remember why, or how it had all started, but he knew, with absolute certainty, he was looking down the tunnel of his own life; a tangle of days, leading back to the man he had once been. All the paths he had chosen to reach the place he stood now had opened at his feet again; all the mistakes and regrets and wrong turnings. No second chances, he had told someone once. Was that true? It was time, he decided, for a leap of faith.

‘Geronimo,’ shouted the Doctor, and leapt into history.

He’d thought perhaps he’d tumble down a void for a moment, but it was simpler than that. The Under Gallery just disappeared, there was a rush of wind and sunshine, and suddenly trees were spinning round his head. He’d just started to wonder how he could be flying through the air, when the ground slammed into him. He didn’t recognise any of the stars now whirling round his head, but some of the little tweeting birds seemed familiar. He tried to focus on the forest floor, which had somehow risen up to stand vertical, and was pressing into the side of his face. It would probably sort itself out in a minute, if he just leaned against it and had a bit of a rest. He winked at one of the funny birds, and it winked back.

‘Who is this?’ demanded a voice he almost recognised. Give us a moment, love, just got here.

‘Doctor, who is this man, and what is he doing here?’ The same woman. Honestly, settle down, there’s birds and stars and the ground is all leaning against me.

‘Just what I was wondering,’ said a man’s voice he didn’t recognise at all. He made an effort to focus. Four Queen Elizabeths stood staring at him. He shook his head, cleared it, and noticed with relief that there were only two. Two? When had there been two? He thought hazily of that birthday when River had cloned herself, then remembered just in time to delete that incident from any written account of his adventures. Also staring at him, he noticed, was a pair of Converse. He looked up. Frowning down at him, from a few feet away, was a man he thought he should recognise. He looked vital and wiry, in a tight suit and tie. The big dark eyes would have seemed tearful if the face hadn’t been so cheeky. He stood like he was posing for an album cover, feet planted wide on the ground, fists balled at his sides, head angled for maximum glare; as skinny and sharp and clever as Mum’s favourite in a boy band. That was odd, thought the Doctor—he could remember describing someone else that way. Who had that been? It seemed to him that he’d been looking into a mirror at the time, and the man he’d been describing was—

Himself. It was him. The man in the forest, staring down at him from one face ago, was him. The Doctor scrambled to his feet and stared in fascination at his younger self. ‘Skinny!’ was all he could find to say. ‘That is proper skinny! I’ve never seen it from the outside. Matchstick man!’

The Doctor was now stepping towards him, and he found himself doing the same. Although those big brown eyes were now clouded in puzzlement, he noticed an air of presumption about them, that irritated him intensely, so he shot an even more presumptuous look back, until he was rewarded with a confused frown.

‘You’re not …’ said the Doctor, as if finally understanding who this new arrival was. ‘You can’t be …’ The eyes now looked pained, as they flashed to the Doctor’s bow tie. The Doctor returned the pained look with a smile. You’ll get there, mate, he thought, bow ties are cool, and reached under his coat. He paused a moment, as he saw that the Doctor had reached under his jacket in exactly the same way, and had now also paused. They stood there like mirror images for a second, eyeing each other, then they smiled and produced their sonic screwdrivers. They held them up, like badges of office.

The Doctor noticed that his new screwdriver was substantially larger than the old version in the Doctor’s hand, and found himself smiling. The Doctor returned his smile with a look of disdain, and asked, ‘Compensating?’

‘For what?’ asked the Doctor.

‘Regeneration,’ replied the Doctor. ‘It’s a lottery.’ He stuffed his teeny-tiny, ickle-wickle screwdriver back in his jacket. ‘Now look,’ he said, trying to make his voice all deep, ‘what’s going on? What are you doing here, in my time zone?’ He glanced at the Elizabeths. ‘I’m busy!’

His time zone?? What did he mean, his time zone. For a moment the Doctor wondered just who the Doctor thought he was, then followed his look to the two Elizabeths, who were staring in confusion at them both. ‘Oh, busy, is that what we’re calling it?’ He gave his best elaborate bow. ‘Hello, ladies!’

‘Just don’t,’ warned the Doctor, from behind him.

‘Private little outing, is it? Couples only? Just the three of you? Well, four of us now. Ooh, complicated. Double dating for two!’

‘Don’t start. I’m in the middle of something.’

‘Oh, I can see that, you’re right in there,’ the Doctor laughed. ‘But look, fair play, whatever you get up to in the privacy of your own regeneration is your business.’

‘One of them’s a Zygon.’

‘Well, I’m not judging you.’

‘Are you listening to me? One of these two is an alien hostile, intent on the conquest of this planet!’

‘Well in that case, mate, I don’t think much of yours.’

There was a humming, sizzling noise from above. The Doctor spun round—the vortex from which he’d just emerged was flexing in the air, stretching and twisting. ‘What’s wrong with it?’ the Doctor asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied.

‘Well what’s it doing here then?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘Well, you’re the one who fell out of it.’

‘You’re the one I nearly fell on,’ the Doctor snapped back, and turned to the Elizabeths. ‘Listen, you two. That thing up there—possibly very dangerous. You both need to get out of here.’

Rather to the Doctor’s annoyance, they both looked straight past him to the Doctor. ‘But what about the creature?’ they asked in unison. The Doctor took a step towards them, making frankly unfair use of the big brown eyes. ‘Whichever of you is the real Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘turn and run in the opposite direction to the other Elizabeth.’ Clever, thought the Doctor, as he listened, and wondered if he was being immodest. The Elizabeths looked at each other, and then each in turn stepped right past the Doctor and planted a long and noisy kiss on the Doctor. As each kiss went on and on and on, the Doctor found himself standing next to the other Elizabeth, shrugging apologies, while she observed in horror the activities of his younger self. In the catalogue of his personal humiliations, the Doctor decided this was a new low.

‘One of those was a Zygon,’ the Doctor reminded himself, as the Elizabeths tore off in opposite directions.

‘I know,’ said the Doctor, discreetly wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

‘Big red rubbery thing. Covered in suckers. Venom sacs in the tongue.’

‘Yes, I’m getting the point, thank you.’

‘I think I’m still getting rid of the taste.’

‘Oh, you think you’re so funny!’

‘From you, that’s a compliment.’

There was another crackle from the vortex above, and this time a voice. ‘Doctor? Is that you?’

Clara! It was Clara’s voice, no question. ‘Clara? Hello? Can you hear us?’

‘Yeah, we can hear you. Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine, yes. Are you still in the Under Gallery?’

‘Course, yeah. Where are you?’

The Doctor realised he didn’t know, and glanced at the Doctor, who called out, ‘England, 1562.’

‘Who’s that?’ called Clara. ‘Who are you talking to?’

The Doctors looked at each other, and grinned. ‘Myself,’ they said in unison.

Now it was Kate’s voice. ‘The portal, or whatever it is, seems to be becoming unstable.’

‘Possibly, yes,’ replied the Doctor. ‘This end too.’

‘Then you should come back through, immediately,’ said Kate, sounding more like her father than he thought possible. ‘In case it closes.’

She had a point. The Doctor looked around, and then grabbed his fez off the ground. ‘Where are they talking from?’ the Doctor asked him. ‘Who are those people?’ The Doctor ignored him, and shouted into the vortex again:

‘Physical passage may not be possible in both directions,’ he explained. ‘Let me just try something first. Fez incoming.’ He threw his fez up into the vortex. He watched as it was sucked out of existence, and waited. Silence. ‘Did you get it?’ he asked. ‘Is it there?’

‘Is what here?’ asked Kate.

‘The fez! I threw the fez back through.’

‘Nothing came through here.’

He was vaguely aware of the Doctor, now grinning cheekily right at his ear. ‘Looks like we’re down one fez. Go on, try the bow tie next.’

The Doctor wasn’t listening. His hand had gone to his head, and he could almost feel the connections snapping together inside. He understood now. He knew exactly where the fez had gone. It had disappeared into the vortex, whirled backwards through time and landed slap bang in the middle his memories. If he was right, it was now lying at his own feet, on the floor of a barn, a very long time ago.

The Doctor interrupted his thoughts. ‘Okay, you used to be me, this is your second go. What happens now?’

‘I don’t remember,’ he replied.

‘How could you forget this?’

‘It’s not my fault. You’re obviously not paying enough attention!’ It wasn’t strictly true, he realised. However hard the Doctor concentrated, two of them standing together played havoc with the timelines and made it all but impossible to form lasting memories. He had a sudden image of himself, pacing in a cold room, explaining that the timelines were tied in a knot and his memory was all over the place. Where had that been? He dismissed the thought and raised his screwdriver.

‘What are you doing?’ asked the Doctor.

‘Reversing the polarity.’

‘Is that all we ever do?’ said the Doctor, raising his very much smaller, teeny-weeny screwdriver. ‘Isn’t there anything new in the future?’

The smaller screwdriver buzzed alongside his, as they both aimed into the vortex. ‘It’s not working,’ he said, after the moment.

‘We’re both reversing the polarity!’ said the Doctor.

‘I know!’

‘There’s two of us—I’m reversing it and you’re reversing it back again! We’re standing here, cancelling each other.’

‘Well stop then.’

‘You stop!’

‘No, you stop!’

He reached for the Doctor’s screwdriver and in the same moment the Doctor tried to grab his. Their momentary tussle was interrupted by a tremendous crash from a few feet away. They stared at one another, neither wanting to turn and look. Something else had dropped through the vortex, and hit the forest floor. There had been no cry of pain on impact, but now they heard a few grunts of effort and the crack of an old man’s knees. Someone had just climbed to their feet.

The forest was still. Birds twittered, bees droned, wind rustled. Still they didn’t look.

‘Anyone lose a fez?’ said a voice like a silken rasp.

The flesh of his face hung like the leather of his jacket and his smoke-slitted eyes glittered like blades.