Doctor Who: Keeping Up With the Joneses by Nick Harkaway Page A

supposed to be timelocked with the rest of the war, except that this one evidently wasn’t. Oh, no, this one was here and it was behaving very oddly indeed, and now it was doing something with really a lot of transtachyonic sheer, something which was frankly a bit impossible, and that was just rude. That much torsion could actually decalibrate the capacitance smoothifier and pop the seams of the TARDIS like a bag full of soup. Splat. Splatter. Splunch. Except not, because the soup would go into the bag and take the kitchen with it. Oh, wait, that was even odder –
    He just had time to say something which would get you arrested on the Omogan Planet of Rain.
    All the lights went out, and he heard a triple impact, like an alien heart or the footstep of something huge walking on three legs.
    Pah pah POM.
    He stood in the darkness listening, and hoping it was still outside. It must be, though. The TARDIS wouldn’t let anything inside.
    The longer he stood there, the more he wasn’t sure.
    *
    Christina was a respectable sort of widow. There was another sort, all dancing on tables and keeping late hours with poets, but she didn’t hold with any of that. She might have been forgiven if, being made single at her relatively young age – she was 35 – she had gone a little mad and done a lot of regrettable things. Oh, not that she was dull. There might well come a day when she would unbutton a little, even be said to cut loose. Time would heal all wounds, no doubt.
    If only it didn’t move so slowly about its business, leaden and deadly bread-and-butter and no cake. Every day she could remember was exactly like every other, stretching back to the moment she had opened her doors to paying customers after her husband had passed away.
    But that wasn’t quite true. The telephone was coming to Jonestown: the mayor had announced it. He would have one on his desk for calling to the Parish Council, and another for London, though he didn’t see the point of that, and the police station would have one, and the firehouse, too, and Mr Heidt who had bought the big house at the edge the park, the old Lord’s manor, he was so rich – apparently – that he would have one, too.
    Hers was a good life. She interfered with no one, and no one interfered with her.
    She smiled at this happy thought, and went to clean the Reading Room. She had guests coming, day after tomorrow, and the reading room was always popular at teatime. She opened the door, and stopped.
    There was a man.
    He did not look like a murderer or a villain, but she knew you could not always tell by the looking. He was reading, evidently, and this was reassuring because even if he was in the wrong place by definition, this being her house and she having no idea who he might be, he was also doing the right thing in this place, reading in the Reading Room, and that was a point in his favour. All the same, before speaking, she stepped to the fireplace so that the poker was within easy reach. She could smell damp in the stones, mould growing in the chimney. She must get someone in to deal with it, or guests would complain. The books would suffer.
    Irrelevant landlady detail. She shut her eyes briefly for focus, then gave a stern cough.
    ‘Excuse me.’
    She didn’t want to be excused at all. She wanted him to give an account of his presence, and that right speedily or she’d bash him with the poker.
    If she had set off a bomb under his chair she could hardly have achieved a more spectacular reaction. He jerked up and out of the recliner, arms windmilling and legs abruptly about six inches too long for his trousers. The book – not one of hers, full of technical drawings and the like, he must have brought it with him – went spiralling up in the air and came down with curious neatness on the seat he had left behind, and he gaped at her for a longish while as if she was the first woman he’d ever seen, and then his mouth opened to let out an incredulous:
    ‘What?!’
    His