Read Doctor Who: Keeping Up With the Joneses for Free Online Page B

POM.
    ‘It must be huge!’ she said.
    ‘The vibration isn’t physical,’ he said, ‘it’s temporal. Each impact is transmitted through time. That thing out there isn’t just walking. It’s banging on the door. Or maybe the roof. Of the TARDIS, which from in here is the entirety of creation. She can’t tell me the way she usually would so she’s sharing her pain. That was the entire aquarium level vaporised. I can feel dead fish in my gall bladder. All right? So, yes, it’s a very loud noise. Now, did I say “run”?’
    The door exploded into pieces, and she just had time to recognise the figure from the weathervane. She’d been right. It was huge.
    She ran.
    *
    He threw himself forward just as a terrible hand flattened the table where they’d been sitting, and said ‘Run!’ again, because people very often didn’t unless you reminded them. Not-Christina ran. So did he. He felt something touch his shoulder, like a puff of air, and knew his suit would need sewing, heard the fabric part as razors plucked, missed his skin by just that much.
    ‘Back door!’ he shouted. Everywhere had a back door. That was a given. In some places it could be rather hard to find, but in a pub, generally speaking, it was through the kitchen and out into the –
    There was no back door in the kitchen, just a white wall. He turned, thinking hard.
    Christina grabbed hold of a butcher’s trolley by the door, a thick wooden block for the Sunday roast on thick rubber wheels so it could go from table to table, and dragged him down onto it, then kicked them off from the sink unit with both feet. The monster bellowed furiously as they skidded past beneath a grasping arm. For an instant, he looked up into its ugly, misshapen face. Stared into vast, mad eyes.
    It said, very clearly: ‘Time Lord.’
    He wasn’t sure if it was an accusation or a plea.
    The butcher’s block hit the frame of the kitchen door hard and tumbled over, spilling them to the floor, and they ran back into the saloon and out of the pub.
    *
    ‘Where do we go?’ Christina demanded.
    ‘It’s your town!’
    ‘It’s your monster!’
    They almost fell around the corner, up the street and away.
    ‘How is it my monster?’
    ‘It said, “Time Lord”!’
    ‘Maybe it’s just well informed!’
    She didn’t have time to argue with that, no doubt the thing would come out of the pub very shortly and try to eat them or whatever it had in mind. She wondered if he ever thought there wasn’t time to argue. He seemed to overthink everything, all the time, to argue it out like –
    It was infectious. It was insane and infectious and now she was doing it, just like him. No, no, no, and absolutely: no. She ran on, leading the way.
    ‘Where are you going?’ he shouted after her, and when she didn’t answer he followed, as she had known he would. He had to assume she knew what she was doing because she lived here, and if she didn’t he still had to go with her in order to save her. She felt footfalls behind her, knew the thing was coming after them, and she derived a brief moment of satisfaction from the thought that at least he was following her rather than the other way around; the sinister weathervane had been wrong about that.
    The footfalls were uneven, as if the thing was limping and dropping to one hand to pull itself along.
Pah pah POM. Pah pah POM.
Run, run, run. She wondered what that room looked like now, the one he had called the console room. Alarms and red lights, she thought, and tortured metal, the way she imagined a submarine at too great a depth.
Pah pah POMMM.
    Behind her the Doctor was pointing the sonic screwdriver, making adjustments and muttering: ‘Complex structure derived from the same basic components, electron physiognomy – ooh, you beauty! Partially stabilised matrix attached to—’ and then he had to stop, and duck, and roll in the gutter to get away from a clutching hand. He was mad. Mad and dangerous to know. She looked around, saw a