Free Doctor Who: Keeping Up With the Joneses by Nick Harkaway

mermaids, not really the point…) Map. Map is not the territory. Not what I’m supposed to see, just a clue to tell me I’m in the right place. OW!’ Another shrieking impact, and this time she saw his foot twist as if he’d put it down, heard the ankle tear. ‘She’s been shielding me but now she can’t any more, she’s losing her grip. Aaaah! Chair! Chair!’ She guided him to the chair. ‘Yes! Chair. Chair is the answer. Oh, you sneaky sneaker! Sit down in the chair. What do we see?’
    She could see a plain table with a pen, some writing paper, and no ink. There were stacks of paper around the chair, piled up. A manuscript. And, for no obvious reason, a saucepan full of water. ‘What’s that?’
    ‘Saucepan! Condensation from the cloud layer in the upper stacks. Always rains on the desk. Doesn’t matter where I put the desk, always rains. If I don’t have a container here it gets on the paper and then it moulders. And you’ve got no idea the trouble you get when psychic paper goes mouldy. Mould on psychic paper is psychic mould. Psychic mushrooms all over the TARDIS, and when you think at them too hard they try to turn into what you’re thinking about… Ah HAH! Mushrooms! “You can’t make breakfast without mushrooms.” Right! Right, what else did he say?’
    She struggled. Outside, somewhere, the monster was stalking, testing. She could hear it, feel it. Heidt had made no sense. ‘“Weavers, webs or woven”?’
    ‘Yes! Here are the mushrooms. Trapdoor universe, the mine’s like a spider. Is that the web? We already know that, it doesn’t help! Oh. Um. Christina?’
    He was staring at her hand where it was resting on the saucepan. She stared too.
    The paper below was stained and brown where the water had slopped over. It must have gathered while he was away from the desk – hours? Centuries? Had time flowed slowly here, or fast, in this strange emergency? – because the paper was indeed mouldy and green, and the green stuff was reaching up towards her fingers like a strange sea creature. It touched her skin. Tickled. She smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, knowing he was, ‘it’s all right.’ She turned her hand, saw the tendrils reaching into her skin. Painless. Natural. And with them: memories. So many. So rich and beautiful and terrible. So sad. ‘Oh. Rose. You miss her, don’t you? You miss them all.’ She drew back, and the column subsided into the paper. ‘Sorry. I know that was private. It just came into my head.’
    He nodded slowly. ‘It would. This is my diary.’
    ‘A psychic diary?’
    ‘Of course. It holds everything I feel, everything I see…’ He sighed, then stared at her. ‘Ohhh, it can’t be…’
    ‘What can’t be?’
    From his pocket, he withdrew a scrap of cloth – the piece of her coat he had torn off in the car after her accident. If her clothes had healed, she supposed, she had to own that it was somehow part of her, unless everyone in Jonestown wore psychic clothes like the firefighters.
    He put the cloth down on the paper and watched as it stretched out, yearning, towards the patch of mould, and the two of them merged. After a moment, the mould rustled and shifted, becoming a wide patch of the same cloth.
    He said: ‘Brilliant!’
    She said: ‘What?’
    And saw him smile in sympathy. ‘This! This is brilliant. You’re brilliant. Ooh, Heidt, you cheeky devil. Yes. Yes. YES! Because I can trust you now, can’t I? Now that I know what the deal is. Oh, Christina – you should keep that name, you know, she can hardly complain that you’re stealing it – Christina, Christina, Christina! You’re amazing. This is why we kept talking about cheese! Cheese means mould. Glorious mould! Unconscious knowledge. And my unconscious knows LOTS. Maybe even more than yours. Ooooh, yes! Here’s the TARDIS, caught in the temporal sheer. Massive fluctuations in the flow of time inside the structure. To keep me safe she shunts them all into one place. I don’t