• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

And they would certainly feel it in America. The white oaks of Virginia would feel it in the earth, while their roots fed off the power of the bloody, buried things which had once ruled the American-Indians but which had now struck a deal with General Washington and his new order. It’s easy to imagine Matthew Crane listening to what those trees told him, and then considering, not for the first time, the strange red envelope which had been brought to him from Europe.

By the time the dawn arrived, the Doctor would have his TARDIS back, Anji would have returned to Henrietta Street, and Scarlette’s cabal would have discovered the shocking truth about the disappearance of Juliette. And through it all, what of Sabbath?

* * *

8

The World and Other Places

Dear John

To Dr. Jack-of‐the-Moon:

I would ask you to forgive me the decision I have made but I know you would not wish me to become sentimental. I know also that whatever I can say it cannot change how you will feel though I hope you will understand my reasoning. I can only guess that you will feel disappointment and perhaps sorrow and for this at least I am sorry. I do not think you will wish to dwell on this and so I will not either.

I hold you in the highest regard and with the greatest affection and though you may not wish to hear it I find myself sad at not being close to you. Yet perhaps I have not been close to you for some time.

In the eleventh century AD, Hassan i Sabbah – guru of the original Assassin movement, the death-cult which inspired the word – ensured the loyalty of his followers by building an enormous garden of pleasure. When a new member was initiated into his cult, Hassan would allow the man free reign within this paradise, first dosing the subject with large amounts of narcotics so that he’d believe himself to be literally in Heaven. In that garden the man would indulge in every imaginable human pleasure, experiencing in his blissed-out state all the delicacies and concoctions he could ever desire, while at the same time being attended by the houris or ‘virgins of paradise’. At the end of this short stay in the garden, Hassan would inform the initiate that he could have a permanent place in this paradise, if he died for the Assassin cause. Having had a taste of the afterlife, the subject would nearly always agree to Hassan’s request, to the point where members of the cult would willingly throw themselves from tall buildings just to prove their loyalty.

This is worth mentioning because it’s hard not to think of Hassan, when one reads the accounts of the Doctor and his TARDIS. Members of the House would rarely be admitted within the doors of this impossible haven, yet when they were they would always return with stories of magnificent, alien vistas; of hallways and caverns containing treasures beyond even the Arabian Nights; of entire worlds trapped within the passageways. The Jonah may have had its impressive map-room, but Scarlette held that the Doctor’s transport could have contained maps drawn on a scale of one-to‐one. The TARDIS was said to have everything from its own fast-flowing river (probably an exaggeration) to a cloistered complex not unlike a monastery in miniature. On one occasion Fitz even claimed it had its own opera house, although the Doctor quickly added that he’d only picked that up by accident, having intended to deliver it somewhere before forgetting all about it.

(In terms of eighteenth-century occultism, these dialogues between the Doctor and Fitz are much like the performances of European charlatans such as Cagliostro. Cagliostro and his servant would frequently be overheard at society functions, fondly speaking of things that happened hundreds of years earlier in a well-rehearsed ‘double act’ designed to make the listener believe that Cagliostro was an immortal being who’d been present at the crucifixion. Which isn’t to say that the Doctor was a charlatan… but the similarities are remarkable.)

By the middle of October the TARDIS was at Henrietta Street, though how it got there from the Jonah