Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [115]
But, as she told Fitz, something she’d seen there had stuck in her mind. At one stage she’d run down a fractured street that had resembled a bleak parody of one of the roads of Charing Cross, and on turning her head she’d seen an opening that had led to a square of some kind. There in the square, she’d seen an entire horde of the apes, forming a grey-pelted mob which stamped and scratched at the pavement but which hadn’t paid her any attention at all. At the centre of the crowd there’d been a mound of some kind, a platform raised above the animals’ heads, stinking of dung. Though Anji had quickly moved on, she was sure that there’d been something mounting that pile as if taking up a position of honour. And now the Countess spoke of an audience with the King of Apes, if such a creature existed: almost a bestial, idiot counterpart to either the Doctor or Sabbath, an Emperor among beast-elementals.
For all his faults, Fitz’s conclusion once again suggests a mind ahead of its time. That afternoon in the white room, he told the Doctor that he believed the apes now had a leader, whereas before they’d been creatures of sheer mindless malice. More importantly, he explained why he thought they now had a leader.
The apes had no existence without humanity. They were reflections of humankind’s own animal limitations. Now there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, and the closer the horizon came the more they bred. Yet they were still mimicking, literally aping, the human race. In any large group of humans, the most primitive desire was to form hierarchical packs, with a single alpha-male leader – usually the strongest or most aggressive member of the pack – at the top of the hierarchy.
As the Doctor himself seems to imply in his Ruminations, this aggressive hierarchical model enforces conformity and ensures a violent reaction against any form of progress. And the apes were the very embodiment of reactionary values. They mimicked all the tools of human ignorance, and now they numbered in their hundreds they’d begun to mimic the most primitive form of human social structure. They had a leader, a King of Beasts, a vicious, screeching God-Emperor who ruled from his throne of filth and bones. For the last month the apes would have been busy worshipping and cherishing him, but the inevitable consequence of such a leader would be a new wave of attacks. Directed attacks this time, massed attacks, led by the lusts and impulses of the new King. It wasn’t so much that they were developing… development was, after all, the antithesis of their purpose… but they were taking whatever measures were necessary in order to drag humankind back into the dirt.
Surely the Countess had reached the same conclusion? It would explain the sudden link she made between the King of Beasts and the King of England, because in the final analysis one was just a distorted image of the other. Scarlette offers the following observation:
The Beast must worship its monarch as it might have worshipped that terrible black Eye which forms the sun of its realm. Should the Beast devise religion, it will no doubt hold that its King acts by the will of the Eye just as our sovereign acts in the name of an Anglican God.
There’s one other thing to mention, about that afternoon. Because according to the folklore of Henrietta Street, while Fitz was trying to explain himself to a dazed Doctor there were events afoot back at the forgotten House.
Nobody lived at the House any more, though technically Scarlette was still responsible for it. So it was largely empty that day, the Doctor’s equipment moved to the TARDIS, the last of the small furnishings gone. The only person left to look after it was Rebecca. Why she’d become so distanced from the others is hard to say, but while her associates spent time in the TARDIS she’d spend it in the abandoned salon, still