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By Root 538 0

And why had Lisa-Beth and Rebecca been spared? The latter question might at least have a simple answer. Whatever had happened during the wedding ceremony, it had removed all the assembled members of the world’s lodges. Lisa-Beth and Rebecca had both expressed a desire to leave Scarlette’s employ, for their own reasons. They, and they alone, were no longer part of any tradition. Then again, that still begs the question of why Katya was taken along with the others. Perhaps it was because Katya was a representative of the Russian Ereticy. Alternatively, it could have had something to do with the secret ballot taken by the House’s women in September… it’s hard to even guess.

But all those who vanished that day, and who survived their later experiences, had a story to tell. All the stories seem unbelievable, and yet all of them are in accord. it was as if this one great ritual, this bonding of the Earth and the elemental, had pushed all those assembled over the edge and into the Kingdom of Beasts.

In his own memoirs, Lucien Malpertuis treated the whole thing as a poison-induced hallucination of the kind which was once common in Saint-Domingue (whose ritualists, to this day, use potent fish-venom in their work). He claims that when the Doctor and Scarlette came together, ‘the world itself did open’: his English was always a bit on the pompous side. He goes on to say that he and the other Maroons from the vault, led by Émondeur, spent several days wandering through a jungle much like that of Hispaniola. But the wilderness, he Said, was bleached grey. The trees seemed calcified, the colours worn out of the leaves and buds, and though they resolved to treat this environment as no different from the Frenchman-hunting‐grounds of home it soon became clear that the Maroons were the hunted ones here.

The story becomes clearer in combination with the testimony of the Masons. Far from arriving in any wilderness, the Masonic parties present insist that they discovered themselves to be in a ‘vast library’. Though it’s never explicitly stated, it’s described in the Archive as being almost exactly like the Archive itself, the hidden repository of all Masonic wisdom in Musselburgh. The chamber was large, its ceiling vaulted and a good thirty feet high, with bookshelves lining every wall and piles of ancient, heavy volumes surrounding the bemused guests. Everywhere there was the smell of rotting paper, while through the tall, stately, Georgian windows those present could see

…the very bluest of skies without… though the light which fell upon the Earth, and which illuminated the magnificent volumes within the library, was tainted with the black of ignorance.

Predictably, the library was overrun by apes. The animals paid the travellers little attention, but squatted on the reading-tables and hunched themselves on top of the stepladders. They were fondling the books ‘in a most improper manner’, suggesting something almost obscene. The apes clumsily pulled ancient tomes from the high shelves, thumbed through them with claws covered in blood and bile, browsed without understanding anything they saw. They ripped pages out at will, stuffed the paper into saliva-rich mouths, or even (horror of horrors) wiped their backsides on the knowledge of generations. One of the witnesses even claimed he saw an original Key of Soloman, that most valuable and mythical of occult texts, being carelessly thrown back and forth by the beasts: beasts which would occasionally stop to open the book and sharpen their claws on its pages. Many of the Masons fled the scene through the library doors, while the apes smashed the windows and threw age-old codices from the higher shelves.

Then there were the other stories. The Servicemen found themselves in a place much like Westminster itself, where idiotic animals filled the benches of Parliament, picking fleas from each others’ pelts while the ‘leader of the House’ threw dung at the creatures in Opposition. Mrs Gallacher, flagellator and procuress, later told her friends that she’d found herself in a boudoir much like that