Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [162]
Fitz immediately began to make suggestions of his own, but if he was trying to issue orders then his words were barely comprehensible. Anji tried to drag him back into Scarlette’s bedroom. The others all looked to Scarlette, even Lisa-Beth, although Scarlette’s first move was to reach for those parts of her belt where she’d once kept her pistols. And her guns had been emptied of ammunition in the Kingdom of Beasts.
Nonetheless, she insisted that they should all stand their ground, even as the first of the apes looked up from the hall of the floor and began to screech at those assembled on the balcony. While the first of the animals were digging their claws into soft wood at the bottom of the staircase, the Doctor himself was stepping out of Scarlette’s room. All eyes turned to him as the apes began to scramble up the stairs.
The Doctor only nodded, and Lisa-Beth claims that Scarlette curtly nodded back. Both may have known what they had to do. After that the Doctor turned his back on all of them, and headed for the next stairway, which led up from the balcony on to the higher floor of the building… the floor where Juliette had made her home, before her fall from grace. Fitz and Anji started to bicker, but soon decided to follow him.
This left Scarlette at the top of the first flight of stairs, facing the sunken, burning eyes of the babewyns. It also left the women of the House once more looking to her for instructions. Scarlette wasn’t thrown, however. Mounted on the wall behind the balcony, not far from the top of the stairway, was the same fighting-sabre which Lisa-Beth had seen Scarlette use so well against the Doctor on her first visit to the House (although it’s a miracle that she and Rebecca had managed to recover it after the debt-collection crisis of the previous year). Scarlette wasted no time at all in arming herself, tearing the sword from the wall.
If it seems romantic, it also seems hopeless. The apes flooded into the House one after another, and only Scarlette stood between them and the upper floors. One woman with a sword could hardly have been expected to keep them all back.
As for the Doctor… he was the first to reach Juliette’s room, on the third level of the House, so nobody else was there to record what exactly he found. From those who followed him, though, the basics are obvious. Because waiting for the Doctor in that room, his massive bulk squatting over Juliette’s old boudoir, was the King of Beasts himself.
The way the King had arrived here is, at least symbolically, easy to understand. While the other animals poured through the veil of Shaktyanda to reach Henrietta Street, the King had been summoned directly to the heart of the House by the ritual of the challenge, ready to face the Doctor in single combat. The description of him later told by Fitz, in Fitz’s last days at the House, is reminiscent of Juliette’s dream diary In the cramped space of the upstairs bedroom, perhaps even surrounded by the thin smoke which accompanied most hallucinatory experiences, the King was as at home as any piece of furniture. Scarlette’s account, excitable as it was, says it all.
The Beast itself was among us then. I am reliably informed that as the Doctor stepped into that room the Beast pushed out its arms, so as to shatter the window and punch a hole the size of its fist through the ceiling. Its jaws were frightening in aspect… it had none of its foul worshippers to defend it, or to keep up its great belly, though it showed no fear when it looked into the eyes of the Doctor [Scarlette ceases to call him ‘Jack’ at around the time of the wedding, oddly]. It must be said also that the Doctor showed no fear as he looked back into the gaze of the Beast.
My friends Mr. K. and Mistress K. told me that they heard the cry of the Beast, plunging into its assault… [as] they clambered the stairs towards that room. It was followed by a most distinct tearing of flesh and bone from above.
Back downstairs, the tearing of flesh was also in the air. At least the shamans here hadn’t used fire as a weapon,