Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [164]
But the sight which greeted Lisa-Beth as she entered the room was unexpected. The boudoir had been wrecked, the weight of the ape-god having torn at the walls and all but smashed the remaining furnishings (Juliette’s room, unlike the others, had been left largely bare). The King of Beasts lay sprawled across the boards, his massive body taking up much of the space in the middle of the floor. His enormous legs were kicking in the air, occasionally making huge dents in the wall by his side. The ape’s arms extended from his body on either side, and although Lisa-Beth says that ‘the fingers were twitching’ they did nothing to protect the rest of his body from, attack.
Straddling the big barrel torso of the animal, perched on his ribcage with one leg on either side, was the thin and pale-faced form of the Doctor. He had something in his hand, and was repeatedly bringing it down on the gigantic beast’s head. At least, that was. Lisa-Beth’s first impression. When she moved a little further into the room, past the staring, unmoving figures of Fitz and Anji, she saw that he was actually assaulting the ape’s thick neck. Whatever he was holding in his hand, it was sharp. He was hammering the object into the animal’s throat, and even Lisa-Beth admitted to finding the sight alarming, as if there were something bestial about the Doctor himself. He’d chiselled his way through the front of the neck, half-severing the King’s head from the body. As was the way with the creatures, there was no blood or matter from the wound other than ‘that which one might expect’.
The King was dead. It was obvious that the King was dead, yet the Doctor still hammered into the neck, as if determined to thoroughly decapitate him. Even when the head was finally severed, the Doctor kept banging his weapon against the floor. In the end, it was Rebecca who stepped forward to stand at the Doctor’s side: Rebecca, who perhaps had a greater understanding of the symbols that were needed than anyone other than Scarlette herself.
The next time the Doctor brought up his arm to strike a blow, Rebecca put her hand on it. The Doctor stopped at once, his head turning sharply, to look her dead in the eye. Even Fitz and Anji were stunned into silence by the utterly blank look on the Doctor’s face.
Rebecca simply shook her head, and at that point the Doctor seemed to realise that this battle was over. He lowered his arm, and let go of his cutting-tool, letting it roll on to the floor. That done, Rebecca herself bent over, to grasp the head of the dead King by the hair of its scalp – the mouth still frozen open, blood coating the snout, eyes sunken into darkness in the skull – and to lift it away from the body.
This was the final iconic image of the Siege of Henrietta Street. The others could only watch, in silence, as Rebecca lifted the big severed head in one hand and calmly walked towards the door. For a moment longer the sound of the horror outside, the scratching of the apes and the death they brought with them, drifted into the room. Then Rebecca shut the door behind her.
There could hardly have been multiple witnesses, then, to the final end of the battle. Almost nobody could have seen the horror on the stairway, or of the ultimate statement to the babewyns, when Rebecca lifted the severed head of the King high into the air and every ape in the salon looked up to see the dead, dark eyes of their pack-leader on the balcony. The best description of the scene is a purely aural one, the screeching which Lisa-Beth heard from the safety of the upstairs room, the scream of rage and disappointment when the apes saw that their primate hierarchy had fallen apart. When they knew, as much as animals ever could know, that in this primitive contest of strength the elemental had proved his own blood to be older, wiser, and more powerful: that it was his kind who’d always held sway over time and space, not demons with the faces of baboons.
Did they vanish