Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [47]
I knew, then, that there are certain boundaries mankind should make every effort to cross. I also knew that the majority of human beings are in no way prepared for this crossing. It is often said that a drowning man will sense a great calm and clarity as he dies, and this was certainly my experience. There was a moment, I recall, when the inevitability of my own death became tangible. The understanding this brings a man cannot immediately be described… it was then that I saw the bed of the river below me, and then that the shadow fell over the sand and the silt before my eyes. I knew at this moment that Leviathan had come to find me, although on reflection the blackness may have merely been the blackness of unconsciousness. I thought of Jonah and his whale; I thought of the island-fish of the Arabian Nights. Leviathan was there, a power and a darkness that swam at the bottom of the river and waited to consume the dead. It was only then that I remembered my purpose here was not to die, but to avoid dying.
(The biblical references here are typical of a Serviceman. Religious imagery was common in Service lore – note that many agents chose Biblical confirmation names, including ‘Hiram of Tyre’, ‘Meshelemiah’, even ‘Sabbath’ himself – even though the majority of recruits were freethinkers. It should be remembered that although the Service was dedicated to a form of mystic logic, the organisation was technically sworn to protect the King and the Protestant Church.)
However useless the archives might have been, Fitz and Juliette do seem to have been inspired by the atmosphere of Cambridge. It was on the first night of their investigation, for instance, that Juliette related to Fitz the vision she’d had back at the House, when Fitz and Anji had first stepped out of the light. And so it was that, in a hired room over a public house in Cambridge, Juliette first told Fitz about the apparitions she’d seen: about the shadow which had filled up the sky, and the engines of war so well-documented by Lisa-Beth, cold and dark and metallic.
Fitz reached the conclusion that the darkness in the sky was some form of god, something powerful and elemental, which almost certainly controlled the apes. And Sabbath? Perhaps he too was now an agent of the shadow, given the odd reference to Leviathan in his writings. The theory must have found favour with the Doctor, who for some time even before coming to London had been nursing the suspicion that something was affecting the ‘horizon’ and therefore time as a whole.
But a week after his arrival in Cambridge, Fitz found an entirely different kind of lead.
On May 20, Fitz and Juliette visited the University archives for the last time. Their session in the reading-room was cut short when the Professor arrived, flanked by three tall and serious-looking men who never spoke a word throughout the entire encounter. The Professor hurriedly explained that ‘circumstances had changed’, and that for a variety of reasons Mr Kreiner would no longer be allowed to consult University records. Fitz responded by flouting his (forged) Service credentials, but this time the Professor was unmoved.
Three large men. Were they the three rat-catchers, still in Cambridge after the Marquis incident, but this time unmasked? In any case, Fitz took the whole thing quite lightly, curiously giving the startled Professor a large and unmanly hug on the way out of the University grounds.
That evening, the Professor left his rooms at the University and, keeping his face down under his coat, made