Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [5]
And couldn’t she hear the apes in the zoo, screaming in their cages?
Her rhythm was growing faster. Yes, thought Lisa-Beth, the world’s definitely speeding up for me. Which was a mercy, anyway. The man’s cries of ‘oh!’ were speeding up too, so either he was close to satisfaction or she was accelerating into her own future too fast. There: catch that thought. The future. The idea that the future is a real thing, not just a place that’s invisible. All time’s like that. Tantra: the Sanskrit word for ‘warping’.
And now she was there, lying spread-eagled on a bed somewhere in India, looking up at a faded (and mildly erotic) picture of Hanuman that somebody had painted on the ceiling. She could feel Little Rose next to her, and Little Rose was screaming, and ten minutes later Mother Dutt was shouting and swearing at them because Little Rose had tried to do something stupid with her own ‘private time’ and come face-to‐face with the demons. Lisa-Beth hadn’t seen any demons, of course. She was fairly sure that Little Rose was just imagining things, as eleven-year‐olds had a tendency to do.
Hard to stay in one place and time. Kadak‐‘oh!’‐kadak‐‘oh!’. Lisa-Beth found herself back in the Shakespeare’s Head, as the half-drunken politician began to explain how King George was actually mad and still thought the British could win the war against America: and Lisa-Beth was biting her lip so as not to point out that all the ruling classes were mad. She thought of the Hellfire Club, in their sweaty cavern underneath Medmenham Abbey, with their nun-prostitutes and their Satanic ape and their rich, bored, lust-crazed inner circle. The machines in the cotton factory were speeding up, matching her own rhythms, more kadak than ‘oh!’ now. Lisa-Beth moved forward and backward through her own private time, not actually peeling it back the way Mother Dutt had allegedly done, just feeling the memories prickle under the surface of her skin and break out in beads of sweat and experience. And the apes in the zoo? Perhaps she’d woken them up as well, woken up the old memories of the house while the rafters creaked and groaned.
‘Babewyn,’ she heard Mother Dutt shout, two years ago when Lisa-Beth was barely seventeen. Because the Mother always spoke in French, never in English, and that was the word she used when she meant demon. ‘Babewyn’. Like one of the brutal, leering, sexually-excited gargoyle-animals that lurked on the roof of Notre Dame. For a moment, Lisa-Beth was so lost in the Mother’s words that she nearly convinced herself she’d achieved the impossible, and rolled time backwards until she was right there in the Indian bedroom.
‘Time will move for you,’ said the Mother, looking seriously from Lisa-Beth to Little Rose. ‘But there is only so far you can go. There is only so much of time that one can understand. There is… what’s the word… there is a horizon, which you will never reach. It is too far to go. At that horizon is the realm of babewyns. In places of understanding no man or woman will ever be able to look. If you should become lost… lost in your own past, as you deal with your client … then look towards that horizon. You will see it, and find your way by it. Your memories will drop away, and once more your old rhythms will return to you. But do not move towards the horizon. You will not reach it, and babewyns may discover you.’
Yes, thought Lisa-Beth. I’m getting lost. She remembered the Hellfire Club again, watched the ape-creature that squatted in the corner of their cave, and only then realised that this was something which had happened before she’d been born. She considered the possibility that she’d looked