Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [6]
Time to end this, she decided. Time to look up at the horizon and find my way home, to go back to time the way the rest of the world knows it. Time to get back to His Lordship. Lisa-Beth sucked in a deep breath, not sure whether she was really sucking it in or just remembering a time at some point in her past when she’d done such a thing. Through the opium she tried to find the horizon, focusing on the sound of the bed (not the cotton machine) and the smell of sweat from the wobbly pink politician.
But the screeching of the apes stayed with her, as if the room didn’t want to let it go, and she could still see the cavern of the Hellfire Club around her. The ape in the corner slowly raised its head, even though she’d never been there and it couldn’t have seen her. She concentrated with the senses of her body, looked for that all-important horizon, that one lifeline which could restore her balance and her rhythm and her city and her bedroom.
All of a sudden, the horizon found her.
Lisa-Beth gasped. She gasped as she lay on the bed in India, she gasped as she looked up at the stone gargoyles of Notre Dame, she gasped at the age of seven as someone pulled her out of the shallower waters of the Thames with a mouthful of black water. All these little gasps came back to her at once, formed one immense gulp for air which swept over her entire body, and in one moment she knew that every gasp she’d ever taken was just a tiny fraction of this, a small rehearsal for the surprise she felt now.
Because the horizon was there. Not in the distance, not further than any woman could reach. It loomed over her. Advanced on her. Reached out for her.
A band of black around the world, around her world, the limits of all human knowledge. Lisa-Beth realised that she couldn’t slow down, couldn’t stop, couldn’t pull herself away from either the man on her bed or the edge of the universe hovering in front of her eyes.
‘Oh, dear God,’ she said, at some point in her life. ‘Have I really come that far?’
It was made up of things no human being could ever know, that no person on Earth could ever understand. It was ignorance, it was darkness, it was time in which nobody could live. It squirmed, like a zoo, unknown animals exploring unknown pleasures and climbing over themselves to reach out for the woman who now approached them. Kadak‐‘oh!’‐kadak‐‘oh!’‐kadak went the ape-machine, but Lisa-Beth opened her mouth a hundred times at various points throughout her memory, and tried to scream at His Lordship to stop.
That was when something came out of the wall at her. Lisa-Beth was vaguely aware that she hadn’t gone too far at all – that the horizon had come to her, that the limits of a human’s knowledge had simply rolled across time to swallow her up – but it hardly seemed the issue as she looked into the eyes of the creature which detached itself from the darkness and leaned towards her.
‘Babewyn,’ said Mother Dutt, and Lisa-Beth realised that there was something important about the word ‘babewyn’ she’d forgotten.
The ape looked up at her from the darkness. Not from the darkness of the Hellfire cave, where Lisa-Beth had never been. It was squatting in the darkness of the horizon. That was the form the creature took: an ape, its fur dark grey and matted with blood, its hide covered in scratches where it had clawed its way over its fellow apes to reach her. She couldn’t see its eyes, as if they’d been poked