Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [7]
It was the Satan of the Hellfire Club. It was the monkey-faced thing that ruled Notre Dame. It was the animal, the beast, the leering, biting, unthinking demon that lay in wait for all unwary witches who tried to go too far into Shaktyanda. This slavering, idiotic guardian of the threshold, this stinking, blood-soaked little god at the edge of time
That’s it, thought the practical part of Lisa-Beth’s mind, the part which was, undoubtedly, no longer in control. That’s what I was forgetting about the word babewyn. The fact that the English turned it into the word baboon. She’d heard Scarlette say it, once. Not that you could trust a word the mad witch said, but… but in front of her, the mindless bastard ape-god raised its arm, bloody fur stretching across muscles that flowed like time itself. Lisa-Beth looked up, with eyes that she rationally knew wouldn’t be looking at anything other than the ceiling of her room, as the ape swung its arm with appalling speed and its claws came down to rip through her chest.
Fortunately, there was just enough self-control left in Lisa-Beth’s body for some part of her to move. She pushed herself back, away from the claw, and felt gravity tug her balance away from her body.
She fell from the bed, tumbling off the edge, not knowing which world she was about to land in. The rhythm stopped, the machine stopped, and in the walls the screaming of the animals was replaced by the ordinary creaking of the house. There was a moment of peace, a moment when Lisa-Beth saw the blackness at the edges of her vision and realised, with some satisfaction, that she was about to pass out. Even now the practical part of her mind was telling her that if she lost consciousness then anybody could just walk into her house and take everything she had, but the rest of her no longer cared.
At that point Lisa-Beth hit the floor, her head cracking against the chair by the dressing-table. In the moments before she passed out her eyes flicked to the bed, and even from the floor she could see the politician’s face. It was ruddy and bloated, and the big sweaty bald patch on his head exactly resembled the big sweaty pink gut that still protruded from under his shirt. Oddly, though, the man wasn’t watching Lisa-Beth. His eyes were wide and shiny, like balls of glass, and they were staring up as if something far more important were hovering at the end of the bed.
Lisa-Beth didn’t have time to move her eyes again, to take in whatever it was the man was staring at. The last thing she saw was a shadow falling over his fat belly, cast in the purest black thanks to the oil lamp at the end of the bed. But to be honest, it could just have been the concussion.
* * *
While she was asleep, Lisa-Beth didn’t dream. She wouldn’t have let herself. More importantly, while she was asleep she didn’t die either. She woke up blinking, staring up at the ceiling, with her back to the Indian rug on the floor. The fumes fading away in the air, the oil lamp flickering down into half-light somewhere outside her vision.
Someone moved in her room. Someone turned over a bedsheet.
Lisa-Beth was up on her backside in seconds. She thought of the things she might find moving around in her bedchamber, of the sweaty politician rifling through her belongings. Of the woman downstairs and the apes in the walls. But when she sat up, the figure she saw standing at the end of her bed – stretching a sheet over the mattress, as if making the bed were a perfectly normal thing to do in the circumstances – came as a surprise.
At first, Lisa-Beth thought it was a man. It took her a moment to see past the clothes, the oversized black greatcoat that the visitor had bundled herself up in. Pulled tight across a dress that needed laundering. Like Lisa-Beth, the woman was blonde and she was