Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [70]
When Fitz and Juliette arrived in the salon, they found it full of a thin, sickly smoke. This may have affected Fitz’s perceptions, because although there was no sign of the Doctor he claimed to have briefly seen a ‘Doctor-shaped hole’ in the smoky air.
A search of the room revealed a note, in the Doctor’s hand. It read: GONE TO FRANCE. BACK FOR TEA.
Where did the Doctor actually go? His failure to keep a diary of his own means there’s no first-hand account of what really happened that day. But one description does exist, in the fragments left behind by Sabbath himself. Sabbath later extracted the entire story from the Doctor and friends, and one of his agents (somewhat clumsily) recorded the details. The thrust of it is as follows.
The Doctor stepped out of time, with the same skill ascribed to the giants of Mayakai folklore. His ability to do this was due to his elemental nature, at least according to Sabbath, who also felt that only the unstable nature of the ‘walls of time’ had allowed the Doctor to do this: the same weakness in time which allowed the apes to manifest presumably granted elementals a fraction of the same power. How much of this account is to be believed is up to the individual to decide. The story goes that the Doctor didn’t arrive in France, as he’d planned (possibly he chose the destination only because Scarlette was already there). Instead he found himself in ‘a stranj and terrible place, under the site of the great black eye’.
This mysterious place isn’t described in full… at least not in the Sabbath account. But here the Doctor made himself clear, as the realm of the ‘great black eye’ is described in his Ruminations. Quite patently this is the same location which Juliette had seen in her vision. The Doctor’s description is written in the style of a warning to other travellers.
It’s a terrible place, although it’s probably not like any terrible place you might have seen in art galleries. There’s no hellfire or pits of agony. It’s a city, the greyest, bleakest city you could imagine. There are buildings, beautiful buildings, but every wall and every brick has been bleached of its colour, worn down by the wind, pulled into ruins, scratched into rubble. There are statues there, like the statues you might see on the Grand Tour of Europe, but they too have been reduced to pale, bleached things with their arms snapped off and their faces scraped clean. The wind never stops making you itch… and everywhere is the smell of animals. Apes, so that the smell isn’t quite far enough from that of the traveller’s own body to make it seem truly alien. Yet the sky is a bright and beautiful blue, which is a cruelty in itself, because under that sky the earth and the city seem more horrific still. Occasionally, parts of the ruined architecture will be familiar. The buildings behind you might remind you of your own place of residence. A distance away you might see places which make you think of the boulevards of, say, Paris. It’s almost as though the traveller brings some of his own city to this graveyard-of‐cities, only to see it reduced to a grey husk.
But it’s the sun that strikes you most. At least, the traveller will at first assume it’s a sun. When you see the pure blackness of it, surrounded by a halo of light against the blue, you might think there’s a simple eclipse. Then the sun will turn in the sky, like an eyeball turning in its socket. The sun will look at you, and when you find yourself staring into its terrible dark centre you’ll be forgiven if you feel like crying out. Be warned, though, that if you make a sound then your cry will sound like an animal’s cry. It may even summon some of the creatures who live in this horrible place, and bring them bounding out of the ruins with their knuckles on the ground.
If you find yourself in this place, then turn back. You have put a foot wrong somewhere. This is the horizon, but the horizon made of flesh and plaster.
These ‘turn back!’‐style warnings are common in the mystical texts of the period, though usually if there