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By Root 454 0

in the place of apes comes to pass. Sabbath certainly spoke of it as though it were the true enemy, often referring to it as ‘the Opposition’, but maybe that’s not surprising. He’d been trained by the Service, and to a covert intelligence operation like the Service an all-seeing eye was the worst kind of enemy there could be. John Dee, when he’d founded the British intelligence community in the Elizabethan era, had written of a mythical arch-nemesis known as ‘Choronzon’: a demon often depicted in occult lore as a gigantic eye. Although the sun-god of the ape world certainly wasn’t Choronzon, its appearance must at least have had resonances for Sabbath.

By the time the ship finally came to a halt at the harbour, the Doctor and Sabbath had already gathered something of the events taking place inland. At this point it’s best to repeat the account word-for‐word (which should give some indication as to who eventually wrote the story down):

There was a grate skreeking from the city, like as the aipes were performing the most indelicate acts or were angry. My friend Mr. S [Sabbath) had been conserned for some time approching the dock but now he was more conserned still. When they went to disembark from the ship they saw movement in some of the streets ahead and the Doctor said there were two aipes he had spyed bounding throu the ruins towards a place not far away. The Doctor also said he recognised bildings nearby as being in the French style and knew he was not far from where he had been before…

Mr. S wished to go towarsd the sound and the smell of the aipes with his own crew squawking at his back, but the Doctor said they were to be careful. Mr. S was quite determind. Though they did not go far into the city they soon turned into a street that (says Mr. S) was ‘a street of London with the excrement of aipes in every doorway’. At the end of the street they could see a crowd of the stinking animals, and the animals were clawing and biting at each other and trying to climb over themselves. Mr. S and the Doctor could only watch and hope the aipes would not see them wile more joined the crowd from the streets around.

That was when with a grate cry another figure was there in the midst of the filthy apes. It was the girl, whose name I cannot spell in English, and as my friends watched this girl pulled herself up out of the screeching hurrah of the aipes. Mr. S does not want to speak of her injuries, but there were red clawings on her face and yet she still looked angry. There were as many as a dozen of the creetures on top of her before her face was lost amongst all there hair and teeth. I am told that she killed two of the animals with her hands as they tore at her (for she could snap bones). But when the dead beasts would fall away the others would only drag away the bodies to be eaten while others jumped on top of that poor girl’s back to drag her down the more.

It must have been a terrible site for Mr. S. I see him with that look he has when he is determind, when his face becomes so serious that you would think a storm was coming up from inside him. But the Doctor rested a hand on him, even thou I would never dare. When the poor girl vanished beneath bodies and claws Mr. S clenched his fists as hard as rocks, and said ‘we must act’.

I do not think anybody could survive such an attack as was described to me being done upon that poor foreign girl.

If anything, this is the one occasion when the account isn’t quite dramatic enough. Perhaps the author was being tasteful, but the full horror of these events – and their effect upon Sabbath – is difficult to overstate. Tula Lui wasn’t simply a warrior, a pawn in the game. She was a sixteen-year‐old girl. And as for the Doctor… the Mayakai was to Sabbath what Juliette was to him. The Doctor had long experienced guilty feelings about Juliette, about the things he knew he had to put her through before the end of the battle. This was a reminder of exactly how dangerous it could be, to be an apprentice to a ritualist or an elemental.

There, in a hallucinatory world somewhere between