Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [86]
The animal was held in chains. The encampment was small, formed out of low makeshift structures which had been assembled out of the debris of the jungle and hidden in the shadows of the undergrowth. At night there was nothing to see at all, except for the occasional fire in the damp darkness. The ape had a hut of its own, a construction not more than four feet from floor to ceiling with its walls stinking from filth. The Maroons had initially hoped to train the creature, perhaps as a weapon against the French, but despite their best attempts to feed it and drug it the ape would tug at its chain and try to scratch the skin from anyone who came within a yard of its enclosure. The Maroons kept it alive, feeding it on any animal carcasses they came across in the jungle, in the hope that one day they’d have a chance to set it loose on the enemy.
When Émondeur showed the beast to the Doctor and Sabbath, on the night of the failed crucifixion, the ‘priest’ seemed proud of the ape. He claimed that he’d summoned it himself, out of the Circles of Hell, and that his Maroons were so well drilled that they’d managed to capture it alive without suffering more than the odd flesh wound. According to Lucien Malpertuis, whom we can presume was hovering nearby like so many of the rebels, the Doctor looked troubled by this. Sabbath simply looked pensive.
The Doctor warned Émondeur that such creatures couldn’t be trained, which made Sabbath smile wryly although he said nothing. But the Doctor was much more interested in knowing exactly how the old man had called the beast into the world. Not surprisingly for a man whose religion was such a mixture of Catholic fury and terrorist zeal, Émondeur claimed he’d performed the summoning with nothing more than a prayer. Even Sabbath had to raise an eyebrow at that.
Émondeur went on to say that it had happened on a Sunday, when the men in his charge would regularly hold a form of Church at the camp, during which they’d commune with the Saints and consume a charming delicacy called the ‘wafer of chair du Français’. On this particular night Émondeur had conducted the service, and while his men had bowed their heads he’d felt particularly inspired. He’d told them that if enough French blood were shed, then the Mackandal-Christ himself might be brought forth to walk the dark places of the island and tear the heads of the slavemasters from their shoulders. Then, in a moment of clarity, he’d gone further. He’d said that indeed, it might be this bloodshed which removed Mackandal from the stake at the moment of his death and brought him into the present.
This was a remarkable statement for Émondeur to have made. That kind of complex thought, implying a kind of structure inside time itself, was virtually unknown even to the great scientific minds of Europe. But it was at this point that the ape had suddenly come screaming out of the forest. The men had panicked at first, as the ape had leaped over the backs of those kneeling to pray under the night sky, scratching at anyone in its path. Only under Émondeur’s leadership (said Émondeur) had the Maroons recovered their wits and brought down the beast.
One imagines the Doctor and Sabbath exchanging glances. While it’s true that the ‘horizon’ on their chart had now extended as far as the islands of the western Atlantic, the notion that even one of the apes could be called by mere casual words rather than the complex ritual of the tantra was disturbing.
However, it was this one piece of information which allowed the Doctor, in the days that followed, to finally piece together the mystery of the babewyns, to finally establish where the creatures had come from, and how he himself was partly responsible for their existence. Sabbath had always blamed the Doctor’s kind for the attacks, not because he was a reactionary (not, that is, because he believed ’there are things man was meant to leave alone’) but because he felt the investigation of such areas wasn’t the province of whores and faded elementals. Now, with the apes