Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [94]
What’s most striking about Emily’s account of the fight, though – apart from the fact that Emily states, for the first time, that she’s following orders – is the suggestion that Juliette was ‘in the mode of the world around her. Emily’s mission seems to have been to complete Juliette’s understanding of this strange connection. Perhaps Juliette’s vision of herself, surrounded by the apes, was a symbolic representation of the way the creatures were crowding around the edges of the planet’s ‘consciousness’. Perhaps she believed that she herself was becoming a place of power, like the Doctor’s legendary TARDIS.
Emily’s writings are so chaotic that it’s easy to think of her as being ignorant and witless. Nothing could be further from the truth. She was flighty and melodramatic, but then again she was still an adolescent (although she wouldn’t change much as she grew older, as the whole world would learn on her ascension to celebrity in 1798). She was charming, charismatic and certainly attractive. Still some years away from being regarded as a great beauty, she already knew enough about the world to avoid being naive. So if she had indeed been ‘primed’ to lead Juliette in a certain direction, she was undoubtedly up to the job.
It was raining that afternoon, and raining heavily. When it rained in central London, the dirt would froth up on the streets and the smell of mud would be everywhere, unlocked from the cracks between the cobbles. Where Anji was intending to go, she never said – possibly to find Fitz and his new tobacconist friend – but she must have been wet and irritable as she stomped through the grey streets and tried to avoid being splashed by the passing horses. All that can be said, from the story passed down in the folklore of the London tantrists, is that she headed down a street alongside the Thames towards the part of London called the Temple (named, incidentally, after the occult temple once constructed there by the Knights Templar).
The tale records that there was no moment of horror, no great flash of light. No indication that anything had changed. Anji simply turned a corner, expecting to find herself in another damp, filthy London street. She probably had her eyes turned to the ground, so she may not even have noticed what was happening at first. At some point, though, she must have looked up. Perhaps it took her a while to notice: to spot the difference between the bleak, grey buildings of the capital and the bleak, grey buildings of somewhere else entirely. Some versions of the story even claim that other passers-by were quite happily wandering up and down the road, not noticing anything strange around them, as if two worlds had quietly been laid on top of each other. Only Anji, say these tales, could see the way the black sun stared down at the city from the shockingly blue sky behind the rainclouds.
What all the stories agree on is that when Anji had taken the scene in, when she’d smelled the way the rain mixed with the ape-dung in the gutters and seen the way the buildings of the Temple were crumbling into the street, she slowly turned to look behind her. What she saw, not twenty paces away, was Juliette. Juliette, soaked to the skin but unbowed, some say wearing the black wedding dress from the Shop. Juliette only stared when Anji noticed her, the two women facing each other in the ruins of London without saying a word.
There are so many stories of this kind in the history, so many accounts of individuals turning a corner and either finding apes in their path or simply dropping out of the world altogether, that it’s easy to start thinking of them as either hallucinations or random incidents. In fact, all the stories have something in common. Note:
– The first ape attacks occurred when ritualists/tantrists, Lisa-Beth among them, actively explored the limits of the horizon and therefore went beyond normal human experience.
– The captured ape in Hispaniola was ‘summoned’ by Émondeur when he suggested