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– Anji and Juliette only slipped into the city of the apes after Juliette had somehow attained a specific level of understanding, possibly thanks to Emily’s coaching.

The pattern is clear. Understanding summons the monsters: and it’s interesting to see how this fits in with the cultural climate of the era. After all, the late eighteenth century was when the western world began to put aside supernatural horrors and create its own new, scientific, myths. The years that followed would see the publication of Frankenstein, a tale of terror for a new age, in which mankind would be haunted not by ancient demons but by the consequences of its own curiosity. And to the eighteenth-century mind, the ape was a symbol of the unknown. It represented the exotic, the undiscovered, the horror from the heart of the jungle. One (later) commentator even pointed out that although ancient mapmakers marked unknown territories with the words ‘here be tygers’, it would have been more appropriate for them to have said ‘here be gybbons’. Some of the more religious lodges are known to have believed that the ape attacks were a judgement from God, but from the accounts surrounding the Doctor in 1782 it seems more as if the apes were the human race’s punishment on itself. Whenever man or woman explored the darkness, the apes would be waiting there.

Juliette, on seeing the realm of the beasts so close to home, must have wondered whether the decisions she’d made had been responsible for summoning the ruined city to the Temple. But at the time, the cause can hardly have mattered much to either her or Anji.

The House of Who

It was felt all across the world. It would probably be going too far to say that it was either the Doctor or Juliette who’d caused the problem, but nonetheless witch-cults as far apart as Africa and Australia (newly-settled, and therefore still under the ‘spiritual protection’ of the aboriginal wirrunen) must have sensed that something was afoot. Furthermore, any counter-ritual was guaranteed to make the problem worse. It’s tempting to imagine the proud, stately, straightforward Mr Crane in America, congenially discussing the troubles with his peers while those (white) men who’d resurrected the old Anasazi ways performed cannibalistic rites in their cellars and clubhouses.

It’s not wise to overstate the problem. The world wasn’t falling apart: the vast majority of the population could hardly have noticed anything happening. There were no reports of carnivorous apes running amok on the streets of the cities, there were no unexplained massacres in urban areas. But those who kept secrets, those who dressed as politicians by day and indulged in the carnality of the tantra by night, suddenly found themselves terrified to make any move that might bring down the wrath of the ape-god on their heads.

Curiously, the one major country which recorded no disturbance at all, not even amongst its archons and its conjurers, was China. A critic might say that this was because the ape-elementals only seemed to punish progressive thought, and China had seemed incapable of that during the eighteenth century. But there could be another reason, and to understand it it’s best to return to the pursuits of the Doctor and Sabbath.

Since 1762, Soho in London had been home to a certain Chinese ‘quack’ who practised under the name of Dr Nie Who. The name seems to have been chosen for its dramatic impact, as although ‘Who’ was his true surname (or at least an anglicisation of it: a more common version might be ‘Woo’ or ‘Wu), there’s no evidence that he was actually a doctor. The obsession of eighteenth-century high society with eastern exotica stretched as far as medicine, and if India was considered outre then China was positively enigmatic. The teeth of big cats, the embryos of unspecified creatures from the bamboo fields, roots which would not simply scream on being pulled from the ground but howl out an entire black opera… all of them were found, pickled and preserved and prescribed, on the wooden