Night of the Animals (20 page)

Cuthbert said, to the dark sky above the zoo, “I'll find them—or him!”

So he left the pool, a guilty servant, a criminal, and a man enthralled to flightless telepathic birds imprisoned in the wrong hemisphere.

AS CUTHBERT HANDLEY TRIED TO DECIDE HOW
and where to find the storied Gulls of Imago, and at the same time accomplish his most consecrated task—the freeing of the otters—he got himself rather seriously diverted once again, this time by a religious development among the zoo's felines.

Cats have a way of drawing people into their worlds. Penguin dreams and holy otters, gory jackals and creepy cults, King Henry's Red Watch and the very white seagulls—all would have to wait. A set of needle-clawed gauntlets, with fur licked clean to a sheen, were about to be thrown down.

Cuthbert found himself in the big cats district of the zoo, passing a series of semicircular windows intended to give glimpses of large felines in their separate enclosures: tigers, a black leopard, a jaguar, and the Asiatic lions, but from that side of the complex, none of the cats were visible at the time. He wondered whether the cats were quartered in secret night quarters, and whether a tube connected them somehow to the penguins' clandestine night-holes. Can't
imagine what the penguins and the tigers would have to say to each other, Cuthbert thought. But you never knew, did you?

He quietly sidled around to the front of the cat compound, to a gift kiosk called the Cat's Curiosity Shop, across from the lion enclosure. There's something happening here, he thought. There was a red sign fastened to the kiosk that read (in handpainted, gold, metal-flake script, which was incongruously ornate):

ALARM BELL

IN EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS

Below the sign was a small red box. It was designed for the lion enclosure specifically, but Cuthbert didn't see that. Instinctively, he started to reach for the box, then hesitated. He took a deep breath and rubbed his wrist across his eyebrow. There was certainly an emergency of some kind in England, he felt.

He gawked into the darkened shop. It nauseated him, looking in. There was a shelf crammed with old-fashioned, twentieth-century-style stuffed leopards and pumas. On another shelf, several holographic jaguars and tigers waved their glowing heads back and forth, but the projections were jumbled up and growing grotesquely through one another like a spotted and striped cancer of catness. He tried a window, and, surprisingly, it opened. There were, right beside the window, bags of popcorn and algae crisps on sale, too, and Cuthbert grabbed a few and stuffed them into his shirt. Close to the locked door, the blue-light numerals on a till could be seen displaying a huge sum from earlier in the day: £80,044.50. Was it possible, he wondered, that a zoo visitor had purchased a lion?

He closed the window, turned around, and stepped toward the lions, who had come out from wherever they were hiding. They appeared wide awake, scrutinizing him, but sat crouched and motionless, their forelegs extended like furry golden cudgels. To be
watched in this way by wild animals, as the sole human of interest, was the rarest of occurrences in England, a phenomenon daytime zoo visitors seldom experienced or would even notice. Cuthbert took it for granted. One of the lions' tails rose like a brown-headed cobra, then fell. There were five of the creatures, the famous old maned male, Arfur, fronted by four females. One of the females, Chandani, suddenly stood up and strutted a few meters to the right; she climbed up into a grassy cubbyhole, and turned around to face Cuthbert again.

Gregarious and greater in number than all the other big cats, the lions held prime position in their enclosure. Theirs was one of the more sensitive, animal-friendly enclosures in the zoo, but it still offered little more space than a studio flat gives a human. It comprised a widely moated jumble of ledges and tall pillars made of concrete. Tall grass, overgrown by design, spewed from every cranny and obscured the concrete's geometric motif of rhomboids and sly cambers. To their credit, the zoo managers were trying especially hard to make the lion exhibit seem less artificial, less self-conscious, less “boundary driven” than so many others at the zoo—it was all part of a “new” thinking that had flowered for a while with the millennium celebrations fifty years ago.

But sentimentality, scientific stuffiness, a lack of funds, little space, and three persistent fetishes—for art, architecture, and horticulture—had stymied the new thinking elsewhere in the zoo, and when the social upheavals and rapid extinctions of the 2020s came along, the zoo management had its hands full simply keeping one of a quickly dwindling number of zoos open. The lion terraces seemed gracelessly situated. The organic wholesomeness of the weeds often looked a lot like simple laxity: bright algae blanketed the moat water so thickly it resembled some green variety of the reinforced cement with a few lily pads set on top, like table doilies. Mud splattered every flat surface.

The lions themselves looked grubby and somnolent, and their flaccid musculature betrayed years of confinement. The algae stains all over the concrete gave the terraces an abandoned quality, too.

Toward the center of the den stood a Chinese tree of heaven with its beckoning thousands of paired, shiny leaves. Beside it was a three-tiered play-shack built of logs. It was as if children had taken up residence in a Mesopotamian temple ruin. The whole enclosure impressed and disturbed Cuthbert greatly.

“Come over here, Cuthbert,” Chandani said, in a gravelly, richly self-pitying voice. “Come forward, not back. We don't want to die like this, as slaves, in cages.”

Cuthbert said, “Not sure. Not yet. Do you know the penguins?”

“They are good animals,” she said. “But they are fooling themselves. They are waiting for something that will never happen. Now, Cuthbert, step closer.”

“Not yet,” he said. “You're the end of me, you lot. I can see it.”

He still felt terribly nervous about approaching the huge felids themselves—their communications to him had been characterized by an immaculate righteousness. No other animal unnerved him as much. He felt that the lions were trying to keep something from him—they represented a kind of authority that had never welcomed him, an official power. It smelled much like Harry9 and the Windsorite radicals. And yet, the lions were also victims of that power, even as they symbolized it. Cuthbert was not sure why this should all bother him particularly. But he decided to put the lions on hold, again, and he crept around the back of the terraces and there came upon an often-missed nook in the rockery where the sand cats lived.

“You cannot ignore us,” the lions in unison called. “You will come back here.”

“I will,” Cuthbert said, strolling away. “Maybe.” He pulled the bags of “butter-flavored” popcorn and algae crisps from his shirt
and, one by one, ripped each open and hurled it into the lion enclosure, the contents flying out. One of the lions sniffed at the popcorn and licked up a few pieces, then slunk away.

Chandani roared, and said, “At the end of time, you will always come back to the lions. You will see. When we are consulted, saints arise, angels sing, and flags unfurl. We are the only animals with the power to make empires.”

Cuthbert said, “I'm building an empire of otters. But I won't forget you.”

“Right,” said Chandani. “What matters more, sir, is that we shan't forget you.”

THE SAND CATS,
FELIS MARGARITA,
INHABITED A
deep, semicylindrical chamber built at waist height into the rear of the terraces. Their floor was spread with coarse sand and pebbles that looked suspiciously like what covered the beaches of Southampton. A complex set of dehumidifiers in the roof kept the chamber more arid than any other spot in England. A few bone-dry pieces of acacia and, of all things, a dried sponge were illuminated with an orange halide heat lamp. Though unintended, the sand cats' narrow cattery came across as a kind of tidy accessory to their enormous cousins' weedy cement heap, plugged into the same mass of mud-spattered, unnaturally smooth concrete. The orange light glowed like the inside of an old bread toaster.

Cuthbert started to bend close to look into the orange-glowing pocket but was distracted. He turned around. He felt a presence near, something low and smutty and ancient. He searched the nearby hedges with his eyes. There was a tremble in a certain holly branch, and dark shapes, the size of footballs, scurrying beneath it.
Something was rustling in there. The wind, he thought. Or a little field vole? Or his eyes playing tricks.

He rotated back around abstractedly. He read part of the short description of the animals printed on a black rectangle.
The sand cat's specialized urinary system allows it to survive long without drinking. It derives nearly all the moisture it needs from food.
He tapped on the window of the cat enclosure. A single golden paw extended spectacularly from the shadows. He could not help but smile.

“Wakie, wakie!” Cuthbert said.

Three of the animals came into focus in the dark. They stood up, their backs rising into huge, awakening arches. Their keepers had petted and touched them assiduously since their arrival from Chad, and they were unafraid of humans. They were among the few animals in the zoo not yet extinct in the wild, but they were far from safe.

“Hello, you lot,” he said. “Yam beautiful, yow am.”

Cuthbert liked them immediately. The docile animals' gold-green eyes were jeweled and soothing. One of them, whose keeper had named it Muezza (after the Prophet's pet, according to the sign), gazed at Cuthbert. It bucked to the side and puffed its ringed tail. It was accustomed to human contact, but not totally at ease with strangers, and never at this hour.

The sand cats were smaller and stretchier-looking than the mogs Cuthbert saw on the streets of London, but their faces were wide and their ears immense—huge golden triangles that could hear the bellies of desert vipers and the feet of jerboas in the Sahara. The cats seemed wide awake in their glass case; they were pawing the window now, looking into Cuthbert's eyes.

Come, Seeker,
Cuthbert thought he heard Muezza say.
Come, Saliq
. The cat's head inclined slightly sideways when it mewled. The
attention engrossed Cuthbert greatly. Was
saliq
a word of blame, or a warm assignation? It seemed a bit of both.

Cuthbert felt he didn't have time to bother with the fine points of a cat greeting. He still wanted to solve the conundrum of the Gulls of Imago. To him the Penguin Pool remained the most obvious mechanism of an unfathomable, and perhaps good (and perhaps not) sort of power, and he wanted to turn it on.

“Ow bist?
^*
Have you seen any seagulls in the area?” he asked the cats.

If there was one thing Cuthbert knew about the moggies of London, it was that they watched birds gingerly. He touched his forehead against the glass. The cats circled around one another, taking turns rubbing against the pane. There was no other response.

Cuthbert decided to change tack. “If a'm a ‘saliq,' mates, perhaps you would be willing to lend a hand—I'm officially seeking otters,” he said. “That's my immediate business. And seagulls—oi'suppose. They're important . . . to help these penguins out, see? And I'm looking for a sort of ghost—or two ghosts, in a manner of speaking. There's this fellow, this Tecton—e's split into a million living bitties. 'E's a load of gulls these days. And my older brother—Drystan. 'E's the most important, mind you. I say ‘ghost,' but it's only as 'e's missing. He ain't jedded.”
^*

Muezza squeezed his way past the other cats, and as he did, he also seemed to squeeze subtly past Cuthbert's world of prayers and madness and dreams, and to speak with familiarity and directness: “You free us, brother, and I
can
tell you about many, many, many small living pests, and perhaps about other things, too.”

“I don't see how it's possible, cat. I only have these bolt cutters, right?” He held them up by one handle, and shook it around, as though gripping a great swan or goose by the neck.

“Oh, brother seeker—and ‘brother-seeker'—surely you know that I would also take you, of all creatures, to the sacred path. I am here to tell you that the path leads eventually to the Shayk of Night. Don't be afraid. I know your purpose. The Shayk has been waiting for you. But I get ahead of myself.”

“That so,” Cuthbert said. He wondered what to make of the cat's strange ideas. They struck him as no less inscrutable than the penguins', but this animal had at least alluded to a plan, as well as a quid pro quo arrangement of genuine promise. Given the fact that he'd made a sort of promise to the penguins, he felt inclined to work with this creature.

“Can you help me free the otters into the cut? This is my most important task.”

“Yes, I can help. All things are possible,” said the cat.

“Really?”

“Oh, so much,” said the cat.

Cuthbert thought for a moment. There was no little red emergency box here; there was merely glass. How dangerous could a little cat be? He tried to weigh pros and cons, and it did not take him long to reach a decision.

“Mind now,” said Cuthbert.

There was a heavy garden hose and squirter looped around its portable, wheeled spool a few feet away, propped against the back wall of the lion terraces. The apparatus was made of a heavy, galvanized alloy. He heaved up the entire assemblage, took a few steps back, and ran forward, ramming it into the glass. As he ran, he began to think of his brother, as if Drystan himself were helping him to push forward. There was a loud knock, oddly attenuated and resonant, as if the blow had come from beneath the sea. The
force of the impact threw Cuthbert back. He toppled over. He was in great pain.

He screamed, “Drystaaaaaaaaan!” What he would give to see him tonight, even under these embarrassing circumstances. How he missed Dryst!

He sat on his arse for a few seconds, catching his breath.

“Drystan,” he groaned. “Jesus, help me. Jesus Drystan. Jesus Drystan. Help me, help me, help me, help me. Don't I have a mucker somewhere? St. Cuthbert? Christ of Otters? Someone?”

The air had grown colder and he was shivering, his teeth chattering occasionally. He lurched up onto his knees and steadied himself. He felt dizzy and self-conscious. “I'm really doing it,” he whispered to himself. Kneeling made him think of prayer, but he felt unsure of what to do about it just then. “Bloody help me, someone,” he said. Here he was, a first-class social disaster on one hand, and on the other a supplicant to Family Felidae of Order Carnivora—all he needed was a rosary of fangs.

A huge triangle of the glass pane, half the size of a newspaper page, had broken off and tilted into the tank. Cuthbert got up and approached the opening—there were the three cats, lumped into a little cave made of artificial, flat rocks; their ears were pulled back in terror. After a little while, seeing Cuthbert and hearing a few soothing words he remembered his granny using (“Kitty-kyloe! Kitty-kyloe!”), their giant ears pricked up. The one named Muezza stepped forward first.
Felis margarita
are known for their gentleness, their sweetness of temper—provided you aren't a snake, chicken, or rodent. Cuthbert simply pulled them out, like free kittens, and dropped them onto the pavement.