Night of the Animals (21 page)

THE SAND CATS STARTED TO KEEN AWAY, STRETCHING
their legs into grand, picky steps, then pushing themselves into low, predatory crawls. This, evidently, is what a little imprisoned meat-eater does when it suddenly takes its place at the top of the local food chain. The killing of natural prey, which the zoo hadn't allowed for decades, had to be eased into; it was like crawling beneath a tender belly—the animal looks for teats, and failing that, goes for the heart.

Watching them, Cuthbert was rapt. He felt that cats were healing, almost magical, and in a funny way, a force stronger than Flōtism.

His grandmother Winefride, among other things, was one of those great cat-loving women one encounters in the world, from Alabama to Zanzibar, the sort who, if given the opportunity, would keep a dozen in the house and feed a dozen more strays under the back porch. Removed from her Clee and Wyre environs to West Bromwich, she had turned to cats and birds as signs of wildness.

In her later years, Cuthbert's father forbade all pets, but Wine
fride always talked as though cats were, apart from otters, the most perfect of God's creatures. If otters brought miracles to the dying and to saints, cats helped the living. She often employed the word
useful
to describe them, though Cuthbert never understood just what that implied. She was always putting out saucers of milk and the occasional kipper for the moggies in the neighborhood.

“They deserve it,” she would say.

In his mind, he could still hear her calling “Kitty-kyloe! Kitty-kyloe!”

Cuthbert watched the sand cats begin to relax and stand taller. In London, a cat could command a certain respect. He remembered the prancing cat logo one saw when visiting the A&E at the Whittington Hospital, up the Holloway Road, where he had regularly shown up in recent years for neulibrium and a hot meal and Flōt detox.

You again, Cuthbert?
his favorite nurses would say.
After your jabs again?
Going to hospital used to be a relief for Cuthbert; he had been welcomed at Whittington for a long time, and the staff never minced words:
Keep it up, Cuthbert, and you'll be dead before you're a hundred
. He had been placed in the hospital's large psychiatric unit seven times for chronic Flōtism, with stays from three days to nine weeks, typically signed off by Dr. Bajwa. He never stayed away from Flōt more than a few hours after his discharges, but he felt a temporary relief—he saw that, in theory at least, it was possible to stop drinking.

And this sense of a reprieve was what he associated with Whittington and felines. He always felt charmed by the hospital's logo of a black silhouette of a cat standing upon a
W.
It reminded him of his grandmother and her earthy strength, a power he tried misguidedly to tap by going to the hospital, where decisions, it turned out, were made for you. But he had trusted the Whittington deeply, and now, he was sure, the Red Watch would be all over it, hunting for him.

In the days before Calm Houses and the Red Watch, he'd known friends from the streets or marginal housing who would, every few years, deliberately smash a storefront, or give some stranger a bad lampin', solely for the privilege of being arrested and sent to the Whittington. Cuthbert especially loved how you could look out many psych ward windows at the Whittington and see, in the distance, the bright beech trees and glowing stonework of Highgate Cemetery, where a few blokes he knew from panhandling and sleeping rough sometimes slept at night in the company of Douglas Adams and Karl Marx, both of whom, one imagines, would sympathize.

CUTHBERT FELT MESMERIZED
as the sand cats made themselves, second by second, freer before his eyes. He felt a strong urge to cuddle one, and he stepped closer to Muezza. Unlike the jackals, the cats did not mark their new territory, but there was a pause. The other cats seemed reluctant to part from one another, but at the same time instinctually compelled to do just that, their noses thrusting ahead. They each gradually slipped into tentative stalks, in three different directions. They were solitary at last, but nearly flattened by a flood of need to stalk blood.

What Cuthbert did not perceive was that the sand cats were also enormously preoccupied with Norway rats. These were the “pests” Muezza spoke of. The cats had heard, smelled, and sometimes seen these rodents near their enclosure since their arrival. Now they could perceive them directly, rustling in innumerable shrubs, in service drains, in zoo stores where dingo kibbles and bolts of dehydrated bananas for the monkeys were kept. Aside from human beings, the rats were the most common free animals in the zoo. And now something beautiful was out to devour them.

One of the cats scrammed madly up a very tall plane tree and
disappeared. Another was tooling around inside a black plastic bucket that stood near the door of an adjacent maintenance shed.

Muezza rolled onto his back, right in the middle of the path that led, eventually, toward the monkeys. Although Muezza was real, Cuthbert's hallucinosis enriched the cat's movements, giving each paw a winged grace and fluidity. The cat, freed by a mentally ill man's delusions, was still acting a cat, but even more utterly so than the lions; he seemed a being more animate and sentient than anything Cuthbert had seen in the animal world. Cuthbert's hallucinations were growing more elaborate, and the animals more garrulous and complex: he was imagining versions of the very “souls” that Heaven's Gate claimed all animals possessed. But whereas the death cult saw these souls as crude, infantile demi-spirits, Cuthbert saw whole, mature psyches. He felt deep wonder before Muezza.

Perhaps this Muezza, he thought, if he couldn't help find Drystan or the Gulls of Imago or the Christ of Otters, could at least absolve him, somehow, of his lifetime of guilt and shame.

The cat froze for a moment, upside down, and extended his pudgy legs to a startling degree. It was as if he were trying to make himself as long as a leopard.

Cuthbert had never seen a cat so desperate to be larger. Muezza sprung back together, a recoiling bungee cord. Then he did something Cuthbert had never seen a cat do: he ran around and around in a tight circle, around and around, chasing his tail, almost ecstatically, until he fell and rolled and stopped himself. The cat turned his head toward Cuthbert as warmly as a fellow sleeper in bed. Cuthbert saw something very odd; it seemed to him that the cat was smiling at him. The expression didn't last long—it was not sewn to his muzzle. The cat stood up, shook its golden ears, and gazed at Cuthbert circumspectly.

“Shukran!” said Muezza. “As-salamu alaykum!” The cat trotted
up to Cuthbert, and peered into his face with what appeared to him utter sentience. “Whoever is kind to the creatures of God is kind to God also. Whoever imprisons a cat will imprison himself.”

“Oh,” Cuthbert said. He had to think about that one. It was a daunting notion, implying that a controlling relationship with animals was like trying to control God. He'd certainly been evil toward animals as a child. But did he ever want to control God?

“I've wandered the world like a dead creature for many years,” he told the cat. “When I was young, even after being blessed by the otters, even after my gran's Learning, even after I knew the truth, after Gran died, I
was
wicked to other animals—and to dogs, in particular. It has spoiled me. It has destroyed my soul, and damned me to alcoholism, then to Flōtism. I thought that by letting the jackals out and whatnot, and then you, too, it might help. Just a little bit of help.”

Muezza began to sniff at a hessian mulch mat set along a trail to protect grass seedlings, then at a long, outstretched hornbeam limb.

“So good, so moral,
saliq,
” said Muezza. “What you fail to understand, perhaps because you are too English, is that all are welcome on the Green Path. We say, ‘Come, come, whoever you are, no matter how many times you've broken your vows.' The blessing of the otters—oh, you will see. It never ends.”

“I did not take vows, Muezza.”

“No need to complicate matters,
saliq
. What I mean to tell you is that there are no restrictions now, not even past sins. You've been forgiven long ago. But you must take the sacred path, the Tariqat. This,
this
is the great beginning. You do not understand who you are, do you?” He spoke with an abstracted air, and without looking away from his plant explorations.

“I don't feel forgiven,” said Cuthbert. “I need help.”

Muezza said: “No one can help you now if you are truly ready.
We cannot make you
more
ready. Your ‘help' is the droppings of depraved sand mice beside my golden, jeweled ‘
This.
' The Tariqat awaits you.”

Then the cat added: “Yet, I must say, if you don't mind, that though you may follow the Green Line to Allah, the
dogs
you have mentioned,
saliq,
I do not understand how you could
not
see that they are of little importance anyway, in the scheme of things. To kill a dog is no great sin—you know that, don't you? They are not allowed to set a single paw on the Green Line. And most dogs are dirty idolaters, you may have noticed. They
worship
lowly human beings. Forget your jackals. Or are you a dog? Of course not!”

Cuthbert didn't understand Muezza fully, but he knew he didn't like the cat's slerting on about dogs or people. His own guilt—for his childhood abuse of a dog, for hurting the penguin tonight, but mostly for nothing at all—stung him hard, goading his indignation into something quite ferocious.

“Are you a dog?” the cat asked again, needling.

He said: “Oh, shut it. That's ronk, you, and quite hateful, really. To injure a dog is cruelty, plain and simple.” The image of the injured penguin came to mind. “To injure
any
animal,” he said. He felt angry and charmed and abashed by the cat. “Why don't you look at me when we're having a word?”

“I smell you.” Muezza laughed. The cat pushed his snout deeper into the grassy weeds. “Regardless of what you say, it is very bad that the jackals have been released. They are ruthless. The Shayk of Night, I have heard, has had to end the lives of many of them in the old land. But if you released them, that must be correct, brother.”

“Are you just saying that, then?”

Muezza didn't answer.

Cuthbert felt baffled—and impatient to go. It seemed to him that the cat was either barmy or ill behaved. He stammered, “I don't
know about any Shakey-Fakey-Half-Bakey of Night. But you're getting on my pip, cat,” said Cuthbert. “I said, it's rude not to look at someone when they're speaking. I've got to go. The otters—they've got to be let out of here. Soon.”

The cat seemed to ignore him—like, in fact, a cat.

Then he said, “
Saliq,
let me accompany you, for as long as I can. If you will have me? I can show you, as I said, the Green Line, the One True Path, that leads to the Shayk of Night, and from the Shayk you can find the way to . . . a cure, before Allah. If you really want the cure.”

A feeling of sadness pushed up from Cuthbert's belly, into his throat.

“I think I am beyond a cure. A'm the worst on earth. If it weren't for my brother, Dryst—and 'e's gone missing, as I said—I wouldn't exist at all to any being, apart from my GP a bit.” At that moment, he felt for the first time sure that he would not survive the next twenty-four hours. He had not wanted this, not tonight, not death.

He said, “The soul-grabbers, they are coming to destroy us all. I've failed miserably, cat. I was thinking—was it thinking or was it something else?—that if I could let you all out, there might be a way to prevent the cult freaks from wiping out all the animals.”

Muezza paused for a moment, twitching his ears and glancing at Cuthbert, then returning his attention to the weeds.

The cat continued, “Enough of your self-pity, Cuthbert. There is always hope. You,
saliq,
are carrying the Wonderments. You do not feel it, but you have them, my
Al-Madhi
.”

“You mean my brother, cat. I am not gifted in the least.”

“I do not. I mean you,
Cuthbert
—the last holder of the sacred knowledge of animal speech.”

“'A corr do this,” he said.

The cat pointed at his bolt cutters.

“But you are doing it,
saliq,
” said Muezza, “and you
must
do it. The world of cats depends on it.”

A siren sounded in the distance. Behind the cat, fringing his golden fur, the strong yellow and blue lights from the edge of the zoo popped open like flowers hungry for night. It was clear to Cuthbert now that someone—police officers? the Watch?—outside the zoo had arrived. His time was running out.

“YET FOCUS ON YOUR INSIDES, NOT ON THE COMET
infidels,” Muezza was saying. It was as if Cuthbert ought simply to ignore the perturbing lights. “You
are
the one who will save us,
saliq
. They are coming soon—be sure—the ‘Neuters,' as they call themselves, one of the arrogant Luciferian species. But look to your Shayk for help. Forget the dangers of the night. The Shayk may feel like a knife on your neck, but he is truly the sweet finger of the Almighty within. It is
good
to feel him, brother. He will give you the strength you need. Feel it,
saliq
. Fear not. It
is
the end of Self.”

“All I feel right now,” said Cuthbert, “is torment. And impatience. And cravings for Flōt. I wish I did
fear
something.”

“Oh-ho, no,
saliq.
There is much to fear ahead tonight. When the white Altar of Lost Chances awakes,” the cat continued, “and when all its dead dreams come to slake the thirst of dead souls, and clouds of white seabirds swoop for cheap lures, when the Altar's machinery of lies bursts open, like a fatal ghost flower, and it begins sucking in the souls of all—
that
is when
he
will come, as we always hear and as it is written, like ‘a thief in the night,' and he
will
attack
without mercy, and he
will
sort the good and the evil. And because he is a cat, he
will
rip away the veils on all hearts—and on your cat heart, especially.”

Muezza's little chest, with its yellow-sapphire center, puffed out. He popped up to the balls of his paws, and all his hair stood up. After a minute of stiff, anxious silence, his tawny body deflated a bit, his hairs relaxed, and he intoned, with the greatest of gravity: “Thus, we shall have a decent look at the
thing
—the heart of hearts. It is the whole reason why all cats play with sharp claws. They are always reaching for a thing so very precious, something that must not be let go once it's grasped—the
heart,
brother. Do not forget that. In the same way the platinum prongs of a ring need a ruby, the cat's claws need a human heart.”

Cuthbert considered all that Muezza said. He felt impressed less by the cat's lucidity than by his fey fervor. He nodded for a moment. He took a deep breath, and an answering flutter of arrhythmias tickled inside him. Dr. Bajwa had tried to teach him to get used to his early beats, but they ever vexed him.

He asked darkly, “The Altar of Lost Chances? That's this bloody entire island, according to my gran.” He squinted at the animal. “But let me put this to you, Cat of Wonder, since you seem to know so much: do you know what the otterspaeke phrase ‘
gagoga maga medu
' means?”

Muezza shook his head. “Oh my friend, my
new
friend, I am no expert in languages. You may actually have overestimated my extensive feline powers. But I am sure this ‘
gaga-maga-baba-boo
' means something good and important,
saliq
. I am sure it is something to do with cats, and nothing to do with dogs.”

“You're really on a line
^*
about dogs, little cocker—and that wants no translation,” said Cuthbert. “Now what about that? S'that Islam proper? And it's ‘
gagoga . . . maga . . . medu
.' It ain't to do with dogs
or
cats. It's the words your otters,
your
London Zoo otters, send me.”

“Otters?” asked Muezza. “
Most
sacred creatures,
saliq
.”

The cat disappeared into the vegetation. Cuthbert could see the black-ringed tip of its tail sticking up from a carpet of ivy. It waved drowsily.

“Yes, brother. You have me. Perhaps I'm not a perfect scribe.
^*
But I respect otters—and all living creatures. I don't like dogs, it is true. And rats. You see my weakness. I want to destroy rats.”

There was a pause and the tail stopped cold and stood straight as a reed. “Oh, I smell them everywhere here!” Muezza emitted a short, pained growl. The strange sound was as diminutive and precise as his face. “Rats, brother. Can you hear them?”

“No, I do not,” said Cuthbert. “For some reason, I don't hear rodents. And now I need to go.”

“Ah, see? They are beneath you, too, brother.”

“Oi, no. Nothing's below me. And I'm not your brother. Please don't call me that.” Cuthbert felt a sudden surge of self-loathing, with his West Bromwich childhood on him like piss on chips. “You wouldn't want me anyway, if you knew me. I'm not like you. I'm a Flōt sot is all. And 'a've a brother, and 'e's more of a gent than me, believe you me. 'E's really my better half, see? 'E's the one what's supposed to carry the Wonderments, but I couldn't save him, see? I couldn't. But if I can free the otters . . .”

An old, very sane bitterness was beginning to engorge his mind. “I'm the monster. I'm worse than human, as my ‘dear old dad' used to say. I'm not even sure if I'm alive. I can't seem to live in this country, see? How can I save a single animal? I couldn't even save my brother.”

Cuthbert felt his heart doubling beats rapidly, and a slight numbness in his lips that always came with his worst arrhythmias. He felt angry.

He coughed. He asked, “I'm dying, cat. I'm ninety years old, and I've been in the wars, as they say. Why don't you just run away and take your freedom, like your mates? I've come to help you. It will help me to help you, you see, if you'd only just run away. Please?”

“Gladly,” said Muezza. “But I am fated to assist you, my elder
saliq
. There are greater concerns than me, and even you, that await us. But you released me—that's a bell that cannot be unrung. So I must help you. And I am also fated to devour rats. We must consume the things we can, the things that are good for us, even if they are dirty and
haram
to the mullahs. The rats are all looking for each other, and since they are so stupid—and they can't even bother to address such wise creatures as you—all they usually find are miles of garden walls between themselves. Yet, let us not forget that even these dirty beasts have love for one another. They are continually trying to cross boundaries, not to write them. It is not their fault that they are disgusting sisterfuckers. And regardless of how I feel about them, they offer nourishment to cats everywhere. What could be more important?”

The cat nodded yes for several seconds, then continued: “But the Salafists and the suicide cults and the doomy ultrasonic neural-missile traders—and even your king, Henry—they—”

“Don't cank on my king!” Cuthbert said. “You leave Harry out of your feline philosophizing.”

The cat grinned, but nervously. “Of course,” he said. “I meant some of these—other . . . leaders? I forget my place,
saliq
. Not the illustrious and powerful king, not His Human Highness. But his Red Watch and his bureaucracy of bullying, and all these new human princes and barons and viscounts—they cannot survive without their cruel apartness. And that is truly death,
saliq,
as you have found yourself. The love of death—it binds them to your Luciferian Neuters in outer space, you see. They want to control. They do not see how joined we are to one another. Fools!”

“Arr,” Cuthbert said. “For most of my life, I've been looking for a touch of someone or something lost long ago. I think I understand you a bit, cat.”

Muezza nodded his huge, bat-eared head—he was gesticulating with enormous melodrama. “But even with the infidels, their time of empowered apartness is ending.”

Then Muezza almost spat: “You will see, brother!” The cat began to chase his own tail. He seemed intent on creating his own tiny tornado of golden fur as he spun out of the hedge, yanking a few ivy vines with him, and dancing and tapping his paws on the walk almost brutally.

“What's the matter with you, cat?” asked Cuthbert. He was beginning to think the cat was more than a few sultanas short of a fruitcake.

“Stop that
cat dance,
” he said. “Please, listen now.”

But Muezza kept spinning, and finally, as though whirling off an invisible axis, the cat fell over with dizziness. He lay there, panting hard, half-covered in ivy leaves.

“You daft muppet,” said Cuthbert. “You silly beast.”

He found it very hard to sustain ill feeling for the cat. He fought off a big urge to pet the animal's golden hair, which nearly sparkled with luminescence.

The cat jumped onto its paws. It slanted its head to the side a bit and blinked slowly. Then it began again to scamper around in a frantic circle, spinning again and again and again until it finally somersaulted.

“Forgive me,
saliq
!” cried the cat, sitting up with a dazed look. “I . . . I say . . . I began to feel Allah in me. I do go on sometimes! Even the Shayk has said so. He says I am too emotional. I am a drunk Sufi. Understand: there has been much destruction in my world, in the
secret Islam
. My brothers and my sisters, we used to range from the Hindu Kush to the Caspian Sea to Morocco
and everywhere between. But the Salafists, and the Wahhabis, and all their tyrants, with their nerve-bombs and fatwas and self-righteousness, they too,
saliq,
are part of the death cult, the Heaven's Gate. And they are all part of a larger Luciferian invasion. We must stop them.”

Muezza pointed toward the sky, extending a little pale-pink claw to the east of the zoo, and for the first time, Cuthbert saw the comet Urga-Rampos. It was vast—a glistening spill of cream rubbed fuzzy, but twice as bright as Sirius. It had two great arms on either side, like an airplane with swept wings and a huge contrail. And it was suddenly all too clear (to his spiring brain, at least).
No
question. That's an alien spacecraft.

“Oh, bloody Jay-
sus,
” said Cuthbert. “It's really there! I must go. You're right, about the comet at least.”

“Yes,” the cat said. “It's a sign. A new dark age is upon us—a long night of evil, ruled by Luciferian hands—and there will be no one trustworthy to bear the news. They are coming to London—but where? That I know not. I have heard that their death machines, made of living concrete, are already here, disguised as buildings. And we cats, of the Inner Way, we must hide in the hills—even the nomads, our old friends, will imprison and sell us to certain deaths, things have become so bad.”

“It's clear that this new world, well, it won't be one I can cope with,” Cuthbert said sadly.

Muezza said, “There is a way,
saliq
. In this England of tomorrow, it's true: you will need your wits. You will need intelligence. You will need claws. You will need grace. You will, in short, need to be, erm—you will need to be a cat. So you have nothing to worry about, do you?”

The cat chuckled a little, and added: “But I am your fated friend. That's the difference. I know things. You could learn much from me, brother. For example, I get all my moisture from kills. Impressive,
eh? It's all the liquid I need. Does that make you realize something?”

The cat took on a shy and unctuous expression, and looked down. “I
do not drink
. Because I have been removed, by you, from the care of my keeper—and praise Allah for that—I can only survive if I kill rats. They are abundant in London—praise Allah, again. But I
do
not drink,
saliq.
You could learn from me. I am like a camel, only I am not stupid and ugly and malodorous.”

Cuthbert said, “You're a sober Sufi.”

“I am the Truth, brother,” said the cat. “And you are, too. You, al-Mahdi of beasts, the green saint, the herald, will save us from captivity and destroy the Enemy, and through you will come a new Messiah—the Otter Messiah. We are together this night because all the animals of the earth depend upon it. Your brother, this emir you love, he depends on it, too, I suspect. We are in the Animal Moment. My mythology is your mythology. My green eyes, they belong to this Green Man of England. And in the desert, where we call him al-Khidr—the Green One. Al-Khidr, the one who helps the Sufi wanderer, who carries our desert secrets, just as you carry your forest Wonderments. You have been praying to your Green Man, the saint of the otters, of seabirds, of the holy island. He is your only true British saint—so, but follow the clues. Don't you see them? Your otters—what are they? They are Britain's cats! Nothing more, nothing less. The Green Man looks at you, he sees you, even now. He will
take you over
if you open your heart. You will see. Light will slash across the night sky, and you will see your destiny. Wait until you visit your Shayk!”

Muezza's eyes were in fact gold-green, Cuthbert saw when he looked carefully. A careless observer would call them gold.

“I don't think your eyes are quite what you think,” Cuthbert said, unswayed by Muezza's metaphysical blandishments. “And aren't Britain's true cats . . . its
cats
? We have thousands of them, you know. Millions, maybe.”

“Yes, yes, you're right—no cat should be overlooked. It's just that the otter in England, the otter is
most noteworthy
—and most excellent. The otter is truly sacred. I swear to you: on the soul of your St. Cuthbert, the soul of your grandmother, the souls of all the good people who have ever died on this island, and—”

“Yow're right barmy!” Cuthbert interrupted, laughing a bit. “Yow're silly as a pie-can.”

Yet he had to admit that he felt quietly moved by Muezza's words. He was drinking himself to death, and now, if nothing else, a considerate kitty was looking in on him, trying to help. And he felt responsible for making sure Muezza got some food. He said, “Yes, well, I suppose you must chobble a few rats then. If it's your fittle and all. But I don't want to see it, right?”