Night of the Animals (32 page)

The prospect of a drink of Flōt now revolted her. As she ran through a few shrubs, toward the big cats zone, her mouth seemed to water, but it wasn't Flōt she desired. Oh, Jesus, thank, Jesus, she said to herself. She wondered if she was a “thinking animal” somehow now. Whatever it was, it drove her forward. Could she read the jackal mind, communicate with chimpanzees, night-ride the elephant soul? She thought, This is crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. But it felt like some new plane, one she would have to walk through and to crisscross to find Cuthbert Handley. It was astral and psychokinetic, a place of tangling dimension-strings covered with fur and reptile scales and timespace flowing with blood. Yet she retained a sneaking inkling that a much simpler explanation existed, for everyone and everything she had encountered in this night were uncannily familiar. In one sense, the zoo's interiors were all her own. Nothing truly had surprised her.

“MUEZZA? BARMY CAT? GONE THEN?”

Cuthbert felt a visceral sadness now, his thoughts like skinless pink tubes snaking around his tummy. He also needed to relieve himself. Why did the cat have to go? Muezza was, apart from Baj, the closest thing he'd known to a friend in many years. He spotted the Green Line again, patchy and worn, and he trudged on, but then he started banging his knees together like a boy trying not to pee; he wanted to find a quiet little corner. He was no longer quite spiring. The soft, uplifting fogs of Flōt were wearing thin, and he could feel a stinging sensation in his penis. Recently, he had begun to piss in his trousers. It was a relatively new inclination, and common among older Flōters, and it contained more than a seed of childish rebellion, but it horrified him. He said to himself, 'twas time to put the mockers on the habit, wasn't it?

Up until about four years ago, he could still enter an Indigent pub—that (just barely) worked. He used to favor the White Lion of Mortimer, in Stroud Green Road. It was a famous dive, insalubrious and half its seats ripped out to pack 'em in, but he felt com
fortable there. Everybody would be spending their dole and eating algae-flavored Discos and cultured-lamb kebabs brought in from the Kurdish joint across the street. Cuthbert even had a few mates at the White Lion, for a time.

But he got too comfortable, as he saw it now. He began to think he was Drystan again, and started, as Drystan, telling “lies” about his brief time at UCL. He grew garrulous. He boasted about how one day he had “dressed down
moi
tutor, Mr. Fusspot Daniels” over the parts of mitochondria, which was almost the exact opposite of what had happened with Cuthbert. He fussed about petty matters, such as whether he received fresh serviettes with every Flōt orb. He fell behind on his tab payments. Finally, one late afternoon, he wet his pants on a pub stool. He'd simply been too unmotivated to get up and go to the gents'. The barmaid, a Polish Indigent with silky red hair, had started punching his arm. “Damn you,” she said. He could still hear her low, succulent voice. “You are too fucking weird for the pub.” But what he remembered best was how good it had felt to be touched with feeling. It had been years.

He didn't dare go into pubs now, even if they were generally safe from the Red Watch.

THE NIGHT WAS CLEAR AND COOL,
and the stars had diminished with the light pollution he was kicking up. Apart from an aching bladder, he was beginning to feel a bit calmer, even with early Flōt withdrawal daggering and dragging down his insides and the growing presences surrounding the zoo. Perhaps he would just ramble for half an hour and go home, and be nothing more than another Indigent tooling about Regent's Park at night. There would be no jackals, no otters, no unctuous cats, no mellifluous monkeys. He would forget the torn-down fence, the goat's head, the Neuters and Luciferians. He would block out his father's beatings. He would
twist out from the strangling yokes of the Wonderments—and he would even put otters behind him.

But he would never get away from the loss of Drystan—not in his long lifetime, and not in another ninety years.

Abruptly, all he felt was that it was time for a slash. He unzipped hurriedly, where he was, and geysered into a sprig of wild mint growing along the brink of the Green Line path. The gibbons began again. “What's that song all about now?” he asked them aloud. As the urine streamed, some other animal howled—a guttural, chittering sort of howl. It was not duet-like; it seemed martial and masculine. Cuthbert felt a little shiver, partly anxiety, partly a pee-shiver, and he looked straight ahead, self-consciously, just as if he were before a public gents' urinal.

He gazed into the sky again for that comet, but a thick, fleeting tuft of cloud again had obscured it. Those culters, Cuthbert thought, arr, they must be gathered inside it now, out of their containers and all, looking down upon the Animal Kingdom, that Neuter Applewhite fellow getting his instructions from Luciferian cabin-mates. Cuthbert wondered what would happen when the craft landed on Earth. The pictures on BBC/WikiNous had shown dramatic tails of high-velocity ice-dust behind the comet. Only dream-skies held such objects, he felt, along with pinwheel galaxies and dripping supernovas. Such things didn't land on planets—they inhaled them.

He considered this Applewhite chap. Creepy bloke—no question. But Cuthbert reckoned that the man in some way connected to NASA, which would account for his confident speeches about space travel in his WikiNous videos. Cuthbert had seen in the
Evening Standard
/WikiNous how Applewhite, who called himself “Ta,” had met his middle-aged woman partner, “Do,” in Houston “We-Have-a-Problem” Texas. Couldn't be coincidence, Cuthbert figured.

Applewhite's attack on the animals grew from his scatty concept that animals “Below Human” existed as earth's most existential threat to the Luciferian soul. Animal bodies were spiritual voids into which the alien soul could, with an erroneous trajectory, sink like an eight ball. While humans had completed much of Heaven's Gate's goal of the extinction of animals through the destruction of ecosystems, the London Zoo and its connected research facilities remained as the world's most concentrated vector of animal diversity. For Luciferians, it was like a giant dish of smallpox germs would be for peoples.

Earth's Animal Kingdom, for its part, knew more about space than Applewhite gave credit, Cuthbert knew. Laika the
Sputnik 2
space dog, Little Joe, Felix the Cat—all had been forced into spaceships, as disposable lives, to guide their countrymen into the stratosphere. He pictured the jackals being led into some canine-engineered spacecraft of their own dogingenuity, shepherded by a Wolf Angel up a great ramp. Cuthbert would have asked the jackals to eat him before they left. He would be like the sacrificial goat, or the architect Tecton who had been turned into seagulls, to become a million pieces of himself, floating in space.

“I'd be a sort of
space
saint!” he shouted. He kept pissing. It was ecstasy, to let it flow openly here. A crushing shame rapidly came into him. He thought, once again, of how cruel he had been to that mongrel, as a child. At least the Russians gave Laika's travails a purpose. He wasn't worthy of Wonderments. But, perhaps, he could work toward them.

He spotted, for a moment, a long, tapering knot of light, to the west, which he thought just might, perhaps, be Urga-Rampos; then it vanished. Was he only going to get one glimpse in his life? He tried to examine the sky more closely. He did not know the stars, their names and such, but why, he thought, should that matter? There was only one celestial object that mattered now, for him and
for all the world. The Heaven's Gaters, he speculated, were somehow going to “switch on” an eternal death mechanism once the cometcraft landed, and all trapped spirits, great and small, human or not, would be sucked in as if into a Hoover.

It was a war. Cuthbert sniffed and turned around, and he pulled up his zipper. That seemed like a good defensive move, for starters. And he needed some sauce, he did. Where in the zoo, he thought, does a man get tipple?

He picked up the pace a bit, walking briskly northwest. Another set of motion detectors snapped on. He heard the same man as earlier, this time as distinctly as if he were standing across the street. “Help me! Bloody help me!” He heard another round of carnal barks and growls. Cuthbert bit down on his index finger. He felt worried. All his decisiveness had disappeared with the cat. He didn't know what to do, what to say, or whether to say anything. But the zoo was looking a bit more familiar. He believed he was heading toward the main entrance gate.

He turned around for a moment, and looked back. It was then that he realized he had wandered off the Green Line.

He caught a glimpse of the old historic BT Tower, sponging up and vomiting a trillion Opticall beams. It looked like the capped top of a great lager bottle. Wasn't far from UCL, really. Was it, he wondered, another mechanism of the death cult?

“No,” he shouted at himself. “Stop, bloody stop—stop!”

It wasn't too late to reverse this tragic night, he thought. He might still send an Opticall to Dr. Bajwa's emergency answering service, or even to the Royal Constabulary. He remembered how he had tugged Drystan's hand with his sweaty little fingers, on the horrible day in 1968, before they plunged into the brook. He had begged Dryst to turn back, away from the Boogles, but Dryst had pushed deeper into the Wyre, screaming “Kill the Mekon!”

But it wasn't too late to stop all this nonsense, was it? With at
least a speck of sanity, he understood very precisely that he was getting into a real bungle-muster tonight, and that it would alter many lives irrevocably if he did not stop soon.

The shadowy green peaks of the Elephant and Rhino Pavilion jutted into the horizon, among which the BT Tower, far away, looked especially minuscule and mannered to Cuthbert. Beyond it, the enormous city was only a glow in the tops of the trees. The stubby pachyderm spires were meant to look like elephant trunks, but they reminded him of the coned tops of old, ruined oast houses he had seen in Birmingham as a child—primitive, simple, and tall as ogres.

Without warning, a set of quick, separate
woops
hit out beside him. They were so loud and dense, he felt he had been thumped on the side of his head. He bolted.
Woop, woop, woop!
He ran for his life, in short, sloppy nonagenarian dog-trots, holding bolt cutters high, but unwittingly headed straight toward the source.

It was the work of a single, black-eyed siamang. It hung in its huge, spindly pen raised on plinths, about ten meters or so from Cuthbert. The siamang was warning something or someone to back off —and very effectively, it seemed—puffing its larynx sac into an impious black balloon. Cuthbert saw the ape, dimly, in its web of play ropes. It was fiendish.

He said in a half-whisper, “Hell's bells! Hell's bloody bells!”

Cuthbert spun back around, his hands trembling, and ran away. The
woops
came like sound grenades, more resonant and deafening than the loudest alarm Cuthbert had ever heard. It amazed and terrified him. The message was as clear to his garbled mind as it would be to any living thing:
get away, or I give you a ball of forever darkness.

Then there were men's and women's voices, from deep in Cuthbert's psychosis. They sounded high-pitched, persnickety, and—for reasons unknown to all but the British Midlands soul—deeply
American. They were repeating certain phrases,
mammals will pass from Earth
and
deactivate the animals
and
render biology void
. The voices slipped down above the siamang's noises, dripping down into the zoo like a kind of contempt for nature, sloshed out of a cup in the sky.

“Oh,” Cuthbert mumbled, irritated and feeling harried, jogging along as best he could. “The culters! They've come! I've no time for otters.” Surely, the great war of the spirits between the Heaven's Gaters and the Animal Kingdom was about to have its first battle. The sounds were a sign as clear as anything. Otherworldly interiors were moving. Pain, anxiety, and failure were its wheel-greasers. He came to a stop. He could not run farther. He bent down, gasping for breath, his heart tumbling. He walked a few feet more, and when he looked up, he could swear that several indistinct figures in white crossed the path, a little ahead of him, near a shadowy pillar of some kind. He thought he saw their white bodysuits, their white Nikes with black swooshes.

“Oh, I see them, those California bastards! Two of them—with a focking camera gun or something,” he said aloud. “Stop, yow focking two-bone Neuters.”

The Neuters' apparent cowardice was no surprise. They would not confront him directly. For a moment, the figures seemed to linger round the tenebrous stone column up ahead on the path, then ran off, cowardly, as Cuthbert approached.

Cuthbert gasped, “Who the fuck are you lot? Come on now! Who are ya?” But he knew the answer, didn't he?

He spoke, in a voice full of false syrupiness: “If that's how
yooo
want to be then . . .” He could not work out where the man crying for help fit into all this. And what of the Gulls of Imago? Did the bloke asking for help have an answer?

The dulcet duet of the crested gibbons rose again, as if in response, singing to Cuthbert like choirboys from mahogany trees:
WITHsul, WITHsul, WE with souls, WE with souls, SO-ouls-ouls-oul.
Cuthbert felt an intense sympathy for the monkeys. He also felt an odd kind of shame for having fled the siamang. It had merely tried to warn him.

With souls!

“Arr,” Cuthbert said, knowingly. “I understand now.” He looked at his hands. The empty one was shaking uncontrollably. He stuffed it into his pocket. His other hand's tremors were causing the bolt cutters to snap open and shut.

He tilted his head, as though listening for the subterranean effects of the gibbon song under the path-stones. He said, “Come now!”

He could not wait for an answer. A profound exhaustion was catching up with him. He wondered whether his liver, or some other major organ, was shutting down, defeating its cheap CoreMods. He had never in his life completed anything important that he had started. The thought riled him. Tonight was going to be different. If nothing else, he would at least like to help the primates have an honest ding-dong with some focking Neuters. He found himself thinking back to his days as an Aston Villa supporter with a firm,
^*
knocking West Brom supporters in the teeth down the pub.

But the Neuters weren't here for a bit of footy roughness.

It occurred to him again that he himself might not survive the night. The idea was not as disturbing as it should have been, but he knew he was ready to do anything to help the animals. What had he to lose anyway, besides the memory of Drystan? These thoughts, so fatalistic, had the effect of calming him. He took his hand out of his pocket. It was still thrutching about, but a bit less than before. He felt very dizzy, and ready to pass out. Perhaps, he thought, he could get a little kip, just a little.