Night of the Animals (23 page)

“Well,” said Cuthbert. “I'll believe it when it 'appens.”

It was not exactly “the moment we stepped away,” but when the
spiring man and his ghost cat staggered from the rough slash in the fencing, the zoo's melanistic leopard specimen—and his name actually was Montgomery—did exit his cage and slink silently into the night. Old Monty, as his keepers called him, was a larger example of
Panthera pardus
—twelve stone, twenty-eight inches at the shoulder, and massive, muscular skull. He did not care about Sufism, or green lines, or Cuthbert's spiring madness, or Anglo-Saxon saints.

Nor was he very hungry, not yet. He was something much more dangerous than that: he was outside a routine he had been habituated to for the nine years of his life in captivity, and he was both terrified and curious.

CUTHBERT WAS SEVERAL DOZEN YARDS FROM THE
big cats area when he was sure that he heard sirens. He could swear, too, there was the man's voice again, a man calling out. His head was playing tricks on him again, it seemed. He wondered what had happened to the jackals. He feared they would come after the sand cats. And how would he himself handle an encounter with them?

He told Muezza of his concern about the jackals, but Muezza only gave a chirpy chuckle.

“I
know
jackals,” said Muezza finally, and rather pompously. “They are really just East African foxes. They are harmless to me,
inshallah
, and thus to you. We can kill them all. But I don't smell them, not anywhere close. I smell monkeys.”

“I don't see how that could be true,” said Cuthbert. “I found jackal handiwork close to here. Bit of a scene, really.”

Muezza shook his head, knowingly. “It's kill-play, brother. Just kill-play.” He swatted out with a splayed paw, as if to demonstrate.

Cuthbert realized he was being preached to in terms that applied
strictly to the feline universe. It was as if he were getting swim lessons from a shark. Try as he might, he would always lack gills, fins, and a requisite shark brain.

The cat continued: “It's the
fel,
the elephant, you must be careful with. This is known to every animal in the zoo. The jackal is only dangerous if you are young, or sick, or old, and there are more than one of them.”

Cuthbert said, “Is that right? How would you know about elephants?”

“How!” the cat hissed. “All the creatures in the zoo know the elephants. I am surprised you would doubt this!”

“I'm still surprised that you're talking. So we're even. I don't even know if you are real.”

Muezza said, “There are three in the paddock—Layang, Dilberta, and Mahmoud. The one called Mahmoud killed his keeper last year. The zoo tried to say it was an accident, but it was not. It was not, after all, Mahmoud who stepped on his keeper's head, it was Allah. And that reminds me, it should be said, too, that the
maimum,
the apes, also, are bad, bad ones. Allah has punished certain men by making them apes and monkeys. They are more a spiritual warning to humans than a physical peril.”

“You like to gab a bit, don't you?” said Cuthbert. “What's all this cantin' business? You should be more careful.”

“Thank you, brother. There is our gossip, of a sort,” said the cat. “We—we imprisoned animals—have little else to do, you see.”

A terrible, high-pitched howl went up, followed by another, then a series of barks.

“That's them!” said Cuthbert.

“Those are not jackals, I tell you,” said Muezza. “They are monkeys—and they are terrifying. The jackals—I sense they are no longer in the zoo at all. They would have left to enter the city. There is news to spread, after all: you are here.”

The cat raised his snout up, somewhat pridefully. He said, “It may surprise you to learn that we chordates
all
knew you were coming. I did, and I have been telling all the other creatures. I am the one who asked them all to communicate with you—because you are the green cat-saint of England. It is no mere accident you have come to me, by the way.” He was silent for a moment, looking all around himself, slowly, as though something might be spying on them. He added, with a hissy sigh: “It is in their best interests.”

Cuthbert felt a chill run up his spine. He was starting to feel as though he needed a drink, frantically. He said, “But others have heard you, too, right?”

Muezza said, “You are the only one.
You.
I think you know the reason.”

The cat put his two front paws on Cuthbert's shin and looked up at Cuthbert. “Among the Christians, the animals spoke on the night of their messiah's birth. This I do not believe. There would, after all, be nothing to discuss. In the Holy Qur'an, it says that not since the days of Solomon have human beings known the speech of animals—‘
O people! We have been taught the speech of birds!
' But now you are here—the Mahdi—to save us from Dajjal.”

“A'm the what? I'm to save us from what?”

“From the Antichrist.”

Muezza coiled tightly around Cuthbert's foot. “You believed in the Christ of Otters, correct? Well, what is the Christ of Otters, brother, but the Redeemer of all, the bringer of the end of days? And who is His harbinger? There is only the Mahdi—that is who. And
you
are him—and you and I and everything and everyone tonight are inside you,
saliq
—that is also true. We may call you the John the Baptist or Cuthbert or something else—but it is the same. They are all the Mahdi. On the authority of Abu Huyrayrah the Kitten-Man, I say to you: Allah will make the night long until the Mahdi comes!”

“No,” said Cuthbert. “I must be
dead
—that's what's happening here. A'm gone—jedded, mate. And
yow
are not real.”

Muezza, standing in front of Cuthbert, blocked his way down the path. “Yes, brother. I am not real, as you say. I am from the dimension of the
jinna
—the subtle universe beneath the one where men live.”

“Oh, that's helpful,” Cuthbert said.

The pair moved on.

He felt baffled and irritated by Muezza's latest claims for him, but he also found it hard not to indulge the idea of saving all the animals.

Cuthbert didn't understand why he hadn't run into the jackals. He wondered if they had indeed escaped into the park and therefore into London. Yet the growling, bleating, baying cacophony stirring around them had increased, especially from the northern areas of the park, where the main entrance lay. And although he mistook them for the vanguard of an alien attack, one autonewsmedia flying drone and a Red Watch frightcopter were already beginning to hum in the sky above Regent's Park, searching for the sources of the disturbance at the zoo.

Muezza fixated on a tall Opticall dish and transmitter from ITN/WikiNous that had spoked high into the air. Cuthbert and the cat could easily see it from inside the zoo.

“It is an abomination,” he said. “Satan's big white spoon!”

It was actually part of an automated news-reporting vehicle, no doubt attracted to the zoo by police Opticall activity. A camera operator and half-literate producer from ITN sometimes rode inside these automatic-news gliders, but human staff weren't strictly necessary—“raw” footage, usually posted with a vocalized caption or two: “OK, coopy-coo friends of WikiNous, we got buckchuck troubles at the London Zoo”—was very popular on the open reaches of WikiNous, even among aristocrats.

For his part, Muezza instantly recognized, in his own way, the tall white stick with a lozenge-shaped dish on its top.

“It's definitely the soul-killing infidel device of Baphomet,” the cat said. “This is a tool from outside the desert, I am sure. This kind of thing is surely what destroyed the Hittites—old friends of the cat. The Luciferians have brought the machines of the great demon, Baphomet.”

It made all too perfect sense to Cuthbert, yet it was the agitated animals
inside
the zoo that concerned him more. Something, if not jackals, or someone, was upsetting them.

Above the din, there also now floated a siren-like, glissando duet. Cuthbert had never heard such a song. It emitted from a pair of crested gibbons, who, like so many of the zoo's specimens, were the only of their kind on earth who had ever lived in the wild. The melodies rose up and up and vibrated in the wind like red paper streamers. They were not far from Cuthbert, it seemed, and he felt excited, but puzzled, too.

“Do you know that wonderful sound?” he asked Muezza.

The cat said, with rich condescension, “It is an unpleasant noise. I have heard it in the zoo, but never seen its origin. Yet I know the sound: some kind of
apes
. These monsters are upset because the Shayk of Night now moves around the zoo. They are warning other apes. They despise cats, so they despise you, too, Kitten-Man, my Mahdi.”

“It is impossible for them to be against me. They don't know me from Adam. And I don't look like you or the Shayk or the lions or any cat.”

“But you are not part of their stinking monkey race,” the cat said.

“Are they—the apes—against the otters, too?”

“Yes, of course. I told you: otters are Britain's
natural
cats. They are more
cat
than your stray moggies of Hackney.”

“Of course, you're wrong on this bit, I'm sure. You're barmy and
absurd and I won't listen to another word,” said Cuthbert. “That monkey, erm, monkey madrigal sort of thing, well, it's the most beautiful sound I've ever heard, it is. It's bostin.”

The cat said, “Yes. You are right, about its beauty. But it does not honor the Shayk, or you, or Allah. Apes do not love God. They don't even love other apes. They love violence and anger. But what you say, I will believe. You are the correct one always and—”

“You're talking bloody flannel now,” said Cuthbert. “I'm a kind of ape, you know.”

Muezza laughed so hard he had to roll onto his back. His fat golden paws stuck up, quivering.

“The Mahdi, he jokes now. It's very funny. This is ‘dark' humor.”

“I'm a human bloke,” said Cuthbert. “I am a primate form.”

“This is very humorous,” said Muezza. “But it is time for me to leave. I have many deserts to cross, to spread the news, that salvation has come to all the cats of the world.”

This upset Cuthbert. He felt he was beginning to love this mixed-up sand cat. He felt that a connection between human and feline had been wrought, even if clouded by the cat's messianism. In the loneliness of his Flōtism, creatures who approved of him were rare.

“Please,” Cuthbert said, “don't go. I will be your Mahdi.”

“Of course you will,” said Muezza. “But go I must. The end-times are upon us, and I have hundreds of rodents to slaughter. I say, thank you, Abu Hurayrah, thank you, Kitten-Man, thank you, al-Mahdi, thank you, O Lord of the Wonderments. I will see you again, someday. You shall see!”

“Ridiculous cat,” he muttered.

CUTHBERT FLOUNDERED FOR
a few moments, searching for the Green Line. He heard the apes singing again and turned to
ward them. He felt he might as well locate the ape singers and ask
them
what they meant. He tripped several more motion detectors as he stumbled on. Bunch after bunch of lights snapped on. From a distance, near the edge of Regent's Park, the switching on of the lights looked eerily floral, full of glimmering white-pinks and white-greens, like the aurora borealis. But up close, on the other side of the zoo fence, where authorities were assembling, the lights appeared harsh, as if some rough wedge of white was being hammered into the aged zoo, spuming out from its southeastern corner and into its sternum.

For a while, Muezza and Cuthbert walked together toward the pretty notes, and then the cat slunk away to his ivy-covered secrecies of Sufi dreams.

“I'm not any savior,” Cuthbert slurred aloud, thinking the cat was still beside him. A hideous self-pity filled him. “I'm not al-Mahdi. I don't know why my gran had to tell me about any focking Wonderments. I'm a Black Country fool, and I've accomplished nothing.”

But he had achieved something: five jackals, three sand cats, and one black leopard were now free.

WHEN THE ORANGE-FREQ ALERT WENT OFF IN INSPECTOR
Astrid Sullivan's eyes that night, it was just about the last thing in the world she felt able to cope with. After years of a relatively happy recovery from Flōt addiction in Flōters Anonymō, Astrid was one of the few Britons to make it to the agonizing second-withdrawal from Flōt, which typically occurred around a dozen years after first withdrawal. She hadn't been able to get over to Highbury's public pool that day for her usual soothing, salutary swim, and she felt especially bonkers. As a senior constabulary officer, she was allowed to set Optispam and adverts to “off,” but she couldn't stop King Henry's official bulletins (no British subject could)—and she couldn't stop a fucking bloody orange-freq.

The freq's flame animations lashed across her corneas. The alerts were meant to shock officers to attention, and they worked. A steady accompanying pair of
eeps
and
zungas
screamed and clangored into the auditory ganglia, so directly they turned eardrums into minuscule audio speakers. If one stood beside a recipient of such orange-freqs, one could
hear
the victim's ears. The sensate
assault on Astrid's skull could hardly clash more with the familiar damp basement kitchen of the old Seamen's Rest, where she was making—
trying to make
—her famously vile tea for her Flōters Anonymō meeting.

Eep, eep, eep, eep! Zunga-gunga-gunga!

“Can't,” she said, nearly whimpering. “Can fucking not. Not now.”

She put her fingertips up to her eyes and flicked off the alert's text without reading it. She could get fired for that, but she just didn't care. The digital fire in her eyes stopped, but the noise wouldn't until she read the bloody thing, and soon it would transform into a steady chittering shriek. Should she read it? No, no—not yet.

Eep, eep, eep, eep! Zunga-gunga-gunga!

The basement had a badly cracked cement floor painted the color of rotten oysters. A small SkinWerks panel squawked with SkyNews/WikiNous in the background. A seaweedy, salty smell hung in the air.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

“Fuck!” she gasped, trying to tune the noise out. It was a skill she was growing fairly adept at, along with her newly acquired compulsion to swim laps at Highbury pool, which often seemed to be the only way she could settle her mind and body. She got on her knees to reach two enormous steel teapots on a lower shelf, ancient pots, greasy things with decades and decades of orange-black flame marks up their sides and their Bakelite handles in spidery cracks.

THAT THE POLICE OFFICER
tasked with after-hours alarms at the London Zoo was herself a Flōter might seem a mordant coincidence. But so pervasive was the desire to “get up,” few institutions lacked their share of active addicts, and the Royal Parks Constabu
lary was no different. If you were Indigent or middle class, and not yet living under a Nexar hood at a Calm House or in soybean-farm serfdom, the defining Scylla-or-Charybdis quandary of the mid-twenty-first century was how to survive the attractions of Flōt versus the milky-sweet promises of the suicide cults.

What made Astrid special was that she was one of a few hundred Flōters in the country who had managed, for now, to break the addiction.

But only just. After eleven years dormant in FA, the dragon of second withdrawal was upon her. Astrid felt incensed it had come to this. She'd done what was suggested. Despite attending meetings semiweekly, volunteering often for tea duties, working with newcomers, relapse and death genuinely threatened her. She couldn't sleep, her muscles hurt, and she endured a daily yearning to push her thumbs into her eyes and gouge out her prefrontal cortex. There were the Flōt cravings, too, of course—cravings that hooked up from the belly like a long silver claw.

THE SEAMEN'S REST,
operated by Methodists, was in a forgotten All-Indigent corner of the Isle of Dogs. It was a place she felt she'd consciously condemned herself to in London's struggling Flōters Anonymō community.

She heaved the two pots onto the steel sink counter.

“One last time,” she said to the teapots. “Up there, you.” She was awake, and alive, and she hadn't evidently topped herself yet. But she wasn't doing tea-making duties again—ever.

The FA meeting merely rented its space at the old Queen Victoria Seamen's Rest, commonly called “the Queen Vic.” It was the biggest hostel for Indigent seafarers in Britain, but now it served more as an anachronism from the days when nonautomated ships deposited crews in the Docklands for shore leaves where brothels,
barrooms, or the Queen Vic were the only alternatives for accommodation. It was a great, ramshackle pile of Portland stone and brick. Atop the Rest perched a three-foot-high statue of an eagle with a noble hooked beak and indomitable steel eyes. The figure was a little weird, but Astrid associated it with recovery. Eagles protected things, she'd think to herself.

Astrid had left work for the evening a few hours before, and a sickening heaviness now squatted in her stomach. She was getting her bearings, and the continuous
eeeeep!
screech had receded in its power to annoy. “Can't I get one night without an alert?” she said, a whine battling her low, thick voice.

Her two orange-freqs that week had been about young aristocrats having sex at night in the Inner Circle rose garden at Regent's Park, which struck Astrid as rather romantic, really. But couldn't the constables deal with that by themselves?

Taking a long breath, she tapped her eyebrow and called up the dismissed alert text:
Hello Insp Sullivan! Possible to pls. Opticall me? Lamps on @zoo. Sorry! PC JL Atwell.

The screaming stopped.

The zoo.
What?

The new probationer—Jasmine Atwell. She was canny, too canny, thought Astrid. PC Atwell did everything by the book, and the upshot was extra work for everyone—at least until her regular sergeant came back from his latest weeklong sickie.

Lights on at zoo? What did that mean?
At the zoo?
False alarms and security-lamp trips were nightly annoyances in the royal parks because of the homeless Indigents who used them to sleep rough. The constables on call at night were unofficially encouraged to pay little heed to the alarms until they invariably stopped. But one at the zoo? A bit odd, that, thought Astrid.

Astrid was more dutiful than many of her colleagues, but she wanted to wait, this time, just a few minutes, before responding.
She needed to calm herself. Her Flōt withdrawal hurt, and it made her feel bonkers. She felt stuck in a sort of cramped, curvilinear awareness with her mind as bare and dark and rubbery as the inside of a cracked tennis ball. Her heart pounded. The zoo! It wasn't the English republicans shooting Mark 66 rockets at Hampton Court, right? It wasn't even a purse snatch. Besides, she was also busy saving her own life, wasn't she? To do that meant finishing two enormous, miserable pots of tea. That's how FA worked.
Serve and recover.
A dozen fellow recovering Flōters, several drug addicts, an old-school alkie or two, and a few plain old psychic bomb-outs—nearly all Indigents—would be showing up within minutes, whinging about tea. Everyone, it seemed to her, complained that her tea was not made early enough, then complained about the tea itself.

Tea done? Tea done? Ooooh, good girl, loovly, loovly—but it's a bit thin, innit?