Night of the Animals (12 page)

Where was Dryst?

His brother had simply dropped through the floor of the forest. That's what Cuthbert saw. So overgrown was this section of the forest over the less acidic soils around Dowles Brook, that the tributary—coursing fast and wide and flush with rainwater from heavy recent storms—was completely obscured.

He ran a few steps more, and then Cuthbert was shouting out in pain and terror, smacking and rolling down a precipitous bank into a brook engorged and irate, the water pressing against him like icy stones. Neither city boy could swim. Little Cuddy grabbed at branches and grasses, but they were all too slippy or too slight or they cut into his tender boy-fingers. All at once, water rushed up his nostrils and into his mouth. It was sweet-tasting and cold but thick with flora and bugs.

He was immersed in five feet of freshwater, and he was scarcely four feet high. He tried to stand up, but he slipped and fell back, his arms winging. He could not find up. The water rushed into him in gales, in potent torrents, rotating him. His eyes opened wide. Suddenly, as Cuthbert remembered it years later, he was gazing upon a fluid face, a being of brown and white and green wearing a momentary smile, then anger, a pale hand—or a paw?—reaching toward him, desperately.

“Dryst!”

Was it Drystan, in Dowles Brook with him, drowning, or someone else? The visage let out a tremendous gurgling noise and vanished in the water.
Ga go ga maga medu,
the creature must have said. Isn't that what was remembered? Surely, that was it—the being's underwater code—the very voice of otterspaeke:
Ga go ga maga medu.

Cuthbert had breathed deeply at that moment and felt the pain of deathly green-waters entering him—this was it. Drystan gone, and he was drowning, too, and it all felt freezing and it hurt, and darkness everywhere now—then abruptly, a force, some physical force seemed to throw him onto his knees, right-side-up, as if in prayer. Something pulled him out, and it wasn't Drystan. It was rough and animal and very strong. The boy had been pushed up to his feet by an animal. Or was it by Dryst?

But now his brother was gone. He had reached for Cuthbert, and the younger boy had tried to reach back, and he had failed.

He began coughing the water out, struggling to his feet, falling against the brook's bank. He was bleeding a bit from his lip. There were pink mallows across his forearms. Fly larvae cases made of sand grains and leaf pieces clung to his clothes like burrs.

“Drystan!”

There was no answer, and Cuthbert began to sob loudly and wetly.

The visible effects of his tumble seemed slight. Up the slick bankside was a provisional path through the hairgrass and broken reedmace where he had rolled down. A trio of white-throated dippers a bit farther downstream kept submerging their heads in and out of the water.

“Drystan!”

For many, many years after, the next few moments played time and again in Cuthbert's mind until it nearly obliterated him. As the ordinary world came back into his young consciousness, he heard the liquid snorts of Drystan coughs—a sound that still rang, unmistakably and unaltered, in his adult ears today. It was a sickening—a moaning, diaphragm-sucking, braying gurgle that was distinctly mulish and utterly Drystan.

Gugga-hurr-gugcaacaa-hurr!

Poor Cuthbert, erstwhile brave boy, believed his elder brother
had been spirited away by the Boogles and was being strangled by them. He was beside himself, a six-year-old in a new world of trapdoors through which older brothers could vanish.

He cried and cried for his brother, but he couldn't see him.

And next, Cuthbert climbed the slippy bank, trying to make it fun, but he felt scared and worried about Drystan. Steaming green liverwort furred up everything, giving all the rocks and logs a coldblooded, snaky feel.

“Don't cry, Dryst,” said Cuthbert. “I'm coming. I'm all right, you sprog!” This is what he must have said. This is what he needed to think he said—again, for decades to come.

Cuthbert sensed he was lucky—even blessed. Yes, that diamond-dotted, sacred sense—that, too, became a psychic imperative, a way for Cuthbert to face so very many coming years of despair.

When Cuthbert finally emerged from the green tunnel, it was as if he were rising from the floor of the forest.

He waited for Drystan to run up to him, snorting phlegm. A dear boy in forever beauty, forever joy, and forever bluster. But Drystan never came.

“I'm not crying,” Cuthbert wailed. “That was good, that. Was it—” He wiped his arm across his runny nose. “Was it fun, was it? Are you all right, you shitehead?”

He swallowed the lump building in his throat. “I saw one of them Boogles,” he screamed. “I'd bet all the
mu
-nay in the world on it. It saved me!”

After an hour of waiting, Cuthbert backed away from the brook until he found the disused rail line and followed it to the right, back toward Bewdley. The line's rails were long gone, but the path was partially marked with orange strips of cloth. It was in the preliminary stages of being turned into the Wyre Walk No. 3 trail by the Forest Commission.

Cuthbert was talking to himself. “It weren't bad, Drystan. The
Boogle, he was more wike an angel from God, but sort of a mardy angel.” He could not comprehend that his brother had drowned, and he kept talking to him. “Is there other things here, other than Boogles? There's animals, isn't there? There's things with no names and all.”

When he approached a curve in the brook, he saw a farmhouse. A couple hundred meters away or so, the rushing Dowles Brook emptied into the Severn. Cuthbert felt great relief and real exhaustion.

That's when he saw the creature again, the dark liquid swoosh of an animal flying out of the forest. It looked like a hyper little man with a chunky living rudder. It ripped through bracken fronds, low and unseen, but making the bracken wave and jerk like a hundred green pennants. It emerged again and plunged headfirst into the water.

It was a giant, Cuthbert saw, at least a meter long, with a head nearly as big as Drystan's. Cuthbert knew that face instantly: it was the good Boogle under the water wot saved him. Or was it Drystan, become a kind of giant dark cat?

The creature vanished and a few seconds later popped up on the opposite bank of the brook, where it raced angrily back and forth, glowering at him and yikkering in its odd, squeaky manner. The lush vegetation on the other side of the brook, all blue with bugle and speedwell, seemed like a special effect of the sky itself, lowered down for the otter to try flying upon.

He had not seen or heard anything like it in his short life. He was speechless, and soon Cuthbert ran off, screaming and pure doolally. It was as if all the day's events had finally rubbed the last trace of West Brom tough away.

Shadows were beginning to take over the Wyre. For ten minutes, he kept calling out and circling around.

“Where are you? Dryst!”

There was no answer. Cuthbert had cried out his loudest cries, and now he was sobbing, and then he began to settle down.

He would have to retrace his steps and bring back help. It would inconvenience the old relations and his mother. His father would kill him. He thought of his mad aunt Millie, petting her white cat, speaking of the King of Night. That seemed a kinder fate than his father's thin black belt.

He started calling as loud as he could, “Bloody hell, Drystan!”

Cuthbert kept thinking he would find him, in some brambles, gulping for air and shuddering, but West Brom tough and proud. Drystan would hug him and pat his back hard. “Chin up, Cuddy,” Drystan would say to him. “You're safe now. No blarting now, Cuddy. We've got to get back.”

“I saw Satan,” he would tell Drystan. “Or some Head Boogle or something.”

“Well, that's good, isn't it?”

“Is it?”

He could hear his brother now. “Of course. How often do you get that? Besides, you said it was more of an angel kind of thing.” Drystan would push his lips out, making a kind of snout the way he did. “Must be a bit of both.”

Cuthbert would smile, his pale cheeks still shiny with tears, and they would go home. And had Drystan not drowned, they would have done just that. They would have gallivanted home with wild yewsticks in their hands and otter scum in their nostrils, and God's bow in the clouds above the Wyre.

CUTHBERT STOOD UP HALFWAY IN THE ZOO SHRUBBERY
and leaped forward. The process of getting in had been like being unwound into something; he arrived dragging a spool of wet vines and scratches with him, his head squeezed to a screaming red bolus. He tumbleswivled through the holly, away from the perimeter fence, holding his arms over his face.

He burst into the open now, immaculately inebriated, and poised atop a long, narrow bank where the bushes associated with the zoo's main fence all ended and a picket of larch trees took over.

“Now that's a long popple 'round the Wrekin
^*
,” he said, panting for breath.

He looked himself over—a mess, all torn and dirt-rubbed, bleeding underneath his clothes. He was tall and fat and befouled. If grimiest north London possessed an immense, snaking digestive tract, he resembled what it would disgorge. It wasn't inconspicuous. He slapped a greenish-yellow dirt off his old bio-mesh trousers, which had a tendency to break down in rain, and his even older navy-blue
Adidas weather-buffer, whose heat cells had long dried out. He took a few steps through the trees. As he moved away from the fence, an Opticall from the zoo's own system appeared on his corneas:

The time is now a quarter past 6:00 p.m. The London Zoo will close in 15 minutes. Thank you for visiting us today. Come again soon!

He stopped again. On second thought, he wanted to take off the weather-buffer. It was nearly in shreds anyway, but the air was very cool. With its three white stripes partly ripped off one arm, it could be considered sporty only if the game were called Woe; and more practically, a torn weather-buffer would attract attention. He took the thing off, balled it up, tossed it down, and kicked it against a knot of tree roots. He had a reasonably clean, maroon pullover underneath, which he'd haggled for £12.50 at one of the back alley markets in Holloway Road. Printed on its front was a cityscape skyline and the unfathomable phrase “Manhattan 3000,” which apparently made sense to someone somewhere on earth.

He knew he had to mind himself. If a Watchman inside the zoo observed him swiftly walking away from the zoo fence, he would explain he'd needed to take a slash and couldn't find the toilets. (His deeply wrinkled, century-old face, unsmoothed by pricey BodyMods, chewed by Flōt addiction, was more of a giveaway of his status than he grasped.) He was sorry, he would say, very sorry to look suspiciously like someone who had just broken into the zoo, ha ha ha ha! Naff, that!

He walked quickly down the rest of the bank, trying to look unruffled, but he was nearly jogging. He stepped over one of the knee-high rails that ran beside all the footpaths in the zoo. About twenty yards ahead, to his left, was a woman in a glowing-pink nightcape stopped with a glide-pram—oh, a Nandroid, he saw, down from
nearby Primrose Hill. The Nandroid—she had huge, soothing violet eyes and creamy-white, skintone-adjustable digital skin—was looking at a small pack of sleeping jackals bunched together in a corner of their pen. The canine pile looked like the discarded fur coat of the god of cyclones. Since they were among the only animals you could spot from outside the zoo in the park, few paying visitors took interest in them.

The Nandroid gazed at Cuthbert and smiled with a quavering pale chin and a cooing sound, but Cuthbert averted his eyes. He couldn't see the silent baby, swaddled in its ovular glide-pram. He knew that the new aristocracy hired professional Indigent monitors who sat at desks watching dozens of infants through those purple Nandroid eyes, reporting anything suspicious to the Watch. (It was one of the highest-paid jobs an Indigent could get.)

Cuthbert felt uneasily excited. He could hear monkeys whooping, far off, from the other side of the zoo. Their aggrieved Borneo beckoning both charmed and bothered him, and he did not think he should stray far to search them out.

Suddenly the idea of letting any of the animals loose seemed nearly as idiotic to Cuthbert as it would to a normal, well-adjusted citizen. He made an audible
whew!
sound. “Natty, this is!” he said aloud. The baby began to whimper a bit, and the Nandroid started to rock the pram tenderly and sing, in Welsh. It was a song his own gran used to sing to him and Drystan: “
Holl amrantau'r sêr ddywedant, ar hyd y nos,
”
^*
and the melody almost made Cuthbert faint with wistfulness.

“
A hyd y nos,
” Cuthbert sang quietly, with a slight slur. “Oh, Gran.”

The Asiatic lion terraces with their tiered cement hillocks and lily-covered moats were right beside the jackals. He'd seen them
only once before, and he was struck now by their tranquillity. Had the lions ever, he wondered,
truly
ever spoken to him? They were nowhere in sight. The Sumatran tigers, the famous jaguar named Joseph, the black leopard, and all the birds of prey—all silent, too—were just beyond that. For several minutes, he seemed to comprehend that it wasn't normal or even good to hear animal voices.

“Jesus,” he said. “I'm fucked.”

When the Nandroid floated away like a great pink hot-air balloon carrying its gondola, and no one else appeared on the path, he moved in closer to the jackals. There were five, he saw, and he gave them a pained smile.

“What are your exact names, now, eh? Are you lot gonna say something now?”

He squinted at them. They were dirty and weird—real animals, and not genomic clones. They were not like the wavy-haired spaniels he saw on Sundays at the park. They had short, tawny hair and narrow skulls. Their large, sharp ears were filled with white hair. A cape of black hair spread down their backs. Their oddest trait was their lean, elongated legs. They looked like foxes on stilts. The placard on the fence read:
GOLDEN JACKAL
(
C
ANIS AUREUS
),
TANZANIA
.

Of course, a jackal hadn't been seen in East Africa for thirty years. Much of the region was entirely given over to colossal biomesh and “green fuel” farms.

He tapped the fence. Cuthbert said aloud, quietly, “'Allo-allo, chaps. Don't want to talk now?”

One of the jackals rolled over and yawned. Cuthbert got out a piece of his diatom-cinnamon chewing gum. He rolled it into a hard little nut and pushed it through the cage. It fell onto the ground. Like magic, and wraithlike, the jackals all stood up and faced him. A young, lean one thrust its head forward and picked the gum off the dirt with its fore-snout, then jerked its head back to take the gum deep into its maw. The animal backed a few steps away from the
other four jackals. It began to chew. It was obviously a strange, difficult food for the jackal. The movement of its jaws scared Cuthbert. It was too rapid and repetitive, and it seemed as if the jackal couldn't make the process stop. He regretted giving it. The chewing jackal's eyes stayed on the other four jackals, who looked interested and apprehensive. Cuthbert put his palms against the cage. A larger, fatter jackal gazed up at him, panting with a “happy” face. Its mouth was partially open and its glistening long tongue quivered. A sudden, lively feeling, a kind of élan, pushed up from Cuthbert's abdomen, into his neck. He felt his cheeks grow warm and tingly.

“Hi, hi,” he said to the animal.

He decided to have a go at setting his marked finger on a strand of fencing, and the black 9 mm mark he'd scored, he noted, was at least five times the width of the thin fencing. It was evident that his bolt cutters could free the jackals easily—and take on much thicker-gauge fencing, too.

A yellow isosceles triangle on the fence displayed a black silhouette of a hand with an orderly half-circle cut out of its palm. It read:

These

Animals

May Bite

“Better not hold my donnies in the cage,” he said to himself; but he felt that he probably could keep his finger there and no harm would come to him.

“You're only a dog, aren't you?” he said. “I've been off my head, puppy!”

After a few minutes, the jackals began to lurk around their long enclosure, except for the one still chewing the gum. They moved with an awkward grace, as if they might fall off their own legs and
yet make it look purposeful. One animal held its head low to the ground, trotting around like a police sniffer dog. It seemed disturbed by something. Much of the grass inside their prison was worn away, exposing long tracts of dirt patted shiny by paws. A few coarse, raw roots sprung from the soil, like the pale elbows of underwater swimmers in a dark lupine lake.

Cuthbert knew the Red Watch was after him, but he hadn't noticed what the jackal had: one tall, unmantled Watchman striding in their direction, from near the hyacinth macaws.

Some of the jackals began barking in their high-pitched, melodious yaps.

Cuthbert realized that he hadn't moved for a long time. It was time to get going.

As he began stumbling along, he stopped to steady himself with his hand on a short brick wall, then lurched against a small elm tree. There was supposed to be a line painted on the walk somewhere for a self-guided tour, but he couldn't see it. If he tried to follow a line painted on the path, anyone with sense would see instantly that he was stewed. He began berating himself for succumbing to the impulses that had brought him here. “Fuck me,” he said. “Fuck me!”

The lone Watchman bumped against him hard and scowled; he carried his golden neuralwave pike, but he seemed distracted and rushed.

“Stay the fuck to the side of the path,” the Watchman hissed, stopping for a moment. “Indigent shite!”

“Ay, sir! Sorry, sir!”

“Haven't you heard? The whole bloody country's on fucking King's Alert tonight. What's the matter with you? You look like a slapped arse, mate.”

The jackals snarled at the Watchman, who sneered at them, “Dirty dogs—is this your little filthy mate?”

One of the jackals, a large male, hurled itself toward the Watchman and smacked against the fence. The Watchman jumped back, reflexively.

“Shite dogs,” he said, shaking his head. “Should be exterminated.”

The Watchman walked away, apparently not interested in further abusing any creature for the moment. Such a painless departure was unusual and lucky, since Cuthbert was surely on the Red Watch List. At best, the Watch List meant arrest and internment; at worst, an Indigent on the list could be neuralpiked to death if she or he met the wrong Watchman. Officially, Indigents not databased or indentured had no restrictions on movement in Britain, but unofficially, the Watch sometimes beat them away, on sight, from places where the upper-middle classes and the new aristocracy congregated, and this almost always involved checking their compliance status. Whatever negligible power and dignity an Indigent ever held, the Watch List instantly crushed them.

HAVING ESCAPED THE WATCH
once again, Cuthbert didn't feel relief so much as curiosity. Why was England on alert this time? Was the Army of Anonymous on the attack again? He thought, then, that he heard distant sirens, but he wasn't sure.

On the far side of the jackal enclosure, a few zoo workers in loose, pine-colored spawn-ball shirts had shown up. They were beginning to work their way through the series of chain-link fence walkways and double gates that led into the jackal enclosure. One of the keepers, a woman with a short brown ponytail, was staring at Cuthbert. He almost felt she was appraising him as a fellow animal, both absentmindedly and indulgently, like a bosonicabus passenger gazing at the face of another passenger in a passing bosonicabus, then glancing away.

Cuthbert decided that he should leave the zoo immediately. He felt certain that he was about to be found out. That last Watchman may have already put in a call. He needed to come back, but only in the deep of night. Or maybe he could get an Opticall to Dr. Bajwa, tell him he was ready for the Whittington, ready to detox.

Cuthbert strolled down footpaths. They sagged and veered with such wide egressions, and offered so few forks, they seemed designed for people easily bewildered. He felt a little more relaxed, simply moving, but this calm would wear out fast, he knew. Oh, god, he could use another good pull off that Flōt orb in the grotto.

He came to a capsule-shaped white sign that hung on black metal tubing. In black lettering, it read: G
REEN
L
INE
T
RAIL: FOLLOW THE GREEN LINE—YOU WON'T GET LOST AND YOU WON'T MISS A THING!
There was an arrow pointing to the ground and a set of paws, but Cuthbert saw no green line. He suspected somehow being tricked by the zoo. The idea that the zoo had merely placed a reference sign poorly did not occur to him. He clipped along but kept pausing at footpath intersections to read cryptic signposts. A taloned claw denoting Birds of Prey; a single long-necked antelope for the Arabian Oryx's lonely zone; a crescent and stars for Moonlight World. Another sign had the zoological society's initials in animal-skin prints: ZSL—for Zoological Society of London—in zebra, snake-scales, and tiger stripes, above its long-used phrase “Living Conservation.” Cuthbert did not grasp the meaning of conservation, really, but he took it as an article of faith. It had to be somewhere, in some tiny hidden cage or test tube in a back office. Unlike the rest of Britain after the Second Restoration, the fifteen-hectare scalene triangle that housed the London Zoo hadn't slid back to an almost pre-Victorian ethos where the poor, the animals, and the non-English were to be worked, caged, and subtly subjugated. After the Property Revolts, conservation outside the zoo had ended in all but signage and laboratories, and if not for a ded
icated and well-connected core of ZSL scientists, the zoo would have shuttered in the 2020s.

CUTHBERT FINALLY REACHED
one of the two main exits and headed out like a satisfied punter. As he pushed the timeworn, clicking, cage-like turnstile around, a sudden lump of terror seemed to expand in his throat in that bad spot he could never see with his eyes—and just as quickly disappear.