Night of the Animals (16 page)

CUTHBERT OPENED THE DOOR AND LUMBERED
into his old IB, No. 1102. The locks were gone, but it didn't look as if the Watch had tossed the flat. It was stark—dark and vacant, mostly, just the brown-stained tiling on floors and walls and hundreds of empty containers. If the Watch had been here, they hadn't taken anything, and miraculously—probably out of fear of the Watch—it seemed as if none of the IB's resident thieves had touched a thing.

“Fuck me,” said Cuthbert. “I don't bloody believe it.”

He plopped down in a white butterfly chair placed before a small, ancient Philips TV that picked up digital signals from old “relic” transmitters left in place for Indigents, normally beamed straight to WikiNous. This was a familiar vessel he sailed upon to visit various continents of despair. Dozens of empty two-liter bottles of cheap cider, bitter, and lager encircled the chair like limpid, amber buoys, along with countless drained orbs of Flōt. The remote was in the chair's pouch-like seat, and Cuthbert had to dig under his rump for it. He was too big for the chair, and one of its
splaying metal rods pressed into his kidneys, but the chair comforted him, and he wanted its bad pleasures to take him over. He switched on the TV. He waved his hand across the tops of the various bottles around the chair until he found an old, cold Flōt orb with weight in it; he grabbed it and guzzled hard.

There were fresh animal voices then, and they said,
Remember, St. Cuthbert.

Cuthbert sat up in his chair, and shook his bottle at the air. He said, angrily: “Take this away, St. Cuthbert, will you?” He took another great swig and hurled the bottle across the room. He closed his eyes. He began to weep as he felt his legs grow long.

“Cuthbert—Drystan,” he said. “Someone.” After a while, the Flōt settled him a bit. He felt calmer, almost able to judge matters.

The news was on. For all his disorder, Cuthbert actually enjoyed watching the news, and especially the royally imprimatured BBC/WikiNous. Once the dull election coverage was over (it was obvious Harry9's hand-chosen new LabouraTory man, in this case one of the former prime minister Tony Blair's sons, would be elected as his prime minister), he began to watch more carefully.

“The enemies of humanity have struck again,” read the presenter. “What may be one of the worst mass suicides in history has occurred, once again, in the American state of California, coordinated with at least a few thousand self-murders—and animal killings—in Britain, as well as, once again, in India, in Korea Hana, and the Nigerian Federation.”

On the screen was raw video footage—the crude automated news-reporting so popular on WikiNous—of the aftermath of a mass self-murder by the most diabolical of the cults, Heaven's Gate. A camera was being toggle-driven through a sort of dormitory. Lying neatly in bunk beds, on stiff-looking backs, were dead people with purple cloth triangles covering their faces. Beside every bed was a large nuplastic set of drawers on wheels. In the video, the
drawers were opened slowly, revealing horrifying contents: inside each were all manner of small, freshly poisoned “voided” animals. There was a black toy poodle, a set of roan cavies, countless cats and kittens, robins, an iguana, hamsters large and small.

As the footage continued, Cuthbert felt almost dizzy with rage and sadness, and a sense of guilt—but he could not stop watching.

This latest Heaven's Gate affair, which was all over WikiNous, had thrown Cuthbert off his usual dolorous paths; it not only disturbed and obsessed him, but it also seemed somehow
directed
at him.

Yet the BBC/WikiNous's coverage was contemptuous, and Cuthbert ate up every morsel. Suicide was considered, in general, degenerate and disloyal to the king, and despite his own history and addictions, Cuthbert felt no love or compassion for suicides; indeed, he felt compelled, as a citizen, to keep abreast whenever these cults hit hard.

A stocky reporter with a Welsh accent spoke in a mocking tone: “Michael, the victims have now been identified by American investigators but their names are being withheld pending”—the reporter rolled his eyes—“family notifications. We're looking at an appalling sixty to seventy thousand victims this time, mostly in Southern California, with a total of more than five thousand deaths in other locations—including one in Hampshire. Crucially, the cult's reputed current leader, Marshall Applewhite III, does not seem to be among the dead.

“It's standard Heaven's Gate,” the reporter continued, “a typical, cowardly operation—coinciding this time with the comet's appearance in the night skies. We have no figures on the animals, but with Heaven's Gate, one normally sees a couple dozen animal corpses along with each human body. It's . . .
reprehensible
. As per usual, the self-murderers are identically clad in long-sleeve white shirts, white trousers, and white Nike trainers. A second videotape, apparently shot just before the killings began, depicts the members
in these outfits with
HEAVEN'S GATE AWAY TEAM
patches being sewn on their sleeves as they smilingly accept their fate. It's the same horrific modus operandi we've seen from the Gate since they first struck, way back in 1997. The king's spokesman has already released a statement condemning the action.”

“Appalling,” the presenter said to the reporter, who nodded.

Cuthbert said aloud, “I hope 'ole Harry gets them!”

The fact that the king's own Red Watch were also trying to hunt
him
down did not mitigate his feeling of loyalty to the Crown or its policies. Cuthbert was many things, but despite the protests of his youth, he was never a revolutionary.

He jabbed the remote's power button so hard with his thumb that there was a slight cracking sound from the device. He stood up but lost his balance and fell down onto a cluster of empty nuplastic bottles. He lay there for a long time, moaning softly. His feeling of anger soon evaporated, and he couldn't work out why he was on the floor in his old flat, trapped.

The dark orange light of evening splashed through his curtainless windows. It was an awful, coarse flush of illumination, and he felt unprotected from it. Then there was a strange sound. For a moment, he swore someone was knocking on the flat's door, softly, shyly, like a lost child. It stopped. After several minutes, it began again,
knof
. . .
knof
. . .
knof
, and he hoisted himself up.

“Drystan?” he asked aloud, his voice shaky. “That . . . you? YOU? Dryst?”

His heart pounding, he trudged to the door and yanked it open. He felt dizzy, blind with fear. It was the skinny-faced boy from outside the IB, earlier. The child's pale lower lip trembled. The scalp below his cropped ginger-brown hair showed delicate blue veins. All the bravado of the group and his speedfin were gone. He was about the same age as Drystan when he vanished, Cuthbert realized.

“You,” Cuthbert said. “You?”

“I'm sorry, sir, I'm sorry. But I wanted to say don't mind my mates, right? They're gonk-bags, right? We just wanted to tell you that, right? You won't Opticall the Watch, will you, for, like, harassing you? Sorry, sir.”

“No,” said Cuthbert. “Never.”

“Thanks, mister. And I hope your lions and tigers all come here. I really do.” The child dashed down the dark hall, and Cuthbert closed the door.

Cuthbert went to the kitchen for some instant coffee. He shook some freeze-dried crystals right from a jar into his mouth and chewed them up. Then he vomited into the kitchen sink. The coffee trick worked, as always. He felt awake. And a little mardy, too. He kept ruminating about the poor animals killed by Heaven's Gate, but then he was just as blameworthy as the cultists, too, wasn't he?

Cuthbert had read excerpts of “belief statements” reprinted from the cult's notorious WikiNous stalk. This Marshall Applewhite III fellow—by all accounts a gentle, but sexually tortured son of a Presbyterian minister—had with an uncharacteristic ruthlessness demanded that his followers not only look down upon animals, as Cuthbert's father had, but also divorce themselves from
all
that was animal within and without them.

That genuinely puzzled Cuthbert.

“We really need to be moving away from stinky little sad animals, my fellow travelers,” said Applewhite in one video. He spoke in a cloying, singsongy tone that Cuthbert found off-putting. “You'll see! When our great ‘Gate' awakens, in merry olde England, you will all see. Right here in London, my friends!”

Animals were on the very lowest level of a deteriorating “assembly line” that produced souls like cartons of solar plugs or bosonicabus engines, according to Applewhite. Household pets such as Osman were crude, aspiring demi-souls trapped at a lower level of
existence, and waiting in anguish to join the higher level. Beasts of burden and wildlife were less worthy yet. When a human died, professed Applewhite, sometimes a conniving animal soul would take over the human “container” and win its slim chance to grow. Animals were, at best, disposable objects, at worst, organic “vessels” loaded with damaging demi-souls.

The cult members, Applewhite claimed, were on much more august metaphysical footing than either humans or animals, naturally. They were neutered—many cultists chemically sterilized themselves—members of a faraway alien race called the Luciferians. They occupied the top of Earth's production cycle, evolving far beyond all other beings. They were not killing themselves but merely shedding their “containers.” Ideas of ecosystem or an interconnected biosphere were hopelessly terrestrial illusions—“scams,” as Applewhite put it—and once the cult's “Level Above Human” had finally left Earth with the “comet's” arrival, the planet would merely be a dangerous spawning mechanism.

“We're going to be getting out of here?” Applewhite said, ending nearly every sentence with a rising-question tone. “We're going home and it's wonderful?”

Applewhite's words rattled Cuthbert and prompted a flurry of febrile questions in him. What if the cultists went after the zoo animals before he had the chance to free them? And what if this Applewhite scoundrel hurt the otters? Then he might not see Drystan again.

If Urga-Rampos, reaching perihelion for the first time in four thousand years, had been the cult's signal to move to the “higher level” and to join their alien brethren from outer space, if the comet was
still,
days after the mass suicide, supposed to be visible even to the naked eye in bright London, if all these things were true, and England was ending and Earth a broken soul-machine—well, then, his time for action was short.

Perhaps the great comet had already landed, in London? Where would anyone find it? Near the embassies?

“Oh, who focking knows?” he said aloud, almost huffing for air.

But the otters, he knew where to find
them
. The average British citizen didn't know it, but otters were the sacred mascots of Albion, as precious as cattle to certain Hindus. If nothing else, he must release them; and, yes, along the way, he would also release as many other creatures as possible, of course, opportunistically or methodically—it didn't matter. The more free animals to face the coming attack of the death cult, the better, he reckoned.

It was all, of course, a florid delusion. But there it was, for better or worse: Cuthbert Handley, a working-class Flōt sot from Birmingham, had to save the animals.

HE FELT FAMISHED; HE WAS TREMBLING. VOMITING
had made him hungry. He got out a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie he had been saving, as well as a leftover block of Golden Syrup cake from the cupboard. For the past few days, he had been eating nothing but vacuum-sealed mackerels and instant treacle cake—and drinking cheap supermarket swills such as Longbow cider. He liked to eat at least a pie a week, but he still considered meat pies a luxury, since each cost seven and a half pounds at Tesco.

To preserve their traditional image, the Fray Bentos pies still came in old-fashioned, flat tins. Cuthbert opened the tin with a can opener whose nuplastic handle was melted badly on one side. He put the oily lid in the sink. He touched the rubbery surface of the uncooked pastry with his fingertips. There was a red-orange film of grease on the pastry. He licked this off his fingers, and got the lid from the sink and licked that, too. It was salty and metallic, and this reminded him of the blood he tasted if he brushed his teeth too harshly.

He pinched off a corner of the manufactured treacle cake, and chawed on that. It was beautiful, he thought, really beautiful stuff.
Count on McVitie's! The thousands of dead frugal members of Heaven's Gate apparently frowned upon the enjoyment of food. For their last meal they had “splurged,” he read, and ordered thousands of turkey pot pies at a particular chain restaurant in America. They stacked their plates for the busboys. Cuthbert loathed turkey. A beef kidney—that was a feast. He carefully placed the pie in the oven. He could hardly wait for it to puff up.

When the pie was cooked and he'd finished it, he rooted through all his drawers and closets looking for dark clothes and something dark to rub on his face. He located the electric torch he kept underneath his bed; its solar-cells had run down, and it offered only a meager glow, but he still thought he should take it.

He could find no shoe polish. He did find an old case of dark brown eye shadow; the nuplastic cover was dusty and smeared with something sticky, but the makeup itself looked perfectly untouched. It was something from the days, years ago, when women and sometimes men would still touch him, perhaps even stay in his bed. He stood in front of the mirror and dabbed a little of the substance on his chin, then wiped it off with his sleeve. He leaned toward the mirror and stuck out his tongue. It seemed pale and thick, like a cod fillet. He still couldn't see any lump in his throat, but he remained convinced something was in there.

He'd thrown a pile of suitable clothes on the toilet seat. Cuthbert undressed. He did not like to see his naked body in the mirror. It was bruised and veiny and his stomach was distended beyond mere mild obesity. The doctor had explained that his liver was in, as he put it, “not great” condition, and he wasn't clearing fluids as well as he should. There was a red patch the size of an apple beneath one of his breasts. He hadn't the faintest idea what it was or what it meant, and he gratefully yanked a black jumper over himself. Trousers were another problem. He didn't own simple dark ones, and many plausible pairs that used to fit had grown too tight
in the last few years. He ended up pulling on some old, dark gray pajama trousers that didn't really look like pajamas; they were “loungewear,” he said to himself, and though loose and saggy, they had two big pockets.

It was well past dusk when Cuthbert put on a black training cagoule he hadn't worn since the 2010s (it had an Aston Villa patch on its lapel, with a lion and the word
PREPARED
in claret on a field of blue—and he feared, for good reason, wearing it around Finsbury Park's Gunner fans). He left his IB in a hurry. Just as he walked out of the IB's atrium, he saw a flash squad of the Red Watch pull up to the estate in two red-and-gold gliders. The Watchmen scampered into the building, neuralpikes held high. They were so focused on rushing the IB building, or perhaps because of Cuthbert's disguise, they completely missed him. It was, to the say the least, a whisker-close call.

He took the No. 29 back down to Camden Town. No one had looked at him askance on the bus, of course, but that's not saying much—he was in Camden, an Indigent zone, and the pubs were just closing. He saw a haggard couple he knew from a mental health drop-in center he used to visit in Kentish Town when such services still existed. They sat on a blanket outside Camden New Tube station with a small ratty dog, a border collie of some kind, but from the border of a very morose nation; they were selling carnations whose stems had been wrapped in faux-palladium foil. No one was buying, naturally, and Cuthbert kept getting jostled.

The flower sellers were thoroughly cabbaged, as far as Cuthbert could see. He waved at them and leaned down and looked at the sad pink carnations, but they didn't recognize him. He remembered the woman, who had long ginger hair—they'd played Master Mind Air a few times at the center and had a tea. But she was off her box, that's for sure, and Cuthbert felt a bit jealous of it. For a moment, he felt a sense of being very different from the lost
souls he saw on the blanket. The public were not looking at him with pity and contempt. Did they sense who he was? Could they see the Wonderments in him?

“Maybe I can stop all this bloody business,” he said to himself. He could go home, pour all his Flōt down the toilet. He would pick up around the flat and clean himself up. He would put on his old silver-flecked necktie and go see Dr. Bajwa and tell him he was ready to be healthy now. He would throw himself at the king's mercy, which he fervently wanted to believe in.

He was beginning to sense that this king and his Watch had no mercy.

“Don't you two remember me?” he asked the two. They held carnations toward him but seemed to look straight through him. It was clear to Cuthbert that Nexar hoods or Flōt had melted his old acquaintances' brains.

A drunk bloke, a guy in one of the new Burberry “frilly polos”—probably some commodities trader of rapeseed futures, out with the mates among the Indigents—put his hand on Cuthbert's shoulder. “Hell-loo!” he said, in a Scottish accent. “You're a real bamstick!”

Cuthbert ran.

“Waitsch!” the yob was calling. “Just waitsch! Bam! Bam!”

CUTHBERT WAS GLAD
to escape the ruckus around the New Tube station. He quickly made his way down the wide pavement of Parkway toward Regent's Park. The night air was cold for the eve of May Day, but it felt fleetingly balmy as he came upon the big old oak and sweet chestnut trees—once part of the vanished Marylebone chase of Henry VIII—that signaled the edge of Regent's district. A crisp breeze stirred and he shivered. He was near his beloved zoo.

WITH THE RIGHT
TOOLS,
it was easy to get into the park itself at night, if not the zoo. It wasn't Buckingham Palace—no spinning spike-wheels or crenellated walls capped with broken bottles pushed into mortar. He threw his leg over a low ironwork fence, well concealed between two bushes, and that was that. He made his way through a strange, manufactured, medievalesque playground, and past a famous sculpture called
Wounded Elephant,
which looked like a granite boulder melted. He'd seen it in the day and not been impressed, but he found himself stopping now. It was some kind of save-the-whales propaganda art. He sniffed it.

The smell—ancient, like frankincense, like lost time itself—reminded him of a cellar; he thought of the crypts of the old parish church in Worcestershire, in whose soil his grandfather, Alfred Wenlock, the wheat farmer, was supposed to have been buried. Cuthbert had never met the man, of course—he'd died when his mother was a mere four years old from the flash pneumonia traceable to a gas attack at Ypres. Henry had never met his father-in-law Alfie either, but he was the only human being he had ever truly spoken of with an odd respect, and Cuthbert wondered if his own father would have been more humane had the wheat farmer not always been, essentially, a ghost.

It was rare—too rare—that Cuthbert could feel self-pity, but he momentarily sensed the depth of his own unfair treatment, profoundly, and felt a righteous anger whenever he thought of the dead grandfather he had never met.

“Why didn't you protect us?” he said aloud just then. “Why not? All we had was an old woman—and the otters.”

Cuthbert began to sob, but he soon stuffed the red ropes of pain back down his throat and made himself stop.