Night of the Animals (34 page)

“Arr,” said Cuthbert. “Sweet gorilla, yes—but beware of the night. And I have a question: have you heard of the Gulls of Imago?”

“Ah,” said Kibali. “You've been to see the penguins. They are stubborn things. I know nothing about the gulls, except that, I am told they're white—and not very beautiful, and that they like to eat chips and rubbish.”

When there was a hole of sufficient size in the cage, the animal stepped daintily out and made for one of the lime trees beside the zoo's perimeter fence. Cuthbert watched the beautiful animal heave itself up to a thick low limb, pull itself across the fence, and drop out of sight. Kibali did not need to be shown the opening Cuthbert had made earlier. Nor had the chimpanzees, who had already crossed Regent's Park and reached Baker Street. But when Kibali crossed the perimeter fence, the whole night went public. More Met and autonews Skydrones would be dispatched. The Red Watch, undoubtedly, would begin a general crackdown on any nearby Indigent “disorder.” There was now a four-hundred-pound gorilla loose in the city. It was the stuff of
King Kong
and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Even King Henry would have to be awakened.

CUTHBERT DECIDED, AT LONG LAST, THAT HE
needed to find the otters, before it was too late, before the dream of finding Drystan ended. The sounds and sights of battle were growing around him. He managed to find one of the pedestrian tunnels that led to the northern areas of the zoo. The green painted line went right into the tunnel. Three strips of tiny blue bioluminescent lights dimly lit the way. Cuthbert felt strengthened when he saw the pastiche of Paleolithic cave art that covered the tunnel's walls. Rusty orange-colored aurochs—a kind of extinct cattle—trotted along with black hooves high, as though eternally jumping something. The zoo fences—that's what they were jumping, he thought. They were free, these big orange bulls.

If things got very bad, here was a good place to hide, he thought. As he exited, he saw one of the ancient red phone boxes off to the side of the path, and he hesitated.

“OK, Dr. Bajwa,” he said aloud. He went into the box. There were only a few such call boxes left in Britain, and the zoo kept it as a kind of nostalgic throwback for tourists. It was audio-only and fea
tured a real working handset. It offered no WikiNous interface—just direct audio Opticalls to people. The overhead light remained on around the clock. The box was strangely pristine inside—none of the things you could find on the kind of phone box Indigents used for cheap WikiNous interfacing—no stickers or cards for prostitutes, no smell of urine, no chewing gum wads pressed all over the glass panels. It also took coinage, something only older people, like himself, tended to use.

He picked up the handset. It felt strangely big and unwieldy. He dug the £1.30 out of his pocket and, unnecessarily, inserted all of it into the Opticall coin slot with a shaking hand. He uncrinkled the piece of paper Dr. Bajwa had given him with his WikiNous cryptograph. He punched it in with shaky hands. The phone rang twice and a woman with a singsongy voice answered, “NHS Élite Doctors' answering service. May I help you?”

“Ar. Tell Dr. Bajwa I'm . . . in the zoo. I've come for the otters and all.”

There was a coughing sound, then the woman said, “Excuse me, sir. What's your name, sir?”

“Cuthbert Handley—savior of animals.”

“Um, well. Handley, is it? Can you spell that, surname first?”

Cuthbert did.

“You're Dr. Bajwa's patient?” she said. “This is an emergency? Dr. Sarbjinder Bajwa?”

“Arr, ma'am.” He was slurring again. “Tell him a'm in the zoo right now. Am yow g'ttin' this?”

“It's all going down,” said the woman. “I believe the doctor's down in Kent for the weekend—flying his solarcopter or some sort.”

All at once, Cuthbert fell backward, pulling the bright yellow handset down with him. Such was his weight that the handset, cord and all, detached like an old banana picked off a bunch. The door
of the box flung open and he found himself halfway in and half-out on the ground. He felt dizzy. He threw the phone away and got back to his feet, using his big cutters to help himself stand up, like a crutch.

“There,” he said. “It's done.”

And then he heard them, reminding him of his task—the otters, surely:

        
Gagoga maga medu, gagoga maga medu,

        
Remeowbrooow, Cuthber-yeow,

        
Anglish water ish arg forever groad,

        
Cuthber-yik-yik-yik-yik, mray for rugrus!

Gagoga maga medu
meant what? He did not know, he thought, and he might never know, but the rest he could work out. It meant, in otterspaeke,
Remember, Cuthbert, English water is our forever road, St. Cuthbert pray for us!
Three separate thoughts, gurgling and ungilled. It was the end of meaning at the moment just before drowning. For Cuthbert if for no one else, the nonsense meant
exactly
that there was still reason to hope in Britain in 2052.

“Arr, I'm coming,” Cuthbert said aloud. “Sweet, sweet boys, a'm coming at last.” He started walking again.

A police solarcopter's spotlight found him and trained its shaky beam on his every move, and with the light from the heavens streaming down, Cuthbert reckoned time was running out.

He began to hobble along more quickly, toward the otters, but after a minute of pressing on like this, he found he was lost and out of the spotlight—his normal state, really. The solarcopter's pilot was inexperienced and applied too much pressure to one of his rudder pedals, and the spotter lost Cuthbert and couldn't seem to find him again, for now.

“Shit,” Cuthbert said. “Thank god.”

He wished he could find one of the zoo's map-signs. He did remember that the otters were located at coordinates “2B,” which Cuthbert interpreted as a kind ontological code.

Through shivering lips, he said, “Or not to be—that's the palaver.”

The air had turned frosty as a great western fold of stratus clouds finally scudded away for good.

Urga-Rampos had become shockingly visible. When Cuthbert saw it this time, it hit him like a kind of antibeatific vision. Its center showed feathering gradations of light, dozens of overlapping white petals. Its long arms had turned into two pallid, satanic horns. The comet itself seemed to be aiming straight for the ground, tearing the sky open. It looked constitutionally
wrong
for England. It was too big and showy and nocturnal, a multifoliate rose from an evil galaxy far away from the Milky Way. Nothing very English about that.

With one nostril missing, a body racked by Flōtism, insanity, and poverty, and his clothes in dirty, torn strips, Cuthbert faced the comet with what could be regarded as astonishing courage. He held his blood-caked fists up and shook them at the comet. He screamed, with a hoarse voice, “In the name of Saint Cuthbert! You've no right to come here!”

He fell down again, in exhaustion, on all fours, his bolt cutters clanking down, and said, “And we've got otters! Good English otters!” He was beginning to suffer acute liver failure. In fact, his skin was turning a sickly yellow-greenish hue, and Cuthbert's life was ending.

At last, Cuthbert had become the Green Saint, just like the statue in the old churchyard where his grandfather's grave was lost. He held a new power now to bring others, too, into his shimmering faith. He was the al-Khidr, the Mahdi, and now he knew it as much as he could know anything. He grasped, too, that his iden
tity in England had always been written in the water of Dowles Brook, and in the songs of the otters since the Day in 1968 when he left the world and become someone else. Ever since, he had awaited this moment—this canonization.

St. Cuthbert the Wonderworker, the harbinger of a new animal Christ, had arrived.

LIKE MANY OF THE ENCLOSURES,
the oriental small-claw otters' exhibit was deceptively hushed at night. The otters' nocturnal habits were only in part disrupted by the zoo's diurnal cycle of daytime visitors and nighttime imprisonment. They remained active denizens of the dark and tended in the wee hours to inhabit parts of their enclosure not seen by zoo guests.

St. Cuthbert's arrival was anticlimactic—at first. Much like at the Penguin Pool, he encountered no movement, no sound. On the sloped walls of textured concrete that made up the fake riverbank were tarry spraints of the animals, smeared and rubbed in by successive paws into marks that looked like a frenzied Sumerian cuneiform. The spraints released a strong, distinctive smell, like jasmine tea. The dung's smell of wildness gave St. Cuthbert confidence and calmness, and he was quick to act on it. Gripping his bolt cutters by their foam handles, he bashed beak-like hardened steel blades against one of two thick glass panels, which allowed guests to view the otters' underwater antics. The effort paid off instantly. A divot of glass popped out and water spouted out onto the walk. St. Cuthbert began jabbing the beak into the hole and easily worked open a gap as wide as a stove. Green water sluiced out in a roar, and St. Cuthbert stood back, staring fixedly and biting his lip. It took about two minutes for the entire enclosure to drain. The California comet aliens were everywhere now, swirling
in the sky, screaming through crackling megaphones, roving the zoo to obliterate the souls of all living beings in Animalia. But St. Cuthbert, the water coursing over his feet, stood now in his little islet of English sacred reverie, his psychotic Lindisfarne.

The moment the water stopped rushing, the entire romp of the London Zoo's small species of otter appeared and leaped down through the gap, pouring out in one quivering, shiny, river-bottom-colored whoosh. It was as though they were, together, the last and most precious thing in England to be emptied from it, a half-water and half-earth being made of golden-brown jewels and smelling of stolen foreign flowers. They were seven animals in all, with the huge and now fully pregnant female at the center of the family, swanning forward with a certain lumpy majesty. Two males, “on point,” as it were, and yikkering softly, fronted the romp, thrusting their noses out to smell for food and danger and water.

The big female turned to St. Cuthbert. He dropped to his knees. He slapped his hands onto the wet pavement of the walk. He thought he heard her say, “
Gagoga maga medu,
” but he couldn't be sure, could he, really?

“I, I, I, I, b-b-b-b-b-beg you,” Cuthbert stammered, falling over and curling up. The cold air, combined with his withdrawals, was making his teeth chatter, his tongue turn to fluttering leaves. “Take away my—my—my sick head. It dunna work royt en-
nay
more.”

You have freed us
, the otters said.
Look at yourself, St. Cuthbert—and call for the Christ of Otters.

But my Flōtism? What about that?

Go to the lions. They will take away all your misery. You will save England and all its animals tonight.

St. Cuthbert began to weep. It seemed clear the otters were suggesting his martyrdom.

No, he said. I dunna want to see en-
nay
loyns.

It's the only way to stop the soul-mongers. Through your salvation alone, St. Cuthbert.

No, he said. Tell me, tell me a different way. Can't I find the Gulls of Imago? He said aloud, repeating the song of the penguins, “Seagulls of Imago, yow're song shall make us free . . . from Cornwall to Orkney, we dine on irony . . . along with lovely kippers from the Irish Sea.” He belched.

You will free the lions, and the gulls will come, and they will set right the arts of the world, at least for many years. They will put the machines of evil back to their original, good purposes.

Must I die? When? Why? What do I do?

But the otters weren't stopping to chat. Long used to the hundreds of incongruous scents in the zoo, they nonetheless sensed the great disturbances in the night. They were keen listeners, and the sounds of the solarcopters and the screaming chimps particularly terrified them. They moved as one, first west, then south toward the unmistakable smell of the dank water of Regent's Canal. Before St. Cuthbert could lift his head, they were out of sight.

He felt mournful and newly devastated and very tired. He could see, indeed, that his skin's color had darkened to a distinct green. It may have been magic, but it was also multiple organ failure.

As he stumbled south, through the cave-art tunnel, keeping off the paths now, and made his way toward the area of the big cats, he stopped at every enclosure, paddock, and cage he could, releasing as many animals as opportunity afforded. He swung open the great rear gate of the elephant paddock, and Layang, Dilberta, and the fierce Mahmoud came lumbering out. The giraffes and nervous okapis proceeded from their large faux-African diorama gingerly. A threesome of yipping fennec foxes from Algeria came out in a playful sprint, tumbling over each other, ready to cavort with any creature that was game. The shy black-and-white tapir named
Gertie, from Malaysia, had to be pushed along from its leafy pen by St. Cuthbert, then shoved, but it soon returned to the safe-smelling imported plants, cowering. The cow-like anoa from Sulawesi, a pair of Andean pudús, and a quintet of pert peccaries from southern Mexico—all of them trotted out quite happily and expectantly, as if their enclosures had merely been expanded.

As the saint walked on, freeing all manner of mammal, reptile, marsupial, and bird, a question he hadn't counted on began to trouble him: had all these animals really
ever
spoken to him?

Yes
, answered the lions.
Don't be a fool, for at the sound of our roars, sorrows will be no more.

But he wasn't so sure. For a few moments, he began to suspect that his mind, under the influence of decades of abuse, had been playing an extraordinary, elaborate ruse. There was a strange feeling of unreality almost suffocating him, as if every part of the whole crazy night itself had been thrown into outer space, and all he had left was a dark, unbreathable vacuum in every direction for a trillion miles.

BY THE TIME
St. Cuthbert had reached the Asiatic lion compound, the London Zoo was being overrun. Because much of the hubbub from the police and autonewsmedia was near the northeastern end of the zoo, the animals naturally fled in the opposite direction, toward its southern tip, where St. Cuthbert had so effectively created his huge hole in the main fence. It was a funnel, and through it the screaming beasts were about to spill into London like unruliness itself, in scalding streams.

At the same time, in St. Cuthbert's mind, there was another, even scarier presence invading the zoo. More and more, he could see flashes of white-bodysuited Luciferian Neuters, gliding unnaturally, as if on wheels, and drawing silver quantum contra-fluxal
staves that popped out of their wrists like long daggers. St. Cuthbert knew they were coming for the animals, and that both he and the Red Watch must do everything to try to stop them.