Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  But the jackals were not following clichés. They were obeying scent. From southwest of their broken pen had floated the intoxicating reek of the Children’s Zoo—sweet loafs of mule manure, oats, damp poplar, and yesterday’s spilled Mars chocolate drinks. The Children’s Zoo was the oldest of its kind in the world. It had in the 1930s caused a ruckus among the fellows of the Zoological Society of London, who were aghast that the public might be too amused. As far as they were concerned, the hoi-polloi’s most advanced questions of zoology involved matters such as the number of lemon Jelly Babies a given animal could eat consecutively. But as often happened during the experimental postwar period, the zoo’s uncommonly arty secretary, Julian Huxley, was adamant: amusement was intriguing, and it sold tickets. It was Huxley’s idea of safe, direct access to benign animals that made it the most unguarded of all the exhibits.

  The Children’s Zoo was meant to look like an old-fashioned, working twentieth-century farm. It contained a half-size red barn with white accents, a miniature sty for the hogs, and a bank of wire rabbit hutches. Near the barn, a colorful set of panels posed questions for children. Is it true that goats will eat anything? The display was supposed to look like a set of stables, and you lifted little wooden “barn” doors to view the answers. Actually, goats are fussy! At the London Zoo, they are offered a blend of oats, barley, linseed and soya . . .

  The jackals were not fussy. Two young bitches leaped over the picket fence and barreled toward the barn. Outside, in the corral, the llama let out a high, pulsing set of orgles. These caught the attention of the jackals, who paused and gazed at this Peruvian oddity for a moment, then roved toward a three-sided oak shelter where the llama stood.

  It was a young, ungelded male, piebald with a black “mask” over its eyes. It bucked forward, darting and kicking. The jackals tried to nip at its cloven toes. They barked maniacally. The llama emitted piercing screams. Every time the jackals tried to get beneath it, it dribbled them back. Soon, a third, male jackal appeared. It scrambled into the fight with a fresh energy and tried to climb up the haunches of the llama, gnashing its teeth, frantically pulling up hanks of woolen hair like a boy who’d dropped all his pocket change on the ground and was trying to grab every last coin. But when the llama spun around and began to cough, it seemed to startle the jackals.

  A bolt of dark slime shot from the llama’s mouth onto the male jackal. The substance was greenish and plentiful, at least a pint. It hit the jackal like an angry smack, spattering over its head and neck. There was a strong, sour stench. The dog whimpered like a puppy, and began circling pathetically, chomping at its own back like a dog chasing its tail. The bitches broke off the fight, and crossed the barnyard, away from the llama. They sniffed at their unlucky brother, and tended to him, but the stench was powerful and disturbing.

  The pack members preened themselves for a full ten minutes, stopping to howl in ragged chorus, and to bite tenderly at one another. Soon, the two other male jackals released by Cuthbert appeared. There was a general refrain of pack-joy, a violent merriment.

  We catch we kill we eat we live!

  The llama, which had calmed down, watched them stiffly. It had defeated the canines, but they could find easier prey.

  The jackals howled again, in furious bliss, and trotted along the edges of the corral, sniffing at a sun-blanched Ribena sip-bag and a tiny green butterfly hairclip and a lost £10 coin. Two stopped to lick at the glistening snails that crept up the fence posts at night like darkness’s very jewels.

  Eventually the pack began ducking into the barn, one by one, stalking, then as a pack. With the spring, the keepers left the main door open in the evening. The mule, especially, enjoyed the cool air. Sometimes, a starling or mockingbird would fly in and perch on its hay feeder.

  When the mule finally perceived the jackals, she neighed stridently. She was a strong, old creature, a retired draft animal whose mother was a Clydesdale and father a favorite beach donkey from Anglesey. She started kicking at the stable walls. It sounded like she would beat the place down.

  One by one, the jackals slipped beneath one of the stable doors. Behind it, they found the two poor, tethered goat brothers. They were sweet, blond billies who were fawned over by children. Aside from the occasional cruel boy, they had never seen a predator in their lives. Now they faced their most ancient enemy, the same species who had chased their wild ancestors in the Zagros foothills of Persia.

  The jackals set upon one of the goats all at once. Within a few seconds, the pack had managed to wedge part of its liver out. The other goat bleated in horror, kicking repeatedly from the stall’s corner, until the jackals massed upon it and brought it, too, to the hay-strewn floor. Each of the goats, conscious and in shock, choking, could feel the dogs rooting in their insides, the snouts digging for their meek, soft hearts. In their caprine minds, there were picture-thoughts amid the agony: a grassy meadowland; buckthorn berries on sugary twigs; a range of granite massifs climbing to ever higher playgrounds of stone. And then the pictures stopped.

  The mule, in the opposite stable stall, who thought of the goats as small, equine associates, brayed without end. Soon, the llama began screaming again, too, and from there another wave of anxiety washed across the entire southern end of the zoo.

  Cuthbert could not see any of this, but he could hear it. It was clear something ghastly and heartbreaking had happened. Neither inebriation, delusions, nor hepatic brain-fog could screen the shock of it. He did not want to guess at the details, what harmless being was being torn to pieces. What had he caused?

  “Damn, damn, damn,” he said to himself.

  Soon, another new set of cries rose. There were feral chitters and dumb groans. So many animals, in an uproar again. It seemed to Cuthbert that, perhaps, his great plan to free as many animals as possible was causing only universal torment.

  He stood still, taking it all in, angling his head to hear every detail.

  “Bugger,” he said. After a full minute or so, the noises abruptly stopped.

  He remained on the path near the jackal kennels, not sure where to go next.

  “Blessed bloody Jesus.”

  He started swinging his bolt cutters with one hand, back and forth, until the loose handle scraped against the ground. The security lamps blazed like daylight. Everything had seemed so straightforward moments before. There was an existential danger to all Britain’s—and the entire earth’s—animals, a threat posed by the Heaven’s Gate cult, by social disorder, and by widespread apathy toward the animal kingdom. His solution had seemed magnificently simple: just let the animals out—all of them. He had not seriously considered that the freed animals presented any danger to the caged ones. What am I doing, then? Stop me, God, help me! He tried to visualize St. Cuthbert, a living statue, the ice on his legs getting licked by an otter’s tongue, his flesh scoured with the enzymes of miracles.

  “I pray to you, St. Cuthbert,” he said, quite earnestly. “For help and for comfort. I pray to you—please!”

  A man screamed, far to the north in the zoo, where Cuthbert had not yet ventured. Cuthbert was sure about it—it was a man. He could not make out the words. It sounded like “No!” or “Wolf!” Cuthbert remembered that the otters were in the north section of the zoo.

  Then, for nearly the last time, Cuthbert was able to step back from everything inside him for a moment. He could see how enormous and real this trouble had grown. While any experienced zookeeper knows that zoos normally echo at night with unhuman sounds, Cuthbert didn’t. To him it was as if something bigger than anything he knew was booming in his head. He did not know how to drive it from his brain, into the world, to expose it. The animals were grabbing it and running with it all by themselves.

  A garbled thought came to him: he could still stop everything, he believed, if he only Opticalled Dr. Bajwa. There was the Opticall address in his wallet. He’d seen a few of the venerable red phone boxes in the zoo, all fitted with passé neuro-optical matrices, but functional enough if
you didn’t have any SkinWerks handy. He imagined Baj in his surgery, frowning at him, but not without kindness. Baj would wrap a long linen healing cloth around his skull. The fabric would suck away the sickness like a great swab. Baj would press an iron bracelet into Cuthbert’s palm, and place a curved knife with square emeralds in its handle before him as a gift. “There is your kirpan. You are very Sikh now!” he would tell Cuthbert. “I am certain!”

  But Cuthbert was plenty Sikh already.

  A STRONG BREEZE AROSE, cooling Cuthbert’s face. He held still in it for a moment; he could feel his trouser legs, rippling. The wind made him feel a bit better. He closed his eyes—the easiest way for most Indigents to turn nighttime Optispam bursts completely off—and he watched glowing shapes and swirls on his eyelids, all shadows of optical adverts and headlines that would normally light up if he opened his eyes (though Cuthbert’s brain had learned to bypass much Optispam “noise”).

  Keep your hair on, he thought to himself. Play it cool, now. Such self-therapy, he knew, was hopeless: he might as well have been fire, telling itself to become orange gummy worms.

  He squeezed his eyes shut tighter. He saw floating gray crescents that stretched into scimitars. Drifting discs metamorphosed into skulls. The longer he watched the patterns on his eyelids, the more ornate and creepy they grew. There were tiny scrimshaw designs now, needle-etched in marine bones, with dead sailor faces painted in tobacco juice, afloat in his head. He snapped his eyes open. Was it a siren he heard? Was that the otterspaeke gagoga maga medu? Was that the song of St. Cuthbert, the otter song of exoneration, or the sound of seawaters smashing into this island nation? Were his prayers being answered, in an otter-language peculiarly well suited to the middle of the twenty-first century? If that was so, he mused, he had gained a wonderful ally against the false Heaven’s Gate. He would gain absolution for his childhood evil. And perhaps, yes, a cure for his Flōt addiction. There would be much to be happy about, really. When the otters slipped into the Regent’s Canal, a great greenness would explode over Britain, a verdant bubble-shield against the death cult. And would he see his brother? Would he get to give Drystan a kiss and a cuddle, and tell him how sorry he was to have failed to save him, so many, many, many years ago?

  For a moment, Cuthbert felt a bit of plain, golden-green delight. No state of mind would seem less appropriate for a well-adjusted human being in Cuthbert’s circumstances; it was another bad sign. Were his EEG available at that moment, the high spikes and shallow valleys of euphoria would be unmistakable: it was Flōt withdrawal—a very bad case. The feeling of joy jarred him to the soul, but it soon passed.

  “Don’t feel like meself,” he said aloud. “Where’s Cuthbert?”

  Where indeed. He did not even resemble himself—he was standing tall, and sucking in his stomach. Instead of his usual fearful, parted lips, his weak, wrinkled, nonagenarian grimace, he glared ahead and scowled. He felt strong and anguished and ready to act. If madness and sanity sat upon opposite ends of a seesaw in Cuthbert’s head, madness could be lifted no longer, and the old Cuthbert was gone, launched into the lunatic sky.

  a way out for animals

  CUTHBERT NOW FELT, WITH A CERTAINTY ONLY A psychotic, withdrawing Flōter could muster, that he would get the jackals out of the zoo. But he also understood, if hazily, that unless the animals found the comparably small and well-concealed hole he’d earlier cut in the perimeter fence, which seemed unlikely, they would be stuck. He hadn’t considered this detail, and he felt irritated, and worried—though not nearly as worried as he ought to have been.

  To Cuthbert, the problem of his personal safety with jackals on the loose seemed minor, though it was far more real than he knew. (As late as the 2030s, in Cyprus—where the last wild population had lived—jackals still dragged the occasional child or old woman off to her death.) A defenseless Flōter, shaky on his illusory stilt-legs, would pose little challenge to a few of them. In any case, he needed a safe way to guide the jackals, and all the animals, out into the city. Meanwhile, the jackals had dissolved, gone liquid brown, and the night had drunk them in. They seemed not just part of the dark now; they were darkness itself, tearing blue flesh from the day and secreting it in their bodies with howls. The vistas around Cuthbert were dominated by canid colors and crass shadows that concealed all light and all graceful things. He felt he had undoubtedly done right to liberate as many of them as possible. Yet he could not expunge the sounds—murderous, gash-filled, so close by—from his head, and in this they were like all things that gnashed his soul.

  He began walking south, toward the main glow of central London. It was a kind of dirty aurora, and it seemed more distinct because of the park’s expanse of darkened sports pitches sandwiched between the zoo and the city outside. As he proceeded, he tripped more and more of the motion detectors, switching on more arrays of lights. They followed him like camera flashes. Every few moments, he would also see lights from others parts of the zoo snap on. The jackals were on the move, too.

  In a few minutes, he came to the southernmost point of the zoo’s interior. It was the place where, on the other side of the main fence, the Broad Walk in Regent’s Park and another footpath intersected, forming the tip of a great pointer directed toward Marylebone, and beyond it busy Oxford Circus and Centre Point. During opening hours, it was one of the spots in the zoo where all visitors turned around.

  There was a maintenance shed and a little white Cushman electroglider. In the bed of the Cushman were a few big peat moss bags, a safety cone, a pitchfork, and a couple of metal buckets. An orange electrical cord was plugged into a socket above its bumper—its molten salt batteries were charging. Cuthbert sat on the white vinyl bench-style cushion of the microlorry and touched the steering wheel with his fingertips. Then he slammed his fist into the horn. Berp! He hit it again. Berp! He got up and walked over to the shed. He jiggled the doorknob—locked. He circled around the shed and realized it had no windows.

  While behind the shed, Cuthbert saw something quite interesting. The zoo’s perimeter fence, in this concealed section of the zoo, comprised just two short panels. These panels formed the squared-off tip of the entire zoo enclosure.

  Open this “tip,” open the zoo.

  Cuthbert worked his way through a bramble toward the fence; he tangled his foot. He pulled up half the underbrush behind the shed, revealing bare ground covered with snails and glistening black mealworm beetles.

  Near the fence were a few old, thin tree branches he broke off. It had the effect of opening an enormous vista of Regent’s Park.

  Directly in front of him, on the other side of the fence, was the ornate Readymoney Fountain, that Zoroastrian fantasy of marble and pink granite. As a frequent rough-sleeper in Regent’s, Cuthbert had long known that it readily offered neither money nor water. But it did, reputedly, offer something he valued: luck. At least, that’s what many of the homeless Indigents who slept in the park believed, and they often bedded down near the pavilion-like Victorian structure, for security.

  Cuthbert set down his bolt cutters and pushed against one of the sections of the fence. It was loose. Heavy wrought iron, painted black, it had sharp, barbless spikes on offset shafts. An animal could easily be deterred, if not killed, trying to cross it; yet though substantial, the fence was ill secured. He surveyed the damp ground into which the fence was planted. He went back to the Cushman and grabbed the pitchfork.

  It took him only a few minutes to chop away and expose the fence’s staking bars. The soil came away effortlessly, like chocolate cake. Cuthbert could not believe how easy it was.

  He stopped to rest and looked up. He plunged the pitchfork into the ground and let it stand. Where was Urga-Rampos? Where would the comet stop, precisely? (Clouds still veiled it a bit.) Soon, the sky started spinning and Cuthbert grew dizzy and lost his balance. He crashed sideways, tumbling onto another dreaded holly switch. The fall was made more treacherous by a short, young stand of ornamental bamboo. But Cuthbert’s bulk simply crush
ed it all. He felt prickles from the holly along the side of his leg. A little slit came open on his trousers at the groin. Though he had fallen hard, he felt no pain whatsoever, only the slight prickles. He no longer registered stings the way normal bodies do. In fact, he felt grotesquely amused.

  “I’m coming apart,” he said. “Damn me trazzies!” He lay there for a minute or two. He thought he heard the squawk of a loudspeaker, and voices. He clambered to his feet. Was it the Watch? Or the Heaven’s Gate cultists, coming for the animals?

  Within a few minutes, he was able to push the fence down far enough that he could get his feet onto it. With his considerable weight, the old man simply “walked” up the fence and flattened it. He fell again, forward this time, onto the soft, grassy turf of Regent’s Park proper. He staggered back to his feet. He looked at his handiwork. Pressed into the ground, the fence’s line of spikes all pointed out, to the open park, like a road sign.

  The London Zoo now had a twenty-five-foot hole in it. It was big enough for an elephant to shamble through. And the location of the breach—at a tip of the triangular zoo—could not have been more favorable for a freed wild beast looking for a way out of the zoo. A single clever, brave person—or a clever, psychotic one—would be able to flush any wandering creatures toward the tip of a natural funnel.

  Cuthbert did not think of these tactics quite so logistically, of course; he didn’t yet grasp how effective his idea might prove. There was more than a passing blip of joy in openly destroying part of the perimeter fence. It was the elation of a vandal—fleeting and culpable. And something was wrong, too. His euphoria, and some of the decisiveness that attended it, were fading. He was beginning to feel sullen and shaky and irritated and close to the ground, whose gravity felt as strong as Jupiter’s. His Flōt spire was wearing thin, his psychosis plateauing.