Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  “I’d be a sort of space saint!” he shouted. He kept pissing. It was ecstasy, to let it flow openly here. A crushing shame rapidly came into him. He thought, once again, of how cruel he had been to that mongrel, as a child. At least the Russians gave Laika’s travails a purpose. He wasn’t worthy of Wonderments. But, perhaps, he could work toward them.

  He spotted, for a moment, a long, tapering knot of light, to the west, which he thought just might, perhaps, be Urga-Rampos; then it vanished. Was he only going to get one glimpse in his life? He tried to examine the sky more closely. He did not know the stars, their names and such, but why, he thought, should that matter? There was only one celestial object that mattered now, for him and for all the world. The Heaven’s Gaters, he speculated, were somehow going to “switch on” an eternal death mechanism once the cometcraft landed, and all trapped spirits, great and small, human or not, would be sucked in as if into a Hoover.

  It was a war. Cuthbert sniffed and turned around, and he pulled up his zipper. That seemed like a good defensive move, for starters. And he needed some sauce, he did. Where in the zoo, he thought, does a man get tipple?

  He picked up the pace a bit, walking briskly northwest. Another set of motion detectors snapped on. He heard the same man as earlier, this time as distinctly as if he were standing across the street. “Help me! Bloody help me!” He heard another round of carnal barks and growls. Cuthbert bit down on his index finger. He felt worried. All his decisiveness had disappeared with the cat. He didn’t know what to do, what to say, or whether to say anything. But the zoo was looking a bit more familiar. He believed he was heading toward the main entrance gate.

  He turned around for a moment, and looked back. It was then that he realized he had wandered off the Green Line.

  He caught a glimpse of the old historic BT Tower, sponging up and vomiting a trillion Opticall beams. It looked like the capped top of a great lager bottle. Wasn’t far from UCL, really. Was it, he wondered, another mechanism of the death cult?

  “No,” he shouted at himself. “Stop, bloody stop—stop!”

  It wasn’t too late to reverse this tragic night, he thought. He might still send an Opticall to Dr. Bajwa’s emergency answering service, or even to the Royal Constabulary. He remembered how he had tugged Drystan’s hand with his sweaty little fingers, on the horrible day in 1968, before they plunged into the brook. He had begged Dryst to turn back, away from the Boogles, but Dryst had pushed deeper into the Wyre, screaming “Kill the Mekon!”

  But it wasn’t too late to stop all this nonsense, was it? With at least a speck of sanity, he understood very precisely that he was getting into a real bungle-muster tonight, and that it would alter many lives irrevocably if he did not stop soon.

  The shadowy green peaks of the Elephant and Rhino Pavilion jutted into the horizon, among which the BT Tower, far away, looked especially minuscule and mannered to Cuthbert. Beyond it, the enormous city was only a glow in the tops of the trees. The stubby pachyderm spires were meant to look like elephant trunks, but they reminded him of the coned tops of old, ruined oast houses he had seen in Birmingham as a child—primitive, simple, and tall as ogres.

  Without warning, a set of quick, separate woops hit out beside him. They were so loud and dense, he felt he had been thumped on the side of his head. He bolted. Woop, woop, woop! He ran for his life, in short, sloppy nonagenarian dog-trots, holding bolt cutters high, but unwittingly headed straight toward the source.

  It was the work of a single, black-eyed siamang. It hung in its huge, spindly pen raised on plinths, about ten meters or so from Cuthbert. The siamang was warning something or someone to back off —and very effectively, it seemed—puffing its larynx sac into an impious black balloon. Cuthbert saw the ape, dimly, in its web of play ropes. It was fiendish.

  He said in a half-whisper, “Hell’s bells! Hell’s bloody bells!”

  Cuthbert spun back around, his hands trembling, and ran away. The woops came like sound grenades, more resonant and deafening than the loudest alarm Cuthbert had ever heard. It amazed and terrified him. The message was as clear to his garbled mind as it would be to any living thing: get away, or I give you a ball of forever darkness.

  Then there were men’s and women’s voices, from deep in Cuthbert’s psychosis. They sounded high-pitched, persnickety, and—for reasons unknown to all but the British Midlands soul—deeply American. They were repeating certain phrases, mammals will pass from Earth and deactivate the animals and render biology void. The voices slipped down above the siamang’s noises, dripping down into the zoo like a kind of contempt for nature, sloshed out of a cup in the sky.

  “Oh,” Cuthbert mumbled, irritated and feeling harried, jogging along as best he could. “The culters! They’ve come! I’ve no time for otters.” Surely, the great war of the spirits between the Heaven’s Gaters and the Animal Kingdom was about to have its first battle. The sounds were a sign as clear as anything. Otherworldly interiors were moving. Pain, anxiety, and failure were its wheel-greasers. He came to a stop. He could not run farther. He bent down, gasping for breath, his heart tumbling. He walked a few feet more, and when he looked up, he could swear that several indistinct figures in white crossed the path, a little ahead of him, near a shadowy pillar of some kind. He thought he saw their white bodysuits, their white Nikes with black swooshes.

  “Oh, I see them, those California bastards! Two of them—with a focking camera gun or something,” he said aloud. “Stop, yow focking two-bone Neuters.”

  The Neuters’ apparent cowardice was no surprise. They would not confront him directly. For a moment, the figures seemed to linger round the tenebrous stone column up ahead on the path, then ran off, cowardly, as Cuthbert approached.

  Cuthbert gasped, “Who the fuck are you lot? Come on now! Who are ya?” But he knew the answer, didn’t he?

  He spoke, in a voice full of false syrupiness: “If that’s how yooo want to be then . . .” He could not work out where the man crying for help fit into all this. And what of the Gulls of Imago? Did the bloke asking for help have an answer?

  The dulcet duet of the crested gibbons rose again, as if in response, singing to Cuthbert like choirboys from mahogany trees: WITHsul, WITHsul, WE with souls, WE with souls, SO-ouls-ouls-oul. Cuthbert felt an intense sympathy for the monkeys. He also felt an odd kind of shame for having fled the siamang. It had merely tried to warn him.

  With souls!

  “Arr,” Cuthbert said, knowingly. “I understand now.” He looked at his hands. The empty one was shaking uncontrollably. He stuffed it into his pocket. His other hand’s tremors were causing the bolt cutters to snap open and shut.

  He tilted his head, as though listening for the subterranean effects of the gibbon song under the path-stones. He said, “Come now!”

  He could not wait for an answer. A profound exhaustion was catching up with him. He wondered whether his liver, or some other major organ, was shutting down, defeating its cheap CoreMods. He had never in his life completed anything important that he had started. The thought riled him. Tonight was going to be different. If nothing else, he would at least like to help the primates have an honest ding-dong with some focking Neuters. He found himself thinking back to his days as an Aston Villa supporter with a firm,* knocking West Brom supporters in the teeth down the pub.

  But the Neuters weren’t here for a bit of footy roughness.

  It occurred to him again that he himself might not survive the night. The idea was not as disturbing as it should have been, but he knew he was ready to do anything to help the animals. What had he to lose anyway, besides the memory of Drystan? These thoughts, so fatalistic, had the effect of calming him. He took his hand out of his pocket. It was still thrutching about, but a bit less than before. He felt very dizzy, and ready to pass out. Perhaps, he thought, he could get a little kip, just a little.

  The old walkway he had entered, which formed the main route between the eastern and western edges of the zoo, and roughly connected the area where
Cuthbert had broken into the heart of the zoo, had long, evenly spaced flower troughs placed in its center, creating a kind of boulevard. It was the zoo’s “High Street” and had been in the same location since George IV. Though the stone troughs were empty for some reason, they were newly whitewashed. Each was three meters in length and just broad enough for someone to lie down in. Cuthbert considered this possibility, pausing and setting his knee on one of the rims of a trough, like a diver preparing to jump off a boat. If he was too lucky, he guessed, he would die of hypothermia in the trough, a primate whose time was done. He could be a ghost here, and but for the lack of drink, it didn’t seem a bad place at all, not at all. If he didn’t die, he might just be awakened tomorrow and a pretty woman who worked for Westminster social services would stand above him, offering a place in a doss house and a hot cuppa—perhaps a prawn curry sandwich? Or a banana? Perhaps Drystan would even find him? Cuthbert was tempted, but he resisted. Who would release the beasts, if not he? There were still the otters to let out—he could not forget his old friends, the otters! There were the poor penguins, and Tecton and the mystery of the gulls. And what if he were, as Muezza said, a kind of holy being, a “harbinger,” with a task in the service of all animals? Wasn’t he supposed to be on the lookout for the Shayk of Night? Surely he would resolve these matters, provided he stayed awake (and alive) a bit longer.

  He focused his gaze on the monument and walked toward it. He felt frightened of the humanoid figures he had seen before. He thought they could rip his soul from his being at the snap of their fingers.

  Perhaps, he thought, I have underestimated them. Maybe they were not merely Applewhite followers, but also demons sent by Satan to capture the Otter Christ. As he got closer to the hexagonal column, he saw it was a cross-bearing memorial of some sort, neatly crafted and built from a fine Portland stone. Six small, old-fashioned incandescent lightbulbs burned under a small, conical stone roof. It was the Lanterne des Morts, inspired by the medieval one at La Souterraine, and placed here after the First World War. The names of a dozen or so men were etched into a bronze plaque, bearing the men’s regiments and their jobs in the zoo (menagerie staff, gardener, zoo librarian, et al), along with a couplet, which Cuthbert read respectfully:

  Till the red war gleam like a dim red rose

  Lost in the garden of the Sons of Time.

  He thought of his grandfather, long ago plowed anonymously under the soil of Worcestershire, and whose place in England was growing over with pink and white campion. He felt an almost practiced bitterness. Where was his grandfather’s shrine then? He remembered his father, boasting that his father-in-law was so tough, he walked away from the gas attack that wiped out his Worcester Regiment, smoking a Woodbine.

  Here I am, Cuthbert said to himself—the lost grandson of a lost warrior of the Great War, staring down the face of a new war while belligerents gather apace around me. I have no weapon, he said to himself. I have no Woodbine. I have no regiment. I have no cloak against the coming assault.

  “But I have the Wonderments,” he said aloud. “And all the voices of animals.”

  last stand of order primata

  IT WAS NOT SURPRISING THAT ANYONE, ESPECIALLY a hallucinating man, might imagine humanlike shadow figures and soulful monkeys in the area Cuthbert had finally reached. He had unwittingly made his way to the geometric center of the zoo, to the core of a long-established district of primates.

  Cuthbert came to a set of double doors, the main entrance to the “pavilion,” which seemed no more to him than an ugly black cage that had “caught” a loose brick-pile. Only a few decades old, it was hard to see how it improved much on the poles and pits and cement-poetry of yore. Like many other parts of the zoo, heavy steel grid fencing and red brick predominated. Each species of primate had a sign with a phrase. There were SPIDER MONKEYS—THE TAIL HANGERS; GORILLAS—VEGETARIAN GENTLE GIANTS; SQUIRREL MONKEYS—SOCIABLE AND CHIRPY; ad nauseam. Debarked climbing logs and draping ropes crisscrossed each cage, and yellow straw covered the floors. The zookeepers worked hard to make this cramped, leafless penitentiary happy for the animals, but no exhibit at the zoo was so uniquely degrading.

  In the central building, zoo guests could glimpse at the apes through glass windows that looked into the apes’ night rooms.

  Cuthbert examined a brass, embossed evolutionary tree on the way, showing how Homo sapiens and apes shared a common Homininae limb. There was a raised silhouette of a naked man and woman. Someone had rudely stuck a piece of chewing gum on the man’s head. Cuthbert pulled it off and scratched it clean with his thumbnail. Below the naked people was a photograph of a prehistoric skull, Australopithecus africanus. It was yellow and long, with a tiny brain case and a protruding maxilla with big squarish teeth—it had no mandible. Cuthbert felt as though the human animal in this form could be comfortable—a place for thoughts no bigger than a tea mug.

  Nearby, to his right, a brightly painted wood sign bore the message: THE GREATEST DANGER TO ANIMAL LIFE. There was a hole in the sign for a human face—unabashed guests could put their heads in the opening and ask a mate to snap a naff “picky” on their retina-cams.

  The happiest of the apes Cuthbert could see was the life-size bronze statue of an old dead London Zoo celebrity, Guy “Fawkes” the Gorilla, set near the entrance of the pavilion. Leaning forward on his knuckles, surrounded by leafy vines, and blessed with plenty of room, Guy looked ready to spring downward and away, out of gorilla heaven, to dole out exploding bananas for all takers.

  Cuthbert gave the double doors a jiggle. They were locked tight with a key, it seemed. But the noise roused the smaller residents. The monkeys suddenly cried out with a furious astuteness. Cuthbert was instantly animated by the whole, simian keenness of the pavilion; he could feel it, physically. The “monkeys,” he hoped, were doing their part to prepare for the Heaven’s Gate war. He would do his.

  He was beginning to see much larger numbers of flashing yellow and blue lights blooming in the west, and more sirens. What he thought were the death cult’s mini-spacecrafts in the sky—ordinary police and autonewsmedia aerodrone, along with a Red Watch frightcopter, investigating an intrusion and rumored animal release at the zoo—beat their wings of liquid titanium like huge dragonflies. He didn’t understand why they didn’t begin to attack. The motion-sensitive security lights he had tripped earlier inside the zoo, he noticed, were turning back off, and a pitch darkness enveloped everything near him, except for light beams coming down from the “spacecraft.” A blue-black spindly bird flew past above him; it was enormous, and Cuthbert stood with his mouth gaping. It was one of the famous herons from the park’s heronry on the lake.

  “You,” he called toward the bird. “You! Get the Gulls of Imago, will you? Can you help, can you?” But the bird was gone.

  The greater apes, late to the noise making, started in just then with a fresh vociferousness. First, a cartload of four chimpanzees, already wide awake in their night room, stormed out into the outdoor exhibit area and began hooing at Cuthbert, sticking their golden, soft fingers through the spaces in the grid-fencing. It was as unusual for them to encounter an interested human at night as it was for Cuthbert. Whenever the night watchman, Dawkins, came through—and that was rare—he typically tapped their cage, listened for a moment, and walked on. But like many of the animals, the chimps were no longer confined to night rooms and holding cells after hours. (In the years before all the other zoos on Earth closed down, many had conceded that since nearly all animals are nocturnal, it was inhumane to keep them locked up all night. And no one had seriously worried about the possibility of a zoo invader like Cuthbert.)

  The chimps soon roused the nearby, and most rare, mountain gorilla named Kibali, who was living in isolation because of his grouchy temperament. He was the last wild-born mountain gorilla on earth.

  He had arrived from the Congo, via Uganda, the year before, all four hundred pounds of him, and he never quite adjusted. His mother and a young sister had been shot to
death before his eyes by Interahamwe fighters where he’d lived, up to then, under a canopy of ayous and sapelli trees. He’d been led away from their bodies on three separate leashes.

  Kibali was hobbling in circles around his night room, fingering his lips with a twitchy boredom. The room served as an indoor presentation area in the day. Its brick walls were daubed a pale green, a lame attempt to simulate “rain forest” tonality from an era nearly gone on earth, but a colossal, eight-foot-long window of toughened glass—for viewing—made Kibali look like a glum man at a bosonicabus stop.

  He picked up a bunch of wood wool and shredded, lurid junk-food wrappers, which were regularly given to him for nest-building. He pulled the soft wad apart in his long black-nailed hands, and tossed the pieces away. A food-wrapper scrap, stuck in Kibali’s neck fur, bore the phrase you can see that Lena has the goods to please all “passengers” on Bonk Air . . . Many gorillas in captivity like to construct messy nests before bedding down each night, but Kibali had stopped making nests. He was just throwing bits around. He received no comfort from the hoots of the chimps; instead, he felt compelled to strike things and to beat his chest.

  Not long after he had arrived at the London Zoo, he had been introduced to a group of biosoftware-cultured females—his potential retinue. But the females had recently been sent, temporarily, to an animal shelter the zoo operated in Bedfordshire. The exile was for their own safety. Kibali had bitten one of their scalps, and nearly broken another’s arm. He was supposed to be having a “cool down.”