by Bill Broun
Astrid noticed the peculiar sign above the box:
ALARM BELL
IN EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS
When she did so, a great, uncanny horn sounded out. It was like the sound of all animal voices synthesized into one snarling caterwaul, or the way thunder would sound if clouds were not water but living creatures.
In a bright, aureate haze, the Zoological Gardens of London gave up its ghosts.
One by one, but rapidly, hundreds upon hundreds of tiny, sparkling green-gold animal figures unfolded from some subtle mundus imaginalis beyond our quotidian world. As Astrid approached the lion terraces, and dozens of other police officers, reporters, and zoo personnel converged, the little animal souls began to whirl around them all, quickly filling in the general vicinity between the lions and the Penguin Pool. It was as if a wild ark had cracked open, and now out they came, a vast revenant herd of nearly two hundred years of caged beings.
Philosophers and theologians in the West had generally not granted animals souls. Exceptions to this rule among the brainy or blessed were few—a mystic cabalist here, a Christian hermit-saint there. These rarest of visionaries, such as Rabbi Chaim Vital and St. Francis, knew that animals never died. Even the Luciferian death cult, the Heaven’s Gaters, feared animals because they believed them to possess, at the very least, weak demi-souls, which threatened their own self-loathing operations. But much of humanity allowed nothing. Toddlers in Florida were told about Peter Rabbit; the one-tusked elephant, Ganesh, was worshipped in Mumbai; the terrier was an object of fetish in Hollywood—but who really, among the humans, apart from the mad and a few brilliant scientists and ridiculed activists, genuinely saw themselves as profoundly equal to their sentient cohabitants of Earth?
Now the souls of the animals living and dead in London were coming to try to save humanity—for they were animals, too.
Some of the spirits were notable. There was the famous Guy, the sterile gorilla, clapping his huge hands with excitement—he was ready to slap the cultists back to San Diego; the black bear from Canada, Winnie, walked forth on its hind legs, growling; Jumbo, the colossal African elephant eventually sold out to Phineas Barnum’s circus, blasted into the night with a joy it rarely had in life. The sweet Sudanese hippopotamus who set Victorian London ablaze with curiosity, Obaysch, lumbered toward the Penguin Pool. Atop him was the Mexican bird-eating spider Belinda, carefully stuck upon Obaysch’s pinkish-golden back. There were lesser-known luminaries, too—Eros, the snowy owl and survivor par excellence, whose unrelenting flight at sea kept spirits up in England’s rationed, dour 1950s. There Eros soared, circling above, catching eyes now like a white undertuft of the night’s ripped-out fabric. Then came multitudes of the extinct beasts, materializing like passé but beloved angels: a Tasmanian tiger, flexing jaws large enough to swallow a wallaby; a zebra horse, the quagga, whinnying and kicking at the cold air; the giant red-speckled Welsh hare, the largest lagomorph the world had ever known—all of them the last of their kind, all perished at the London Zoo.
The glittering procession of animal souls doubled over and twisted into itself like some living, breathing Möbius strip, like a million wet honeycombs balled into intersecting globules, like an explanation for the seventh dimension, like a religion. It was as if all the powers borrowed from them by kings, nations, by parents, by children, by creeds across human history and right to the Pleistocene, had been ceded back to the animal kingdom. Here’s what we lent you, they seemed to suggest, look at it.
lions’ play
THE CATERWAUL CONTINUED BEHIND ASTRID’S thoughts, a steady background hum of shrieks and yowls and barks, but she could also hear her granddaddy—or whoever Cuthbert was—his labored and lagery breath, his hepatic farts, his hopeful misery—as though she were right beside him.
She leaped over the wall and slid straight down into the freezing water.
“Cuthbert!” she said, scampering on hands and knees, up the other side of the moat, slipping badly. “Wait!”
This mucky St. Cuthbert looked so big to her—twenty stone, at least, tall as a standing bear, but ragged and filthy—and huge! And he was covered with the algae from the moat, and green head to toe like the copper-covered statue of St. Cuthbert the Wonderworker in the Worcestershire churchyard where the pauper’s grave of Cuthbert’s granddaddy, Alfred Wistan Wenlock, had been lost forever.
“It’s Astrid! It’s Tritty! Saint! Cuthbert! Listen!”
Now Atwell was calling down from above, too, from the enclosure wall. “Come back, Inspector! The specialists are coming. They’ll put a stop to this.”
“I can’t,” said Astrid. She made another leap up from the moat but slid right back down. She couldn’t seem to extract herself.
Meanwhile St. Cuthbert was on his feet, holding forth in the dirty, algae-covered center-court, surrounded by the five grubby Asian lions. Hundreds of pieces of the crisps and popcorn he had earlier thrown to the lions, with the best intentions, still littered the ground. The algae dangled off his bolt cutters and hung from his clothes. It even slopped from his mouth, giving him a mantle of watery jade that seemed to grow out of his mouth.
“A’am this green ’un, arr?” said St. Cuthbert. “And yow . . . yow’re the last ones to visit. I said I’d see about coming back. And I’ve got blessing for all, blessings, I say, blessings for all.”
“Cuthbert!” cried Astrid. But he didn’t seem to hear her.
“And not a moment too soon,” said the matriarch, Chandani, to St. Cuthbert. “The enemy is near. They must not be allowed to gain the upper hand. We will make our stand here, and we will vanquish them. But you need to let us out.”
Chandani spoke in her usual velvety tone, but now St. Cuthbert noticed a haughty but exquisitely measured new timbre in it. She was excited, her tail rising slightly, her brow arched. “You have released great beauty tonight—but now comes the discharge of justice and nobility. Only British lions can offer those things. Let us free.”
“Oh, come on then, and enough canting,” said St. Cuthbert. “Oi’ve ’ad my share of speeches tonight.” He was swaying a bit on his feet, holding his chin out, as if doing that alone might keep him from falling on his face.
Suddenly, both Astrid and St. Cuthbert saw the spectral quarkbeam shoot a second time out of the American Embassy. The lashing ray then whipped down again like an angry snake and drove its head into Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool. The ramps, somehow restored to their dual-helix “DNA” shape after heavy Cuthbert’s damage to them earlier, began to twist around. It was as if the architecture had been switched on; the white, sloped inclines of the Altar of Lost Chances started to whirl around like the wing-blades of death itself. As it turned, Neuters poured out of the Altar, pulling out their stunners and spreading like leukemia.
Astrid felt terrified. But in her and St. Cuthbert’s midst, they were beginning to see a counterweight to the cult’s artful technologies. The souls of the animals were quickly collecting into an emerald nimbus, half alive, half supernatural, which kept expanding and expanding. Within the cloud St. Cuthbert and Astrid could see all the animals, led by the black leopard, Monty, beginning to attack the white Neuters. It was a gory, glittery battle, and the animals seemed to be gaining an advantage.
“Oh, it’s bostin beautiful,” St. Cuthbert said, breathless. He turned to the lions. “Where’s your door now? Daynt see it here. Quick, quick!”
“Please, Cuthbert. Get out of there!”
The old male with a scraggly mane, Arfur, walked in slow, arthritic steps toward the back of the terraces. There was a small green door built into one of the sort of cement predellas upon which content lions were supposed to display themselves to the public. For safety purposes, it could not be locked on the outside, only latched up, in the event that a keeper needed to escape. St. Cuthbert quickly opened the green door. On the other side of the recessed double-gate staging area was a heavy chain. Getting down on his hands and knees arduously, Cuthbert crawled in, cut the chain, and opened anoth
er outer door which, at last, gave the great felids free and clear passage to their beloved country.
When St. Cuthbert came back, Arfur was jogging around a little, as if preparing himself; he kept circling the shiny-leafed Chinese tree of heaven, which had been planted in the lions’ living area.
“Go, then,” St. Cuthbert said. “Fight!” But the lions did not leave. They seemed to be flexing their limbs, bumping one another, working themselves into a kind of kill-state.
“Holy man,” said Chandani. “We are here to save the animal world. You are part of that kingdom—only part. This does not mean we have no needs of our own, nor selfishness, nor desires. We want you. Surely, you could have seen that, long ago.”
Then St. Cuthbert turned and finally saw Astrid in the water—like Drystan, so many, many years ago, struggling to stay up. There was something wrong with her limbs now. Whether it was the Death, or fatigue, or a simple lack of coordination, the great swimmer, the queen of Highbury pool, suddenly couldn’t seem to swim or even hold herself up above the five feet of water. She slipped below, gasping. The “Christ of Otters” in Astrid was gone.
“Drystan! Bostin! You came! You came! I knew you would!”
Astrid splashed down into the moat water again, coughing, and trying to scramble, again, up the other side, and flailing and slipping and sliding, trying to rise to her feet, but falling again and again. And that was when Chandani leaped onto Cuthbert.
“God, no,” shouted Astrid.
“It’s OK,” said Cuthbert, who was smiling. “Let them have me.” The lions piled onto him with such force they rolled en masse down into the moat, but Astrid bravely threw herself at the tangle of man and beast.
They were in the water again, and Astrid grabbed for this ancient lunatic who she thought might be her long-lost grandfather. She could not tell what was lion and what was human—it was all warm and ragged and desperate. The lions were speaking, but Astrid no longer could understand them, yet, underwater, it did sound like the phrase she’d heard herself saying before, the underwater words, gagoga maga medu. And the words emerged in bubbles as the swimming lions reached for Cuthbert and now Astrid with their huge jaws. Astrid felt that the lions harbored no ill will, but there was real rage in their movements. Unlike the Neuters, the lions killed with passion and with meaning, using the same blessing phrase Astrid had heard from Kibali and Cuthbert had heard from the otters years ago in Dowles Brook. Like so much aggression by cats of all sizes, the line between affection and murderousness was both blurry and long. Just as any household Siamese will “play” with a fortuitously caught mouse, the lions’ assault on Cuthbert was not without an element of real fondness.
“Don’t kill him,” Astrid commanded the lions, her voice full of its own animal-to-animal heat. She had never heard herself speak with such conviction. “Do not. I will not lose him! Not again!”
And with that, the lions broke off their attack. It was as simple as that. They respected firmness.
“We were agitated,” said Chandani, and once again, Astrid could understand their words. “That is all. We have been . . . pent up.”
The lions helped drag Cuthbert and Astrid out of the moat, biting down on their shoulders gently, drawing them to safety like two of their cubs, and departing.
“And now you are baptized,” Cuthbert said to Astrid. “And I am, too.”
Chandani, the strongest one, the huntress, did not join the battle against the Neuters. She craved the purest form of freedom, and she slinked away into Regent’s Park. There, on one of the tidy bowling lawns, the lioness chased and harried a Red Watchman until Kieran from the AnimalSafe Squad, freshly returned from the sad chimpanzee business at Madame Tussauds, brought her down with a tranquilizer dart, much to his own relief. It was one of the few happy outcomes for the animals that night.
The other lions, including Arfur, began to head to the Tower of London. The lions had been sent away from the old Lion Tower in 1835. They wanted to go back. It was their right, they had always been told. They made it to towers, but of the brutalist variety in the Barbican, where they were cornered in Lakeside Terrace. A contingent of city police officers easily subdued the distracted animals while they played with the jetting fountains in the round red-brick pools. They could not stop themselves from batting the water jets with their paws, obsessively.
All lived, but only Arfur was granted, by chance, a fate that nearly matched his leonine dreams. All he had wanted was to sit in the Tower and protect the Realm. He was more stupid, lazy, and old than the other lions, but with his long, golden, wonderfully messy mane, footage of him on the autonews apparently caught the king’s attention.
“That one,” Henry had told one of his consorts as they lay naked in his bedchamber, watching the ceiling autonews feeds. He was up on Flōt, fully His “Highness” indeed. “I’ll get that one—for next year. He’s a rascal, he is—you can see. I shall have an official picture with a fucking lion. ‘Dieu et mon droit’ and all that. What do you think of that, then?”
your song shall make us free
AFTER THE LIONS LEFT, CUTHBERT AND ASTRID had lain for a while on the lip of the moat, a green heap of Flōtism and moat slime and blood ties woven in threads of dreams and pain and need. They were a perfect public spectacle, and the autonewsmedia ate it up.
A roaring crowd of autonews “gatherers” and zoo staff and police surrounded the lion enclosure.
When Astrid began to sit up, that tall, indefatigable autoreporter named Jerry and his chunky fotolivographer encouraged them, rather cynically, to hold still.
“No, you’re perfect!” called Jerry. “You better stay put, yeah? Until the paramedics arrive? Perhaps something’s . . . erm, broken?”
“There’s plenty broken,” croaked Cuthbert.
THE SKY WAS BEGINNING TO BRIGHTEN. The Neuters from outer space were quickly vanishing in Astrid’s and Cuthbert’s minds, and a golden green cloud was spreading over London. Astrid kissed her granddaddy’s clammy forehead, pulling him as close to her as she could. She said, “You mustn’t ever leave me again. Never, Cuddy, never,” and for Cuthbert, every one of her words seemed to be uttered by Drystan, and he had found what he felt he’d needed for eighty years, since his poor older brother drowned in Dowles Brook.
Meanwhile, Atwell and Omotoso appeared again at the edge of the enclosure, looking down on Astrid and Cuthbert.
“Idiots,” said Atwell. “You’re a perfect fool, Inspector.”
“I second that,” said Omotoso.
Soon, Astrid could see the oddly fatter Dr. Bajwa again, shaking his head, but smirking, too.
“You have been delivered, it seems,” hollered Dr. Bajwa. “I told you. I told you, didn’t I? It’s as plain as a pikestaff.”
Elbowing into the crowd came Mason, waving bystanders aside with authority, repeating the phrase, “Sorry, security, sorry.”
Then Suleiman glided in. For reasons known only to him, the Zanzabari man was wearing on his feet the speedfins one normally saw on kids playing dangerous games of hurtball around the IBs. He was smiling openly, with his American visa now inserted. It was a silver holographic eagle that popped up from the palm, beating its wings in its flight to nowhere.
Mason and Suleiman leaned far over the edge of the enclosure, and Mason called down to Astrid, winking, “Help’s on the way. Just hang tough, y’all.”
Eventually, Astrid also spotted Tom, her friend from FA.
She felt embarrassed to see him.
“I did not drink,” she said, looking down.
Tom seemed unfazed. “Of course you didn’t. But it’s a miracle. I was starting to think I’d be the only one who did the Death. And now I’m not.”
Astrid then took her Cuthbert’s hand and kissed it.
Soon, a detail of the king’s personal Beefeaters, the Yeomen of the Guard, took up positions near key “battle” sites—the Penguin Pool, the American Embassy—and showily stood sentry duty, all part of Harry9’s plan to “own” the nigh
t as an exemplar of Windsorian might. One Beefeater came to the edge of the lion enclosure and planted her neuralwave pike with a thud. Few loyal subjects could ever have been as pleased as St. Cuddy to see such an old-fashioned regal spectacle, apparently on his behalf.
The raw video feeds, broadcast from the autonews and spread on WikiNous, were already fashioning a kind of rough narrative—the hands of King Henry’s council were behind this—which presented Cuthbert and Astrid as fending off a terrorist suicide cult. Cuthbert’s release of the rare zoo animals was framed as a sort of stopgap “tactic.” As long as the cultists were dead and their gobs shut, Harry9 was happy.
“Tritty,” said Cuthbert as they lay beside the moat. “That’s your name? But I’ll always see Drystan in you, you know? I’m all done. My body’s shot. A’m done for. But you found me. You remembered me. It’s all I could have ever wanted. Never forget now, all right?”
Suddenly, a mass of white birds appeared above everyone’s heads, singing madly. Seagulls! It was as if a beneficent, reintegrated version of the Neuters had materialized. They had wings. They were not here to harm, but to inspire. They swooped down and began to gobble up the popcorn and crisps that Cuthbert had tossed into the lion enclosure during the night. They screamed for joy.
“Blastid,” said St. Cuthbert. “It’s the Gulls of Imago. They’ve come.” And finally St. Cuthbert himself sang in his croaking voice the penguin song, all to the tune of “A Hundred Years Ago”:
Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,
From Cornwall to the Orkney, we dine on irony,
Along with lovely kippers from the Irish Sea.
