The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  Not a sign. Later, back in the surveillance post, we ran all the CCTV from all over the zoo, and you never see him leave. It was probably because I spent more time than any of the others poring over the monitors that I came to realise something else, something equally weird; you never see him arrive. You see him going from compound to compound, on the way to the lions, but you never see him at the gate or outside, in the car park. No vehicle was left unaccounted for, and he hadn’t been on any of the coaches. I’d thought he was one of the art students. He wasn’t.

  All of this was after we’d searched the lion compound, thoroughly, all six of us. We closed down the zoo, got everybody out (after securing the video from Mr & Mrs Bowen), and we went through the whole compound, twice – once, quickly, by electric light, in the company of three extremely nervous policemen, and then a proper fingertip search the next morning. The lions were edgy throughout, irritable and jittery. They didn’t like it any more than we did, and they needed watching. I don’t think any of us had ever felt more vulnerable in the presence of the big cats than we did that evening, so soon after witnessing the beginning of a mauling incident.

  But in a mauling incident you expect blood, and a carcass, and there was none – not even on the clothes. The compound was clean. There were some gnawed cow bones from the lions’ last feed-time, and that was all. Nothing to suggest fresh predation. Nothing to suggest anybody had even been in there, except for the little pile of torn and tattered (but still unbloodied) clothing where the attack had taken place. We even went through their scat for the best part of a week, sifting the piles of acrid reeking carnivore stool for bone and tissue fragments. I suppose that was as good a way as any of demonstrating exactly where we were with the whole investigation. We just didn’t have a clue.

  So, back to the video evidence; back to the CCTV, and Mr Bowen’s photo. Long hours scouring the tapes, till we pieced together a narrative of the incident. The trouble was, it turned out to be one of those modern narratives, the open-ended kind where you’re supposed to decide for yourself what the hell happened in the end. Art-house cinema of the most infuriating kind, with no climax, no release.

  There’s the boy, standing by the moat, climbing the wall. Here I come, just too late to stop him. There he is in the compound, stripped off and preaching his incomprehensible sermon to the lions. And then bang, out go the lights and all hell breaks loose. What I’ve told you is all we know, including the stuff you don’t see on the video, my own impressions and sensations. And I defy you to make any more sense of it than we were able to at the time.

  We were closed the next day and the Saturday as well, partly to do a proper search of the entire zoo, partly because we wanted to assess the behaviour of the lions. The search turned up nothing – I may as well tell you that straight away. As to the lions and their behaviour, that was a different matter, and a more troubling one. I’m not a qualified animal behaviourist, like Manoj; I am a zookeeper, though, which I think qualifies me as a high-ranking amateur. I know how big cats act: I know the rules of engagement, how to approach them, what signs to look out for. I know when to stand my ground, and when to run. It’s hard-earned knowledge, and you come to rely on it. There are circumstances in which it’s necessary to your survival, and you wouldn’t want to get it wrong. And that Friday morning, when I was walking the lion compound with the other keepers, I felt something was wrong, even though we were doing everything right.

  It would be stupid and incorrect to say that we never get nervous. A little nervousness around the carnivores is no bad thing, it stops you getting sloppy and keeps you alert. But that’s fear of a known thing, a possibility comprehended. This was different. This was the feeling of not knowing what to be scared of. I felt – talking over things later we all felt – that there were signs out there, but we were missing them. Crucial signals, impacting directly on our safety and well-being, that we weren’t picking up on because we couldn’t recognise them. And even if we managed to spot them after all, would we understand them? I don’t know. I felt as if the rules had been changed, and nobody had told us.

  After a while it became actively unsettling, and I was very glad to get out. I remember the sky above the compound was black with starlings, one of those preposterously big flocks with thousands of birds wheeling and plummeting in perfect formation. Their hoarse raucous squawks filled the air as we left the enclosure. The lions padded back out of the holding area and congregated in the middle of the grassed area, watching us go. The male roared, once. Up on the hill, the baboons started up a racket of their own as if in answer. From all across the site, each animal seemed to join in the chorus. None of us keepers could think of anything to say.

  And so the incident fizzled out. We’d managed to keep it out of the press, so there was no grief from that quarter. A local paper ran a brief story on an inside page the next day, but none of the nationals ever picked it up, nor the TV, which was just as well. I suppose some soap star broke up with her footballer boyfriend, or perhaps it was just the millennial ballyhoo waiting round the corner. The police kept an open case file on the incident, but seemed happy enough to drop it as soon as they could. There wasn’t a lot in it for them, really. No missing person in the outside world to match up with our missing person inside the bars, if you see what I mean. I think they were treating it as petty trespass at best: no-one hurt and no victim, no real harm done, and no repercussions for anyone. And so the zoo settled back into its hibernatory winter peace and tranquillity…only not quite.

  The first incident came just after New Year. This time, it’s safe to say absolutely no-one was watching. I wasn’t on duty that day, but I got the phone call around nine a.m. – could I come in straight away? It was urgent.

  Up in the surveillance post that morning had been Graham. At the start of his shift, he’d been checking through the CCTV, going from compound to compound and along the avenues between. Everything was quiet. It was a dull rainy morning, and all the beasts were sheltering. Then, as the next camera clicked in, he got a shock. There was a lion loose outside the compound.

  Unlike the previous incident, there’s no permanent record of this. The system was in the middle of a refit, and no tape exists of what Graham saw that morning. However, he describes it consistently and straightforwardly, and his word is good enough for me. He saw a lion – a big male, but not our big male – out of the enclosure, padding up the path that led past the baboon enclosure.

  As Graham caught sight of it, the lion looked up in the direction of the camera. As if it had seen him too, he said; as if the surveillance apparatus worked both ways. For a moment they looked at each other – ‘well, that was what it felt like,’ says Graham, somewhat embarrassedly. He’s not a particularly imaginative man, so I don’t believe that was a later embellishment of the truth. If he said it at all, it would have been because that was the impression he got. So they stared at one another, man and beast. After a long second or two the lion moved swiftly, out of shot and into the cover of some nearby bushes.

  A dangerous animal out of its compound is automatically a grade-A emergency. Thankfully, the main gates wouldn’t be open for another hour-and-a-half, but all timetables had gone out of the window now, of course. Immediately, Graham was on the walkie-talkies and the tannoy, ascertaining the whereabouts of every staff member. Once everyone was accounted for, he called the police. Next, he rang around all the other off-shift keepers, me included.

  I arrived not long after the police. I showed them my accreditation (which mostly consisted of my uniform), and managed to attach myself to the first team to enter the park. I think they were glad to have me there. Though they looked every inch the television SWAT team with their flak jackets and SLRs, I could tell they were as nervous as hell. Overhead the helicopter was clattering in a circle around the perimeter. At least it drove the starlings away.

  We were getting ready to enter through the main gates when the mobile phone of the co-ordinating officer rang. He answered it, listened bri
efly, and looked up. ‘Panic over,’ he said, unmistakable relief all over his rain-wet face. ‘It’s back in its cage.’

  What had happened was, Graham had been checking the lion enclosure all the while, trying to ascertain which animal had got out. It might well have made a difference, since each beast has its own personality. Some can be easily cowed, and some are more prone to confrontation than others. The rain made things difficult. The pride were sheltering in and around the den, and it wasn’t until Graham actually got in the Land Rover and went to check, that he was able to report back. Two males, three females, all present and correct.

  We still searched the entire zoo, of course, although the search took place in an altogether more laid-back spirit than would otherwise have been the case. Unfortunately, the laid-backness didn’t last, and before long we got the distinct impression that the police were a bit fed up with us. Bringing them all the way out to the suburbs on these false alarms – couldn’t we run our own zoo properly, or what? They didn’t exactly accuse us of wasting their time, but they came very close.

  Graham took some flak, from zoo management as well as police, for sounding the alarm. I thought this was not just unfair but deeply, dangerously ignorant. What was he supposed to do? There was an animal outside its enclosure and running loose: a big predator, the biggest we had. All the protocols were in place for such an incident, and he’d had no choice but to follow them to the letter. Ah, but obviously you didn’t check, they told him. Wouldn’t it have been better if you’d checked? To which he could only point out, I did check, to the best of my ability – and besides, I saw what I saw. A lion, loose outside the compound. And then they would look at him, you know, in that oh, really? way, and Graham would have to bite his lip and try not to lose his temper.

  Once the police had got back in their vans and cleared off, the rest of us keepers checked out the lion enclosure. There was no sign of an obvious breach of security. We looked in the bottom of the moat for scat, which you’d expect to find if one of the animals had been down there even temporarily. Twelve feet of more-or-less sheer concrete would be a formidable obstacle, after all. Nothing down there. No breaches of the fence around the back of the compound, either, so we were left with a variant on the same question that had troubled us the last time. How did it get out? And, come to that, how did it get back in again?

  It had me beat. I believed Graham: how could I not? I trusted him absolutely. And for the next week I found myself lingering round the lion compound, just watching them, trying to work it out. That’s how I saw their behaviour patterns had definitely changed. It hadn’t just been a nervous reaction, that first morning after we lost the boy. You could see a real difference, if you knew what to look for. It wasn’t the behaviour of beasts in a cage – nor, come to that, of uncaged beasts. It was something none of us had seen.

  I asked Manoj, with his academic background in behavioural study, and he agreed. ‘It’s not standard pack behaviour,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t fit the captivity model, or any other model I’ve ever heard of. Over and above that –’ he began, and stopped.

  ‘It’s bloody creepy,’ I finished, and he frowned at me. I don’t think that was supposed to be part of the behavioural lexicon.

  We didn’t know it yet, but our troubles with the lions were only beginning. In the weeks and months that followed Graham’s sighting, lions were spotted outside their compound on no less that five occasions – three times on CCTV, twice by keepers on foot. Concerning the former, we have tape of one such sighting. You can just about make out the unmistakable shape of the predator, moving through bushes around the edge of the zebra enclosure. This was the strangest of all, the one that completely defied all explanation. To be where it was when it was caught on camera, the lion would’ve had to escape its own compound, negotiate the moat and the twelve-foot wall and all that, pass – on a normal working day, with upwards of a hundred people on site – along the main thoroughfare of the zoo, and scale a ten-foot fence with spikes at the top. And it would have had to have done it all again, in reverse, to get back in the lions’ den with the rest of its mates by the time Manoj and I arrived on the scene with our tranquilliser rifles. Because, as usual, we counted five lions in the compound by the time we got there.

  On the tape, the zebras don’t even seem to see the lion. There’s no alarm, they don’t go charging away to the far side of the compound. But as soon as they saw Manoj and me, they couldn’t move fast enough. One glance, and they were gone, off in a snorting, cantering rumble of hooves, leaving only a pile or two of steaming crap on the trampled grass. This was something we were getting used to by now. Even the friendliest beasts, the apes and the elephants, were starting to shy away from us, if not become actively hostile. This was odd – downright worrying, even – but it wasn’t our biggest problem that spring.

  The biggest problem was that we’d effectively lost any measure of control with regard to security in the most dangerous area of the whole zoo. Once you discounted (as you obviously had to) the notion that there was a stray lion, not a member of our pride, loose and roaming around the zoo, then you were left with the unpalatable fact that if one of ours did get out, then we’d have no way of distinguishing it from the phantom animal we were seeing on the CCTV. All our security compromised, in the worst possible way.

  What were we supposed to do? Keep calling the police out on wild goose chases? We’d be like the boy who cried ‘wolf’ once too often. Sooner or later, they wouldn’t bother turning out; and who was to say that wouldn’t be just the occasion they were needed? As a compromise measure, the management hired new guards – not experienced keepers, just untrained muscle from Group 4, really nothing more than glorified bouncers. They were supposed to patrol the avenues and walkways, with orders to call in anything out of the ordinary straight away. They were no use whatsoever; we might as well have saved our money. In fact, they were the proximate cause of our key fatality.

  This was in April, an unseasonably hot spell towards the end of the month. I always used to like going about the grounds in springtime, the smells and sounds of nature reawakening from its winter hiatus, the blossom on the trees, the contentment of every animal at the return of sun and warmth. For the space of a week or so, I felt better walking my beat than I had since the turn of the year. It helped take my mind off things: not only the business with the lions, but now a problem with the new guards.

  One or two of them had been seen behaving inappropriately round the animals. They’d been caught on CCTV hanging over the moats and throwing sweets, sometimes sticks and stones, cans of Coke, even. Some were actually taunting the animals through the bars of their cages. Stupid, loutish behaviour, the sort of thing we’d eject a member of the public for. By April, there was a significant undercurrent of hostility between the full-time staff and the temporaries. We were hardly even talking to each other, let alone co-operating fully and closely, as per the plan. That might have helped avoid the tragedy…but then again, didn’t they bring it on themselves? Don’t we all, in the last analysis?

  It was late in the afternoon again, but the day had been warm and the sky was still filled with light. The last of the visitors had just left, and we’d locked down the outer compound. Peter and I were doing one last walk-through, checking there were no stragglers left behind, getting ready to put everything to bed. Usually this was my favourite time of day, in my favourite season. Under normal circumstances, I would have been relishing this stroll around the grounds. As it was, I was unaccountably nervous. Peter says he felt it too, and as I mentioned before, he’s not an overly imaginative man.

  There was something in the air – I think the animals sensed it too, because all over the site they were skittish, restless, unusually noisy. The gemsboks, when we passed by the antelope enclosure, were actually butting the fences. I got on the walkie-talkie to Manoj, up in the surveillance post, to get his opinion.

  ‘I’ll have a look,’ he said. ‘Stay on while I just get this…ah, you bloody thing
. I hate these gadgets.’ I knew what he’d be doing: clicking through the various camera angles from the CCTV around the zoo till he got one that showed the antelopes. It sounded as if he was having a few technical problems. ‘Why don’t they make these things – oh, shit.’ Over the course of two words his entire tone changed. ‘Sam. Peter. You copy?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Incident in progress, north side of the baboon enclosure. Two of the new guards, attack under way. Get over there right now. Stay on the line.’

  Again, it’s captured on tape, but again there’s a complication. Because it was spring, the blossom was out on the cherry trees that line the main avenue through the zoo. The blossom restricted the view of the baboon enclosure as seen from one of the CCTV cameras – the one, as luck would have it, through which Manoj was watching the developing incident. What he’d seen was this:

  Two of the hired guards, standing by the wire mesh of the fence, making fun of the baboons. The leader of the troop, a powerful adult chacma, was practically in their faces, the other side of the chain-link. He was a grumpy, muscular specimen, a natural boss and something of a bully to boot. He wasn’t above stamping his authority on the group, usually by means of his teeth. Manoj told me once something he’d read about the species in an old and extremely politically incorrect text, something along the lines of: ‘A full-grown chacma is more than a match for two good dogs.’ This one, Manoj thought, would probably be more than a match for two stupid security men.

  As he’d watched, one of the guards had actually jumped on to the fence and started rattling it, shaking it on its stanchions in imitation of a monkey, or so it looks on the tape. The other one had moved slightly to one side, obscured by the blossom of one of the nearby cherry trees. Like the other one, he was far too close to the fence.