Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

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.

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 another 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.