Bill Broun
Night of the Animals
For Annmarie
And every night when his brethren were abed, Cuthbert would go and stand in the cold water all naked up to the chin till it were midnight, and then he would come out, and when he came to land he might not stand for feebleness and faintness, but oft fell down to the ground. And after a time as he lay thus, there came two otters which licked every place of his body, and then went again to the water that they came from. And then Cuthbert arose all whole.
author’s note
The novel employs language from both fading and emerging dialects and slang of Birmingham, the Black Country, old Worcestershire, and the Clee Hills region of England, from Guyana, as well as future-set, speculative words and phrases along with common phrases from British English. With more arcane or esoteric regionalisms, or opaque terms, footnotes are added where I felt they would help readers better appreciate the story.
one
listening to the zoo
ON THE LAST DAY OF APRIL OF 2052, AS A NEWLY discovered comet, Urga-Rampos, neared Earth, a very ill, very old, and very corpulent man started to shoulder his way into the thick hedges around the last public zoo on earth. Cuthbert Handley, a freshly minted nonagenarian — and a newly homeless one — clambered into the shrubbery as fast as his large, frail bones allowed (which wasn’t very). As the tough branches of yew and hazel abraded his arms and neck and face, he hardly felt them: what stung him was consciousness, every last red, lashing ray of it.
“Crack on,” the old man grumbled to himself, struggling to guard his eyes with his immense hands. “Go, you two-boned bletherhead — you get a wriggle on!”
It hurt Cuthbert to think, and it hurt to feel. Most of all, it hurt to remember. For a moment, he saw the boy’s face — that sinking face, with black, deep-river eyes. He saw the long lips, as purple and frail as iris petals, and the pale forehead wreathed in rushes. He glimpsed again the tiny clawing hands, grabbing at fronds of ferns from the brook-side, and all of it, the whole creature, tangled in green threads of time, plummeting, twisting, swimming, down to the depths, right down through the misery of the last century.
There, or somewhere, was his lost sweet brother, the otter-boy. Here, now, eighty years later, he would be found.
Cuthbert had never stopped looking.
“Drystan,” the old man whispered aloud. He paused for a moment, gulping for breath, pulling a twig off his ear. “I’ll find my way to you. And to tha’ others.”
And what of this comet?
All the world jabbering about it, and it was the worst of omens, Cuthbert felt; Urga-Rampos seemed to presage a frenzied phase of the mass-suicide pandemic that had already wiped out tens of thousands of Britons, and abroad, millions of other people — and animals.
For the most powerful and largest of the suicide cults — a group named Heaven’s Gate, originally from California — had also let it be known that animals occupied a “Level Below Human,” as the cultists put it, and must be exterminated to enable suicided cult members to travel more readily to the “Level Above Human.” Earth was a “dead vessel,” they claimed, a mere technical impediment to spiritual ascension. They also claimed God had “revised” Jehovah’s covenant with Noah. Instead of revering the “bow in the cloud” of Genesis, that ancient sign of His promise never again to destroy Earth’s living creatures, the cultists said to look to the white comet, to a new covenant in which animals didn’t fit, and on one continent after another, they found ways to tip already endangered whole ecosystems toward their bowls of ashes.
The international response had been, so far, slow and uneven. America, where most of the cults had begun and where the self-murders and animal killings seemed to be accelerating, had organized a “cognitive policing” effort, but it wasn’t authorized outside New York, despite being under the control of the new “national police,” an extension of the U.S. Army. Only a few other larger countries — Korea Hana, India, the Nigerian Federation, and Britain — seemed up for a fight.
As the last great repository of living “whole” animals on earth — genomic clones were available but also dwindling in numbers — the London Zoo now ranked as the cult’s biggest target, at least as Cuthbert saw it. The animals had awakened — for him, he believed — because Britain, and indeed the world, stood in desperate danger. Waves of species were being wiped from the wild at a level not seen since the end of the Mesozoic era. So few nonhuman animal species existed in the deforested, bulldozed, and poisoned planet, the London Zoo had truly become a kind of “ark” for all interconnected life — an ark, and a death row prison.
The animals, wisely, wanted Cuthbert to help them escape before it was too late.
CUTHBERT WAS BIG, big, big — twice the size of most Britons and half as dainty. Despite his semihomeless state, he always, somehow, managed to find food, especially his favorite — cold kidney pies and kippers. His love of England was outsize, too, nearly as great as his respect for its ruthless king, Henry IX. His fingers were as thick and dirty as parsnips, and his feet as long and narrow and slippery as eels. An old set of EverConnector™ muscle-sleeves bound his old body together, but he heaved around a fat tummy on the lankiest of frames, and his enlarged heart, thick-walled with cardiomyopathy after decades of high blood pressure, struggled to siphon his gallons of blood around a porpoise-shaped body. And yet this most unlikely of recipients, Cuthbert Handley, a lowly Indigent born long ago in the Black Country, the son of a machinist, was the most recent, and perhaps final, recipient of a gift given only to a few people through human history — the Wonderments.
Earlier that day, he had bided time until the right moment came with the long sleeving shadows of evening and the zoo visitors beginning to disperse for the day. When the nearby Broad Walk and the adjacent playground emptied of people, he had made his appalling gambit, unbandaging caution from his long limbs in one rip of movement. He could not scramble fast enough now. A branch jabbed his neck. Another struck his thigh. He scrunched his eyes shut. He kicked his filthy way forward, a man powering an immense spinning fan of rags and anguish. The hedge’s branches felt far stiffer than he remembered, and much sharper. He flung his ancient forearm at them. He ducked. He sidestepped. He puffed his chest out. He threw another chunky forearm out. It was as if he were trying to taunt a mob of thin men all threatening to stab him with a yew stick.
And there was a kind of horde about him, after all. Cuthbert, who had lived much of his life on the dole* and, later, “the Sick” (disability benefit), and who could not stop drinking Flōt, was not simply disturbed. He heard things—loads of things. For half of the past year, his mind had inhabited, like a terrified moth in a candle lantern, a phantasmagoria of mental tiger-shadows and ghost-smokes. It was far worse than even the renowned horrors of a typical first Flōt withdrawal. Every time he saw an animal, whether a stray moggy or the rats running along the New Tube rails before trains burst into the station, he felt sure the creatures were preparing to do or say things to him, or both — until they finally did just that. He could hear the language of animals — or so he believed — and he was doing this.
And here he was, attempting to break into the old London Zoo.