Night of the Animals(123)

And then, as if on cue, something astounding occurred, at least from the perspective of one grubby saint, and the lions, too. Out of the narrow forest at the zoo’s fence, out of the twinkling green lights and sparrow nests and bowls of darkness, out of his gran’s porcelain thimble and deadly Dowles Brook, out of his drunkenness and sorrow and shame and a loneliness no one but a Flōt sot could know, out of an endless night of kitten games and enclosures drained—there came a being from St. Cuthbert the Wonderworker’s deepest anguish—the Christ of Otters. The Lord of Animals came because, in the end, St. Cuthbert needed a Lord.

St. Cuthbert stared in wonder. His long lost brother’s hair was longer, and his eyes more fearful and feminine, but here he was, risen from the dead, walking purposefully, and looking every bit like Drystan . . . if . . .

If.

If, thought St. Cuthbert. If, if, if, if, if.

If he were a woman, in her late twenties or early thirties.

“Drystan?” asked St. Cuthbert. “I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.”

Arfur roared with a bellicose grandeur that could have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary as the very definition of leonine.

It was, of course, a Royal Parks Constabulary inspector, a woman, and her physical resemblance to the Handley brothers was indeed, as Dawkins had put it, “the spit.” The black-brown eyes, the high cheeks, even the freckles taken from the dappled downs of Clee—she was as close to a doppelg?nger as one got. It was the face that had that night launched a thousand scripts in St. Cuthbert’s head.

But she was different, too, from the Drystan whom St. Cuthbert had been imagining all night. She was calmer, and more professional, and less delicate. And she had very long, wispy, obsidian hair.

“Drystan? Are yow the Christ of Otters?”

“I’m Inspector Sullivan,” the woman said. “And you’re Mr. Handley, aren’t you? Cuthbert?”

“Yow’m my brother,” he declared flatly to the woman, shaking his head, gasping to catch his breath. “Gagoga maga medu,” he said. His eyes were wet with tears. He nearly comprehended, in his rough way, that this constable, the utter stranger, wasn’t the boy who had died so many, many years ago, but it was hard for him to accept that it wasn’t somehow a kind of Drystan—changed, yes, hidden in the shape of a beautiful woman—but Drystan.

“Are yow ’im? Dryst?”

“No, I’m afraid I’m not,” she said. She felt tears slipping down her face. “But if you want to call me that, you should. I work for the Royal Parks. The constabulary. I’m a special sort of officer.”

“If I say something to yow,” he asked her, “does he hear me? Does the Christ of Otters? Are yow ‘possessed’ by ’im, loik, as it were?”

“I don’t know—Cuthbert. I don’t know if it works like that,” said the woman. “But I’m very interested to hear about all this. Are you hurt?”

“T’snothing,” he said. “But you must leave me now and get down to Grosvenor Square, if you’re the Christ of Otters.”

With that, St. Cuthbert pulled the remake Undley Bracteate from his pocket, the talisman he had tried years ago to give to his cousin Rebekka. He placed it into Astrid’s hand and closed her fingers on it.

“Treasure it,” he said to her. “The animals tell me I’ve become a kind of saint. St. Cuthbert. I don’t know ’bout that. But this talisman, it will keep you safe, Drystan—or whoever you are.”

She looked at the medallion, long broken from its key chain. It showed the two brothers, Romulus and Remus, drinking from the teats of a wolflike creature. There was the inscription, in ancient Frisian runes, g?gog? m?g? medu, and Astrid rubbed her thumb over the ancient incantation, and smiled gently at the man.

She reached then into her own pocket, and pulled out her old pearl rosary. It was her own most precious possession, and she hung it around St. Cuthbert’s neck.

“There,” she said. “Now you’re a proper apostle, aren’t you?”

She wanted now, dreadfully, to believe this homeless man might somehow be connected to her in a more direct way. And if she couldn’t be “Drystan” or an Otter Messiah, couldn’t she, perhaps, be the lonely granddaughter of the poetical drunkard who had spent a night with her grandmother, and vanished from her and her mother’s lives, so long ago? Could that not be what drew her toward him tonight? Might this peculiar ancient sot not be her grandfather? Was it so impossible? In his state of inebriation and need, she observed, he seemed content to let such questions live in golden unanswerability. But she reckoned she would need more of an answer.

“Why did yow come here?” he asked her.

“To help you, I suppose,” said Astrid. “And maybe for another reason. I don’t know. You have caused an awful load of worry for many people, you know, Mr. Handley.” She put her arm over his shoulder to steady him, and unusually for him, he didn’t fight it. “Do you understand that . . . Cuthbert?”

Just as the old man seemed poised to answer, an orange-freq unexpectedly flashed across Astrid’s corneas, its flames whipping up in the purple-yellows of a gas fire.

Eep, eep, eep, eep! Zunga-gunga-gunga!

“Fuck!” she said, squeezing her eyes shut.

Astrid read the text. Special notice: Detention and suspension order. RPC Inspector Astrid Sullivan, white female, aged 32, 5'10". Please detain. Considered armed and possibly dangerous. Caution. Possible tie to terrorists.