Night of the Animals(142)

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 M?bius 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.”