Night of the Animals(2)
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.
“Almost there,” he said, panting. “Break a leg, mon!”
Cuthbert had no money, no friends, and no possessions, but he had learned through the Wonderments to listen to England’s animals. It was something even the powerful king he so revered couldn’t comprehend, and through this skill, he was going to save Britain and its creatures.
Unfortunately, Flōt addict and madman that he was, not a living human soul on earth believed him.
And on Flōt, as everyone knew, one could believe that microscopic violet-quiffed visitors from Planet Flōtica kept castles on the tips of every blade of grass. One could believe that the last Tasmanian tiger didn’t actually freeze to death in 1936 because of an incompetent zookeeper. When Flōt was good, it was hands down the best legal hallucinogenic and sedative on earth. It offered more than intoxication, more than a release: it took you rippling across whole new planets of purple-white euphoria. Like the old rave drug ketamine, or “Special K,” from the 1990s, it offered a sense of being utterly, and sometimes pleasantly, alone; but uniquely, it also gave the proprioceptive illusion of having extremely long, lissome, and powerful legs. To “get up” or “spire” on Flōt, as it was often called, was all about total self-possessed elevation. On Flōt, the world stood miles below you alone, a distant purple and white field of violets you could only feel tickling your ankles, and you needed nothing or no one else—not God, not a lover, not your pet cat.
CUTHBERT HAD DONE the proper prep for his assault on the zoo, or at least he thought so. A few meters through the dense shrubbery lay a secret grotto that he had fashioned earlier that month inside yew and hazel hedgings and a few coppiced beeches, scooping dirt with his dry hands and charily snapping twigs. He kept an emergency bottle of Flōt stashed there, and a powerful pair of bolt cutters. His plan was to wait until darkness, cut his way in, then break open as many enclosures as possible—especially the otters’. It was the most organized thing he had done in decades. One couldn’t spot the grotto from either the park or the zoo’s interior. It sat a meter from the zoo’s sturdy iron perimeter fence, close to the jackals—and to a rare gap in the iron fence. But the grotto might as well have been in France, such were the difficulties of getting to it now.
Cuthbert shoved forward a few more paces until the crisscrossing hazel branches budged no more and encapsulated him in a green foliate cage. For a moment, he thought he saw a boy, a thin boy with dark hair, shoving along with him a few meters away in the shrubbery. “Dryst,” Cuthbert said. “Look at me. Over here!” Then the boy vanished. Every so often, a stressed branch would crack and loosen the cage’s “bars,” allowing Cuthbert to move again. At one point, tiny twigs jammed up both nostrils and his mouth, making it appear as if he were disgorging leaves from his face like some kind of garden goblin.
“Oh, shittin ’ell,” he gasped, spitting out flecks of shredded leaves. The beast of first Flōt withdrawal was upon him, too, pulling him downward, tearing at his nerves, seizing his muscles—including his fragile heart. A singularly vicious facet of Flōt addiction was its two-bell-curved dual-withdrawal syndrome. It crushed the newly and the long-term sober alike with two acute phases sometimes a decade or more apart. Yet the dual-withdrawal also allowed ex-addicts past the initial psychosis-laden hell of withdrawal No. 1, an island of peace and sanity, before dragging them into the furies of withdrawal No. 2.
For so many years, from the last days of the era of the powerful prime ministers and the European Union, up through the Great Reclamation and the Property Revolts and the slow rise of the various suicide cults of the 2020s, and on through the Second Restoration to the new king in 2028, the ramshackle Cuthbert had somehow survived. All those decades, he’d searched doggedly for his long-lost elder brother, Drystan, who, in his mind, had vanished when they were children, way back in the late 1960s. Since then, after leaving the Black Country, he had learned to suck in and oxygenate himself on London’s quotidian pathologies as naturally as breath. The filthy old town seemed to nourish him, to fuel the hunt for his brother. He took in every coarse ’oi of speech, ate every chip-butty* bag of cheap potato joy, learned every mucky machination to blag* Flōt—all of it, fluently and helplessly, and it had all led to this brambled corner beside the beasts. If the entire history of London, from the Iron Age to the age of digital skin, had a meaning, this spot, as far as Cuthbert knew, was precisely where it stood. This, he was certain, was where his dear long-lost brother Drystan would come back and stay.
GOD KNOWS, the paroxysms of the 2020s and Henry IX had sucked nearly every other last drop of energy from Britain’s tired veins. While thousands of artists, philosophers, and authors had joined the suicide cults or the ranks of brazen self-promoters on WikiNous—the implanted, all-purpose comm-network that grew within human tissue—the most original minds faced almost total indifference.