Night of the Animals(49)
He remembered this as he made his way through the clattering hallways of his old IB. When he was younger, it had simply been too early for him to learn the language of animals—and too early in Britain’s national life, since it hadn’t yet hit its prophesied bottom. And not until Dr. Bajwa had sent him to the London Zoo had he begun, really, to know that something new was afoot, and to believe he would find Drystan again, and to act, despite great peril, to welcome the Christ of Otters.
“Christ, forgive me,” whispered Cuthbert. “I’ve my own heart of a demon.”
But we take you back, he could hear the dog Osman say. Without condition.
the death cult strikes
CUTHBERT OPENED THE DOOR AND LUMBERED into his old IB, No. 1102. The locks were gone, but it didn’t look as if the Watch had tossed the flat. It was stark—dark and vacant, mostly, just the brown-stained tiling on floors and walls and hundreds of empty containers. If the Watch had been here, they hadn’t taken anything, and miraculously—probably out of fear of the Watch—it seemed as if none of the IB’s resident thieves had touched a thing.
“Fuck me,” said Cuthbert. “I don’t bloody believe it.”
He plopped down in a white butterfly chair placed before a small, ancient Philips TV that picked up digital signals from old “relic” transmitters left in place for Indigents, normally beamed straight to WikiNous. This was a familiar vessel he sailed upon to visit various continents of despair. Dozens of empty two-liter bottles of cheap cider, bitter, and lager encircled the chair like limpid, amber buoys, along with countless drained orbs of Flōt. The remote was in the chair’s pouch-like seat, and Cuthbert had to dig under his rump for it. He was too big for the chair, and one of its splaying metal rods pressed into his kidneys, but the chair comforted him, and he wanted its bad pleasures to take him over. He switched on the TV. He waved his hand across the tops of the various bottles around the chair until he found an old, cold Flōt orb with weight in it; he grabbed it and guzzled hard.
There were fresh animal voices then, and they said, Remember, St. Cuthbert.
Cuthbert sat up in his chair, and shook his bottle at the air. He said, angrily: “Take this away, St. Cuthbert, will you?” He took another great swig and hurled the bottle across the room. He closed his eyes. He began to weep as he felt his legs grow long.
“Cuthbert—Drystan,” he said. “Someone.” After a while, the Flōt settled him a bit. He felt calmer, almost able to judge matters.
The news was on. For all his disorder, Cuthbert actually enjoyed watching the news, and especially the royally imprimatured BBC/WikiNous. Once the dull election coverage was over (it was obvious Harry9’s hand-chosen new LabouraTory man, in this case one of the former prime minister Tony Blair’s sons, would be elected as his prime minister), he began to watch more carefully.
“The enemies of humanity have struck again,” read the presenter. “What may be one of the worst mass suicides in history has occurred, once again, in the American state of California, coordinated with at least a few thousand self-murders—and animal killings—in Britain, as well as, once again, in India, in Korea Hana, and the Nigerian Federation.”
On the screen was raw video footage—the crude automated news-reporting so popular on WikiNous—of the aftermath of a mass self-murder by the most diabolical of the cults, Heaven’s Gate. A camera was being toggle-driven through a sort of dormitory. Lying neatly in bunk beds, on stiff-looking backs, were dead people with purple cloth triangles covering their faces. Beside every bed was a large nuplastic set of drawers on wheels. In the video, the drawers were opened slowly, revealing horrifying contents: inside each were all manner of small, freshly poisoned “voided” animals. There was a black toy poodle, a set of roan cavies, countless cats and kittens, robins, an iguana, hamsters large and small.
As the footage continued, Cuthbert felt almost dizzy with rage and sadness, and a sense of guilt—but he could not stop watching.
This latest Heaven’s Gate affair, which was all over WikiNous, had thrown Cuthbert off his usual dolorous paths; it not only disturbed and obsessed him, but it also seemed somehow directed at him.
Yet the BBC/WikiNous’s coverage was contemptuous, and Cuthbert ate up every morsel. Suicide was considered, in general, degenerate and disloyal to the king, and despite his own history and addictions, Cuthbert felt no love or compassion for suicides; indeed, he felt compelled, as a citizen, to keep abreast whenever these cults hit hard.
A stocky reporter with a Welsh accent spoke in a mocking tone: “Michael, the victims have now been identified by American investigators but their names are being withheld pending”—the reporter rolled his eyes—“family notifications. We’re looking at an appalling sixty to seventy thousand victims this time, mostly in Southern California, with a total of more than five thousand deaths in other locations—including one in Hampshire. Crucially, the cult’s reputed current leader, Marshall Applewhite III, does not seem to be among the dead.
“It’s standard Heaven’s Gate,” the reporter continued, “a typical, cowardly operation—coinciding this time with the comet’s appearance in the night skies. We have no figures on the animals, but with Heaven’s Gate, one normally sees a couple dozen animal corpses along with each human body. It’s . . . reprehensible. As per usual, the self-murderers are identically clad in long-sleeve white shirts, white trousers, and white Nike trainers. A second videotape, apparently shot just before the killings began, depicts the members in these outfits with HEAVEN’S GATE AWAY TEAM patches being sewn on their sleeves as they smilingly accept their fate. It’s the same horrific modus operandi we’ve seen from the Gate since they first struck, way back in 1997. The king’s spokesman has already released a statement condemning the action.”