Night of the Animals(50)
“Appalling,” the presenter said to the reporter, who nodded.
Cuthbert said aloud, “I hope ’ole Harry gets them!”
The fact that the king’s own Red Watch were also trying to hunt him down did not mitigate his feeling of loyalty to the Crown or its policies. Cuthbert was many things, but despite the protests of his youth, he was never a revolutionary.
He jabbed the remote’s power button so hard with his thumb that there was a slight cracking sound from the device. He stood up but lost his balance and fell down onto a cluster of empty nuplastic bottles. He lay there for a long time, moaning softly. His feeling of anger soon evaporated, and he couldn’t work out why he was on the floor in his old flat, trapped.
The dark orange light of evening splashed through his curtainless windows. It was an awful, coarse flush of illumination, and he felt unprotected from it. Then there was a strange sound. For a moment, he swore someone was knocking on the flat’s door, softly, shyly, like a lost child. It stopped. After several minutes, it began again, knof . . . knof . . . knof, and he hoisted himself up.
“Drystan?” he asked aloud, his voice shaky. “That . . . you? YOU? Dryst?”
His heart pounding, he trudged to the door and yanked it open. He felt dizzy, blind with fear. It was the skinny-faced boy from outside the IB, earlier. The child’s pale lower lip trembled. The scalp below his cropped ginger-brown hair showed delicate blue veins. All the bravado of the group and his speedfin were gone. He was about the same age as Drystan when he vanished, Cuthbert realized.
“You,” Cuthbert said. “You?”
“I’m sorry, sir, I’m sorry. But I wanted to say don’t mind my mates, right? They’re gonk-bags, right? We just wanted to tell you that, right? You won’t Opticall the Watch, will you, for, like, harassing you? Sorry, sir.”
“No,” said Cuthbert. “Never.”
“Thanks, mister. And I hope your lions and tigers all come here. I really do.” The child dashed down the dark hall, and Cuthbert closed the door.
Cuthbert went to the kitchen for some instant coffee. He shook some freeze-dried crystals right from a jar into his mouth and chewed them up. Then he vomited into the kitchen sink. The coffee trick worked, as always. He felt awake. And a little mardy, too. He kept ruminating about the poor animals killed by Heaven’s Gate, but then he was just as blameworthy as the cultists, too, wasn’t he?
Cuthbert had read excerpts of “belief statements” reprinted from the cult’s notorious WikiNous stalk. This Marshall Applewhite III fellow—by all accounts a gentle, but sexually tortured son of a Presbyterian minister—had with an uncharacteristic ruthlessness demanded that his followers not only look down upon animals, as Cuthbert’s father had, but also divorce themselves from all that was animal within and without them.
That genuinely puzzled Cuthbert.
“We really need to be moving away from stinky little sad animals, my fellow travelers,” said Applewhite in one video. He spoke in a cloying, singsongy tone that Cuthbert found off-putting. “You’ll see! When our great ‘Gate’ awakens, in merry olde England, you will all see. Right here in London, my friends!”
Animals were on the very lowest level of a deteriorating “assembly line” that produced souls like cartons of solar plugs or bosonicabus engines, according to Applewhite. Household pets such as Osman were crude, aspiring demi-souls trapped at a lower level of existence, and waiting in anguish to join the higher level. Beasts of burden and wildlife were less worthy yet. When a human died, professed Applewhite, sometimes a conniving animal soul would take over the human “container” and win its slim chance to grow. Animals were, at best, disposable objects, at worst, organic “vessels” loaded with damaging demi-souls.
The cult members, Applewhite claimed, were on much more august metaphysical footing than either humans or animals, naturally. They were neutered—many cultists chemically sterilized themselves—members of a faraway alien race called the Luciferians. They occupied the top of Earth’s production cycle, evolving far beyond all other beings. They were not killing themselves but merely shedding their “containers.” Ideas of ecosystem or an interconnected biosphere were hopelessly terrestrial illusions—“scams,” as Applewhite put it—and once the cult’s “Level Above Human” had finally left Earth with the “comet’s” arrival, the planet would merely be a dangerous spawning mechanism.
“We’re going to be getting out of here?” Applewhite said, ending nearly every sentence with a rising-question tone. “We’re going home and it’s wonderful?”
Applewhite’s words rattled Cuthbert and prompted a flurry of febrile questions in him. What if the cultists went after the zoo animals before he had the chance to free them? And what if this Applewhite scoundrel hurt the otters? Then he might not see Drystan again.
If Urga-Rampos, reaching perihelion for the first time in four thousand years, had been the cult’s signal to move to the “higher level” and to join their alien brethren from outer space, if the comet was still, days after the mass suicide, supposed to be visible even to the naked eye in bright London, if all these things were true, and England was ending and Earth a broken soul-machine—well, then, his time for action was short.
Perhaps the great comet had already landed, in London? Where would anyone find it? Near the embassies?