Night of the Animals(58)
He began walking south, toward the main glow of central London. It was a kind of dirty aurora, and it seemed more distinct because of the park’s expanse of darkened sports pitches sandwiched between the zoo and the city outside. As he proceeded, he tripped more and more of the motion detectors, switching on more arrays of lights. They followed him like camera flashes. Every few moments, he would also see lights from others parts of the zoo snap on. The jackals were on the move, too.
In a few minutes, he came to the southernmost point of the zoo’s interior. It was the place where, on the other side of the main fence, the Broad Walk in Regent’s Park and another footpath intersected, forming the tip of a great pointer directed toward Marylebone, and beyond it busy Oxford Circus and Centre Point. During opening hours, it was one of the spots in the zoo where all visitors turned around.
There was a maintenance shed and a little white Cushman electroglider. In the bed of the Cushman were a few big peat moss bags, a safety cone, a pitchfork, and a couple of metal buckets. An orange electrical cord was plugged into a socket above its bumper—its molten salt batteries were charging. Cuthbert sat on the white vinyl bench-style cushion of the microlorry and touched the steering wheel with his fingertips. Then he slammed his fist into the horn. Berp! He hit it again. Berp! He got up and walked over to the shed. He jiggled the doorknob—locked. He circled around the shed and realized it had no windows.
While behind the shed, Cuthbert saw something quite interesting. The zoo’s perimeter fence, in this concealed section of the zoo, comprised just two short panels. These panels formed the squared-off tip of the entire zoo enclosure.
Open this “tip,” open the zoo.
Cuthbert worked his way through a bramble toward the fence; he tangled his foot. He pulled up half the underbrush behind the shed, revealing bare ground covered with snails and glistening black mealworm beetles.
Near the fence were a few old, thin tree branches he broke off. It had the effect of opening an enormous vista of Regent’s Park.
Directly in front of him, on the other side of the fence, was the ornate Readymoney Fountain, that Zoroastrian fantasy of marble and pink granite. As a frequent rough-sleeper in Regent’s, Cuthbert had long known that it readily offered neither money nor water. But it did, reputedly, offer something he valued: luck. At least, that’s what many of the homeless Indigents who slept in the park believed, and they often bedded down near the pavilion-like Victorian structure, for security.
Cuthbert set down his bolt cutters and pushed against one of the sections of the fence. It was loose. Heavy wrought iron, painted black, it had sharp, barbless spikes on offset shafts. An animal could easily be deterred, if not killed, trying to cross it; yet though substantial, the fence was ill secured. He surveyed the damp ground into which the fence was planted. He went back to the Cushman and grabbed the pitchfork.
It took him only a few minutes to chop away and expose the fence’s staking bars. The soil came away effortlessly, like chocolate cake. Cuthbert could not believe how easy it was.
He stopped to rest and looked up. He plunged the pitchfork into the ground and let it stand. Where was Urga-Rampos? Where would the comet stop, precisely? (Clouds still veiled it a bit.) Soon, the sky started spinning and Cuthbert grew dizzy and lost his balance. He crashed sideways, tumbling onto another dreaded holly switch. The fall was made more treacherous by a short, young stand of ornamental bamboo. But Cuthbert’s bulk simply crushed it all. He felt prickles from the holly along the side of his leg. A little slit came open on his trousers at the groin. Though he had fallen hard, he felt no pain whatsoever, only the slight prickles. He no longer registered stings the way normal bodies do. In fact, he felt grotesquely amused.
“I’m coming apart,” he said. “Damn me trazzies!” He lay there for a minute or two. He thought he heard the squawk of a loudspeaker, and voices. He clambered to his feet. Was it the Watch? Or the Heaven’s Gate cultists, coming for the animals?
Within a few minutes, he was able to push the fence down far enough that he could get his feet onto it. With his considerable weight, the old man simply “walked” up the fence and flattened it. He fell again, forward this time, onto the soft, grassy turf of Regent’s Park proper. He staggered back to his feet. He looked at his handiwork. Pressed into the ground, the fence’s line of spikes all pointed out, to the open park, like a road sign.
The London Zoo now had a twenty-five-foot hole in it. It was big enough for an elephant to shamble through. And the location of the breach—at a tip of the triangular zoo—could not have been more favorable for a freed wild beast looking for a way out of the zoo. A single clever, brave person—or a clever, psychotic one—would be able to flush any wandering creatures toward the tip of a natural funnel.
Cuthbert did not think of these tactics quite so logistically, of course; he didn’t yet grasp how effective his idea might prove. There was more than a passing blip of joy in openly destroying part of the perimeter fence. It was the elation of a vandal—fleeting and culpable. And something was wrong, too. His euphoria, and some of the decisiveness that attended it, were fading. He was beginning to feel sullen and shaky and irritated and close to the ground, whose gravity felt as strong as Jupiter’s. His Flōt spire was wearing thin, his psychosis plateauing.
He thought to himself, Where are the bloody saints now? I’ve been handed a pitchfork, but no other directions.