Night of the Animals(75)

In the deep murk of the enclosure, several shadows seemed to burst to life for a second or two. It was as if little dark doors were swinging open to reveal silhouettes of lost souls.

“Oh, now I see something!” said Cuthbert. There was a kind of sirocco of dark heat that stole past him. “That something? That it? Am I seeing it?”

“I do not know, saliq. It’s not so simple. But something is wrong, I sense. This is not how I expected this to go. The Shayk, he is disturbed, I fear. We must leave now. You will see him, I promise, before the night ends.”

“The darkness—it’s f*cking roasting, like boiling oil.” Cuthbert stuck his head into the gap in the enclosure, ignoring Muezza. He slurred, “A’m ready, ready, ready. To stop killing myself. With booze, right? Help me, Shayk.”

Muezza said, in a severe tone, “We really must leave. He can kill you, saliq. He is not . . . easy to predict.”

“I don’t care,” said Cuthbert. “Not really.”

“Your insect juice speaks now. We do not want to anger him, and you are too important to endanger. You—you caged Kitten-Man—you are more to Allah than even the Shayk. He prepares to stalk upon endless fields of urban darkness, to tear great secrecies, flesh from bone, and we must accept that. It is a powerful thing to be blessed to behold, but we don’t want to behold it now.”

“Why is he angry?”

“I don’t know,” said Muezza. “Perhaps because of the invasion of the comet cult. Something is wrong. He left before we could talk with him. That is sometimes . . . his way.”

“But I don’t ‘behold’ anything! I want to stop. To stop the Flōt!” Cuthbert beseeched. “I want my f*cking otters. And my brother! For England’s sake, they really must be found.”

The cat didn’t seem to hear him. “We must go,” said the cat. “This is how Allah’s will has worked! If you wish to find Drystan, let’s go.”

Muezza began running ahead in the direction he wanted Cuthbert to follow, then trotting back to goad him on when Cuthbert hesitated, craning his head around to look back at the opened cage, several times, like Lot’s wife. He felt bitterly disappointed in the failure of the meeting to lead to a sense of imminent hope over his Flōtism, or even to get him closer to finding the Gulls. He stumbled after the cat, not knowing where precisely to put his feet, reeling a bit.

“I don’t believe you!” said Cuthbert. “Look at your Shayk. When we came to pay our respects, he offers nothing. No sounds. Nothing. I still will drink, won’t I? Just glimpses of something dark—and possibly asleep?—moving inside its box? This is the end of your Green Line, your One True Path? D’yow think I’m saft?”

Muezza stopped trotting along in his fussy cat prance, and shook his head. He said, “So narrow, so ephemeral, so small is this way of thinking! Surely you are in pain and suffering, because this could not be our Mahdi talking. This is your Flōtism, poor one. It wants you to want everything now, now, now. I will tell you once more, the Shayk will take you to Allah. He is your ally. He will have a part in grave future events, but you, not he, are the key. And Drystan, too—he will appear. Do you not understand what just happened?”

Cuthbert said, “Oh, I understand too well now. You have tricked me into doing something very very stupid. I understand it perfectly.”

“I did not trick you, most assuredly I say to you. But stay on the Green Line. I warn you.”

“Ha! Let’s not talk, OK?”

For a while, they did not. Then Muezza said, “Cuthbert, my saliq, you have just released the Shayk. He is without question the most important one of our kind on the earth, except for you, of course. The moment we stepped away from his sight, I assure you, he left his prison. A new era has arrived! The Dajjal will perish, in a pool of fire. Don’t you comprehend the consequence of this occasion?”

The cat lay on its side for a moment and looked up at Cuthbert, with a sort of smile on its muzzle. “I do not know precisely how he will get you off Satan’s milk, but it will come about, just as surely as the day follows the night. He is the Shayk of Night. He controls all things of the dark. He will prise you away from your Flōt orbs, somehow.”

“Well,” said Cuthbert. “I’ll believe it when it ’appens.”

It was not exactly “the moment we stepped away,” but when the spiring man and his ghost cat staggered from the rough slash in the fencing, the zoo’s melanistic leopard specimen—and his name actually was Montgomery—did exit his cage and slink silently into the night. Old Monty, as his keepers called him, was a larger example of Panthera pardus—twelve stone, twenty-eight inches at the shoulder, and massive, muscular skull. He did not care about Sufism, or green lines, or Cuthbert’s spiring madness, or Anglo-Saxon saints.

Nor was he very hungry, not yet. He was something much more dangerous than that: he was outside a routine he had been habituated to for the nine years of his life in captivity, and he was both terrified and curious.





the autonewsmedia rolls in


CUTHBERT WAS SEVERAL DOZEN YARDS FROM THE big cats area when he was sure that he heard sirens. He could swear, too, there was the man’s voice again, a man calling out. His head was playing tricks on him again, it seemed. He wondered what had happened to the jackals. He feared they would come after the sand cats. And how would he himself handle an encounter with them?