Night of the Animals(76)

He told Muezza of his concern about the jackals, but Muezza only gave a chirpy chuckle.

“I know jackals,” said Muezza finally, and rather pompously. “They are really just East African foxes. They are harmless to me, inshallah, and thus to you. We can kill them all. But I don’t smell them, not anywhere close. I smell monkeys.”

“I don’t see how that could be true,” said Cuthbert. “I found jackal handiwork close to here. Bit of a scene, really.”

Muezza shook his head, knowingly. “It’s kill-play, brother. Just kill-play.” He swatted out with a splayed paw, as if to demonstrate.

Cuthbert realized he was being preached to in terms that applied strictly to the feline universe. It was as if he were getting swim lessons from a shark. Try as he might, he would always lack gills, fins, and a requisite shark brain.

The cat continued: “It’s the fel, the elephant, you must be careful with. This is known to every animal in the zoo. The jackal is only dangerous if you are young, or sick, or old, and there are more than one of them.”

Cuthbert said, “Is that right? How would you know about elephants?”

“How!” the cat hissed. “All the creatures in the zoo know the elephants. I am surprised you would doubt this!”

“I’m still surprised that you’re talking. So we’re even. I don’t even know if you are real.”

Muezza said, “There are three in the paddock—Layang, Dilberta, and Mahmoud. The one called Mahmoud killed his keeper last year. The zoo tried to say it was an accident, but it was not. It was not, after all, Mahmoud who stepped on his keeper’s head, it was Allah. And that reminds me, it should be said, too, that the maimum, the apes, also, are bad, bad ones. Allah has punished certain men by making them apes and monkeys. They are more a spiritual warning to humans than a physical peril.”

“You like to gab a bit, don’t you?” said Cuthbert. “What’s all this cantin’ business? You should be more careful.”

“Thank you, brother. There is our gossip, of a sort,” said the cat. “We—we imprisoned animals—have little else to do, you see.”

A terrible, high-pitched howl went up, followed by another, then a series of barks.

“That’s them!” said Cuthbert.

“Those are not jackals, I tell you,” said Muezza. “They are monkeys—and they are terrifying. The jackals—I sense they are no longer in the zoo at all. They would have left to enter the city. There is news to spread, after all: you are here.”

The cat raised his snout up, somewhat pridefully. He said, “It may surprise you to learn that we chordates all knew you were coming. I did, and I have been telling all the other creatures. I am the one who asked them all to communicate with you—because you are the green cat-saint of England. It is no mere accident you have come to me, by the way.” He was silent for a moment, looking all around himself, slowly, as though something might be spying on them. He added, with a hissy sigh: “It is in their best interests.”

Cuthbert felt a chill run up his spine. He was starting to feel as though he needed a drink, frantically. He said, “But others have heard you, too, right?”

Muezza said, “You are the only one. You. I think you know the reason.”

The cat put his two front paws on Cuthbert’s shin and looked up at Cuthbert. “Among the Christians, the animals spoke on the night of their messiah’s birth. This I do not believe. There would, after all, be nothing to discuss. In the Holy Qur’an, it says that not since the days of Solomon have human beings known the speech of animals—‘O people! We have been taught the speech of birds!’ But now you are here—the Mahdi—to save us from Dajjal.”

“A’m the what? I’m to save us from what?”

“From the Antichrist.”

Muezza coiled tightly around Cuthbert’s foot. “You believed in the Christ of Otters, correct? Well, what is the Christ of Otters, brother, but the Redeemer of all, the bringer of the end of days? And who is His harbinger? There is only the Mahdi—that is who. And you are him—and you and I and everything and everyone tonight are inside you, saliq—that is also true. We may call you the John the Baptist or Cuthbert or something else—but it is the same. They are all the Mahdi. On the authority of Abu Huyrayrah the Kitten-Man, I say to you: Allah will make the night long until the Mahdi comes!”

“No,” said Cuthbert. “I must be dead—that’s what’s happening here. A’m gone—jedded, mate. And yow are not real.”

Muezza, standing in front of Cuthbert, blocked his way down the path. “Yes, brother. I am not real, as you say. I am from the dimension of the jinna—the subtle universe beneath the one where men live.”

“Oh, that’s helpful,” Cuthbert said.

The pair moved on.

He felt baffled and irritated by Muezza’s latest claims for him, but he also found it hard not to indulge the idea of saving all the animals.

Cuthbert didn’t understand why he hadn’t run into the jackals. He wondered if they had indeed escaped into the park and therefore into London. Yet the growling, bleating, baying cacophony stirring around them had increased, especially from the northern areas of the park, where the main entrance lay. And although he mistook them for the vanguard of an alien attack, one autonewsmedia flying drone and a Red Watch frightcopter were already beginning to hum in the sky above Regent’s Park, searching for the sources of the disturbance at the zoo.