It wasn’t too late to reverse this tragic night, he thought. He might still send an Opticall to Dr. Bajwa’s emergency answering service, or even to the Royal Constabulary. He remembered how he had tugged Drystan’s hand with his sweaty little fingers, on the horrible day in 1968, before they plunged into the brook. He had begged Dryst to turn back, away from the Boogles, but Dryst had pushed deeper into the Wyre, screaming “Kill the Mekon!”
But it wasn’t too late to stop all this nonsense, was it? With at least a speck of sanity, he understood very precisely that he was getting into a real bungle-muster tonight, and that it would alter many lives irrevocably if he did not stop soon.
The shadowy green peaks of the Elephant and Rhino Pavilion jutted into the horizon, among which the BT Tower, far away, looked especially minuscule and mannered to Cuthbert. Beyond it, the enormous city was only a glow in the tops of the trees. The stubby pachyderm spires were meant to look like elephant trunks, but they reminded him of the coned tops of old, ruined oast houses he had seen in Birmingham as a child—primitive, simple, and tall as ogres.
Without warning, a set of quick, separate woops hit out beside him. They were so loud and dense, he felt he had been thumped on the side of his head. He bolted. Woop, woop, woop! He ran for his life, in short, sloppy nonagenarian dog-trots, holding bolt cutters high, but unwittingly headed straight toward the source.
It was the work of a single, black-eyed siamang. It hung in its huge, spindly pen raised on plinths, about ten meters or so from Cuthbert. The siamang was warning something or someone to back off —and very effectively, it seemed—puffing its larynx sac into an impious black balloon. Cuthbert saw the ape, dimly, in its web of play ropes. It was fiendish.
He said in a half-whisper, “Hell’s bells! Hell’s bloody bells!”
Cuthbert spun back around, his hands trembling, and ran away. The woops came like sound grenades, more resonant and deafening than the loudest alarm Cuthbert had ever heard. It amazed and terrified him. The message was as clear to his garbled mind as it would be to any living thing: get away, or I give you a ball of forever darkness.
Then there were men’s and women’s voices, from deep in Cuthbert’s psychosis. They sounded high-pitched, persnickety, and—for reasons unknown to all but the British Midlands soul—deeply American. They were repeating certain phrases, mammals will pass from Earth and deactivate the animals and render biology void. The voices slipped down above the siamang’s noises, dripping down into the zoo like a kind of contempt for nature, sloshed out of a cup in the sky.
“Oh,” Cuthbert mumbled, irritated and feeling harried, jogging along as best he could. “The culters! They’ve come! I’ve no time for otters.” Surely, the great war of the spirits between the Heaven’s Gaters and the Animal Kingdom was about to have its first battle. The sounds were a sign as clear as anything. Otherworldly interiors were moving. Pain, anxiety, and failure were its wheel-greasers. He came to a stop. He could not run farther. He bent down, gasping for breath, his heart tumbling. He walked a few feet more, and when he looked up, he could swear that several indistinct figures in white crossed the path, a little ahead of him, near a shadowy pillar of some kind. He thought he saw their white bodysuits, their white Nikes with black swooshes.
“Oh, I see them, those California bastards! Two of them—with a focking camera gun or something,” he said aloud. “Stop, yow focking two-bone Neuters.”
The Neuters’ apparent cowardice was no surprise. They would not confront him directly. For a moment, the figures seemed to linger round the tenebrous stone column up ahead on the path, then ran off, cowardly, as Cuthbert approached.
Cuthbert gasped, “Who the fuck are you lot? Come on now! Who are ya?” But he knew the answer, didn’t he?
He spoke, in a voice full of false syrupiness: “If that’s how yooo want to be then . . .” He could not work out where the man crying for help fit into all this. And what of the Gulls of Imago? Did the bloke asking for help have an answer?
The dulcet duet of the crested gibbons rose again, as if in response, singing to Cuthbert like choirboys from mahogany trees: WITHsul, WITHsul, WE with souls, WE with souls, SO-ouls-ouls-oul. Cuthbert felt an intense sympathy for the monkeys. He also felt an odd kind of shame for having fled the siamang. It had merely tried to warn him.
With souls!
“Arr,” Cuthbert said, knowingly. “I understand now.” He looked at his hands. The empty one was shaking uncontrollably. He stuffed it into his pocket. His other hand’s tremors were causing the bolt cutters to snap open and shut.