Go to the lions. They will take away all your misery. You will save England and all its animals tonight.
St. Cuthbert began to weep. It seemed clear the otters were suggesting his martyrdom.
No, he said. I dunna want to see en-nay loyns.
It’s the only way to stop the soul-mongers. Through your salvation alone, St. Cuthbert.
No, he said. Tell me, tell me a different way. Can’t I find the Gulls of Imago? He said aloud, repeating the song of the penguins, “Seagulls of Imago, yow’re song shall make us free . . . from Cornwall to Orkney, we dine on irony . . . along with lovely kippers from the Irish Sea.” He belched.
You will free the lions, and the gulls will come, and they will set right the arts of the world, at least for many years. They will put the machines of evil back to their original, good purposes.
Must I die? When? Why? What do I do?
But the otters weren’t stopping to chat. Long used to the hundreds of incongruous scents in the zoo, they nonetheless sensed the great disturbances in the night. They were keen listeners, and the sounds of the solarcopters and the screaming chimps particularly terrified them. They moved as one, first west, then south toward the unmistakable smell of the dank water of Regent’s Canal. Before St. Cuthbert could lift his head, they were out of sight.
He felt mournful and newly devastated and very tired. He could see, indeed, that his skin’s color had darkened to a distinct green. It may have been magic, but it was also multiple organ failure.
As he stumbled south, through the cave-art tunnel, keeping off the paths now, and made his way toward the area of the big cats, he stopped at every enclosure, paddock, and cage he could, releasing as many animals as opportunity afforded. He swung open the great rear gate of the elephant paddock, and Layang, Dilberta, and the fierce Mahmoud came lumbering out. The giraffes and nervous okapis proceeded from their large faux-African diorama gingerly. A threesome of yipping fennec foxes from Algeria came out in a playful sprint, tumbling over each other, ready to cavort with any creature that was game. The shy black-and-white tapir named Gertie, from Malaysia, had to be pushed along from its leafy pen by St. Cuthbert, then shoved, but it soon returned to the safe-smelling imported plants, cowering. The cow-like anoa from Sulawesi, a pair of Andean pudús, and a quintet of pert peccaries from southern Mexico—all of them trotted out quite happily and expectantly, as if their enclosures had merely been expanded.
As the saint walked on, freeing all manner of mammal, reptile, marsupial, and bird, a question he hadn’t counted on began to trouble him: had all these animals really ever spoken to him?
Yes, answered the lions. Don’t be a fool, for at the sound of our roars, sorrows will be no more.
But he wasn’t so sure. For a few moments, he began to suspect that his mind, under the influence of decades of abuse, had been playing an extraordinary, elaborate ruse. There was a strange feeling of unreality almost suffocating him, as if every part of the whole crazy night itself had been thrown into outer space, and all he had left was a dark, unbreathable vacuum in every direction for a trillion miles.
BY THE TIME St. Cuthbert had reached the Asiatic lion compound, the London Zoo was being overrun. Because much of the hubbub from the police and autonewsmedia was near the northeastern end of the zoo, the animals naturally fled in the opposite direction, toward its southern tip, where St. Cuthbert had so effectively created his huge hole in the main fence. It was a funnel, and through it the screaming beasts were about to spill into London like unruliness itself, in scalding streams.
At the same time, in St. Cuthbert’s mind, there was another, even scarier presence invading the zoo. More and more, he could see flashes of white-bodysuited Luciferian Neuters, gliding unnaturally, as if on wheels, and drawing silver quantum contra-fluxal staves that popped out of their wrists like long daggers. St. Cuthbert knew they were coming for the animals, and that both he and the Red Watch must do everything to try to stop them.
His nemesis, his abuser, his pursuer—the thuggish Watch—now shared the same enemy as he.
“The Watch and I—on the same squad,” he said, snickering. “That’s not on, not on.”
father drury and his “dogs”