AND WHAT of the other animals?
The Shayk of Night, predictably, disappeared. He would hide in the trees for as long as he was needed, be it days or decades, ready to bring infidels to the true faith. Eventually, he would join the ranks of Britain’s cryptozoological legends, a big black felid, sometimes spotted late at night on westerly moors by some excitable retired schoolmaster.
The zookeepers, try as they may, couldn’t find Muezza, Monty’s little admirer, and it was assumed that he would take up with the feral cats of north London, happily hunting Norway rats for all his days ahead. The other sand cats were eventually rounded up.
The otters, like most of their species, went in different directions. One headed to the Thames estuary. It would swim toward Lindisfarne on the North Sea, where the spirit of St. Cuthbert awaited all pilgrims. Another otter would make its way west, toward the quieter corners of Somerset, and perhaps, one day, even toward Worcestershire, the Severn basin, and the Wyre Forest. The otter pups were in pain—they had been forced to abandon the new mother because such were the forced detachments of the mustelid universe. It was a place where you just swam on. The spirit of St. Cuthbert would protect them until, one day, they repopulated Britain’s rivers and streams. Meanwhile, their video likenesses were to be broadcast all over the world, thanks to the ginger-haired reporter, Jerry. For several days, the most popular image projected of the zoo disturbance would be the video of the six newborn otters in their glossy blankets of caul, their dutiful mother licking them clean, with interspersed interview shots of the tiresome David Beauchamp, finally a minor celebrity, explaining how the London Zoo was already planning a “once in a lifetime” exhibit called “Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Otter.” “That’s my title, actually,” he would be heard saying.
AS MYSTERIOUSLY AND BIZARRELY as the Luciferian attack had begun, it had ended up receding, rapidly, in terms of both concrete facts and in what people believed about the night. The white demonic arch that rose from Grosvenor and landed in the zoo’s Penguin Pool had flickered off, and the comet Urga-Rampos disappeared from the Eastern Hemisphere. Nearly as soon as the horrors had gone, some people claimed they never existed. The timeline vandalism of Harry9’s ?thelstan’s Bliss further served to confuse the public.
But some things could not be disputed.
All across Britain, and especially in London near the American Embassy, the bodies of hundreds of suicided “Neuters” were discovered that May Day and in the days afterward. They all wore white coveralls, cropped haircuts, and white Nike trainers. But they were not, as Astrid had imagined, all clones of Marshall Applewhite III. They were ordinary citizens, from all over the Americas, northern Europe, and Japan and Singapore, especially, who had dedicated themselves to the HeavensGate.com cult and decided to end their lives in England in order to “shed their containers” and meet Applewhite in his comet starship. It would be the apex of the suicide cults’ powers on earth. In every case, the suicides had imbibed lethal doses of sedatives along with Flōt and killed at least one poor animal, usually someone’s stolen domestic pet. All had an American $5 bill in their pockets for the afterlife, which they apparently considered a cut-rate operation. In central London, as planned, a large squad of Neuter aggressors had managed to murder dozens of other noncult members, in some cases force-feeding victims sedatives and Flōt, and some of the loose animals, did indeed attack them.