A stocky reporter with a Welsh accent spoke in a mocking tone: “Michael, the victims have now been identified by American investigators but their names are being withheld pending”—the reporter rolled his eyes—“family notifications. We’re looking at an appalling sixty to seventy thousand victims this time, mostly in Southern California, with a total of more than five thousand deaths in other locations—including one in Hampshire. Crucially, the cult’s reputed current leader, Marshall Applewhite III, does not seem to be among the dead.
“It’s standard Heaven’s Gate,” the reporter continued, “a typical, cowardly operation—coinciding this time with the comet’s appearance in the night skies. We have no figures on the animals, but with Heaven’s Gate, one normally sees a couple dozen animal corpses along with each human body. It’s . . . reprehensible. As per usual, the self-murderers are identically clad in long-sleeve white shirts, white trousers, and white Nike trainers. A second videotape, apparently shot just before the killings began, depicts the members in these outfits with HEAVEN’S GATE AWAY TEAM patches being sewn on their sleeves as they smilingly accept their fate. It’s the same horrific modus operandi we’ve seen from the Gate since they first struck, way back in 1997. The king’s spokesman has already released a statement condemning the action.”
“Appalling,” the presenter said to the reporter, who nodded.
Cuthbert said aloud, “I hope ’ole Harry gets them!”
The fact that the king’s own Red Watch were also trying to hunt him down did not mitigate his feeling of loyalty to the Crown or its policies. Cuthbert was many things, but despite the protests of his youth, he was never a revolutionary.
He jabbed the remote’s power button so hard with his thumb that there was a slight cracking sound from the device. He stood up but lost his balance and fell down onto a cluster of empty nuplastic bottles. He lay there for a long time, moaning softly. His feeling of anger soon evaporated, and he couldn’t work out why he was on the floor in his old flat, trapped.
The dark orange light of evening splashed through his curtainless windows. It was an awful, coarse flush of illumination, and he felt unprotected from it. Then there was a strange sound. For a moment, he swore someone was knocking on the flat’s door, softly, shyly, like a lost child. It stopped. After several minutes, it began again, knof . . . knof . . . knof, and he hoisted himself up.
“Drystan?” he asked aloud, his voice shaky. “That . . . you? YOU? Dryst?”
His heart pounding, he trudged to the door and yanked it open. He felt dizzy, blind with fear. It was the skinny-faced boy from outside the IB, earlier. The child’s pale lower lip trembled. The scalp below his cropped ginger-brown hair showed delicate blue veins. All the bravado of the group and his speedfin were gone. He was about the same age as Drystan when he vanished, Cuthbert realized.
“You,” Cuthbert said. “You?”
“I’m sorry, sir, I’m sorry. But I wanted to say don’t mind my mates, right? They’re gonk-bags, right? We just wanted to tell you that, right? You won’t Opticall the Watch, will you, for, like, harassing you? Sorry, sir.”
“No,” said Cuthbert. “Never.”
“Thanks, mister. And I hope your lions and tigers all come here. I really do.” The child dashed down the dark hall, and Cuthbert closed the door.
Cuthbert went to the kitchen for some instant coffee. He shook some freeze-dried crystals right from a jar into his mouth and chewed them up. Then he vomited into the kitchen sink. The coffee trick worked, as always. He felt awake. And a little mardy, too. He kept ruminating about the poor animals killed by Heaven’s Gate, but then he was just as blameworthy as the cultists, too, wasn’t he?
Cuthbert had read excerpts of “belief statements” reprinted from the cult’s notorious WikiNous stalk. This Marshall Applewhite III fellow—by all accounts a gentle, but sexually tortured son of a Presbyterian minister—had with an uncharacteristic ruthlessness demanded that his followers not only look down upon animals, as Cuthbert’s father had, but also divorce themselves from all that was animal within and without them.
That genuinely puzzled Cuthbert.
“We really need to be moving away from stinky little sad animals, my fellow travelers,” said Applewhite in one video. He spoke in a cloying, singsongy tone that Cuthbert found off-putting. “You’ll see! When our great ‘Gate’ awakens, in merry olde England, you will all see. Right here in London, my friends!”