The London Zoo now had a twenty-five-foot hole in it. It was big enough for an elephant to shamble through. And the location of the breach—at a tip of the triangular zoo—could not have been more favorable for a freed wild beast looking for a way out of the zoo. A single clever, brave person—or a clever, psychotic one—would be able to flush any wandering creatures toward the tip of a natural funnel.
Cuthbert did not think of these tactics quite so logistically, of course; he didn’t yet grasp how effective his idea might prove. There was more than a passing blip of joy in openly destroying part of the perimeter fence. It was the elation of a vandal—fleeting and culpable. And something was wrong, too. His euphoria, and some of the decisiveness that attended it, were fading. He was beginning to feel sullen and shaky and irritated and close to the ground, whose gravity felt as strong as Jupiter’s. His Flōt spire was wearing thin, his psychosis plateauing.
He thought to himself, Where are the bloody saints now? I’ve been handed a pitchfork, but no other directions.
He wiped sweat roughly from his forehead with his arm. He grabbed his bolt cutters from the grass.
He started back to the zoo’s path, feeling its gravity acutely. He kept rubbing his tongue against a bit of loose skin on the inside of his cheek. It wouldn’t stay in place. It was as if every strand and filament in his body were drooping away, post-Flōt. He stopped at one point until he could scrape the tiny piece away; he rolled it against the roof of his mouth, then swallowed it. He began walking again, stiffly, with the short-legged proprioceptive illusion one often felt in withdrawal. At the path, he tried to orientate himself in the way sloshed people do, cocking his head to the side and squinting through one eye. He only vaguely understood the zoo’s layout, but he could sense that the location and vastness of the breach in the fence held possibilities.
The zoo seemed far larger than he had remembered it. Outside, in the park, it had always looked compact, like a secret animal-holding cell set behind a hedge or two. Inside it felt bigger than England. He felt a stab of impatience in his stomach. He started to hurry, in a leaning, stiff-legged manner. He decided he might just as well flit from exhibit to exhibit for a while, “regrouping” before the night’s larger, onerous undertakings.
Again, he heard a voice shouting out, now more distinctly: “Help me!” It was hard to tell if it was a man or a woman. The voice sounded very old, however, and weak. It couldn’t have been Drystan—he knew that much.
Cuthbert thought for a moment of calling back. But what was there to say?
The idea that a human being, the night watchman, for instance, could be standing, terrified, atop a picnic table, begging for help, or trying to find a tree to climb—nothing even close crossed Cuthbert’s mind.
He followed one of the paths and ambled north, past the Bactrian camels. On the path he came upon part of a carcass. It was a hoofed leg, but its thigh and haunch had been shorn away neatly around a bloodied bone. Cuthbert knelt down; he felt he would weep, but didn’t. There was only a stinging rigidity in his throat that soon passed.
He touched the cloven hoof. Its halves reminded him of a tiny pair of beaten ballerina slippers. He rubbed the pastern and, pinching the hock, he turned the leg over. It felt cool and sticky with blood. He pulled his hand away in a jerk. He could not work out what sort of animal the leg belonged to, but he guessed a deer. He thought momentarily of the roe deer he would sometimes see grazing in the lawns of a ruined castle in Dudley the family had sometimes visited on the way to Worcestershire and the Wyre. But they had short, reddish-brown hair, and this animal’s was blond and long, and as soft as a girl’s.
When he stood up, he checked around the ground for any other parts of the unfortunate creature. He did not see anything obvious.
He walked along, using his foot to push aside shrubs that edged the path. He soon came to a place that looked ravaged. There were long smears of red on the pavement, streaking into the grass like the lamb’s blood signs of Passover. In a spray of new grass he spotted something odd. At first, he thought it was a watering jug with a strange pink spout, left by some forgetful gardener. Only when he looked much closer did he see it was an animal head—a goat’s. Its eyes and the sockets around looked vigorously chewed out. The whole muzzle and lips had been removed, giving the skull a teeth-gritting mien.
“Fuck me,” said Cuthbert.