Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  At the convention this weekend he had often felt just as ignored and friendless. Well, he knew he tended toward an introspective moodiness, which didn’t lend itself well to convention-style banter. Or was he making excuses for those who shunned him because of his color? He hated to think he might be that defeated.

  Beyond the splintering picnic tables and blistered kiddie rides the path wound through gardens gone wild – fallen leaves snagged in tall weeds – and curved around the edge of a pool which might once have contained goldfish but was now a murky soup. The gravel of the path scraped and crunched under his shoes, the rocks grinding together like teeth gnashing in sleep. Peripherally, David saw a movement close to the ground, and turned half expecting to see a peacock waddling along, but it was only a low bush buffeted by a gust of chill wind.

  The path forked in several directions now; a sign post indicated that the PETTING FARM was to the right, and SNOW LEOPARDS and WOLVES to the left. He chose the left path. He polished off his coffee and cigarette, put the butt of the latter into the cup of the former and carried it with him until he found a rusted waste bucket to drop it in. Lighting a fresh cigarette, he considered a large area enclosed by a high mesh fence, the enclosure dominated by a looming outcropping of rock like the bare crest of a mountain. There was no sign that he could see to indicate what animal might have dwelt within, but he guessed mountain goats or some such. He watched for some time, squinting through his smoke, as if he hoped some animal would at last emerge from the crags, but of course none did.

  As David stepped forward again, he heard a short deep grunt from somewhere ahead of him, and he stopped again in his tracks.

  What had it been? It had sounded like an animal sound. It had been vaguely bovine, but perhaps less domestic than that. Maybe even one of the low throaty sounds a great cat makes. But it was pointless trying to imagine what sort of animal had made the sound, because it couldn’t be any animal, could it? What was the likelihood that even the humblest little zoo would forget one of its animals in closing down, leave it behind? Even if they had, it would starve to death within its pen.

  Unless it had escaped from its pen. Or escaped during the hectic moving/closing process. And remained in the vicinity of the zoo, afraid to venture far from it.

  David smirked derisively at himself. Right, he thought.

  At most, it was a dog. More likely, it was some sound beyond the zoo itself, a car or just about anything. He continued his aimless stroll, not anxious to return to his car and the road. He’d rather lose himself on these paths than on the highway again. He realized it was foolish...especially where the sun was dropping steadily under its own molten weight. He didn’t want to run into the police, or run into the sprayers of that cryptic graffiti he had seen. But he told himself he’d work his way back toward the parking lot any time now. After this cigarette. Or maybe one after that, for the road.

  What was there to rush home to? The kids lived with their mother and their mother had not been replaced. There was only work tomorrow. He did not want to hurtle toward that. He wanted to hear the echoes of his mother’s voice, in this place, and the echoes of animal sounds, even if both were only in his imagination. Echoes of his childhood.

  He peered into more penned areas and empty cages. He was reminded of news footage he had seen on TV during the Gulf War; animals in a zoo cut off due to the fighting were starving to death. He was haunted to this day by images of the cadaverous lions, crying out forlornly as they slowly died in their cage. Abandoned, all but forsaken. There had been a magazine article about it, too; a devoted zoo worker had finally made it in to check on his charges, and an elephant had been so happy to see him that it had wept. David hadn’t known that elephants could cry tears. The story and accompanying photos had given him a physical ache in his chest.

  He couldn’t remember now what the final outcome had been. He supposed that the problem hadn’t yet been resolved at the time of the article. Had that elephant died? Those beautiful lions? He did know, however, that Iraqi troops had been killing some of the animals for target practice. For fun. And people thought lions were frightening.

  He wondered what the fate of the animals here had been. Moved to other zoos? Or destroyed?

  There was a cage that a sign indicated had once housed a vulture; now it contained only the vulture’s macabre props: a grinning horse skull, a few sets of antlers, stray bones strewn about the dirt floor. David could almost imagine that the zoo he had seen on TV had resembled this at last: cages of exotic skeletons, like crumbled museum displays, carcasses picked clean by the tiny animals like mice and insects that were free to come and go between the bars.

  As he contemplated the bones, there was a rustle of the bushes that hunched darkly behind him. He turned more abruptly than was logical. He saw nothing, but the shifting of leaves had seemed more than the lonely wind might produce. More focused, and more aggressive, almost as if some animal low to the ground had crashed along through the brush just beyond the path before darting off into the deeper brush and trees again.

  David moved ahead at a brisker pace. He really should think about circling back to the parking lot.

  The path now became long and straight, directly bordered on his right by a high fence. Beyond the fence was the street he had driven along as he turned into the zoo. Traffic on the road was sparse; only the occasional car hissed past. He hoped none would be a police car, that he wouldn’t be spotted on the other side of this mesh, like one of the zoo’s denizens himself.

  To his left there was another enclosure dominated by heaps of rock, looming cold and shadowed. But whereas the presumed mountain goats’ pen had been open at the top, this one had a high ceiling of mesh as well. A sign explained the precaution – this had been where the advertised snow leopards had dwelt. He stopped to read a plaque which offered a few interesting facts about their habits and habitat: they lived at the highest altitude of any of the great cats. Atop one of the thick posts of the outer barricade, someone had left and forgotten a pair of binoculars. But then David realized, as he picked them up, that the heavy rubber-sheathed instrument was attached to the post by a strong cable so as not to be stolen. It was there so that former visitors could spy on the leopards more closely.

  David crushed his cigarette, lifted the glasses to his eyes and played with the focus. He imagined that the small, thick-coated leopards had been fond of perching up on the rocky ledges. He traced the lenses along those jagged shelves now, idly, the focus shifting in irritating watery waves. He was unfamiliar with binoculars and was determined to master them, to get a focus that would remain consistent.

  A white figure darted through his field of vision, passed in and out in a cloud of blurred focus.

  David lowered the binoculars sharply, gazed up at the gloomy cliffs with his naked eyes. Had it been there, on that ledge, that he’d seen the figure? There was nothing there now. He looked at the spot through the glasses again, fought to keep perfectly still so the image wouldn’t cloud and waver. He saw nothing but some weeds rippling. Having his eyes covered even with a viewing device made him feel suddenly vulnerable, so he set the glasses back atop the post.

  What had he seen? A large dog lunging between the rocks? Something on all fours, it had looked like, and very thin. Somehow the figure had seemed both shadowy and yet pale. But it hadn’t been black or white so much as simply colorless. A visible invisibility.

  In other words, a figment of his imagination. He really had to get out of here; it was much too lonely, much too sad a place. Its cold wind was stirring up loose leaves inside his brain, loose memories of actual animals he had viewed in his childhood, as distant and removed as another lifetime now. He wondered if going forward would be quicker than retracing his steps. Well, he’d pick up the pace again. He went forward.

  A sun-faded plaque to his right announced that the next enclosure contained a number of Mexican wolves. He didn’t stop to read the facts this time, however. The wolf enclosure was very large and deeply f
orested. The path curved now, away from the street, circled him back toward the heart of the zoo. The path became elevated, as well, as it hugged a swelling hill. He wondered how zoo patrons had ever been able to spot the wolves in the dense vegetation of their keep.

  At the crest of the hill there was another outcropping of stone, but this one he could tell was fake, plaster perhaps artfully molded into a cave. He trudged up the increasingly steep incline and at last reached the cave, cursing himself for not backtracking after all. But how could he resist peeking into this cave, which he would have loved as a child? He ducked inside it, and at his feet a wolf lay gazing up at him, several cubs suckling at her belly. His heart lunged in the cage of his chest.

  But the nursing wolf was a statue, fused with the floor of the faux cave. Another plaque offered more fascinating wolf facts. Bastards, David thought. How many children had shrieked when stumbling upon that petrified wolf? He could imagine some poor old grandmother clutching her chest as she crumpled to the floor of the mock den, with its clever imitation cave paintings of elk or antelope and its stenciled handprints. Amongst these symbols was more of that black, blurry spray-painted graffiti, menacingly modern and primitive at the same time.

  David emerged from the cave, started down the other side of the hill. He could be on his way home by now. He was in an unfamiliar part of the state; who could tell how much longer it would take to get home tonight? If he got home too late he’d call in sick tomorrow, whether his bosses expected his convention report in the morning or not. But they’d think he’d had too much to drink at the convention, or shacked up with some woman he’d met in the hotel bar, as if he could ever be so lucky.

  From the hill he could now see city skyscrapers, distantly looming above the tree line, deep gray against the darkening gray of sky. The city and its suburbs like Dearborn Heights would spread, flow over the wooded oasis where this zoo now hid and cowered amongst the trees, itself all bones like an abandoned lion.

  Now he was on the opposite side of the wolf enclosure, and he glanced that way as he trudged down the slope. And again his heart jolted as he saw a figure so pale it seemed to glow, ducking between the trees. He realized it was keeping pace with his descent, and even thought he heard the crackle of twigs under its feet. The separation of the mesh fence did little to alleviate his alarm. Whatever it was, it had somehow got from inside the leopard enclosure to the wolf enclosure, so it could just as easily get out here to where he was.

  And he no longer thought it might be a dog. Some snow leopard left behind, after all?

  Or worse, perhaps – might it be a person?

  But what he’d glimpsed appeared to be without clothing. And the impression he’d received was one of emaciation.

  Some demented child – some homeless person, hiding out inside the derelict zoo? It wasn’t beyond possibility, was it?

  David broke into a trot, keeping his gaze on the wolf pen as he moved. Did he see occasional stirrings of the undergrowth, like the swells of a dolphin cruising parallel to a ship without quite surfacing? But at last the wolf enclosure was left behind as the path veered away into another direction...

  He slowed his trot to a brisk walk again. Still, he had the unsettling sensation of being followed. No – stalked. He should have paid heed to the graffiti, the nearness of that mountain range of city. People shot helpless zoo animals for fun. People were capable of more horrors than any alligator or panther that might once have been housed in this place.

  At the base of the hill the trees receded and there was a broad clearing of cement. Its naked openness relieved David – no brush in which a person, animal or hallucination might hide. A sizable enclosure here had a large plaque wired to its mesh which featured a photo of the famous and recently deceased Ivory, the albino elephant. David had almost forgotten about her. So this was where she’d lived and been shown. A structure like a small airplane hangar adjoined the caged area; she’d obviously slept and sheltered in there.

  David paused to look at the plaque, which he realized was intended as a giant card for people to pen their condolences upon. Most of the messages seemed written by children, though others were obviously from parents or teachers on school outings. “We loved you, Ivory” and “We’ll miss you.” But some clever soul had drawn a word balloon on the plaque, next to the photo of the white elephant, and Ivory seemed to be saying the word, “wassup?” Most of the inscriptions were faded and washed away. This made the mysterious graffiti on the plaque seem to glow black in contrast. The word “wassup” didn’t seem humorous to David; it was as alien and as ugly and beyond his comprehension in sentiment as those sprayed symbols or initials or whatever they might be.

  From inside the black maw of Ivory’s structure came a mournful sob. It was faint, muffled by the depth and dark of the barn-like building, and was halfway between an animal’s grunt and a human moan.

  David backed away from the plaque, the mesh, as if afraid something would burst suddenly from that cavern, rush the fence. He spun on his heel and resumed his brisk walk. Didn’t want to seem too afraid to whatever might be stalking him. Animals could smell fear. And people relished it.

  The path narrowed ahead. The pallid openness of cement was replaced by the dark closeness of vegetation. But there was no other way except through it.

  The path twisted and turned, and branched off in several directions. This development did not please him; he wanted only the one clear path back to the admission booth. Was that its roof now, however, and its boards showing through the leaves and pine needles? Thank God. David tossed a glance over his shoulder. Through a break in the trees he could again see the city rearing on the horizon. The sky was so dark now, the sun below the rim of the world, that lights sparkled from those looming monuments, as icy as stars.

  He reached the structure he’d spied, and it was not the admission booth but a log cabin, like something homeless people might have fashioned as a shelter against the coming winter. But yet another plaque explained that this was a mock-up of a camp that conservationists or biologists and so forth would use whilst on excursions into the wild.

  It had several windows without glass or even shutters, and from a distance was as black as outer space inside. David reached out on impulse and tugged at the door latch, but it was sealed or locked. He gingerly drew near enough to one of the windows to gaze inside.

  There was a table that he could make out in the murk. And a cot, it looked like. He was certain that had been utilized for explorations of a more carnal nature. Some tattered charts and maps on the walls, but whatever other props there might have been had been destroyed or removed. David thought he saw the twinkle of glass shards on the floor. Broken beer bottles. And across one of the maps – wasn’t that more spray-painted calligraphy?

  Irrationally, the child in him imagined how cozy such a structure would be if he could light a fire in its metal fireplace, if he could huddle here safe against the cold autumn night as it fell around these log walls. Its simplicity touched upon some primitive, romantic side of him crouched in the underbrush of his cells.

  But as his eyes adjusted more to its gloomy interior, he at last made out the vague outlines of the figure that knelt in the corner, behind the wood stove. Watching him all the while. It was an animal, hunkering, perhaps gathered for a leap. Or a person, naked and insane, sheltering here, anxious to protect its territory. Whatever it was, it turned its head just a fraction, just enough, that light somehow reached its eyes. Maybe it was the faint, icy city light. Whatever its source, it was just enough to make the thing’s eyes glisten like the shards of the broken bottles.

  This time David broke into a full run. And he could swear he heard the brush crash behind him. The thing he had seen...he was convinced it had pounced through one of the cabin windows to pursue him.

  The gravel under his shoes ground and shifted and once he nearly stumbled; he gave his ankle a wrench in redirecting his weight. Through his harsh breathing and the clatter of gravel, did he hear more
gravel crunching further behind him? He didn’t dare look behind him for fear of stumbling again or slacking his pace or seeing those glowing eyes more clearly. But he sensed, as a primitive hunter on a savannah or open plain might sense, the thing that loped along behind him, waiting for just the right moment to launch itself into the air.

  Was that a low throaty grumble or a whispery giggle?

  His instincts couldn’t tell him whether it were animal or human – but really, what was the difference? -- only that it ran on all fours and its eyes blazed hungry and it was nearing...almost on his heels...and then David burst from the path onto the paved lot where the admission booth stood unmanned. He leaped the chain but snagged his ankle, tumbled hard, cracking his elbow on the pavement. He sprawled onto his back and found himself looking up with frenzied eyes at the path beyond the swinging chain.

  He saw the thing for just a moment, ducking back around a bend in the path, thwarted though only the thin chain separated the two. Did it really look like some feral adolescent, nude, eyes glaring emptily in its snarling face? Was its hair kinky and close, its nose broad, lips full as though it were black? But it wasn’t black, or white, so much as colorless. And skeletal, thinner than anything that could still be considered alive...

  Clutching his elbow, David scrabbled to his feet. He limped across the lot to where his car shone dully under a streetlight. Autumn leaves had fallen upon its hood as if it had rested abandoned here for days or weeks.