by Adam Nevill
Jason’s horror at Electra’s deception turned to anger. ‘What the hell are you wittering on about? I asked about a zoo, not budgets and roads.’
Gerald grinned as if Jason was positioned exactly where the older man wanted him to be. ‘What you need to understand, what you need to know, is how it all came about –’
‘No, I don’t. There is no zoo. I know what I need to.’
‘Oh, but there was once. Pentree Zoological Gardens. In ruins now. You can still see it from the A2546. If you’re going towards Bunridge, just before you get to where the Man in the Moon used to be . . .’ And this continued for some time. Another of Gerald’s interests was interminable road directions using landmarks that no longer existed.
‘Stop.’ Jason even held his hands up as if pleading. ‘Please, stop. The zoo. There was a zoo, but it’s no longer open?’
‘That’s what I said. When Gibbet –’
‘Stop. Slow down. Please. This zoo. The zoo itself is still there? So what else is there?’
Gerald frowned.
‘In terms of leisure activities? Funfair? Restaurant? Pub? Whatever? Why would anyone go there now?’
‘Well, they wouldn’t, unless they belonged to the local historical society. I was once the secretary, from –’
‘Gerald! Why would the local historical society go there?’
‘Because of the architecture, of course. It’s one of the last remaining Victorian zoos built by Bellowby. A testament to inhumanity. If you were an animal shipped over from Africa or Asia, then the last place you’d want to end up was Sullet zoo. You see, what you need to understand –’
‘So it’s a museum of sorts, open to the public?’
‘Not likely. There’s never been enough money to pull it down, let alone preserve it.’
‘So it’s derelict? This is a derelict Victorian zoo?’
‘More or less. Why do you ask?’
‘I’m going there tomorrow. To meet a friend.’
Gerald’s eyes burned with an opportunist’s glee. ‘Well, all right, I’ve nothing on. I’ll come too. There’s no point going unless someone’s with you who knows the story.’
‘No. No. Thanks, but no. It’s a date.’
‘A date? With a girl? There?’ Gerald’s shock was shared in equal parts between the idea that Jason knew an actual woman, and the idea that they intended to visit the abandoned zoo together.
‘The story we don’t need. Sorry, local history, that sort of thing. Wouldn’t quite work.’
Gerald deflated at the rebuff. ‘Maybe she knows all about it then.’
‘I doubt that.’ And then Jason wondered if he was meant to find the zoo locked up and in ruins on Saturday morning, as if that were to serve as an epitaph to his romantic aspirations. Or was Electra suggesting that he was an animal that should be locked up? The best place for him after pestering her at work and staring at her legs for months? My God, he thought, and seemed to shrink inside. Was it that noticeable, his leering?
‘A bad business. Religious nutters finished off what a shortage of funds began.’
His miserable reverie broken, Jason looked at Gerald. ‘What? What did you say?’ A question he’d never thought he’d ask Gerald. ‘What bad business? What nutters are you talking about?’
Gerald appeared to expand anew with the spirit that had so recently deserted him. ‘The animals all died. Horribly. Poisoned, they suspected, from chemicals that drifted over from the works out at Bunyip. Place had been in decline, of course, for years, so the poor beasts were in bad shape. No money, you see. Way before the animal rights lot got organised, the animals’ welfare was in serious decline. But a group of swivel-eyed evangelists had actually been going into the enclosures and poisoning the animals at night. The Sisters of the White Cross, they called themselves. They had a temple out Ruddery way, but it’s a teeth-whitening place now . . .’
And for the first time as a resident in the house, Jason stood still, without fidgeting or looking at his watch, or breaking away to make phone calls that he did not need to make, and he listened to Gerald.
‘Hi.’ Electra’s eyes smiled with a warmth he’d not known them capable of.
Questions he wanted to ask her tripped over each other in his mind like clowns wearing long shoes. His thoughts were enshrouded by a fog of confusion and desire that refused to lift. But there was no doubt that this was a date. The realisation made him shiver.
A young woman would not have worn boots with spike heels and tights so shimmery that they appeared wet, or a stretchy miniskirt and that much make-up, unless she intended to impress. She must have spent hours on her hair too.
A long wooden frontage bore faded depictions of animals with humanlike faces. ‘How do I get in?’ He followed this with ‘Why here?’ when the girl he was now struggling to recognise as his colleague showed him a gap between a metal pole and the tented security wire attached to the upright. Electra didn’t answer, but smiled and dipped eyes made entrancing by a pair of false eyelashes, when he said, ‘You look amazing, by the way.’
One turnstile of the four attached to the ticket booths soon turned with a loud metallic knocking as they each passed through the original entrance. The mildly unpleasant notion of the turnstile’s sound echoing far out to what lay beyond the gates, like a curious doorbell, was dispelled when Jason was confronted with what stretched around him.
He found himself on a wide tarmac forecourt once designed to receive large crowds. Opposite the turnstiles was a boarded-up gift shop and a shuttered Go-Ape café. Façades of animal-themed sideshows stretched to a disused toddlers’ fairground, where the gaudy plastic reds and yellows of the little fairground rides remained bright against the encroaching treeline. In the distance, a small train, intended for children, slumped on punctured tyres against a miniature platform that was embellished with gingerbread filigree ironwork. A toilet block with a flat roof had mostly been engulfed by moss and dead tree branches. Tall, busy weeds erupted through the footpaths. Food wrappers faded enough to appear bleached covered most of the ground.
But above the concessions, a steep hill, reminiscent of a small Alpine mountain, rose into low grey cloud. Peering toward the mist-enshrouded summit, he glimpsed concrete enclosures, rusty metal poles and tatters of wire hanging from them, a decaying cable-car ride, and signs of footpaths cutting through the wild deciduous foliage. The zoological gardens had been built into tiers around the hill, all connected by a winding path that began on their left.
The bizarre and exotic surroundings excited Jason as if he were a child. He wondered if he’d underestimated the girl at his side. Had she a sensitivity to the strange beauty of dereliction? An empathy, unfettered by intellectualism, with past grandeur? An interest, at the very least, in local history? He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her pretty mouth hard and move his hands over her diminutive curves. She seemed to read his ardour but not be appalled by it. She smiled.
‘This might be the only interesting thing about Sully.’ His remark also pleased her. Amidst such ruin her sudden laugh was melodic, magical. He’d never heard her laugh before.
‘There’s nothing like this anywhere else.’ She raised her face to the hill as if in adoration. ‘Never makes me want to see this place when it was open.’
Jason wasn’t sure he grasped the sentiment but wanted to agree with her. Though there was something about Electra’s enthusiasm that also made him suspect that she might be mad. Mad but beautiful, like the Sisters of the White Cross, according to Gerald. One of them had been a local beauty too, who’d once been crowned Miss Great Britain. She’d taken the veil for the sect after succumbing to its obsession with the Garden of Eden before the fall of man.
‘Why here? Why do you come here?’
Electra’s face adopted the half-concealed smile he knew too well from Agri-Tech. He hoped this one was merely playful. ‘Cus it makes me happy. Peaceful, like.’
‘You come here a lot?’
‘Loads.’
‘On your own?’
‘Mostly. Sometimes I meet friends.’
The idea should have been reassuring, but such was his greed for the girl that Jason preferred the idea of her always being alone here, in a place she would share only with him.
‘They might be here later. We can meet up.’
‘Your friends are coming?’ He hoped his disappointment wasn’t obvious.
Electra set off up the path on their left, as much to cut off his interrogation, he sensed, as to show him more.
Her face betrayed an eagerness to get higher more quickly than his new shoes would allow. Her posture also seemed looser, more limber, while her face remained angled upwards as if to catch a sun’s rays. He was seeing a side to the girl he’d never glimpsed at work and she was becoming harder to recognise as each minute passed. He tried to combat this estrangement by talking to her.
‘You know what happened here, in the seventies, before you were even born?’ He found himself in danger of reciting parts of Gerald’s monologue, which had lasted for over an hour the previous evening: a discourse rich with details about the cult who’d gradually destroyed the zoo’s complement of animals, embellished with the council politics that had subsequently kept the place shut. More than the breathlessness caused by the ascent, a sudden horror at the insidious influence of Gerald in his companionless existence made Jason stop talking.
‘Oh, you know about that?’ There was a spine of sarcasm in Electra’s tone. She stopped by a vast canopy constructed from steel poles and netting. Great rents and holes gaped in the overgrown enclosure’s covering. Rotten logs and a deep lake of dead leaves consumed the floor. In the centre of the area was a thicket of unmanaged tree growth. High on the rear cement wall were the unappealing mouths of two artificial caves. Electra grinned at the abandoned enclosure as if she had spotted a rare and shy animal inside.
Jason cleared the signage with one hand: a steel placard upon which a map of Asia was embossed. With a finger he traced the species of the former occupants: GELADA BABOONS. ‘How did they get in, I wonder. The women. The nutters who poisoned the animals.’
Electra chose to remain mute. It irritated Jason. He filled the uncomfortable silence again. ‘One of the women was killed. Did you know that? But not by the lions or the tiger they had here back then, like you’d think. An elephant got her. Can you imagine that?’
According to Gerald, an ancient and blind pachyderm called Dolly had used its head to press one of the Sisters of the White Cross against the floor of its pen: the beauty queen. She’d crept in to soak the straw with arsenic but had the life crushed out of her instead. The elephant had also placed its knees upon her legs and held the position, while pressing her with its vast skull, until she was dead.
Concluding her silent communication with the stained rocks and dead wood where baboons had once scampered, Electra turned away from the railings and moved further up the hill. ‘They always get things wrong,’ she said, though Jason was confused as to who ‘they’ signified. ‘People don’t know what happened here,’ she added.
‘Oh, they do. Nutters killed every animal except the reptiles. Apparently they bludgeoned the smaller ones they could corner. Doesn’t surprise me at all that the . . . town –’ he’d nearly said ‘council’ and that would just not do on a date ‘– wants to keep the place quiet. Makes it all a bit eerie, don’t you think, once you know the story? I think the surviving women were committed.’
Jason was aware his comments were displeasing Electra. Perhaps it was their morbidity, a tone that he could not shake from his thoughts now that he was inside the zoo.
‘People don’t know why it happened. They wasn’t there.’ Electra said this sharply, but with a sly look in her lovely eyes, as if she were privy to a secret that she could not disclose. It made her seem simple and immature. ‘You shouldn’t have opinions if you don’t know the facts,’ she added. ‘Horrible things happen for good reasons. Don’t you know that?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said too quickly, desperate to return her mood to what it had been.
He followed her in silence and was led past horribly small, overgrown cages for owls, kookaburras, macaques, scarlet macaws and Amazon parrots. The ascent made Jason sweat and wheeze, which he tried to conceal by dropping just behind her line of sight. Electra clipped on, her small and lovely legs sheening in the thin metal light and effortlessly sending her ahead to the foot of a long cement staircase that led to another level.
A sign beside the worn metal handrail at the foot of the stairs indicated that orang-utans, gibbons, chimpanzees and lemurs once whiled away their captivity somewhere above. Dense branches of small trees arched over the steep passage, sealing out most of the natural light. Jason would have to bend over to get through.
‘You coming or what?’ Electra said.
He was almost too winded to speak. ‘Is there another way . . .’ The heel of his left foot was suddenly smitten with a hot and painful blister.
From the hilltop, from out of the fog-wreathed trees, came a sharp cry that Jason wanted to believe was human, though knew it was probably not. And into his mind came suggestions of yellow teeth, of dust being kicked up in clouds by clawed black feet. He imagined thin, hairy limbs racing up tree branches in enraged pursuit of other furred shapes.
Electra giggled. And for a moment, before she slipped into the dark tunnel that surrounded the staircase, her expression had seemed especially salacious. Wanton though cruel, and much older than it should have appeared on such a young face.
So quickly did Jason turn to where he guessed the noise had issued that he fell against the railings at the mouth of the staircase. His eyes groped about the dark, wet trees above. He peered into the distance, at the pointed cement roofs, vaguely alien in the way they poked through the mist and treetops nearer the summit. And where the mist hung about the peak he was also struck by the unappealing suggestion of a ruined temple returned to some steaming jungle on an Asian mountain range. The shriek, the fog, the wildness of the trees, all conspired in his mind to make him suspect that he had passed beyond the margins of Sullet-upon-Trent, a town not really belonging anywhere either.
Further up the stone staircase, Electra’s tipped heels clicked through the shadows.
Jason followed. He called her name twice and said, ‘Hang on!’ She laughed, sweetly, from a greater distance than seemed feasible.
Within the smothering canopy of tree branches, Jason soon struggled to see where he was placing his feet. His breath was loud about his head, and his heart beat inside his skull. Stumbling forward, one hand flailed to where he hoped the railing might be. But amidst the scents of leaf mulch and wet earth, a trace of her perfume lingered. He chased the fragrance.
Daylight eventually formed a coin of white gold when he rounded a corner on the cement staircase. As he neared the top, Electra’s lovely blonde head appeared and she joyfully cried, ‘Keep up!’ before vanishing. The comment made Jason feel twice his age.
He only stopped struggling upwards when startled by a second shriek, a cry at the side of the staircase, mere feet away from where he laboured. An animal scream followed by a boisterous scampering towards where he was, which swiftly evolved into the determined progress of a presence that he could not see, passing over his head. It was aware of him below, though, of that he was certain, as much as he was certain of the speed and strength of whatever thrashed through the darkness above.
When Jason eventually made the top of the staircase he was near insensible with exhaustion and fear. But Electra was not waiting for him on the wide and greening concrete path.
With the taste of blood and panic in his mouth he peered back into the narrow tunnel he had emerged crouching from. Down there, all was quiet again. But he was now certain that the Sisters of the White Cross had failed to destroy every animal that had been kept in captivity here, four decades earlier. Some kind of ape must have survived and bred descendants. Indigenous British wildlife included nothing of that size, capa
ble of such agility so high above the ground, that could have made such an infernal cry.
These vestiges of feral animal survival must form part of the appeal to Electra and her trespassing friends; they knew that the zoological gardens were not quite as empty as the town thought. She’d wanted to surprise him with something special and secret that he could not see anywhere else. Her cryptic comments made more sense to Jason now.
But where was she? He feared their date had degenerated into a childish game of hide-and-seek. He was too tired and shaken to get into the spirit of something like that now. Even if the taste of her mouth was waiting as a reward for his being a good sport, Jason wanted to go home.
Enclosures for animals lined each side of the only possible route onwards, fronted by raised viewing platforms. His repeated cries of ‘Electra!’ were greeted with a misty silence that he mistook for anticipation in the verdure around him.
The only tolerable way out of here for him was up, to eventually get down again. The original design of the zoo was much clearer; visitors would move to the summit, circling the sides, while viewing the animal attractions on their ascent. Other features must await on the descent.
He was now flanked by the orang-utan and chimpanzee houses. He worked this out from the badly painted depiction of an orange ape on a viewing platform. In the opposite pen, chains still suspended a complex arrangement of logs from which chimpanzees once capered. To his dismay, and a dread that he now tried to swallow like a lump in the throat, he noticed that some of the hanging logs were gently swaying as if from recent use. He expected to see a black face peer out from one of the lightless doorways that burrowed into the cement wall of the chimps’ old home. A detritus of tree stumps and dead tree branches littered the broad discoloured basin.
Behind him, in the orang-utan area, there came a sound of a heavy object flopping into water.
Wide-eyed, breathing like an asthmatic, and eschewing the viewing platform that looked structurally unsafe, Jason rushed to the railings closest to the sound.