Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  “It’s a goat,” Astrid heard herself whisper hoarsely. “I’m fairly certain of that.”

  “I don’t want to look,” said Atwell.

  “Don’t,” Astrid said. She used her baton to roll the head over. There were no maggots or flies, no fetid smell. “This is part of the whole lights business,” she said. “Whatever did this did it tonight. Nothing to be worried about. It’s not a person that’s done it. People don’t chew goat snouts off.” People did much worse, she thought.

  She turned to face Atwell, who seemed to be recovering, standing taller. Atwell finally glanced at it again.

  “It’s just my stomach, ma’am—it’s been bothering me. Crikey! It’s horrible.” She turned her face away again. “I can’t look or I’m going to chunder. Don’t—look—at me—yeah, if I lose it, Inspector? It’s humiliating, guv, in front of you, yeah?”

  Atwell bent over and vomited. Astrid gently placed her hand on her colleague’s back. It was hot and damp and muscular. “OK, I’m OK,” Atwell said. “OK, it’s passing. Good.” She breathed in thickly, then spat. “Fuck!”

  “Easy,” said Astrid.

  “This head, guv, it does fright me just a bit. I mean, I don’t want to go like this goat. Who did this?”

  “Easy,” she said. She rubbed Atwell’s back. “Easy.” She said, “It’s what did it. This bit, it’s animals on animals. That’s precisely what we’re looking at.” Squinty faced and tilting her head, she held her hand up for quiet.

  Then she was sure she heard a voice—a peculiar, persecuted one, quietly whinging from thin air.

  Umm, kay-kay, femaleans! You’re flarking me out, kay-kay! It was high-pitched but distinctly male, and it came from above. There was no one in sight.

  “Fuck all,” said Atwell.

  “Now that is right crooked by half-fives,” said Astrid.

  Atwell nodded and said, “Couldn’t be more. Do you think we . . . well, should keep walking, around the ‘perimeter’?”

  “Oh—Beauchamp’s bloody perimeter. For fuck’s sake. No.” Astrid bit her lower lip. There was that anger. A rage before the Death. If she just held on. It was passing, wasn’t it? “Actually, yes. Sorry. Beauchamp’s right. We can walk, of course, we’ll get around, but I want to investigate that person who’s having a lark at our expense. It’s back toward the pandaglider. It may be the joker who tried to give you a scare, earlier.” She looked up at the sky. A cool night-breeze was blowing. She said, “It came from up. Up is a funny place for a person.” She pointed at the field beyond the grove of plane trees that lined the Broad Walk. She said, “Maybe in that direction?”

  So they left the goat head and walked back toward the glider.

  Had they made it around the southern tip of the zoo, just a few yards beyond the goat head, they would have encountered Cuthbert’s notable handiwork with the fence. They would have been able to raise the section of heavy ironwork fencing Cuthbert had pushed down into the turf, and plug up the only hole in the zoo in its two centuries.

  up a tree like zacchaeus

  THE JACKALS WERE ALREADY LONG GONE. THE five of them had scurried out of Regent’s Park and managed safely to cross the Marylebone Road. A young group of True Conservative politicos, drinking themselves silly at a local public house over Election Eve polls (LabouraTory was crushing them), had seen the jackals outside the window and mistook them for large bizarre cats (cats that lived, mysteriously, in packs).

  “It’s a good sign—animals,” one of them slurred. “A jolly good one. As long as we’ve got our cats, England will dure.”

  “Dure? Steady, Michael.”

  “Yath!” Michael answered, quite definitively.

  When Astrid and Atwell got back to the pandaglider, the sound of the high-pitched man whinging started up again, but it sounded even closer.

  Femaleans, help me—kay-kay?

  “Who’s there?” shouted Astrid.

  “Up here. Here!”

  Astrid and Atwell started jogging across a small pitch that fanned into the northeastern quadrant of the park, against Camden Town. They soon made it to another stand of young plane trees.

  “Jesus suffering Christ!” the man rasped, in a lower, raspier, gravedigger’s voice. “Worthless!”

  For a moment, no one responded. Then the man spoke again: “It’s Dawkins—the night keeper. Up bloody here.” They looked up, and there in one of the smallest trees in the group, caught like a horrible fly in a spiderweb of branches, dangled a lanky young man. “No one fucking respects the night keepers!”

  Astrid and Atwell trained their torches on the figure, and Astrid immediately recognized the face, and so did Atwell. He looked very different than Astrid recalled. He was much thinner. He wasn’t so much a bag of bones as a ripped-open turnip sack of them. He was wearing a saggy set of boxers, thick knit socks slipped around his ankles, and a pair of very old weatherbeaten Reebok hovershoes, which clearly were missing their hover-cell, or he would have floated back home. But it was Dawkins all right, the eccentric Indigent the powers that be allowed to watch the zoo at night from the inside, the latest in a two-hundred-year line of eerie, solitary, and terminally irascible nocturnals who kept the London Zoo at night.

  “Dawkins? You’ve lost several stone, right?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  The fellow looked worse for it. The blotchy skin of his face stretched over a narrow skull and deep-sunk eyeholes. His lips were a pair of dead leeches—gray but very full (of what, one daren’t ask). His ginger-colored hair stood up in a stiff patch like corroded steel wool. Astrid had met him only once, when she first started working for the constabulary (she was introduced then to most of the zoo’s key personnel), but the guy gave one such a creepy feeling, he was impossible to forget.

  Dawkins had quite the reputation, too. Astrid had heard that so protective and secretive was he about his tiny apartment in the old Reptile House (at night, he was the only soul—unless one believes animals have souls—in the zoo), he was mostly kept on due to kindly administrators who did not want to confront him. That he had abandoned his snake pit tonight was remarkable. Astrid recalled a more filled-out Dawkins, wearing riveted glass-goggles, a ridiculous red toy-soldier jacket with epaulets, and a brass-cast antique respirator. She remembered him asking her if she’d read the long-passé steampunk magazine Hiss (its heyday must have been around 2014, if she recalled).

  “It’s all I read,” he had once boasted to Astrid. “It’s the only bit of truly high culture that’s not tat, at least in England. On real paper, you know.”

  “Oh yeah. They do paper. That’s their little thing,” she’d replied.

  Dawkins’s main duty, Astrid knew, was to turn the zoo’s security system on and off each night and, above all else, notify others if some emergency arose. This night he seemed to have failed magnificently in his only real charge. This bone-spur of a man had been jostled out of his hole, and all he wanted was to get back in it safely. To hell with the rest of humankind.

  “You don’t remember me?” Astrid asked. “It’s Inspector Sullivan? We’ve met, Dawkins.”

  “I might do,” he said glumly.

  “Well, I remember you. Do you need help, getting down?”

  “I don’t need any help.”

  “Well come down then, please.”

  “I remember your partner, the cow,” Dawkins said, repositioning his feet, as if preparing for a long stay in the tree. “She piggin’ abandoned me to the animals. I can’t bloody believe it.” He jabbed a skinny finger toward Atwell. He said, “You’re duff, you, you’re a wanky excuse for a copper.”

  Atwell looked deservedly angry, puffing air out between her lips. She started tapping her toe. She said to Astrid, almost inaudibly, “Shall I get him down?”

  Dawkins wouldn’t shut up for a moment, it seemed. “The Parks Police! Ha! The anti-litter Gestapo is more like it! And she’s a duffer, a —”

  Suddenly, Astrid screamed, her anger as big as Dawkins’s tree, “Gerro
ut! Shut your cake-hole and come down, sir. You’re getting on my wick now, you are, damn it. You stupid son of a bitch—you two-bone dox!” The deadly ire of second withdrawal was out again, this time for all to see. And it felt like righteousness. It felt like bliss on fire.

  “Tell him,” said Atwell. “Tell him.”

  Astrid took hold of herself. She grabbed the little thread of fury spinning out from her heart and she reeled it back in.

  “This is inexcusable, sir,” she said, coughing a little. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . I . . . but you’re an employee of the royal parks, right? There’s no need for all these insults. But Mr. Dawkins, that is. You come down now. You must be cold and tired, mustn’t you?”

  “No, mammy, I will not,” he said. “There’s bloody dangerous animals loose. No can do, officer.” He gave them a scandalous, bony-cheeked grin. “Why should I come down now with tigers still birdy-fly-fly free?” He pointed again at Atwell, wagging his finger. “I wasn’t enough of a victim before, was I? I was all ballsed up and you did nothing, and that’s wot’s really got me up a tree.”

  Atwell shook her head. She looked at Astrid with a momentary confusion, her big eyes like almonds suddenly cracked open. She said to Astrid, “I didn’t know who he was, ma’am. He was screaming—I was alone. You know that, yeah? You know I needed assistance. That’s the reg.”

  Atwell turned back to Dawkins and said with an affected confidence (which Astrid found a little off-putting), “You can’t have everything you want, just the way you want it, on your schedule, Mr. Dawkins. That is life, my friend.” She whispered to Astrid, “Look at him, up a tree like Zacchaeus. He’s strange. Remember: he said his mother was in the zoo.”

  Astrid whispered back, “I say we just make as though we’re going to leave him. He’s an . . . obscure gent, isn’t he?”

  Then Astrid said to Dawkins, “Mr. Dawkins, what’s this about your mother, in the zoo?”

  Dawkins startled, raised his arms as though defending himself against something, then looked into his lap. He said, “She’s not exactly me mother. She’s my sister. She’s visiting. Except . . .”

  “Wha?” said Atwell.

  Astrid said: “I need the facts here, Dawkins. I’m warning you. I won’t be bothered with nonsense at this point. You don’t want to be arrested for obstructing the course of justice, do you? Let’s get this straight: your sister is at your flat, in the Reptile House?”

  Dawkins glared at her, nodding his narrow head in anguished fury.

  “She’s my best friend. Her name’s Una. She’s really not supposed to be there, in the apartment. I hain’t allowed to have visitors. She’s Indigent, of course, but she don’t have the special status wot I’ve got. But I thought, if I just tell people she’s my mother, right, they won’t press. It’s not what you think. It’s not abnormal,” he said, pronouncing each syllable. “See, she’s a bit thick, all right? I take care of her, sort of like. We have our own pet snake, too. She’s all white—perfectly. Una doesn’t go anywhere without our snake. People don’t understand it, you see? She has brain damage. When she was nineteen, she was run over. A glider-lorry full of Bronze Age artifacts, from one of the unis—a student driving it. In Dagenham.”

  Atwell and Astrid looked at each other, and Atwell said, “Dagenham—just past Barking, of course.”

  “Ha-ha,” said Dawkins. “If the Watch comes, they’ll put her in a Calm House, and I’ll never see her again. You can’t tell them.”

  Astrid said, “Mr. Dawkins, I’m very sorry, sir. I think we’ll just need to make sure Una is safe is all. I’m not worried about anything else. I won’t tell the Watch. But will you please come down?”

  Dawkins said, “Can you get me a soft drink?”

  “Uh, well,” said Astrid. “I suppose we—could? Can’t you just climb down? You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  “I’ll need a Diet Vanilla Coca-Cola?” he said, a bit shyly. “Then I’ll come down.”

  Atwell turned to Astrid, her lips parted, with a perplexed expression. “Where do we get that, sir? That’s from fifty years ago.” Astrid shook her head, and quietly said, “We don’t.”

  She said to Dawkins, “Listen, we’ll see if we can get someone to get you a . . . Coke . . . back at the nick, but you really need to come down.”

  “Diet. Vanilla. Coke. There’s a special edition.”

  “Yes, well,” said Astrid. “You’re going to feel the fool if you stay there, aren’t you? What would Una think? Aren’t you worried about her? And Mr. Beauchamp is on the way. Do you know Mr. Beauchamp? David Beauchamp? Is he your . . . gaffer, or something?”

  “Beauchamp? Oh, f-allin’ bugger us all,” said Dawkins, looking crestfallen. “He’ll give me the sack if he hears about Una.” He shook his head. “Poor girl! She’s not well—physically. She’s got the stomach flu’s goin’ round. And I’m . . . not well. We need each other very badly, Inspector. I told her to stay in the Reptile House when I saw the lights start to go on around the zoo. She’s a bit done up tonight. I blagged a kind of fancy explorer’s outfit, right, with lots of pockets and all, yeah? But when I saw the jackals, I panicked, and I nipped off, and I don’t know where Una is now. Oh blood and sand! I’m an ’orrible thing!”

  Astrid sighed. She said, “You’re making this out to be more than it is. Really, Mr. Dawkins. Come down. Beauchamp doesn’t need to know anything.”

  “You all can take the mick out of me if you like, and so can Mr. Beauchamp, but I’ll report it to the King’s Employment Tribunal, I will. I’m not going to be forced to endanger myself. And there’s a crazy man in the zoo, too—I saw him. Mad as a box of frogs. Talking to himself.”

  “You saw someone else?” This new fact blindsided Astrid. She looked toward the zoo for a moment. “A man? Another man?”

  “From a distance. I think. I think. Yes, I thought I did. I was too terrified to get close. He looked rather desperate. He—this is odd—he—”

  “Take your time, sweet pea,” said Atwell.

  Dawkins smiled at her, blinking. “I am a sweet pea, to be honest. But a fucking cold one!” He starting hugging himself with his arms, but could not, in his exhaustion, muster much vigor. “Well,” he continued. “Here’s something funny.” He rubbed his hand on his thigh and looked at Astrid. “I could have sworn the man, well, he weren’t at all the spit of you, no, Inspector, and he’d be a minging, plug-ugly version of you. But he sort of ’ad your cheekbones, like, vaguely mind you, and a sort of similar something about his face, though he did look badly battered—and drunk. Typical Flōt sot, I should think. Do you know him?”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “You ain’t some . . . type of . . . cousin?”

  Dawkins’s claim disturbed Astrid, and her heart began racing. She said, “Ha! Now you’re off your chump.” But her anxiety hadn’t gone. The idea of her drunken doppelgänger, in the zoo, created an instant sense of unreality that signaled, for her, the last gasp of her own sanity. The travails of second withdrawal were far worse than she’d imagined, it seemed.

  Nonetheless, she decided to try an old FA trick—to “act as if,” that is, to pretend she wasn’t really crazy. She said, “Now, will you come down from the tree? Or will we need to send something up to get you?”

  “Yes, a Flōt sot!” Dawkins repeated. He seemed pleased to be able to condescend to anyone.

  He didn’t say anything for a while, and then, with an agility that took Astrid and Atwell by surprise, he started to lower himself to the ground, unfurling one arm, taking hold of a branch, and so on, again and again, with balletic grace.

  “I’ve been getting more fit,” he said. “It’s more attractive. I’m going to be sex on a stick someday.”

  “Yes you are, love,” said Atwell. She put her hand on Dawkins’s back and gave him a few puppy-pats. At first, he jumped forward, then he leaned back into her hand. “Let’s get you warm now,” she was saying.

  Just as Atwell said that, several huge se
ts of headlamps exploded onto the Broad Walk and on all the area around them. It was not illumination; it was the national autonewsmedia, or a leading edge of it—a white squarish satellite truck from ITN/WikiNous, a tired, slightly shit-faced reporter from the Sun/WikiNous, and some kind of European woman freelancer in a Lancia glider with a smashed-in front end. This little trio alone had the power to do lasting damage, or bring great approbation, to almost any public figure or institution in Britain, provided the target wasn’t one of the king’s favorites. How they got wind of the zoo occurrences seemed beside the point, but Astrid felt she knew whose long-fingered hand had given the media’s naughty bits a throttle in the night.

  “Unbelievable,” said Atwell, stating the obvious.

  Dawkins looked newly terrified. “I want to hide,” he said. “If they put me on TV, I’ll sue the bastards.”

  a cry in the night

  YES, THE MASTURBATORY STAGECRAFT OF DAVID Beauchamp was unmistakable. An ugly blue hatchback glider was zooming up behind the others. It was he, long and sallow and perfectly humorless. He wanted the nation to see how the zoo handled a crisis—and perhaps position himself better for the zoo director’s role.

  Before Astrid and Atwell had got Dawkins back to the pandaglider, Beauchamp was waving his arms around, gathering the reporters, and starting an ersatz, melodramatic “press briefing.”

  “And I emphasize,” Beauchamp was saying. He was got up in some purple shiny-tie-and-powerwool-shirt combo from Burton Menswear and trendy, loose, star-pleated trousers. On top, he appeared to be two parts Chillcreem to hair.