The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  Pills: they make you vomit, before they do anything else. Plus, if you underestimate the dose you’re apt to end up alive still, but hooked up in perpetuity to a dialysis machine, with maybe a really incapacitating stroke or two to boot. Gas stinks, and you need the nerve to stay put until the anoxia kicks in. Rope’s tricky: if the drop’s too short you’ll choke slowly, and if it’s too long, you’ll decapitate yourself. Neither one of those outcomes is for the squeamish. Heights: well, lots of people have problems with heights at the best of times, and it’s among the messiest and most traumatic of scenarios for the relicts, the discards, those you leave behind, the ones who have to identify you afterwards. Knives sting, and even the deepest cut can clot once you’ve passed out. Guns: would you believe the number of people who’ve held a firearm to their heads, pulled the trigger – and missed? Not missed entirely, of course; just missed enough to make sure they’ll spend the rest of their lives in an IC ward being fed intravenously and turned each day to have their bedsores dressed. If they’re lucky. Death’s fraught with mistakes, and given the options, you might well decide it makes perfect sense to go down to the zoo, wait till it’s not too busy and then let yourself down into the lions’ den. Leave it to the experts, so to speak.

  I’m not joking. The act has a sort of logic to it. The big cats are swift enough killers, as we’ve seen on a thousand wildlife documentaries, brief savage scuffles on the dusty Serengeti, and there is something about the act…I don’t want to give the wrong impression here, but something almost approaching dignity. Some quality of fitness and distinction that’s lacking in those other methods I’ve mentioned. Something gladiatorial, almost: a willingness to look death straight in the face. To look into its eyes, to feel its reeking carnivore’s breath on your cheek…

  But it’s hell for us keepers. Once a big cat has tasted manflesh, it can never again be trusted. The line has been crossed: you know it, the beast knows it too, and you have to scrutinise every facet of its behavioural patterns around humans thereafter. If it shows the slightest deviation, there’s only one thing for it. Hesitate, and you’re lost. That’s not a thing you’ll hear for public consumption from the zoo authorities – they’re far more likely to dole out the usual platitudes, there’s no such thing as a maneater, there are only wild animals, doing what wild animals do, and our duty of care remains unchanged, blah blah – but believe me. In practice, the days of any such beast are numbered. As a keeper, someone who puts himself on the line with these creatures each day, you’d have to be either stupidly trusting, or just plain stupid, not to be aware of the situation, and ready to act upon it if necessary. I quickened my step almost unconsciously, skirting the artificial knoll where the baboons swarmed and barked to approach the lion enclosure from behind and slightly above where the boy had been standing.

  There it was, a moated expanse of drab suburban veldt across the river; and there was the boy. I got out my field glasses and gave him the once-over. So far as I could tell, he seemed not to have moved. By now I wasn’t thinking sex: half-an-hour is just too long for a compulsive masturbator to stay still, really. As far as animal rights went, he didn’t appear to have either the equipment or the back-up for anything I could imagine a protestor would want to do. Violence was still at the back of my mind, as was self-destruction. I watched him through the glasses as he watched the lions, and the time wore on, another five, ten minutes. It was late in the afternoon now, and starting to get cold. You could smell the frost lying in wait behind autumn’s mud and woodsmoke, and the first wisps of ground-mist were starting to rise along the riverbank. Before long Graham’s voice would come over the tannoy, the park is closing in twenty minutes, please make your way towards the main exit…

  Would the boy make his move before then? And what would it be? Above me the light sensors tripped in, and the bright white floods lit up along the broad avenues. Reflexively the boy looked up, then around him, as if startled out of his reverie. I decided it was time to go in closer. Casually, trying my best not to look like a policeman, I began to stroll down towards the lion enclosure, a couple of hundred yards off down the path.

  I’d just reached the footbridge over the river when it all started to go off. The shrubs along the riverbank blocked my view of the compound for a moment. All I could see was a couple of the art students, pointing and shouting. I quickened my pace to jog on to the bridge, then broke into a flat-out run when I saw what was happening by the compound.

  The boy was standing on the waist-high concrete wall, hauling himself up the railings. I shouted no, fumbled my walkie-talkie clear of its clip and gave the all-channel alert as I ran. We were going to need the tranquilliser darts, and quickly; or else medical support at best.

  He was over the railings now, sliding out of sight down the concrete ramp into the moat. One of the students, a girl, was hanging over the wall, arms outstretched and yelling to him, but he took no notice.

  I reached the compound just as he hit the bottom of the moat. All of us by the outer wall were shouting now, but I don’t know whether he heard a thing. If he did, he showed no sign of responding.

  Instead, he straightened up from his crouch, and began to climb the opposite side.

  Two or three other people had come over by now, drawn by the commotion. One of them owned a hand-held camcorder, and was filming continuously throughout what happened next. Looking at the film, this is what you see:

  Jerks and blurs, then a wobbly balance as the autofocus kicks in. The boy has reached the top of the inner wall: he stands on the concrete lip a while before letting himself down into the compound proper. Nothing is hurried about him, nothing hesitant; he glances from side to side, almost expectantly: where are they?

  They were there all right. Five in the pride: two males, one little more than a cub; three females, one of them pregnant. All of them in good condition, fit and active, a functioning pack. They have names, which we use when we have to in order to distinguish them, but I don’t honestly see any point in naming a wild thing. It’s a false sort of domesticity: it encourages you to project human motivations, human emotions on what’s basically a natural born killer, pure and simple. Calling it ‘Simba’ doesn’t change its essential nature, or turn it into something out of Disney. It doesn’t make it any more knowable, nor is it something you can shout out in times of crisis, like a dog’s name. All any lion does that matters much can really be summed up under the most basic of headings. It eats, it sleeps, it procreates. Given the opportunity, it stalks and kills. And these lions weren’t sleeping any more. All around the compound they were waking up and beginning to take notice, and they were getting ready to stalk.

  You can see on the video; first one, then another comes into view, at the periphery of the screen. The big male, watching; and the most inquisitive of the females. The camera jumps around a lot – it’s being operated by Mrs Nora Bowen, sixty-three years old and growing more agitated by the minute – but you can make out the lions well enough. Three, four, five, here they all come. And the boy, stepping away from the retaining wall.

  The condenser microphone on the camera is mostly picking up Mrs Bowen, whose alarm and concern is immediately evident, and Mr Bowen, who is alternately trying to get his wife to give him the camera and offering her technical instruction. Above their broad Lancashire accents you can just make out the sound of a man shouting in the distance. That’s me.

  I was at the lip of the moat, scrambling over: no time to get around to the proper entrance on the far side of the compound. Stay still, I was yelling; don’t panic. (I suspect that whenever we tell someone not to panic, we’re always partly talking to ourselves: I know I was.) Sliding inelegantly down the concrete, I lost sight of what was going on in the compound.

  On the video, you can see what I was missing. Not much. Slowly and deliberately, the boy walks out into the middle of the flat grassy area, then stops. The lions are surrounding him in a rough semicircle. No escape.

  Scrambling to the top of the inner moa
t wall – it’s half the height of the outer, six feet as opposed to twelve – I knelt on the rim and took stock of the situation as best I could. I was now much closer to the boy, yards closer than Mrs Bowen with her video camera. On the tape you can just about hear me calling – not yelling any more, I was too close to yell, it would have spooked the lions – calling to him to start walking backwards in my direction. Up on the wall, I could hear him. He was talking, but I couldn’t understand anything that he said.

  It wasn’t any language I’d heard before. Thinking back now, it still sounds like the strangest mixture of sounds; but I can say with a degree of certainty that whatever it was, it wasn’t gibberish. Peter Whelan, the first keeper to answer my emergency summons, thinks the boy was just making noises to mimic an animal, chatter and meaningless babble. The thing is, though, he hardly heard any of it, arriving as he did at the critical point in time when things began to get confused. I had a decent chance to listen to it, and it sounded to me structured, as if it carried significance and meaning.

  What did the lions make of it? That’s just another imponderable. They held their ground against the intrusion on to their territory, shifted their forepaws a little and gazed stonily at the intruder. The big male roared once, as if in warning, and some of the others were already growling, their heads low and watchful.

  Slowly, still speaking to the lions in that same fluently hypnotic way, the boy began to undo the buttons on his jacket. He slipped it off, dropped it to one side, and then started on his shirt. Hello, here we go, I thought, glancing round distractedly for back-up: we’ve got an exhibitionist. For some reason, it was vitally important that the lions see his dangly bits. Stupid little sod. What is it with people, I asked myself helplessly. Couldn’t they recognise a bad idea when they had one? Now it was up to me to stop him, or to pick up the bits when it was all over. ‘Get back here,’ I hissed. ‘Start walking backwards.’ I wonder if he even heard me.

  He was taking his trousers off: I’d already spotted his desert boots, discarded at the bottom of the moat. In a few seconds he was naked under the floodlights, exposed to the pitiless scrutiny of the lions.

  Beneath the panic that had impelled me across the moat I began to feel a deeper, more fundamental fear. This isn’t going to turn out well, I told myself, wincing at the puniness of his skinny white body as he turned slightly, first one way, then the other, as if acknowledging each beast in turn. This is going to be bad. I’d never seen lions attacking a human before, not under these circumstances. I was fairly sure that was exactly what I was going to be seeing, any time now.

  Again I glanced round for back-up. I could see Peter Whelan running at top speed over the brow of the hill near the baboon enclosure. He had a gun. I thought we were probably going to need it. I was horribly, miserably scared, because I could see already how this was going to end – the two of us, on the ground, trying to frighten off the lions, but there were only two of us, and there were five of them…

  With a grunt Peter hit the bottom of the moat and scrambled up the other side to where I was. ‘Slowly,’ I warned him, hoisting him up alongside me. ‘Quiet. Don’t get them any more wound up.’

  Though out of breath from his sprint, Peter understood the need for quiet. ‘Bloody hell, Jim,’ he panted, ‘this is a bad ’un.’

  ‘Went over a couple of minutes ago,’ I whispered back. ‘Then he got his kit off. What have you got?’

  ‘Tranks,’ he said, unslinging his rifle, ‘and an airhorn.’ They run on compressed air, and sometimes come in useful for frightening a beast off. ‘Manoj is bringing the rest of the stuff.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to get him to come back this way, but he isn’t listening.’

  ‘What’s he doing with his clothes off?’ Peter frowned. ‘He’s not trying it on, is he?’

  ‘Not as yet,’ I told him. ‘Anyway, he doesn’t seem that excited, does he?’ This may seem not just distasteful, but irrelevant, but at least a hard-on would have been indicative of some sort of motive. As it was, another explainable scenario had gone out of the window, and we were still none the wiser as to his intentions.

  ‘Actually, I wasn’t looking, meself,’ whispered Peter, glancing over his shoulder. ‘Here’s Manoj coming now.’

  Just then several things happened in quick succession. The boy’s soft babbling had been gradually increasing in volume; now, it was loud enough to be picked up by the Bowens’ camcorder mike. The tape’s been played for a linguist from the nearby university: he said it didn’t belong to any of the language groups he knew about, but was intrigued enough to request a copy of the tape. We had to tell him no. Too many outsiders have already seen it, and we don’t want it ending up on the internet for the delectation of the clicktrance classes.

  For a moment the boy’s shouting distracted me from the arrival of Manoj, who’d just reached the other side of the moat, where the Bowens were. On the video you can see me glancing towards the camera, making first a shush gesture, then a hurry-up. Then, I turn back to the enclosure. On the audio, you can hear the boy, ranting away at the top of his voice, and the big male roaring. A moment of clarity on the tape catches him to perfection, head thrown back, no more than fifteen yards away from the boy.

  ‘Give me the airhorn,’ I told Peter. ‘Take aim.’

  Peter raised the rifle to his shoulder. ‘Which one?’ he said. ‘The big bastard?’

  ‘Your call,’ I said. Under normal hunting circumstances, the females make the kill, but these circumstances were about as far from normal as you could imagine. It’s the male’s pleasure to ring-fence the pride from intruders, so my money was on the noisy alpha. But I had a nasty feeling that when one went, they’d all join in, and there was no way Peter could reload that fast. Maybe if he took the big fella first…

  The boy was screaming himself hoarse by now; no trace of panic, but a commanding, almost exhortative tone, like a hellfire preacher at the climax of his sermon. He started jumping up and down, pumping his fists and stamping on the bare soil – that wasn’t too preacherly a sight, I grant you, not in his state of undress. The lions surrounding him in their semicircle snarled and twitched their tails. My finger twitched on the trigger of the airhorn.

  ‘Why doesn’t he bloody shut it?’ hissed Peter. ‘Oy!’ Loud enough for the boy to hear him, under normal circumstances. Loud enough for the lions to react too, I thought. But none of them seemed to hear us, neither man nor beasts. They were too wrapped up in each other. We were fast approaching the moment of truth.

  The next three things happened almost simultaneously. First, Manoj came clambering up the retaining wall of the moat, and we had to give him a hand, loaded down as he was with rifle and ammo – all live rounds, no tranquillizers.

  Second, there was movement in the compound behind us. All of us – Peter, Manoj, and myself – looked up just in time to catch it. There was the boy, shrieking one last commandment to the evening sky, his breath condensing in the winter chill. And there were the lions, galvanised into life, up off their haunches and running at him. All five of them, all at once.

  Peter tried to take the alpha male. He missed – we found the dart later, stuck into the ground. Manoj was just fumbling his rifle to his shoulder. I was blowing the airhorn in short sharp blasts, then just one long continuous hoot, feeling totally useless. Beside me, Manoj managed to get one shot off – again, a miss, which saved him a great deal of trouble later on – and then they were too close to the boy, practically on him already.

  Then, in a sudden sparking fall of brilliance, all the floodlights round the compound shorted and went out.

  To this day, we don’t know the reason for that. The timing was too spot-on for it to have been coincidental, yet what could have caused it? On the video, everything goes dark, exaggeratedly so, darker than the time of day would strictly warrant, and then there’s one brief explosion of light that floods out the whole screen. That’s Mr Bowen, alongside his wife, who’s just remembered he has another
camera, for stills. He presses the shutter release more or less by reflex, and the automatic flash kicks in.

  Looking at his picture, you can see Peter and Manoj and me, up on the inner wall of the moat; I’m turning round to see why the lights have gone out. That’s why I caught the flash full-on, which in turn is why I was functionally sightless for the next ten seconds or so. It’s hard to make out anything inside the compound with the naked eye. Mr Bowen’s built-in flash was only good over a few yards, up close at parties, and it couldn’t cut through the insidious dusk which had been gathering all the time, unnoticed under the floodlights. A digitally enhanced version of the photo brings out a little more detail: a blurred, indistinct heap, at just about the spot on which the boy was standing. They were all upon him.

  Up on the wall, we could hear snarling and snapping and the thud of bodies on tight-packed soil, but we couldn’t see anything of the boy. None of us could: I was squinting blind after taking the brunt of Mr Bowen’s flash, and the other two were still trying to adjust their vision after the floodlights went out. They both saw the lions fall upon him, and then he was lost beneath their colliding bodies, trapped under a rugby scrum of hot fur and strapping muscle. It wasn’t until three or four minutes later, when the rest of the backup arrived with lanterns and a big mobile lighting rig we used for night photography, that we were able to get a proper look inside the compound. When we did, two things were immediately apparent.

  The first thing was that the lions had dispersed back to their various areas of the compound. Our searching beams picked them up under trees, behind brush cover; we saw them snarl, bare their teeth at the intrusive shafts of light.

  The other thing was more of an absence. Throughout all the compound, there was no trace whatsoever of the boy, alive or dead.