Night of the Animals: A Novel

By Bill Broun

In this imaginative debut, the tale of Noah’s Ark is brilliantly recast as a story of fate and family, set in a near-future London.

Over the course of a single night in 2052, a homeless man named Cuthbert Handley sets out on an astonishing quest: to release the animals of the London Zoo. When he was a young boy, Cuthbert’s grandmother had told him he inherited a magical ability to communicate with the animal world—a gift she called the Wonderments. Ever since his older brother’s death in childhood, Cuthbert has heard voices. These maddening whispers must be the Wonderments, he believes, and recently they have promised to reunite him with his lost brother and bring about the coming of a Lord of Animals . . . if he fulfills this curious request.

Cuthbert flickers in and out of awareness throughout his desperate pursuit. But his grand plan is not the only thing that threatens to disturb the collective unease of the city. Around him is greater turmoil, as the rest of the world anxiously anticipates the rise of a suicide cult set on destroying the world’s animals along with themselves.

Meanwhile, Cuthbert doggedly roams the zoo, cutting open the enclosures, while pressing the animals for information about his brother. Just as this unlikely yet loveable hero begins to release the animals, the cult’s members flood the city’s streets. Has Cuthbert succeeded in harnessing the power of the Wonderments, or has he only added to the chaos—and sealed these innocent animals’ fates?

Night of the Animals is an enchanting and inventive tale that explores the boundaries of reality, the ghosts of love and trauma, and the power of redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9780062400819

Bill Broun

BILL BROUN has worked as a newspaper and magazine journalist in both the US and the UK. He was appointed a resident fellow at Yale University in 2002, where he lectured in English and journalism, and currently serves as Associate Professor of English at East Stroudsburg University. Born in Los Angeles to an English father and an American mother, he now lives in Hellertown, Pennsylvania.

Book preview

one

listening to the zoo

ON THE LAST DAY OF APRIL OF 2052, AS A NEWLY discovered comet, Urga-Rampos, neared Earth, a very ill, very old, and very corpulent man started to shoulder his way into the thick hedges around the last public zoo on earth. Cuthbert Handley, a freshly minted nonagenarian—and a newly homeless one—clambered into the shrubbery as fast as his large, frail bones allowed (which wasn’t very). As the tough branches of yew and hazel abraded his arms and neck and face, he hardly felt them: what stung him was consciousness, every last red, lashing ray of it.

Crack on, the old man grumbled to himself, struggling to guard his eyes with his immense hands. Go, you two-boned bletherhead—you get a wriggle on!

It hurt Cuthbert to think, and it hurt to feel. Most of all, it hurt to remember. For a moment, he saw the boy’s face—that sinking face, with black, deep-river eyes. He saw the long lips, as purple and frail as iris petals, and the pale forehead wreathed in rushes. He glimpsed again the tiny clawing hands, grabbing at fronds of ferns from the brook-side, and all of it, the whole creature, tangled in green threads of time, plummeting, twisting, swimming, down to the depths, right down through the misery of the last century.

There, or somewhere, was his lost sweet brother, the otter-boy. Here, now, eighty years later, he would be found.

Cuthbert had never stopped looking.

Drystan, the old man whispered aloud. He paused for a moment, gulping for breath, pulling a twig off his ear. I’ll find my way to you. And to tha’ others.

And what of this comet?

All the world jabbering about it, and it was the worst of omens, Cuthbert felt; Urga-Rampos seemed to presage a frenzied phase of the mass-suicide pandemic that had already wiped out tens of thousands of Britons, and abroad, millions of other people—and animals.

For the most powerful and largest of the suicide cults—a group named Heaven’s Gate, originally from California—had also let it be known that animals occupied a Level Below Human, as the cultists put it, and must be exterminated to enable suicided cult members to travel more readily to the Level Above Human. Earth was a dead vessel, they claimed, a mere technical impediment to spiritual ascension. They also claimed God had revised Jehovah’s covenant with Noah. Instead of revering the bow in the cloud of Genesis, that ancient sign of His promise never again to destroy Earth’s living creatures, the cultists said to look to the white comet, to a new covenant in which animals didn’t fit, and on one continent after another, they found ways to tip already endangered whole ecosystems toward their bowls of ashes.

The international response had been, so far, slow and uneven. America, where most of the cults had begun and where the self-murders and animal killings seemed to be accelerating, had organized a cognitive policing effort, but it wasn’t authorized outside New York, despite being under the control of the new national police, an extension of the U.S. Army. Only a few other larger countries—Korea Hana, India, the Nigerian Federation, and Britain—seemed up for a fight.

As the last great repository of living whole animals on earth—genomic clones were available but also dwindling in numbers—the London Zoo now ranked as the cult’s biggest target, at least as Cuthbert saw it. The animals had awakened—for him, he believed—because Britain, and indeed the world, stood in desperate danger. Waves of species were being wiped from the wild at a level not seen since the end of the Mesozoic era. So few nonhuman animal species existed in the deforested, bulldozed, and poisoned planet, the London Zoo had truly become a kind of ark for all interconnected life—an ark, and a death row prison.

The animals, wisely, wanted Cuthbert to help them escape before it was too late.

CUTHBERT WAS BIG, big, big—twice the size of most Britons and half as dainty. Despite his semihomeless state, he always, somehow, managed to find food, especially his favorite—cold kidney pies and kippers. His love of England was outsize, too, nearly as great as his respect for its ruthless king, Henry IX. His fingers were as thick and dirty as parsnips, and his feet as long and narrow and slippery as eels. An old set of EverConnector™ muscle-sleeves bound his old body together, but he heaved around a fat tummy on the lankiest of frames, and his enlarged heart, thick-walled with cardiomyopathy after decades of high blood pressure, struggled to siphon his gallons of blood around a porpoise-shaped body. And yet this most unlikely of recipients, Cuthbert Handley, a lowly Indigent born long ago in the Black Country, the son of a machinist, was the most recent, and perhaps final, recipient of a gift given only to a few people through human history—the Wonderments.

Earlier that day, he had bided time until the right moment came with the long sleeving shadows of evening and the zoo visitors beginning to disperse for the day. When the nearby Broad Walk and the adjacent playground emptied of people, he had made his appalling gambit, unbandaging caution from his long limbs in one rip of movement. He could not scramble fast enough now. A branch jabbed his neck. Another struck his thigh. He scrunched his eyes shut. He kicked his filthy way forward, a man powering an immense spinning fan of rags and anguish. The hedge’s branches felt far stiffer than he remembered, and much sharper. He flung his ancient forearm at them. He ducked. He sidestepped. He puffed his chest out. He threw another chunky forearm out. It was as if he were trying to taunt a mob of thin men all threatening to stab him with a yew stick.

And there was a kind of horde about him, after all. Cuthbert, who had lived much of his life on the dole* and, later, the Sick (disability benefit), and who could not stop drinking Flōt, was not simply disturbed. He heard things—loads of things. For half of the past year, his mind had inhabited, like a terrified moth in a candle lantern, a phantasmagoria of mental tiger-shadows and ghost-smokes. It was far worse than even the renowned horrors of a typical first Flōt withdrawal. Every time he saw an animal, whether a stray moggy or the rats running along the New Tube rails before trains burst into the station, he felt sure the creatures were preparing to do or say things to him, or both—until they finally did just that. He could hear the language of animals—or so he believed—and he was doing this.

And here he was, attempting to break into the old London Zoo.

Almost there, he said, panting. Break a leg, mon!

Cuthbert had no money, no friends, and no possessions, but he had learned through the Wonderments to listen to England’s animals. It was something even the powerful king he so revered couldn’t comprehend, and through this skill, he was going to save Britain and its creatures.

Unfortunately, Flōt addict and madman that he was, not a living human soul on earth believed him.

And on Flōt, as everyone knew, one could believe that microscopic violet-quiffed visitors from Planet Flōtica kept castles on the tips of every blade of grass. One could believe that the last Tasmanian tiger didn’t actually freeze to death in 1936 because of an incompetent zookeeper. When Flōt was good, it was hands down the best legal hallucinogenic and sedative on earth. It offered more than intoxication, more than a release: it took you rippling across whole new planets of purple-white euphoria. Like the old rave drug ketamine, or Special K, from the 1990s, it offered a sense of being utterly, and sometimes pleasantly, alone; but uniquely, it also gave the proprioceptive illusion of having extremely long, lissome, and powerful legs. To get up or spire on Flōt, as it was often called, was all about total self-possessed elevation. On Flōt, the world stood miles below you alone, a distant purple and white field of violets you could only feel tickling your ankles, and you needed nothing or no one else—not God, not a lover, not your pet cat.

CUTHBERT HAD DONE the proper prep for his assault on the zoo, or at least he thought so. A few meters through the dense shrubbery lay a secret grotto that he had fashioned earlier that month inside yew and hazel hedgings and a few coppiced beeches, scooping dirt with his dry hands and charily snapping twigs. He kept an emergency bottle of Flōt stashed there, and a powerful pair of bolt cutters. His plan was to wait until darkness, cut his way in, then break open as many enclosures as possible—especially the otters’. It was the most organized thing he had done in decades. One couldn’t spot the grotto from either the park or the zoo’s interior. It sat a meter from the zoo’s sturdy iron perimeter fence, close to the jackals—and to a rare gap in the iron fence. But the grotto might as well have been in France, such were the difficulties of getting to it now.

Cuthbert shoved forward a few more paces until the crisscrossing hazel branches budged no more and encapsulated him in a green foliate cage. For a moment, he thought he saw a boy, a thin boy with dark hair, shoving along with him a few meters away in the shrubbery. Dryst, Cuthbert said. Look at me. Over here! Then the boy vanished. Every so often, a stressed branch would crack and loosen the cage’s bars, allowing Cuthbert to move again. At one point, tiny twigs jammed up both nostrils and his mouth, making it appear as if he were disgorging leaves from his face like some kind of garden goblin.

Oh, shittin ’ell, he gasped, spitting out flecks of shredded leaves. The beast of first Flōt withdrawal was upon him, too, pulling him downward, tearing at his nerves, seizing his muscles—including his fragile heart. A singularly vicious facet of Flōt addiction was its two-bell-curved dual-withdrawal syndrome. It crushed the newly and the long-term sober alike with two acute phases sometimes a decade or more apart. Yet the dual-withdrawal also allowed ex-addicts past the initial psychosis-laden hell of withdrawal No. 1, an island of peace and sanity, before dragging them into the furies of withdrawal No. 2.

For so many years, from the last days of the era of the powerful prime ministers and the European Union, up through the Great Reclamation and the Property Revolts and the slow rise of the various suicide cults of the 2020s, and on through the Second Restoration to the new king in 2028, the ramshackle Cuthbert had somehow survived. All those decades, he’d searched doggedly for his long-lost elder brother, Drystan, who, in his mind, had vanished when they were children, way back in the late 1960s. Since then, after leaving the Black Country, he had learned to suck in and oxygenate himself on London’s quotidian pathologies as naturally as breath. The filthy old town seemed to nourish him, to fuel the hunt for his brother. He took in every coarse ’oi of speech, ate every chip-butty* bag of cheap potato joy, learned every mucky machination to blag* Flōt—all of it, fluently and helplessly, and it had all led to this brambled corner beside the beasts. If the entire history of London, from the Iron Age to the age of digital skin, had a meaning, this spot, as far as Cuthbert knew, was precisely where it stood. This, he was certain, was where his dear long-lost brother Drystan would come back and stay.

GOD KNOWS, the paroxysms of the 2020s and Henry IX had sucked nearly every other last drop of energy from Britain’s tired veins. While thousands of artists, philosophers, and authors had joined the suicide cults or the ranks of brazen self-promoters on WikiNous—the implanted, all-purpose comm-network that grew within human tissue—the most original minds faced almost total indifference.

WikiNous had long ceased being freely moderated by WikiNousians. Its inner workings were no longer open-sourced; they were open-branded and edited vertically by subeditors obedient to Henry IX and the aristocracy and rules, rules, rules. The sending of messages in Britain had become expensive, tightly centralized, and censored; in America, India, Scandinavia, and parts of the Far East, WikiNous’s relative freedom had brought its own set of problems (particularly, the cults), but even there, open network protocols were dead and the Internet golden age was long gone. Cryptographically protected WikiNous stalks had replaced the URLs. Among Britons, WikiNous mainly spread Harry9’s official views and a boorish brand of light newsertainement.

Oh, Dryst, Cuthbert said aloud, reaching with his hand toward the fence. He clutched a shock of tender, faintly serrated hazel leaves, pulling himself forward. Dryst!

Finding the boy wasn’t just the search of a lifetime for Cuthbert—it was a command, a direction, a holy destination.

That his lost brother would have been aged ninety-two, were he alive, was entirely meaningless to old Cuddy. Drystan was, in his mind, always a child.

CUTHBERT TURNED AROUND and leaned against the crosshatching branches he’d just plunged through. He found that they supported his full weight—all twenty-two stones of a man wattled together with crylon mesh and half-poisonous nickel rods. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. It had rained the night before, and a few drips of water coursed slowly across his cheeks and down his neck.

Gagoga, he gasped, breathlessly, repeating the most mysterious of the various phrases he had been sent a few months before by the zoo animals. Ga! Go! Ga! he cried, sounding as raw animal as he knew. How he knew this watery, gurgling phrase, what it meant, where it came from, why he ought to repeat it—none of those things were quite clear. But he knew he must say it.

Gagoga.

The zoo wasn’t the only source of animal voices, though it was the strongest. He heard them all over the place these days. England roared and screeched with them, especially those of cats. He could hardly make it down the street lately without a moggy telling him that moths in the moonlight were enchanting, or saying that those blue mallow flowers along garden walls in Holloway smelled of petrol, or asking him to touch me here, no touch me there, no here yes there here between the ears there here there—workaday cat-thoughts, really.

Britain’s dogs had much to say, too: a Seeing Eye Labrador on a bosonicabus* had told Cuthbert that invisible grid lines crisscrossed every pavement, street, house, New Tube, or bosonicabus entrance in the city. From its point of view, London was impeccably Pythagorean and soothing. A wirehaired fox terrier, on the other hand, who yelped behind a wooden gate that Cuthbert often passed in Islington, would shrill with impish pep, Happyfury! Happyfury! Happyfury! Cuthbert did not know what it meant—but he believed it.

And on and on they went, voices from across Albion. The black-eyed ponies of the New Forest wanted larger pastures. The fat gray seals off the Isles of Scilly wanted cleaner breeding waters. That autumn, down from the craggy Black Carls of Beinn Eighe came the angry voices of red deer stags in rut, barking for sex. Then there were Britain’s forty million head of sheep, and each head, Cuthbert suspected, had a gentle idea of its own.

All these animals didn’t talk to him exactly, not like Virginia Woolf’s Greek-uttering birds or Kipling’s noble, contraction-averse wolves. Words did not pass through snout, proboscis, or mandible. But nonetheless, the animals asserted themselves toward him. They sent messages, some limpid, some inscrutable, but all appreciable. Some were preverbal, others expressive and exact. Most were enigmatic—but they all nipped at him, if only just a little.

They spoke so tersely, too. Often the zoo animals imparted just one or two expressive words. "Saliq, the sand cats would whisper. Murkurk, rumbled the hippos. Progress and dominion," the imperial—and often verbose—lions would intone, and so on. On more and more days, these occult reductions popped into perfect sense within Cuthbert. For example, murkurk, as Cuthbert grasped it, clearly meant let the hippopotamus make its way to the Thames. He’d think: how much clearer could it be?

HE LIFTED UP a tangle of the thin, elastic branches in the hedge with his arm, spun around, and tried backing in. He needed to make sure no one was watching. He felt he could not be more prepared for today, considering his circumstances. He’d put on his black weather-buffer and green trousers for cover. He wore the hood on the buffer, and cinched it tight around his swarthy face. He looked like a big, dark Teletubby from the old TV program—a new one, Boozey, with a smashed television screen on its tummy and two purple Flōt bottle-tops for eyes.

Getting to this secret spot, a maneuver he had practiced twice that week, seemed far more difficult this evening; he felt as if he were crawling under a duvet stuffed with plaited, stinging sticks. He had ducked and shoved in, stolid and elephantine, but come to a real sticking spot. He must move fast. If a passer-by spotted him—a fat man splayed in the hedges—undoubtedly a commotion would ensue. If that happened, everything ended. His grand plan to free all the animals would die.

It was with this realization that something truly unaccountable appeared before Cuthbert, within the hedges. All at once, a broad and robust figure, in the shadows of the leaves and branches, crept upon him. A nimbus of golden-green air surrounded him. Cuthbert began to quake in terror, his neck hair standing on end.

You! cried Cuthbert. You there!

The figure seemed to have actually sprouted from the ground within the hedges, a massive yew tree dotted with angry red berries. For a moment, it spumed in all directions, chaotically, a flutter of spinning green boughs with handfuls of black soil and nightlarks and tiny owls bursting from it. A multitude of small, dark animals—they resembled hares made of shadow—poured out from its base and took off into the night air, where they dissolved. The great yew-tree figure moved toward Cuthbert, who could barely breathe, such was his dread.

What do you want from me? he asked.

The figure replied, "Gagoga." The voice was unlike all the other animals he had been hearing. This one was familiar, yet oddly muffled. It was like code from some enormous forest, a code spoken from beneath one of its deepest, darkest brooks.

Cuthbert whispered, Drystan?

the depraved practitioner

CUTHBERT’S GENERAL PRACTITIONER, DR. SARBJINDER Singh Bajwa, to whom he had grown quite close in the previous months, and who had tried so hard to protect Cuthbert from himself, surely would have started tapping his middle finger on his desk the way he did if he were observing all this.

Of the small cadre of harried NHS Élite GPs who administered to the poor in the All-Indigent zone around Holloway, the locals considered Dr. Bajwa especially long-suffering and kind, and because of this, he was in mortal danger. When it came to the treatment of Indigents, the new aristocracy brutally rooted out softness. Indeed, compassion (in anyone other than King Henry) was considered a form of depravity.

But Dr. Bajwa loved on—and in so many degenerate ways—and as far as he was concerned, the regime could top itself. He was well known for his adoration of paper and his unnecessary reminders written in ink on passé sticky notes. He was always handing these to his patients, despite the dozens of Opticalls—the catchall name for audio calls, text messages, and Optispam, sent via WikiNous’s neuro-optical interface—his patients automatically received with every consult. Few, apart from Cuthbert, knew that beneath the quiet, tolerant, papyrophilic surface of the doctor lurked a more swaggering personality.

Over the previous six months, and well before Cuthbert had got himself stuck beside a green phantom in the hedges, the doctor had developed feelings of both duty and bewilderment when it came to the welfare of this particular addict. Here was a tough old Flōt sot who also showed signs of depersonalization disorder as well as, perhaps, a variety of Cotard’s Syndrome (a delusion in which a patient was convinced she or he is dead). He was, among other things, interesting to Dr. Bajwa. And impossible.

Cuthbert had spoken to him many times about his delusion of animal telepathy, and Dr. Bajwa, or Baj, as friends and regulars called him, would invariably fiddle his fingers, grimace, and proffer one of his beloved English idioms. The doctor was quadralingual, with English, as he saw it, the strangest of the four tongues, but he loved how its scores of idioms put splattering city life into tidy, confident boxes. I see you’ve really grasped the nettle this time, he sometimes said to Cuthbert, usually with an expansive grin.

THE REVELATIONS ABOUT Cuthbert’s animals had begun one morning the previous October. He had been telling Baj about a shambling stroll he’d just taken in Regent’s Park, which encased three sides of the zoo. He’d been stoned on Flōt, as usual, walking on skyscraper legs.

It was, as it happened, the day of the last performance of the season at the park’s Open Air Theatre, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona was being hastily staged despite the outbreak of raucous protests near the theater. The protestors, who struck Cuthbert as far too obstreperous to be Heaven’s Gaters, heckled the wealthy theatergoers by throwing paper balls made of crumpled pages of old mass-market paperback copies of the banned Hamlet. There was a live dog in the production, a badly trained mastiff with droopy flews, and it kept barking incessantly, sometimes nearly howling.

Wearing tight black garments, keeping hair long and dotted with bioluminescent pearls, and, in a few cases, marking cheeks with tiny black tattoos—like prison tears but actually meant to resemble the similarly shaped black warden pears of Worcestershire—the protestors frightened and repulsed Cuthbert, who revered the Crown, but he felt too wobbly to do anything about it, and the dog—those sore-throated, snappy, endless barks!—badly unsettled him.

Arf! Arf! Arf! Ar-rar-rar-arf!

Who’s torturing that wammel? he asked the protestors, yawning. They smiled and ignored him. Doesn’t anyone have one bit of respect for God’s creatures?

Just as he readied to spread himself along an empty bench for a nap, the mysterious, wild cacophony spoke to him.

Eeeeeeegaah raar! Zchaaag! As he recounted to Dr. Bajwa, the noise actually knocked him onto a bench.

Like this, he said. Cuthbert threw himself back in his chair a bit, as if to demonstrate.

The animals of the Regent’s Park zoo, it seemed, didn’t care for "any Two Gentlemen," he said.

The dog, and the angry students and all—you see, I think all the noise sort of stirred up the animals in the zoo, you see? That’s my own little theory, that. The theater’s within earshot—of the zoo, right?

I can imagine that, said Dr. Bajwa. He was convinced, at this point, that Cuthbert was joking with him—and wasting their time.

So, one of the otters said, Cuthbert had blurted, "they said, well, they said they want to be let up tha’ cuts,* the ones behind Regent’s, right? You know, with those pretty boats?"

They ‘said,’ you say? ‘Said’?

Cuthbert glanced down, as if mildly ashamed, and added, I might say ‘yikkered,’ really—that’s a little more like it, actually.

Yikkered. Otters. Cuthbert, I—

Exactly.

Doctor and patient sat in a consultation room at the courtyard-facing back of a Victorian office building in north London. A rusty-red and white Afshar rug with boteh leaf designs covered most of the floor. The space smelled of fig leaves and cedar from Dr. Bajwa’s cologne, and were it not all so greatly soothing, Cuthbert might have held back more. A spray of hot green sunlight and a spring breeze trickled through the office’s ancient diamond-mullioned casement windows the doctor always kept ever so slightly open. With one sweet new breeze, Dr. Bajwa’s hope that Cuthbert was winding him up collapsed.

"You’re hearing animals? In your mind?"

What? No. He scrutinized his doctor’s face for a moment. In my ears, doc. In my lug’oles.

Soon, the particulars came out. Cuthbert claimed that thousands of animals across London—cats, dogs, rats, garden foxes, lab monkeys, hares, pet gerbils, and of course zoo animals—were trying to speak to him.

They don’t let up, doc, Cuthbert said. It’s quite difficult—to be on the receiving end, as it were. He said he tried at these moments to imagine his long-dead grandmother’s kind face, with her wispy-white tendrils of hair sometimes falling in her eyes. She would have gently rued Cuthbert’s whining. You didn’t whine about the Wonderments—and you didn’t talk about them outside the line of descent. "And you wouldn’t believe how many cats there are in this city."

Dr. Bajwa listened, half shocked, half transfixed, and nodding more out of courtesy than acquiescence.

"There’s a sort of naffed-off chimpanzee going off on me right now, Cuthbert had said that day. His eyes darted around the room, as though observing the black-furred words of an ape pummeling the walls. E’s warning me to leave him alone!"

The doctor took a deep breath and nodded his head.

That sounds like a very sensible approach, he said, with a note of certified sternness in his voice.

Cuthbert puckered his lips and grazed his fingertips across his own forehead. Could do, he said. S’pose.

And you remember, you’ve got help, Cuthbert. Help for you, help for your body, help for your mind. Dr. Bajwa spoke in a slow, soft cadence. You remember all we’ve ever said, how I’m not going to let anything happen to you, right?

Ar, yam a chum, slurred Cuthbert.

reaching for the derelict heart

DR. SARBJINDER BAJWA WAS A MUSCULAR MAN with a broad neck and great tactile power. He preferred solutions to problems that could be applied manually, if not pharmacologically. In his spare weekends, he had, among other feats, learned to pilot one of the new solarcopters, which could be spun through the most theatrical, thousand-foot-high spirals with a simple kneading motion of the hands. On his consultation desk he kept a chromed fifteen-kilo dumbbell he liked to lift between patients. He could be a touch boastful, but he was always warm, too, with long, clement eyes the burned green of cardamom and a precise beard so closely shaven it seemed more a placement mark for a beard than the thing itself. His physical might, well known to his friends, seemed effortless. At weddings and family celebrations, he’d let three or four of his young nieces and nephews swing like squirrels from his arm.

Patients would always inspect, with visible appreciation, that gleaming dumbbell on the desk. It made them feel safe—sheltered from disease, protected from themselves, and beside a power more muscular, if not stronger, than King Henry and the Windsor fanatics.

ALTHOUGH CUTHBERT HAD HIS OWN Indigent block flat, or IB, as one was called, he barely occupied his assigned living-hole. The IBs were so structurally dangerous, depopulated, and crime ridden that many residents in the last twenty years had abandoned them. When he had started reporting the animal voices, he had been officially, off and on, one of Dr. Bajwa’s increasing number of no fixed address patients, and he had indeed spent most recent years sleeping rough, mooching sofa space from strangers, moving in and out of TB-filled doss houses, missions, and cacky B&Bs. (The only family listed on his GP records was a cousin named Rebekka, a retired NHS Élite nurse listed as living in Hertfordshire. Her WikiNous cryptograph was Cuthbert’s last emergency contact, but she had moved voluntarily into a Calm House.)

Baj inhabited a more orderly world, but it was not without its own disjunctions and sudden partings. He was a former top sport-medicine researcher who had been stripped of access to his treasured laboratory under the resurgent monarchy; the doctor was thirty years younger than Cuthbert, but like Cuthbert, he didn’t fit into his country.

Fewer and fewer did. With the introduction of the Baronetcy Alimentation Act of 2025 and Positive Disenfranchisement Act of 2028, many of Britain’s most cherished social reforms passed under Victoria had been obviated. National devolution fell out of favor, and the Scottish and Welsh national assemblies lost key powers. A new Orangeman Army sprang up in Belfast. Stunningly, across Great Britain, thousands of urban laborers willingly gave up their rights to vote in exchange for secure jobs on the new soybean farms outside the cities, along with housing in family dormitories, free basic meals, and free access to mind-numbing Nexar hood treatments.

(Electroencephalographic headwear made of fibronic cloth, Nexar hoods—of a pyramidal shape and in ubiquitous NHS Élite blue—were fitted on people, often but not always voluntarily, and usually at government-operated Calm Houses, and used to send soothing signals down their neuronal axons. The signals could also be read, monitored, and manipulated. Over the course of sessions lasting from hours to days on end, the hoods would smooth and desplinter brain activity like a kind of mental wood plane. The effects lasted for weeks.)

With the new Acts, the old National Health Service had also split into the tiny, private NHS Legacy (for hereditary or purchased peerages, certain public workers, and the thousands of hangers-on in the vast new aristocracy), and the ragged, more and more depleted free NHS Élite (for Briton’s seventy million Indigents and a handful of others from the shrinking lower-middle class). Many middle-class Britons not crippled by various WikiNous distractions had already been decimated by the popular suicide cults, which attracted them in droves. Millions of the rest in the middle, having lost suffrage with the Positive Disenfranchisement Act, fell to official Indigent status during the so-called Great Reclamation of the 2020s, when trillions of pounds of value were written off financial markets.

As a physician under the Baronetcy Alimentation Act, Dr. Bajwa would normally be accorded a nonhereditary peerage, but he hadn’t saved nearly enough money for even one of the new baby-baronetcies, as they were known, and the Bajwas lacked connections. (The physician’s own younger brother, Banee, a former republican activist, had overdosed on heroin years ago, despite all his family’s effort to sort Banee out, as their father put it, and this had marked the whole clan as rather dubious.) Moreover, Baj far too often spoke his mind and showed benevolence for the poor—ruinous habits under Henry IX, or Harry9, as Indigents called him.

Baj’s casual denunciations, spoken among supposed friends, of NHS Élite’s emphasis on palliative neurology—in which the relief of pain supplanted research and one-on-one care—had got him assigned to an NHS Élite surgery in offices across the Holloway Road from a betting shop and a Szechuan masturbation stand. It was a far cry from the wealthier central London districts, where serene greens for spawn-ball—a slow-paced kind of tennis with genomic, hour-lifetime lagomorphic spawn-balls carefully played across a grassy court—art galleries, duty-reduced luxury shops, and some of the new schools for women’s etiquette had all taken root.

Your misapprehensions, he said to Cuthbert one day. "Listen. If you don’t take your meds as prescribed, and you don’t keep off the Flōt—Cuthbert, listen, you listen to me—this is the price. That’s one thing I must say. And that’s just one. You know what I mean, surely. If you do something foolish, in public, you’re going to find yourself wearing a hood, my friend. Or going for a burton."*

I don’t care, said Cuthbert. At least it’s not Whittington.

"You have no idea what you mean. There is . . . nothing . . . really . . . wrong with Whittington," the doctor said, wincing a bit. As the last decent free hospital in London, and the only remaining NHS Élite site for addiction treatment, the Whittington Hospital, close by in Archway, was scandalously overstretched.

Whittington doesn’t work. It’s hopeless. I can’t understand why King Harry’s let it go this way. It’s not much better off than banjaxed in a Nexar hood, is it?

You are. The hood is . . . the end. Of everything. Whittington can be a start. There’s an effort there. There’s hope. A hope and a prayer.

Cuthbert blinked a few times and smiled in a strange, sour way. The most I’ll ever do is get a few days past the first Flōt withdrawal. I admit they’re very clever at the Whit, I s’ppose. And I feel like that lot . . . loiks me. In their way.

See? You have friends there, thank you, said the doctor. You go to Whittington. I’ll get you in, fast-tracked. Anytime. At a moment’s notice. And why worry about the second withdrawal? That’s years away.

Flōt’s bell-curved dual-withdrawal syndrome arose from its unique twin-cycle neurotoxic effect on the brain’s serotonergic system. Unlike most abstinence-based drug recoveries, in Flōt recoveries the peril went from bad to better to lethal as years clean passed. The most recovering addicts could hope for were some comparatively peaceful years between first and second withdrawals, typically about ten to fifteen, followed by a dark time of anger, insomnia, and floridly hypomanic delirium that marked second withdrawal’s arrival.

Cuthbert leaned his chair back on its hind legs for a moment, then brought it down. He tilted his head slightly, listening. He crossed his legs and gazed upward, smiling more thoroughly now, as if staring at the credits screen of a deeply gratifying film.

I wish I could tell you more, but it’s not possible, he said. "The animals, see. Again. I hear them. Foxes now. They want to say . . . thank you? To all the people in this dirty owd town. Cuthbert chuckled a bit. Thank you! Ta! Funny, eh? ‘Cheers!’ What’s there to thank? Cuthbert’s smile fell. His eyes glistened. Them foxes are innocent—and foolish. Thoi’ve no bloody idea."

The doctor noticed a tremor in the aged man’s lips as he spoke. He took a relatively small daily dose of the ancient, crude antipsychotic med Abilify, in a desultory manner, but his massive Flōt intake negated most of its benefits.

What makes them innocent?

They trust us, said Cuthbert. They oughtn’t.

Dr. Bajwa started on the desk with his finger, making tiny circles. Then he began tapping powerfully—hammering, really.

This is only your brain—and the Flōt. Tap, tap, tap. You need to be careful . . . about what you say. You understand?

I try to be careful, said Cuthbert. "But the animals are speaking to me . . . for a reason. It’s something I’ve waited for my whole life. This was supposed to happen, see?"

The doctor’s knowledge of what could happen to Cuthbert in the clutches of NHS’s mass psychotherapeutic division, EquiPoise, made it hard to give him the space he needed to talk freely. He feared openness. Even very casual talk therapy was considered a luxury reserved for the new aristocracy. EquiPoise’s Psyalleviators, or P-levs, whose official role was to battle the era’s viral cults and political radicals on behalf of the king, had convoluted the simplest rites of doctorly care among the masses.

There were smaller, new nuisances in Dr. Bajwa’s life, too. Unusually, lately, he felt easily winded and kept getting bronchitis; his boyfriends kept dumping him for blue-eyed English boys; his family criticized him for not aspiring enough; his friends were all moving to the controversial new colonies in Antarctica. But the way Harry9’s government had come between him and his patients—this, more than any other problem in his life, incensed him. Stunningly, despite all the cruelties Indigents such as Cuthbert suffered under Harry9, Cuthbert himself—and he wasn’t alone among Indigents—held the monarchy in the highest regard, and he could be quite jingoistic.

There’s not one thing on earth that’s not better in England, he would sometimes slur at Baj. We’ve got the best cats—and best football. And good ’ole Harry’s the best of all the bloody bunch.

Such statements quietly infuriated Baj, yet something about Cuthbert’s blend of good-heartedness, reactionary nationalism, and almost artistic grandiosity also, despite his knowing better, mesmerized him. He wanted to understand it.

The doctor one day had looked up from his antique linen-paper notebook and smiled purposefully at Cuthbert in the consultation room.

"O-T-T-E-R-S, said Baj aloud, writing each letter with a strong hand in black ink with a big gold-plated fountain pen. The pen was inscribed with Sanskrit script that translated as, Only action will define us." Unlike most of his colleagues, few of whom knew how to use a pen, he loathed the trendy SkinWerks digital aerosols that let one write and read on the skin.

Why otters? Why them?

Cuthbert looked askance. They’re . . . very godly creatures, too. Do you want to know why?

Yes, I do. Bajwa tried to speak in a friendly but resolved tone, but a trace of irritability crept in. I certainly do. Now wait just a moment . . .

He took his stethoscope from his desk drawer.

Let me, he said, unbuttoning the top of Cuthbert’s shirt and deftly, with two fingers, holding the stethoscope’s diaphragm against Cuthbert’s chest. He heard the tattered hwoot-dub hwoot-dub of his murmur. The fact was, the fat old man—six foot four and twenty-two stone—could drop dead at any moment.

Your cardiomyopathy’s not any worse, the doctor said. But you need to take it easy. He put the stethoscope back in the top drawer of his desk. There were at least two newer cardiac CoreMods™ available for Cuthbert’s type of enlargement, but both were strictly NHS Legacy items, or one had to pay millions on the private mod market.

Thirty years before, Cuthbert had won, through the old BodyMod™ lottery, two lower-cost mods—a cheap ventricle wall panel on his heart and a onetime infusion of pluripotent hepatocytal cells for his liver. He’d also managed, in his early eighties, to get his hands on a spool of crylon body-mesh and a used set of EverConnectors, sized 2XL, and this set had come with cartilage drugs, too, as well as free installation.

The otters, said Cuthbert. They have a message—for all of England.

It’s your brain, he said. "Just your brain. But if you can’t stop spiring* and get through the first withdrawal—listen, Cuddy—you know, it’s a kind place, and they’re brilliant and they’re discreet, Cuddy. He frowned slightly. They’ll keep you well away from EquiPoise. There’s a simple and deadly health issue here, my good friend."

Oh, Jaysus, said Cuthbert. I should’ve kept my gob shut. Not Whittington. I’ve said too bloody much!

It was at this point that Dr. Bajwa reached across his desk, took Cuthbert’s hands in his, and gave them a firm, tender squeeze. He leaned so far forward that one of the armpits of his blue suit jacket made a little ripping sound.

Cuthbert beamed at him, although his dry lips quivered a bit.

"No, you have most certainly not told me too much, said the doctor. He felt as if he wanted to reach through a dark blue shell of pathology and grab the great, derelict heart before him. You must trust me. There’s nothing wrong with Whittington Hospital. But you . . . are . . . very . . . unwell, my friend."

"You are very decent, sir, Cuthbert pronounced. But let go ’o me maulers," he said, pulling his hands back fiercely. Cuthbert couldn’t remember the last time anyone had held his hands. The doctor’s grip was colder than he’d imagined. Cuthbert could smell the figgy notes of his Diptyque cologne.

"I’ve had enough of the Whitt—I’ve packed it in, in moi mind, Cuthbert said. I feel, I, I, I really ought to let the poor otters into the cuts. It’s for England. He gave the doctor a sly look. And the king could use my help."

You shouldn’t talk like that, my friend. I mean, Cuthbert. They are utterly merciless.

There was a long silence. After a while, the doctor wrote in his notepad.

But, go on. Come. I’m—I’m listening carefully. And when you say otters—you do mean the sort of minky, playful things?

Otters, Cuthbert repeated. A gleam of aureate light radiated through the window. I know it might sound completely barmy. It was indeed that, as far as Dr. Bajwa saw it. One surely never heard the word otter more than once in a career in a north London GP’s office.

You know my missing brother Dryst? I think he might have sort of become a kind of otter. Cuthbert nibbled gently at the inside of his cheek; there was a tough little ridge of flesh there that he sometimes liked to worry. Of sorts.

Dr. Bajwa said, I know you feel that loss. And after the challenges you’ve had, I’m sure you feel it all the more. And after so very many decades of . . . griefs.

No, no, no, said Cuthbert, shaking his head. He’s back, you see? Drystan has returned. And I think ’e’s in the zoo. There’s more to tell. Much more, doc. But I corr.*

Dr. Bajwa thought for a moment, rubbing his short, graceful beard.

I want you to stay away from the zoo, Cuthbert. Let’s avoid things that obviously upset you. And these zoo voices—they’re not your friends. The doctor coughed a few times. He was coming down with something, it seemed. He said, You’re a very clever man, so surely you grasp that?

Cuthbert was, but he didn’t, couldn’t, and wouldn’t.

singled out for otterspaeke

SO IT WAS, AT FIRST, THAT DR. BAJWA SIMPLY advised Cuthbert to avoid Regent’s Park. Anything to de-escalate Cuthbert’s obsession seemed a step forward. Keep out of Regent’s Park, and these zoo voices will fade, the doctor thought. Here was simple, sensible medicine.

"A zoo can be a rather intense sort of place, if you think about it, Dr. Bajwa had said to Cuthbert. It’s no place for you."

CUTHBERT RARELY MADE APPOINTMENTS; he would just show up, in all his shabby glory, with a heap of vinegary chips in his arms, or a warm purple sphere of Flōt in his coat. The frowning admins would send him back to the consultation room, holding his own file and wearing his usual shamefaced smile.

The zoo admission’s twenty-five bloody pounds, he was telling Dr. Bajwa one day. I saw the sign at the gate. He clasped his hands together. They were filthy and mottled with white psoriasis and liver spots.

Hardly anyone goes—that’s why, Dr. Bajwa said.

A few years before, after the closings of both the Beijing and Bronx zoos, a short flurry of patriotic stories about the London Zoo had memed across WikiNous, most along the lines of the first and last standing, although the first bit wasn’t entirely true. Still, almost no zoo animals existed in the wild anymore, and thousands upon thousands of species were newly extinct. Polar bears, giant pandas, as well as most large marine species, wild ferrets, and cranes, survived only as genomic software that the children of the rich used to print miniature cuddle and bath toys as well as living mobiles.

Cuthbert had never been inside a zoo, even as a child, and the doctor wanted to keep it that

Reviews for Night of the Animals

[lgcullens · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Overly verbose, making it a chore to get through, but I did like the focus on the animals escaping the captivity we've imposed on them. To me the book said a lot about the human bubble.

[lisapeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What a strange, strange book—like nothing I've ever read. Very interesting, a bit shaggy, some beautiful language, big themes, a dystopian future, politics, animal ethics, cults, addiction, and a whole lot of other stuff to chew on. Which is to say, more later.

[wolfeyluvr · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was not content with having started this book until I completed it. Almost every time I picked it up I thought "should I just quit this one or not". Some part of the world created in this book made me continue. I guess I just wanted to know what happened to the animals and while the dialogue was hard to swallow it had a nice rhythm. The future created in this book was interesting. I wish there'd been more details about that actually, especially prior to the end of the book. I'm glad I finished but not sure its one I could recommend to anyone.