There is evil in the heart of London Zoo. It comes in the early hours of the morning, caged in the back of a dead man’s truck. The driver has a broken arm bandaged with a ripped shirt and the passenger is slick with blood. They stand ashen faced in my torchlight and tell me to prepare the strongest enclosure we have. They cannot meet my eyes when I ask what manner of creature they have captured.
I went to look, because then I did not know any better. It was crouched in the corner. Scales and slime and claws, larger than a man and my head began to swim as I understood that no loving God could ever have dreamed this monstrosity. It noticed me then, its eyes great yellow globes that met mine for a second, too long, before I wrenched myself away. I felt the bile rise in my throat and it tasted like salt. I was damned, then. I am Lot’s wife. It is almost a relief.
It takes three stout men and a crane to unload the truck and move the cage into position. The thing inside thrashes and keens high and clear; a mother’s scream. If the operator needs to vomit, we all choose not to notice. Expelled into its new holding cell it howls its outrage and paces on malformed webbed feet. The tail… The hideous tail flashes quicksilver between the bars and snaps a man’s wrist. He barely makes a sound as he falls back.
The passenger, the gentleman still soaked in blood, tries to tell me how sorry he is with his wordless expression. I am already numb to my doom, and will not give him the satisfaction. He must know what he has done. The creature roars - a bubbling, hiccupy thing - and the apes take up the call. The zoo explodes into cacophony. I feel as if my head might split in two.
The constables arrive, with the detective who questions the two delivery men. They usher me out, but not before I learn that the creature has killed half a dozen men. That the two of our workers who went with them to catch it have died. “Dismembered”, is the word they use. My mind swims. I think of the work Christmas party. How Eddie gave me cigarettes on night shift. Stuart had children, I think. My soul sags under the weight of it.
I am sent home, ostensibly to rest. My wife greets me, her voice thick with having been woken. She asks if I am alright. I have no answer for her. I do not dare to fall asleep.
-
The animals know that this is wrong. The lions hide in their dens, the apes have not stopped howling since that first night. The parrots have begun to pluck their own feathers out. Their cage is thick with them, like a carpet of jewels. It is beautiful, and it is obscene.
The animals know better than the people. Every day brings new experts to drown their souls in the vanity of knowledge. Many cannot handle the truth of the thing, and flee back to the waking world. But others become obsessive, fever-bright, and we have to set up cots for them in the break room because we cannot make them leave. They poke it and prod it, and take samples. The zoo is closed to the public because we cannot muffle its screams. They huddle in their furtive groups and they mutter phrases like “convergent evolution”, “breakthrough of biology”, and “new species to science”. They do not see that compared to the creature, we are the new species. We are the johnny-come-latelies to its ancient world.
They find that it was wearing something when it was brought in. A cheap shawl, pinned with a tin broach. They test it thoroughly, conclude that it is a trophy from one of its victims, and consign it to the dustbin. I do not know why I recover it.
The shawl is cotton, and the pattern is floral and old-fashioned. It reminds me of my grandmother, and of childhood holidays on the coast. It has been badly water-logged and it is stained with pond scum. Stained with blood. Maybe this is what remains of Stuart, or Eddie. I wash it carefully. I must be tender with it as the acid from the creature’s skin has made it fragile. Once it is clean, I re-pin the broach and fold it in my desk drawer. Sometimes when I am at home, I find myself thinking of it. My wife has stopped asking whether I am alright.
-
Most of the scientists have left now. The word I hear dropped from their lips is “vivisection”. I am told the creature will be moved, taken to its final resting place. They clap my back, and tell me I will be pleased to see the back of it. They tell me I should take a vacation, spend some time with my wife. I nod, but I cannot remember how to smile.
It is me now who lies on the cot bed at night. I cannot bring myself to face the silence of my home any longer. In the quiet I still hear the creature in my ears, the gurgle of trapped water. In snatches of sleep I am haunted by fangs, and claws, and the word “dismembered”. I sought the noisy discord of the zoo, but now it is quiet here as well.
The lions no longer move. We know they are alive by the rise and fall of their emaciated rib cages. The apes lie listless and still. The parrots pluck all of their feathers, and begin to pluck their own skin. Even as they lay bleeding in the soft bed of their own fallen glory they continue to tear at themselves until there is nothing left of them. I find the last ones, and I twist their necks. Their dead alien faces look relieved.
The creature is quiet now too. It curls cramped in the corner and it leaves our food offerings untouched. Where before its eyes glowed like gas lamps, now they are lifeless and dim. It makes me angry to see it so pathetic. The emotion wells up in me unbidden, almost unfamiliar after such a drought of any feelings at all. This creature should not be, certainly. But more than that it should not be here, in this place, caged and lit up like a circus animal. The wrongness of it nearly chokes me.
I run the shawl through my hands to soothe myself, and some of the anger bleeds away. I am careful, gentle. It slips through my fingers like a rosary. Sometimes the broach catches on my skin, the tip scoring straight lines across my palm. Like the rocks at the beach, like the sharp barnacles. I fall into memories of a childhood on the Somerset coast, of the cadence of my grandmother’s voice as she sung us to sleep. Of the sound of the waves striking the sand.
-
It has been unseasonably dry, but tonight it rains for the first time. I am the only one here, perhaps the only man awake in all of London. I am sitting facing the creature’s cage. Tomorrow the scientists will take it away, and I will never see it again.
The rain is sudden and heavy. Great droplets flash in the artificial light and burst on the concrete. I am drenched immediately. The shawl in my hands goes sodden and limp. And in the cage, the creature lurches to its feet.
It is not graceful, has never been graceful. It totters on overgrown talons, its back hunched and arms clutched close. I am struck dumb by the resemblance to a timid old woman, of my grandmother, stepping forward to meet her brood off the train at the beginning of summer. The shawl is still in my lap as I gaze, transfixed.
She shuffles into center stage, and begins to violently undulate her limbs. Legs, arms, tail, all jerk and spin spasmodically as the rainwater pours over her scales. At first I do not understand. Is she having a fit? Is she dying?
She is dancing. I watch as she twists herself into arcane shapes of worship, eldritch patterns giving thanks to the rivers of rainwater running over her. Giving thanks to her lord, her father. It is burned into my mind as surely as a cattle brand. I feel my thoughts reshaping themselves around the damage, and all I can feel is joy. I am damned, I am unshackled. What can there be left to fear?
I leap to my feet to try and join her, but my body is pitiful and I can only ape her movements. I cry my frustration and she sees me for the first time. This time when our eyes meet, there is no cold shock. There is only the warmth of the familiar. She comes to the cage edge to welcome me, and I am stunned by her generosity; that she would interrupt her fearful litany for something as small and pathetic as me. My instinct is to fall prostrate at her feet, but she tells me to raise myself high instead. This is no Christian church where a bent back is celebrated as sanctified.
My sight dims, and instead of bars I see a city rotting at the bottom of the ocean. Grotesque architecture stretches in my mind’s eye as forbidden angles choked with weeds invite me to a place older than man. I stay as long as I can, desperately trying to hold it within me, but I am a cracked vessel and the water cannot stay. I am drowning. I vomit brine; the taste is acrid and it makes me homesick. As I come back to my body, the geometry of the zoo looks lacking, somehow thin, compared to the majesty I caught only a glimpse of. I look to my sister, and her expression mirrors my pain. We are trapped in this miserable flat world. She is trapped, she says. But perhaps I am not?
-
I do not remember the journey from there to here. Perhaps I took a cab. Perhaps I flew. Anything is possible tonight. It is cloudy, and there is no prophetic moon to guide my way, but I do not need her. I am my own compass. I am still in London, but the streets are dead here. I am the only man awake, the only man walking - that is, if I am still a man. Hidden dimensions roil within me, and they are nearly ready to be birthed. I have run the shawl through my fingers so often it is beginning to come undone.
It is unassuming. A house, a garden. A path through overgrown nettles. Perhaps they sting me as I pass through. The pond is waiting for me, its blue-green disk reflecting nothing of the sky. I fancy I can hear singing at the edge of my perception. I am alone, but I have never felt less lonely. Not even on my wedding day.
I pull my shoes off first, place them carefully together. I then neatly place my socks inside. The shirt, the trousers, the underwear: I fold them and set them aside. As if I might ever come back to them. As if anything on this side of the mirror matters anymore. The last thing I abandon is the shawl, reduced to ragged tatters. The broach winks at me. I have no need of it anymore.
The water is freezing, but it is a balm on my feverish skin. I ease myself in slowly at first, then throw myself with a thunderous splash. It isn’t joy I feel; it is more feral and more ancient than mere emotion. But it is pure and strong and I am no longer drowning. The first gasp of brackish water does not choke me.
I swim down. The well is deep, deeper than London. Deeper than the skin of the Earth. I kick my legs, and they are strong. One last thing to surrender, and I barely notice it go. My old skin floats behind me, above me, rising to the surface like pond scum. My tail thrashes and I am free.
I am finally free.