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. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, 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 cla.s.ses.
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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d?"
"Your call," I said. Under normal hunting circ.u.mstances, the females make the kill, but these circ.u.mstances 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 hoa.r.s.e by now; no trace of panic, but a commanding, almost exhortative tone, like a h.e.l.lfire 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 b.l.o.o.d.y shut it?" hissed Peter. "Oy!" Loud enough for the boy to hear him, under normal circ.u.mstances. 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.
Not a sign. Later, back in the surveillance post, we ran all the CCTV from all over the zoo, and you never see him leave. It was probably because I spent more time than any of the others poring over the monitors that I came to realise something else, something equally weird; you never see him arrive. You see him going from compound to compound, on the way to the lions, but you never see him at the gate or outside, in the car park. No vehicle was left unaccounted for, and he hadn"t been on any of the coaches. I"d thought he was one of the art students. He wasn"t.
All of this was after we"d searched the lion compound, thoroughly, all six of us. We closed down the zoo, got everybody out (after securing the video from Mr & Mrs Bowen), and we went through the whole compound, twice once, quickly, by electric light, in the company of three extremely nervous policemen, and then a proper fingertip search the next morning. The lions were edgy throughout, irritable and jittery. They didn"t like it any more than we did, and they needed watching. I don"t think any of us had ever felt more vulnerable in the presence of the big cats than we did that evening, so soon after witnessing the beginning of a mauling incident.
But in a mauling incident you expect blood, and a carca.s.s, and there was none not even on the clothes. The compound was clean. There were some gnawed cow bones from the lions" last feed-time, and that was all. Nothing to suggest fresh predation. Nothing to suggest anybody had even been in there, except for the little pile of torn and tattered (but still unbloodied) clothing where the attack had taken place. We even went through their scat for the best part of a week, sifting the piles of acrid reeking carnivore stool for bone and tissue fragments. I suppose that was as good a way as any of demonstrating exactly where we were with the whole investigation. We just didn"t have a clue.
So, back to the video evidence; back to the CCTV, and Mr Bowen"s photo. Long hours scouring the tapes, till we pieced together a narrative of the incident. The trouble was, it turned out to be one of those modern narratives, the open-ended kind where you"re supposed to decide for yourself what the h.e.l.l happened in the end. Art-house cinema of the most infuriating kind, with no climax, no release.
There"s the boy, standing by the moat, climbing the wall. Here I come, just too late to stop him. There he is in the compound, stripped off and preaching his incomprehensible sermon to the lions. And then bang, out go the lights and all h.e.l.l breaks loose. What I"ve told you is all we know, including the stuff you don"t see on the video, my own impressions and sensations. And I defy you to make any more sense of it than we were able to at the time.
We were closed the next day and the Sat.u.r.day as well, partly to do a proper search of the entire zoo, partly because we wanted to a.s.sess the behaviour of the lions. The search turned up nothing I may as well tell you that straight away. As to the lions and their behaviour, that was a different matter, and a more troubling one. I"m not a qualified animal behaviourist, like Manoj; I am a zookeeper, though, which I think qualifies me as a high-ranking amateur. I know how big cats act: I know the rules of engagement, how to approach them, what signs to look out for. I know when to stand my ground, and when to run. It"s hard-earned knowledge, and you come to rely on it. There are circ.u.mstances in which it"s necessary to your survival, and you wouldn"t want to get it wrong. And that Friday morning, when I was walking the lion compound with the other keepers, I felt something was wrong, even though we were doing everything right.
It would be stupid and incorrect to say that we never get nervous. A little nervousness around the carnivores is no bad thing, it stops you getting sloppy and keeps you alert. But that"s fear of a known thing, a possibility comprehended. This was different. This was the feeling of not knowing what to be scared of. I felt talking over things later we all felt that there were signs out there, but we were missing them. Crucial signals, impacting directly on our safety and well-being, that we weren"t picking up on because we couldn"t recognise them. And even if we managed to spot them after all, would we understand them? I don"t know. I felt as if the rules had been changed, and n.o.body had told us.
After a while it became actively unsettling, and I was very glad to get out. I remember the sky above the compound was black with starlings, one of those preposterously big flocks with thousands of birds wheeling and plummeting in perfect formation. Their hoa.r.s.e raucous squawks filled the air as we left the enclosure. The lions padded back out of the holding area and congregated in the middle of the gra.s.sed area, watching us go. The male roared, once. Up on the hill, the baboons started up a racket of their own as if in answer. From all across the site, each animal seemed to join in the chorus. None of us keepers could think of anything to say.
And so the incident fizzled out. We"d managed to keep it out of the press, so there was no grief from that quarter. A local paper ran a brief story on an inside page the next day, but none of the nationals ever picked it up, nor the TV, which was just as well. I suppose some soap star broke up with her footballer boyfriend, or perhaps it was just the millennial ballyhoo waiting round the corner. The police kept an open case file on the incident, but seemed happy enough to drop it as soon as they could. There wasn"t a lot in it for them, really. No missing person in the outside world to match up with our missing person inside the bars, if you see what I mean. I think they were treating it as petty trespa.s.s at best: no-one hurt and no victim, no real harm done, and no repercussions for anyone. And so the zoo settled back into its hibernatory winter peace and tranquillity...only not quite.
The first incident came just after New Year. This time, it"s safe to say absolutely no-one was watching. I wasn"t on duty that day, but I got the phone call around nine a.m. could I come in straight away? It was urgent.
Up in the surveillance post that morning had been Graham. At the start of his shift, he"d been checking through the CCTV, going from compound to compound and along the avenues between. Everything was quiet. It was a dull rainy morning, and all the beasts were sheltering. Then, as the next camera clicked in, he got a shock. There was a lion loose outside the compound.
Unlike the previous incident, there"s no permanent record of this. The system was in the middle of a refit, and no tape exists of what Graham saw that morning. However, he describes it consistently and straightforwardly, and his word is good enough for me. He saw a lion a big male, but not our big male out of the enclosure, padding up the path that led past the baboon enclosure.
As Graham caught sight of it, the lion looked up in the direction of the camera. As if it had seen him too, he said; as if the surveillance apparatus worked both ways. For a moment they looked at each other "well, that was what it felt like," says Graham, somewhat embarra.s.sedly. He"s not a particularly imaginative man, so I don"t believe that was a later embellishment of the truth. If he said it at all, it would have been because that was the impression he got. So they stared at one another, man and beast. After a long second or two the lion moved swiftly, out of shot and into the cover of some nearby bushes.
A dangerous animal out of its compound is automatically a grade-A emergency. Thankfully, the main gates wouldn"t be open for another hour-and-a-half, but all timetables had gone out of the window now, of course. Immediately, Graham was on the walkie-talkies and the tannoy, ascertaining the whereabouts of every staff member. Once everyone was accounted for, he called the police. Next, he rang around all the other off-shift keepers, me included.
I arrived not long after the police. I showed them my accreditation (which mostly consisted of my uniform), and managed to attach myself to the first team to enter the park. I think they were glad to have me there. Though they looked every inch the television SWAT team with their flak jackets and SLRs, I could tell they were as nervous as h.e.l.l. Overhead the helicopter was clattering in a circle around the perimeter. At least it drove the starlings away.
We were getting ready to enter through the main gates when the mobile phone of the co-ordinating officer rang. He answered it, listened briefly, and looked up. "Panic over," he said, unmistakable relief all over his rain-wet face. "It"s back in its cage."
What had happened was, Graham had been checking the lion enclosure all the while, trying to ascertain which animal had got out. It might well have made a difference, since each beast has its own personality. Some can be easily cowed, and some are more p.r.o.ne to confrontation than others. The rain made things difficult. The pride were sheltering in and around the den, and it wasn"t until Graham actually got in the Land Rover and went to check, that he was able to report back. Two males, three females, all present and correct.
We still searched the entire zoo, of course, although the search took place in an altogether more laid-back spirit than would otherwise have been the case. Unfortunately, the laid-backness didn"t last, and before long we got the distinct impression that the police were a bit fed up with us. Bringing them all the way out to the suburbs on these false alarms couldn"t we run our own zoo properly, or what? They didn"t exactly accuse us of wasting their time, but they came very close.
Graham took some flak, from zoo management as well as police, for sounding the alarm. I thought this was not just unfair but deeply, dangerously ignorant. What was he supposed to do? There was an animal outside its enclosure and running loose: a big predator, the biggest we had. All the protocols were in place for such an incident, and he"d had no choice but to follow them to the letter. Ah, but obviously you didn"t check, they told him. Wouldn"t it have been better if you"d checked? To which he could only point out, I did check, to the best of my ability and besides, I saw what I saw. A lion, loose outside the compound. And then they would look at him, you know, in that oh, really? way, and Graham would have to bite his lip and try not to lose his temper.
Once the police had got back in their vans and cleared off, the rest of us keepers checked out the lion enclosure. There was no sign of an obvious breach of security. We looked in the bottom of the moat for scat, which you"d expect to find if one of the animals had been down there even temporarily. Twelve feet of more-or-less sheer concrete would be a formidable obstacle, after all. Nothing down there. No breaches of the fence around the back of the compound, either, so we were left with a variant on the same question that had troubled us the last time. How did it get out? And, come to that, how did it get back in again?
It had me beat. I believed Graham: how could I not? I trusted him absolutely. And for the next week I found myself lingering round the lion compound, just watching them, trying to work it out. That"s how I saw their behaviour patterns had definitely changed. It hadn"t just been a nervous reaction, that first morning after we lost the boy. You could see a real difference, if you knew what to look for. It wasn"t the behaviour of beasts in a cage nor, come to that, of uncaged beasts. It was something none of us had seen.
I asked Manoj, with his academic background in behavioural study, and he agreed. "It"s not standard pack behaviour," he said, "it doesn"t fit the captivity model, or any other model I"ve ever heard of. Over and above that " he began, and stopped.
"It"s b.l.o.o.d.y creepy," I finished, and he frowned at me. I don"t think that was supposed to be part of the behavioural lexicon.
We didn"t know it yet, but our troubles with the lions were only beginning. In the weeks and months that followed Graham"s sighting, lions were spotted outside their compound on no less that five occasions three times on CCTV, twice by keepers on foot. Concerning the former, we have tape of one such sighting. You can just about make out the unmistakable shape of the predator, moving through bushes around the edge of the zebra enclosure. This was the strangest of all, the one that completely defied all explanation. To be where it was when it was caught on camera, the lion would"ve had to escape its own compound, negotiate the moat and the twelve-foot wall and all that, pa.s.s on a normal working day, with upwards of a hundred people on site along the main thoroughfare of the zoo, and scale a ten-foot fence with spikes at the top. And it would have had to have done it all again, in reverse, to get back in the lions" den with the rest of its mates by the time Manoj and I arrived on the scene with our tranquilliser rifles. Because, as usual, we counted five lions in the compound by the time we got there.
On the tape, the zebras don"t even seem to see the lion. There"s no alarm, they don"t go charging away to the far side of the compound. But as soon as they saw Manoj and me, they couldn"t move fast enough. One glance, and they were gone, off in a snorting, cantering rumble of hooves, leaving only a pile or two of steaming c.r.a.p on the trampled gra.s.s. This was something we were getting used to by now. Even the friendliest beasts, the apes and the elephants, were starting to shy away from us, if not become actively hostile. This was odd downright worrying, even but it wasn"t our biggest problem that spring.
The biggest problem was that we"d effectively lost any measure of control with regard to security in the most dangerous area of the whole zoo. Once you discounted (as you obviously had to) the notion that there was a stray lion, not a member of our pride, loose and roaming around the zoo, then you were left with the unpalatable fact that if one of ours did get out, then we"d have no way of distinguishing it from the phantom animal we were seeing on the CCTV. All our security compromised, in the worst possible way.
What were we supposed to do? Keep calling the police out on wild goose chases? We"d be like the boy who cried "wolf" once too often. Sooner or later, they wouldn"t bother turning out; and who was to say that wouldn"t be just the occasion they were needed? As a compromise measure, the management hired new guards not experienced keepers, just untrained muscle from Group 4, really nothing more than glorified bouncers. They were supposed to patrol the avenues and walkways, with orders to call in anything out of the ordinary straight away. They were no use whatsoever; we might as well have saved our money. In fact, they were the proximate cause of our key fatality.
This was in April, an unseasonably hot spell towards the end of the month. I always used to like going about the grounds in springtime, the smells and sounds of nature reawakening from its winter hiatus, the blossom on the trees, the contentment of every animal at the return of sun and warmth. For the s.p.a.ce of a week or so, I felt better walking my beat than I had since the turn of the year. It helped take my mind off things: not only the business with the lions, but now a problem with the new guards.
One or two of them had been seen behaving inappropriately round the animals. They"d been caught on CCTV hanging over the moats and throwing sweets, sometimes sticks and stones, cans of c.o.ke, even. Some were actually taunting the animals through the bars of their cages. Stupid, loutish behaviour, the sort of thing we"d eject a member of the public for. By April, there was a significant undercurrent of hostility between the full-time staff and the temporaries. We were hardly even talking to each other, let alone co-operating fully and closely, as per the plan. That might have helped avoid the tragedy...but then again, didn"t they bring it on themselves? Don"t we all, in the last a.n.a.lysis?
It was late in the afternoon again, but the day had been warm and the sky was still filled with light. The last of the visitors had just left, and we"d locked down the outer compound. Peter and I were doing one last walk-through, checking there were no stragglers left behind, getting ready to put everything to bed. Usually this was my favourite time of day, in my favourite season. Under normal circ.u.mstances, I would have been relishing this stroll around the grounds. As it was, I was unaccountably nervous. Peter says he felt it too, and as I mentioned before, he"s not an overly imaginative man.
There was something in the air I think the animals sensed it too, because all over the site they were skittish, restless, unusually noisy. The gemsboks, when we pa.s.sed by the antelope enclosure, were actually b.u.t.ting the fences. I got on the walkie-talkie to Manoj, up in the surveillance post, to get his opinion.
"I"ll have a look," he said. "Stay on while I just get this...ah, you b.l.o.o.d.y thing. I hate these gadgets." I knew what he"d be doing: clicking through the various camera angles from the CCTV around the zoo till he got one that showed the antelopes. It sounded as if he was having a few technical problems. "Why don"t they make these things oh, s.h.i.t." Over the course of two words his entire tone changed. "Sam. Peter. You copy?"
"Yeah."
"Incident in progress, north side of the baboon enclosure. Two of the new guards, attack under way. Get over there right now. Stay on the line."
Again, it"s captured on tape, but again there"s a complication. Because it was spring, the blossom was out on the cherry trees that line the main avenue through the zoo. The blossom restricted the view of the baboon enclosure as seen from one of the CCTV cameras the one, as luck would have it, through which Manoj was watching the developing incident. What he"d seen was this: Two of the hired guards, standing by the wire mesh of the fence, making fun of the baboons. The leader of the troop, a powerful adult chacma, was practically in their faces, the other side of the chain-link. He was a grumpy, muscular specimen, a natural boss and something of a bully to boot. He wasn"t above stamping his authority on the group, usually by means of his teeth. Manoj told me once something he"d read about the species in an old and extremely politically incorrect text, something along the lines of: "A full-grown chacma is more than a match for two good dogs." This one, Manoj thought, would probably be more than a match for two stupid security men.
As he"d watched, one of the guards had actually jumped on to the fence and started rattling it, shaking it on its stanchions in imitation of a monkey, or so it looks on the tape. The other one had moved slightly to one side, obscured by the blossom of one of the nearby cherry trees. Like the other one, he was far too close to the fence.
Watching the tape, all you get is that there"s some kind of commotion. The blossom stops you from seeing exactly what"s happening, but you can see the reaction of the other guard. He drops down from the fence, and runs over to help his mate. You can also see the rest of the baboons stop hooting and grimacing, and watch. Just watch.
"That"s the weird bit," Manoj said to me afterwards, the first time we looked through the VT together. "See the troop leader there?"
"He isn"t doing anything," I said.
"Exactly." Manoj looked at me. "He"s ceded authority to another animal."
I was confused. "Another member of the troop?"
"Not a chance," Manoj said decisively. "This boy? Never."
But it"s true: you can see him standing back with the others, just watching, like us. After what seems like ages, but according to the timestamp on the tape is just over ten seconds, the guard falls back from the fence and into camera shot again.
Even on the tape you can see he"s very badly messed up. The paramedics tried to save one of his eyes, I believe, but it was too late probably from the start. Most of the rest of his face he left inside the compound. Inside the cage, the baboons leap and cavort in a frenzy of excitement.
The other guard, who"s dragged his wounded mate away from the fence and back on to the tarmac path, now lays him on the ground. Quite forgivably, he turns away for a moment to be sick before fumbling for his walkie-talkie. Then, something he sees away behind the cherry trees makes him stop what he"s doing. He freezes for a second, and then he"s off and running, disappearing out of shot.
G.o.d knows what he was running from, but he was heading towards us. We were on the far side of the zoo, sprinting flat out towards the baboon enclosure. Under normal circ.u.mstances we"d have met up near by the main block, and who knows? Things might have gone very differently for him for all of us. As it was, he never got that far.
We could hear noise from all over the zoo by now: attack cries, hoa.r.s.e belligerent roars and squawks and hoots that ranged across the whole spectrum of aggression. On bits and sc.r.a.ps of tape that follow the guard"s progress along the main avenue, you can piece together what"s happening. Each enclosure that he pa.s.ses is filled with shrieking animals, pressed close to bars and fences. More than once the proximity of these malevolent creatures cause him to shy away, take evasive action. The chimps clinging to their chain-link fence scream and hurl excrement at him, and he trips and stumbles, but he"s up on his feet and running again within a second.
He looks as if he"s scared out of his wits. It would have been something to see what it was, back by the baboon enclosure, that put the fear of G.o.d up him that way. When he draws level with the elephants, lined up by the edge of their enclosure and trumpeting ferociously, it"s their sheer bulk, I think, that sends him veering off in a different direction, off the main avenue and on to on of the side paths. This is the way to the nocturama, a tunnel sunk below ground level, home of the night creatures.
Manoj saw him sprinting down the brick-lined cutting that leads to the entrance to the tunnel. There"s no CCTV inside there: it"s too dark in the normal course of events. There"s red-light illumination that lets you see the exhibits, but that"s all. Only in an emergency are the normal bulbs switched on, from a switch-box by the entrance. And only later, long after it was of any practical use to us, did we remember that fact.
We were still running. From where we were, on the slightly higher ground, we could see the guard disappear into the cutting. What on earth was he doing down there? Thumbing the walkie-talkie switch I panted, "Manoj?"
"Here."
"Why"s he gone down the tunnel?"
"I don"t know. Wait " Manoj sounded rattled.
"What?"
"Did you see that? What"s he doing with his clothes off?"
"What? Where?"
"...Never mind," directed Manoj. "The man that needs your help is over by the baboon compound. Leave that other now. Let him run around the place stark naked if he likes."
"But "
But nothing. Already it was too late. From down in the nocturama we could hear the screams. The other guard had run into trouble.
Without thinking I changed course, ran down the slope towards the other entrance to the tunnel. Behind me Peter was arguing with Manoj on the walkie-talkie, but I only had ears for the screaming.
Please G.o.d, I was thinking as I ran, for f.u.c.k"s sake, no more bother. Just keep a lid on it until we can get these idiots out of here. I don"t know who I was praying to, if that was a prayer. It"s not a thing I do. It must have been the screaming that got to me.
It came echoing out of the open-ended tunnel, so piercing and intense that as I drew level with the entrance I actually came to a stop, trying to remember what exactly we kept down there. Insects, bats, moths...nothing dangerous that I could bring to mind. Perhaps the bloke just had a thing about the dark, I told myself. Maybe he just got the fear. But I knew it was worse than that; every shred of instinct told me so. Fifteen years" experience in zoos, maybe. I suspect it was more like two million years" worth of evolutionary impulse.
The screaming stopped abruptly as I reached the head of the steps down into the tunnel. I thought I heard the sound of something running I was going to say, footsteps, but it"s as well to be exact. Something running, down in the dark.
I took one step down, and then another, then found myself unable to go any further. Coming up from that tunnel mouth was a stink like nothing I"d come across in all the years I"d spent around animals. I can hardly describe it, except to say that it reached deep into the ancestral parts of the brain, the centres of instinct and fear. It was stale and cloacal and rotten; it was the smell of must and decay, spoiled meat and sour animal p.i.s.s. Rising through it like a basenote was the overpowering stink of blood.
Gagging at the stench, I took another few steps down into the tunnel. Peter caught up with me then, and it was easier with him there. We advanced down to the bottom of the steps, and into the nocturama. That stupid little prayer was running through my head still, like a mantra.
It was musty and mildewed and dripping down there. Green slime coated the plastic windows of the exhibits, and there was nowhere near enough light. We walked on into the dark, past moths measuring out the dimensions of their prisons, past fireflies flashing unintelligible signals. On the other side of the tunnel, the chiroptera: avid famished bats that swooped through the lightless recesses and cl.u.s.tered on the dead boughs of artificial trees. Predators and prey in the natural scheme of things. Now, they merely pressed closer to the gla.s.s and watched as we advanced.
On we went around the corner, where the stink was mounting. I"d slowed now to something less than walking pace. Had we been going any faster, we"d have fallen over it. It was hard to see in the semidark, but we could make out the shape clearly enough. A man, lying on his back. The red light-bulbs in the animal recesses made the blood seem almost transparent at first. Then Peter focused his flashlight, and we saw what was left of him; which was not a lot. Down in that sewer-smelling tunnel, trapped in such a narrow s.p.a.ce with a thing like that...I wonder can you imagine how awful it was? Along the walls, the watching worm-lizards pressed greedily against the windows, tongues darting in and out of their cruel slits of mouths. And everywhere now, through all the length of the tunnel, the fierce reek of blood.
That was really the last straw, so far as the zoo was concerned. One guard dead in the tunnel, horribly mauled by some as yet unidentified predator. Another with the front half of his face chewed off: by a baboon, it was officially decided, though some responsible authorities, Manoj amongst them, begged to differ. These latter pointed out certain aspects of bite radius and attack pattern, and at the back of Manoj"s mind though it never really came up at the inquest was the behaviour pattern of the other baboons in the enclosure, the temporary submissiveness of the troop leader.
Either way, we were doomed. The local council had been treating us like pariahs for G.o.d knows how long, even before the incident. We had animal-rights protestors crawling all over us at the best of times. Now, one man was dead and another maimed for life, and driven half crazy into the bargain. Wouldn"t you be? It wasn"t our fault, was all we could say in our defence: not that that cut any ice with the police. There was a full investigation, conducted of course in the hot moralistic glow of the media spotlight. That was hardly the best sort of publicity, as I"m sure you can imagine.
We were closed all through the Easter holidays, one of our busiest times, and then to cap it all the Health & Safety Directorate weighed in with their report. They delivered a d.a.m.ning a.s.sessment of our operation: among other things, they said the safety of the zoo was thoroughly and irretrievably compromised, that our security measures were demonstrably inadequate, and that we seemed to have no effective control over the movements of the animals, up to and including the most dangerous of the predators. In short, they had no option but to withdraw our public safety certificate, effective immediately.
That was it. In very short order, the council swung the axe, the board of directors resigned, and we were finished. Arrangements were made to flog off the a.s.sets and rehouse the animals in zoos around the country. Then the bulldozers would move in, the land would be sold for redevelopment, and a line would be drawn under the whole unfortunate affair. Which brings me more or less up to where we are right now.
These last few weeks and months before the closure have been the strangest of all. We run a skeleton staff no need for security any more, not without visitors, no need to walk the compound more than once or twice a day. That"s our excuse, anyway. The plain and simple fact is, we"re scared now. The Health & Safety people were right, to that extent: we have lost our grip. Ever since the accident we"ve effectively lost track of how many animals there are in any given enclosure, at any given time. The most basic rule of zoo security has been breached, utterly and irrevocably it seems. Once darkness falls, animals are loose and roaming across the compound, and they run in strange new packs. It"s no longer unusual to see big cats in with ungulates, or birds flocking across species. You"d expect a bloodbath every night, but it never happens.
By the same token, there have been no more attacks on humans since the killing of the guard, but still you can imagine how we feel. It"s far from unusual for a keeper on the ground to see something on the path, ahead of him or behind him, towards the hours of dusk, or when mist and rain affect the visibility. At night, we basically cede control of the zoo; we have no choice. It"s shameful we can hardly look at each other sometimes but it"s also an oddly liberating thing to admit it. Peter feels the same way, Graham, even Manoj. After all we"ve seen, we can"t be around these animals for long without getting the creeps.
You feel it at feeding times and during routine medical procedures. Even walking past the enclosures you sense it. A subtle, yet decisive change in the balance of our interaction; a shift in power. Though we"re at least nominally free, able to leave at the end of our shifts and drive home to our empty houses in the suburbs, it"s hard not to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned. The bars are there to protect us. Have we really come to depend on them so much? It"s as if the beasts are the free ones, not us, not any more. As if some inconceivable insight has emanc.i.p.ated them, raised their consciousness to a level no one thought they"d ever reach. Those are Manoj"s words, not mine. When he said it to me, just the other day, I asked him what he meant, and he threw up his hands in the air. "I don"t know. I sound like a b.l.o.o.d.y swami, don"t I?"
"You do, a bit," I said. We were up in the G.o.d-seat, watching the closed-circuit.
"Well, look at them," he said, indicating the lions on the monitor. "I"m keeping all the tapes, you know. I"m thinking of going back to university, doing my post-grad. I can use them for my thesis."