The Weird Part 156

They find a punchbowl roped in cobwebs and fill it with water and stare in to see the silk awake. They turn off all the flashlights and haunt each other in the dark with sobs and screeches. They roast marshmallows with a butane lighter. The boy recites the alphabet backwards. The friend dances.

By nightfall the sky has cleared and the mother takes the boy out onto the slanting roof of the house and they lie on their backs on the s.h.i.+ngles and she shows him the constellations. The dippers, the hunter, the seven sisters, the two bears. The mother tells the boy how the stars are immense b.a.l.l.s of flame millions of miles away, and how many of them may already have been dead for hundreds of thousands of years.

Hidden behind the stack of the chimney, the friend laughs in derision and reaches out its hand and rubs the pattern off the sky. Then it draws new figures: the claw, the widow, the thief, the coc.o.o.n. The planet shudders and rocks and the boy loses his grip and skids down the plane of the roof until the mother catches his hand and pulls him to safety. She bundles him into her arms and totes him down the attic stair, soothing and scolding and breathless, while he cranes his neck to peer behind him at the lights scattering across the dark like startled starlings.

The boy and his friend play in the garden, under the sun. They play in the garden, which is on the edge of the wood, and the trees shade it, many games. They play pick-up sticks, checkers, hide-and-go-seek, and things, and the sun enacts changes in their skin and hair and eyes. They play in the garden, and smile. They smile and smile and smile and smile and smile.

The boy's mother puts an extra cookie on the plate for the friend, but the boy says the friend doesn't eat. She brings an extra pillow for the bed, but the boy says the friend doesn't sleep. What does it do all night then, she asks the boy, doesn't it get bored? Plays in my dreams, the boy tells her.

The boy and his friend make shadow puppets in the afternoon. The boy curtains the windows and holds his hands in front of the lamp and does a bird, a rabbit, a hunchback, a spider. The friend opens the curtains and crouches on the window-sill, a black silhouette against the sun. The sun pulses and s.h.i.+vers in the sky and the outline of the friend flickers and wavers at the edges. Its body makes an ocean wave, a spouting volcano, a hurricane, a shape-changing cloud: giraffe, dragon, whale. The boy crows and claps his hands. The friend grows huge in the window and blots out the light, making the night sky. It spreads its limbs so no sliver of sunlight peeks through and it makes the bottomless well.

The boy's mother sits on the edge of the tub and the steam clings to her; she is composed of droplets. At bath time the friend disappears, the boy says; it hates water. The mother runs the hot when the boy complains that the bath is cooling. She shampoos the boy's golden hair with the tips of her fingers. She rubs the puffs and cracks of deep pruning on his hands. When he announces that the bath is over, she starts a splas.h.i.+ng war to make him forget.

The boy has a duck for the bath, and to play with the duck, an inflatable bear, and to amuse the bear, little pills that pop open into sponges, and to collect the sponges, a net with b.u.t.terfly shapes sewn into the webbing, and to transport the net, a battles.h.i.+p that sprays water through its nose, and to fight the battles.h.i.+p, a tin rocket that rusts in the water, and the mother cuts her hand on the crumbling metal and the blood makes a blossom in the bath. The boy leaps up and shouts out that his friend is calling and he runs s.h.i.+vering and half drowned out of the bathroom.

The mother stays behind and bandages her hand into an enormous white paw. When she tucks the boy in that night, she brandishes the paw and growls and tickles his stomach. But he says the friend can smell the rusty blood and he insists that she leave, and she does and wonders if the boy is weary of her or protecting her from his imaginary friend, and she sits for an hour in the window seat in her bedroom, watching trees and clouds move across the reflection of her face in the pane.

The boy and his friend camp out in the treehouse. They make believe there's a siege and they're starving to death. They make believe there's a war and they're hidden in a priest's hole. They make believe it's a nuclear winter and they're trapped in a fallout shelter. They make believe they're princes locked in a dungeon by the king's wicked councillor. They make believe they're hermits fasting in a mountain cave. They make believe they're stowaways in the hold of a galleon. They make believe they're magicians tied up in a chest. They make believe they're scientists in a sunken bathy-sphere. They make believe they've been swallowed by a giant and explore the vast cavern of his stomach. They make believe they're in a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p warping through black holes. They make believe they're shrunken to the size of tiny bugs, stuck in a raindrop falling to earth. Sometimes they climb through the trapdoor out into the treetop and sit astride the st.u.r.dy limbs and pretend they're galloping on white stallions in a thundering herd of wild black horses.

Sometimes they close their eyes and pretend to be blind and they feel each other's faces and the boy is careful not to hurt the friend. Sometimes the friend grooms the boy, picking the bark and sap from his hair and licking the pollen dust from his face. Sometimes the boy curls up in the lap of the friend and the friend asks him questions. What animal would you like to be? What food would you eat if you could only eat one? How would you choose to die? What is your greatest fear? What superpower would be the best? If you could save the world by sacrificing one life, would you do it? What was your first word? What is your earliest memory?

The mother calls the boy into her bedroom and shows him the photographs she has spilled out over the white froth of tumbled linens. The scent of the soap washed into the sheets has always reminded the boy of snow, but tonight it stings his cringing nose, astringent.

She shows the boy pictures in dull umbers and maroons, long-ago film, of the boy's parents before he was born. This is his mother, distracted in an itchy sweater, in a cabin on her honeymoon, lamplight the color of cooking oil s.h.i.+ning and blurring on her face. Her hair is shorter and it looks rough and blunt and p.r.i.c.kly. Her smile is unfamiliar. Here is his father, forehead buried in a dark navy watchman's cap, chin and nose smothered in a charcoal turtleneck, marking off a pale strip of skin out of which black eyes gape, the inverse of the bandit's eye mask.

Now pictures of the boy as a baby, with a fat lolling neck and a glazed expression, bulbous and gaping in a matted blue towel, or seemingly deserted in a flat field on a gray day. The photos get glossier and brighter as they go on. Last year on the ferry, noses and eyelids smashed flat by the wind. This past winter, roasting potatoes in foil in the fireplace here, the lighting off, their hands red and their faces smeared across the exposure. The boy and the mother on the boy's birthday at the zoo. A leather-chested gorilla with blood in its eyes stands behind them as they pose, the spit spray of its roar fouling the gla.s.s wall of the enclosure. The boy squirms on the bed, bored and truculent.

In the night the boy and the friend sneak back into the mother's bedroom and steal the box of photographs. They draw the friend into the pictures: sometimes a black zigzag of shadow at the corner of the frame behind the mother, sometimes a silvery trail the friend makes with the point of a needle, a shape hovering between the boy and the lens. With crayons, the boy draws the friend's scales and the stripes of its fur onto the face of his father, and the friend shades its own eyes within the eyes of the gorilla.

When the mother finds the pictures in the morning she cries and screams at the boy, and he takes off, kicking the ground, the corners of his mouth wrenching down despite himself, and runs to the wood, and begs the friend to take him inside, behind the tree line, and the friend does, and comforts him.

The boy and the mother make up and on Sunday they bake cookies for breakfast. They have a collection of cookie cutters and they bake pigs and crescent moons and hearts and maple leaves, royal crowns and saxophones and lighthouses and b.u.mblebees. They sprinkle jimmies on the tops, or push in currants with their thumbs. s.h.i.+very with sugar, they bustle into town and the mother, rapid and excitable, buys suspenders and striped shoelaces for the boy's first day of school, and a set of stencils, and stickers that smell of chocolate, bubble gum, peanut b.u.t.ter, and green apple. On the way home she asks casually how the friend will keep busy when the boy is at school all day. It will come with me, says the boy, startled, and the mother, kind and vague, shakes her head with her eyes set on the distance.

When they reach the house, the boy tears through the rooms, but the friend is nowhere to be found. At last the boy discovers it in the bas.e.m.e.nt, huddled beneath the stairs, tearing apart a daddy longlegs. I won't go! promises the boy, and any other supplication he can think of. By and by, he's able to coax the friend upstairs, where it scuttles into the boy's bedroom and under his bed. It stays there through the evening and all night, and in the morning the mother sees the boy's face is puffed and flushed as if he's been stung, and his eyes have a queer translucence.

The mother invites the boy and the friend to dance. She pushes the armchairs and ottomans to the outskirts of the living room and sweeps the floor, making an odd pile of broken dried leaves, frayed and twisted threads of gold and purple, small slivers of gla.s.s, dust clumps woven in spheres like tumbleweeds, and wasps, curled in on themselves like fetuses, their antennae shattered.

The mother wears an ivory slip and black opera gloves and, on a long chain, a cameo that chills her through the thin silk of her slip. The boy comes down in his small black suit, which still fits him perfectly. He hasn't grown. The mother rummages in the spare room for a man's dove-gray fedora, which engulfs the boy's ears and slips backward, the brim chafing his neck. Baby's breath is wedged in the band.

The boy informs the mother solemnly that the friend has sent its regrets. The mother, stymied, asks if he and she might go together to press the invitation, but the boy fuddles the needle onto the record and extends his hand without answering. The boy and the mother waltz awkwardly. Where did you learn to dance? says the mother, I thought I would have to teach you. My friend taught me, says the boy, are you jealous? The mother stares at him. No, she says, that's not it. The needle staggers into a gouge in the record. Oh, dear, the mother says, what a shame. My friend loves this song, says the boy. He puts his arms up trustingly, as if to be carried, high above his head, and his fingers curl around where the shoulders of the friend might be. They sweep about the room, the friend a confident lead, the boy swooning gracefully in its embrace.

The mother forms an encouraging smile. I'll get some refreshments, she says, champagne with ginger ale, and lemon ices. Switch off the lights when you go, says the boy, still revolving. The mother hesitates, flicks the switch, and mounts the stairs. Sometime in the night the music skids to a halt.

She knows it's beautiful. She knows what kind of skin it has blue-veined, with a thick translucence like sh.e.l.lfish, bruising easily in a kind of panic. She knows because it's obvious.

She knows, because her son has told her, in a voice with a reverential, primal hush, like the silence of dim morning air at ease on still water, that his friend has a wonderful facility of climbing in the trees and running in the tallest, most whipping, stinging gra.s.s. She knows that a heartbeat will slow to the rhythm of its voice. She knows its eyes are colors from another spectrum. She knows the fine golden down that covers its limbs; she just knows.

She knows the ravishable tenderness of its throat. She knows the coils of its ears can provoke a dangerous hypnosis if regarded too long. She knows the razor sharpness of its elbows and the woozy perfume of its breath.

She knows that the rays of the sun are addicted to its body and that it drinks in the moonlight with upturned mouth. She's never seen it, but she knows. She doesn't know the secrets it shares, the memories it hides, the fears it cherishes, or why it is vying for her son.

Past the tree line, just within the wood, is the skeleton of a burned-down barn, and brambles of blackberries and bushes of lady's slippers have gentled the ruins. Past the barn, a deer trail leads through a claustrophobia of clawing saplings and las.h.i.+ng briars, until the wood opens, and the floor is a miniature forest of tiny trees of climacium moss. Long gray vines sway from the canopy; the branches over which they're looped are lost in leaves and in the clouds of spores and insects that laze overhead. The boy grabs a vine and swings. He whoops once, then swoops silently between the trunks on the endless arc of his pendulum. The friend tugs the vine to a halt and brushes the boy's face in apology. Hurry, it says.

They trudge out of the forest of moss and down a short bank graceful with ferns and irises and ending in a stream that cuts through the wood. Waterfleas flash in the current and the boy sees the velvety puffs of silt where crawfish have shot back under rocks with fear of him. Before the water, the friend pants in terror, so the boy tucks it in his pocket and hops carefully across the rocks to the opposite bank. The leaves of the wood rustle and suns.h.i.+ne shakes down in a brief warm muddy rain. Beyond the stream is the dank overhang of the cliff, under which round stones mark out a ring in the mud. There are some curls of burned metal, mildewed spent sh.e.l.ls from a shotgun, and bones chewed by an animal. The friend breathes deeply here, and traces its hand against the soot smoked on the rock ceiling, and a silver skin oozes down to blind its eye. Up the back of the cliff they go, grabbing at tree trunks and clawing the dirt to ascend the incline. Then suddenly they've plunged to the top and the summer has fallen away.

The ground is covered with black and brown leaves, and the wind has shaken the treetops gray. There's a gravestone, white with chips of mica, and with a carving of an arum lily garbled and shallowed by weather, and violets growing all around. All already ready, says the friend. The boy sighs. Let's run away, he says. The friend is silent. I'm hungry, says the boy. You're never hungry now, says the friend, and that's true. The boy shrugs. The friend ruminates, and chews a sprig of poison ivy. Suddenly its hot hiss snakes out and its tongue is in the boy's ear. Poisoned you! cries the friend. The boy screams his laughter and he's running through the wood yelling, I'll find the antidote, and the friend strolls after him, smiling.

The boy and the mother sit Indian style on the boy's bed and play Cat's Cradle. The boy threads his fingers through the string to make the Cradle. The mother slips her hands into the maze. Pinching the taut cord, she whisks the boy's fingers free, and makes the Soldier's Bed. The boy s.n.a.t.c.hes at the intersections, and pulls them through themselves, and the Candles s.h.i.+ne in his hands. The mother reaches over awkwardly, and twists the string. Its bite tightens around the boy, and his skin swells and reddens. With a wrench of her wrist, she constructs the Manger between them. The boy's tiny fingers go darting among the knots. Before she knows it, he's imprisoned in Diamonds. We won! exults the mother. The boy smiles at her. His eyes are prisms for the day's light. She sees that there's something he holds in his mouth, gleaming dark and wet. A candy, a tongue, a morsel of mercury.

The mother reaches slowly for the bowl of water that stands by her son's painting set, on the night table, dips her hand in it, and with a panicked lunge, she flicks the liquid on the boy. It wrenches back on the bed with a jolt and a high-pitched moan. Her hand flies to her throat. She squeezes her eyes closed. Hey! protests the boy. What are you doing? Then he lurches for the bowl and begins to flick her back, in messy muddy splashes. The mother quavers and laughs in great gulps. The paint water soaks into the blankets, patterning her legs and hands with blurred designs, mottled markings, scaly smudges in brownish red and brownish blue and brownish green.

She lets the boy spill out the whole bowl, and although she changes the linens and blots the bed with towels to soak up the moisture, he still makes her flip the whole mattress before bedtime, so that the friend can nest there with no fear of the wet.

The boy discovers the friend hidden away in the fortress that sprawls across the living room, layer upon layer of sheets and wool blankets and towels and clothes slung between armchairs. The friend is p.r.o.ne, half sunk into the floor, disappearing into the wood like a s.h.i.+p slowly submerging below the skin of the sea. The boy throws his arms about the friend and covers it with chafing kisses. The friend coughs faintly but its eyes flash into brightness, burning the boy where the friend's gaze falls on him. What's wrong? the boy whispers fiercely. What's happened? You haven't gone, croaks the friend, you're here. I'm here, says the boy, of course I'm here.

The friend and the boy stand up and spin themselves in circles. Even when the dizziness has pa.s.sed the boy can't remember what's where in the room outside the fortress. The french doors, the fireplace, the grandfather clock have all lost their places. The friend draws three doors for the boy. Where do they lead? says the friend.

The boy thinks hard. The first door, he says, a garden full of delicious fruit that feels pain when you bite it. Your turn. The friend considers. It says, the second door: a world in the center of the earth where you're turned inside out. You walk backward, talk backward, and see backward. Third door? The boy imagines. Third door, he says, somebody else. You can live in their body, but they control all your movements and your thoughts. The friend laughs. Pick a door, it says. The boy spins and spins until he doesn't remember which door is which. He opens one and falls out into darkness.

In the yard, in her bathing suit and sungla.s.ses, the mother sits rigid in the blare of the sun. Little worms of perspiration nose their way out of her skin and trail across her upper lip. Beside her is a gla.s.s of ice water; she picks it up to watch the blades of gra.s.s, pale with the cold of the gla.s.s, rise shakily from their crus.h.i.+ng. Glossy crows settle over the lawn. She lies down but finds she can't endure the crawling of the gra.s.s across the back of her neck. A dragonfly comes cras.h.i.+ng toward her face and she gasps. A gnat executes stiff seizures in the cold of the ice water. Her fingernails ache from the dirt packed beneath them. She puffs at a dying dandelion to make a wish, and the seeds blow back and stick to her lips and tongue. She plucks at the petals of a daisy, then beheads the whole thing summarily with a jerk of her thumb. Mama had a baby and its head popped off! she sings.

The boy is staring at the lion and he doesn't dare to move. The boy is in the big blue armchair in the living room, with the lamp in the shape of a dancing lady spilling light from the table beside him, but the lion only a few feet away is in darkness, a darkness that grows thicker and thinner, so the boy keeps losing sight of the lion, though neither of them is moving.

Into the boy's dream comes the friend, and the boy feels relief like the sudden release of a waterfall that's been dammed up, and with his eyes he signals the presence of the lion to the friend. The friend stays very still, and the darkness blows like wind over its face, and the boy loses and finds the friend's features for hours. At last the boy comes to wonder, in a rush of urgency, why the friend doesn't slay the lion. Kill it! whispers the boy. Please, kill it! The friend makes a sign and the boy sees that he himself is holding a long dagger. Me? I can't, pleads the boy. Please, kill it. The friend gestures to the boy to make use of the dagger. The boy stares aghast at the lion. Its eyes are mournful like the eyes of the boy's dog that had died, but there's a low growl coming from it like the moans of the tomcats that fight in the yard at night. The boy doesn't move. The lion climbs painfully to its feet and pads over to the boy and lies down beside him. Wondering and trembling, the boy places his hand on the lion's head. The friend spins around, claps its hands, and screams, and the lion's jaws hurtle open and its roar is pounding the boy like blows, and his terror is gagging his throat.

He comes awake with the friend beside him in bed, laughing and fanning the boy's face. That was a close one! says the friend, twinkling. What were you thinking? You almost got us killed, it giggles, and cuddles. The boy falls back into sleep, with his eyes screwed tight shut against dreams, and his skin smelling sour with dried crust of sweat.

The mother goes in the gloaming to the grave in the wood. She sits. Moths smack against her flashlight and are snarled in her hair. After some time, she climbs back down the cliff and wades into the stream, flinching at the bite of the water on her skin. She drops a ring, a small plastic figurine, and a gray fedora into the water. She makes three wishes. With her toe she buries the ring and the toy in the mud, and she watches the floating fedora tear against some bracken on the bank and be devoured by shadows. On the way home she bats in a fury against the thorns that snag her clothes and beat her legs.

She sits on the porch. The screaming of the mosquitoes, an incessant and furious anguish, is overwhelming; it seems to the mother that all the darkness of the lawn might be a black cloud of suffering insects; but nothing bites her. There's a damp smell and she feels her skin crawling, flinching away from her bones. Behind her, the screen door slaps against the jamb in the windless, ponderous night, and the mother stays very still, only slightly stiffening her back.

Before dawn she goes into the boy's room and lifts his body from the bed. She bears him cautiously out of the house to the car, and tucks him into the back seat. His clothes are already folded on the pa.s.senger seat. In the minute between the starting of the car and rolling out of their driveway, the mother's alarm grows so fierce that her vision is blurred. Once they gain the public road, it's vanished, and she's calm and deadened. She drives to the school and she parks.

When the sun comes up and the doors groan open and the flag struggles up into the pale air above her, she's ready. By the time the buses come marching in disciplined formation up the drive, he's awake. He doesn't seem alarmed by his abduction; just sleepy and bewildered and quiescent. They get his overalls on and his velcro firmly strapped. He observes the patterns described by the hundreds of small milling bodies with grave interest. She holds onto his hand as far as the cla.s.sroom door. For some time she sits in the car and watches, but nothing comes or goes until she does.

Alone in the house, the friend trickles from room to room, carried by a draught that floats past the curtains, through the walls, and around the doors. The molecules of the air bruise the friend's body and it suffers this.

In her car, driving, the mother thinks of the friend with shaken pity, and in his cla.s.sroom the boy draws a picture with a blank face and long arms like tangled ropes and a sky full of dashes like rain falling like arrows or like shooting stars.

The friend drifts into a cobweb and clings there till its weight rends the strands and it resumes its meandering course. Where it drags along the floor, dust gathers on its skin, smothering the pores. The eyes of the friend empty and its mouth consumes itself. At last, with a sigh, it disperses.

At the end of the day, the mother watches to see that the boy files out with the others, and then in her car she shoots out ahead of the schoolbus to be ready to greet him when he jumps down the steps to disembark at the end of their drive. He's glowing like a new penny and he navigates the yard in a series of bounds. He has a collage for the fridge, of black horses pasted on a picture of a coral reef, and he has a caterpillar made of pipe cleaners. The mother and the boy nestle the caterpillar in the gra.s.s at the base of the sycamore to protect the treehouse.

There are mimeographed lists from the teacher, of Things to Buy and Things to Do, and the boy has won a ribbon for thinking of the most words beginning with A. At lunchtime the other children had raised an outcry over the boy's purple pickled egg, and the mother promises that tomorrow he will have a white-bread sandwich cut in triangles and an apple with a leaf still on the stem. For recess they learned to jump rope while singing songs and afterward the teacher read a story that the boy had never heard, about a child who flies on the back of the wind. The boy runs about the house, visiting the attic and the bas.e.m.e.nt and the bathroom, as if to see how different they've become. He told a girl in his cla.s.s about the pond and the girl didn't believe that he has one and the mother says that the girl can come and see for herself, with some other of the boy's cla.s.smates, if he would like.

During dinner the boy bounces up and down, upsetting the jar of cuc.u.mber salad. He runs out twice to make sure that he has everything in his backpack that he'll need at school the next day, and three times to check that the caterpillar is still in place, guarding the treehouse. He doesn't mention the friend, and his eyes are the color that the mother remembers.

By bedtime the boy is exhausted and the mother tucks him in and sings mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey and he accompanies her in a contented blur of humming that spins around the edge of the tune. When she turns out the light and clicks closed the door he's already quite asleep.

He wakes not because of the volume of the breathing in the room or because of its horrible wet crackling and sucking, but because of the heat the breath gives off, a heat like an anvil, which crushes him into the bed. The windows are fogged over and the moon leaks through the droplets on the gla.s.s in weak smears of sickly light, like the ghosts of murdered stars.

He knows his waking has been noticed, for whatever it is is now holding its breath. He can hear the interminable, deliberate creak of the floorboards where something is s.h.i.+fting its weight under the bed with infinite caution and cunning. Then a terrible quiet. The boy quakes and his spasmodic gasp is like a slap cracking across the silent face of the darkness. The longest pause. At last the bed begins to joggle teasingly and then to rock violently so he can barely keep from sliding off. Every time his hand or foot slips over the side of the mattress he sobs with terror and feels the humid wind where something has just missed its s.n.a.t.c.h at him. The earthquake in the bed is because the thing is shaking with laughter. Whatever is under the bed is laughing.

Then the laughter stops, and the smell comes up, dank and congealed, and he can feel the putrefying odor worming inside his pyjamas and bloating his skin with its stink, and the monster stretches itself. The room tilts as the monster ripples its spine, voluptuous; and the flayed leather of its body rustles and sucks as it moves, and it unfurls from under the bed, he sees its arm creep out, as if on a thousand little millipedal feet, right there before him, in the same air that's burning and las.h.i.+ng against his own starting eyeb.a.l.l.s, and the nails of the thing shred whatever faint moonlight has crept through the steam in the room, and the boy knows, he knows, its head is coming out next, and he hears the cut and the thrust and the singing of its teeth as they emerge, smiling and smiling and smiling.

The Lion's Den.

Steve Duffy.

Steve Duffy (1963) is a contemporary British writer who has lived in Norfolk and London, but is currently living and working on the North Wales coast. He is a recipient of the International Horror Guild Award for the story 'The Rag-and-Bone Men' and has published two short story collections, Tragic Life Stories and The Moment of Panic. Duffy's work has appeared in several of Datlow and Windling's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies. 'In the Lion's Den' (2009) is one of those most difficult of weird fictions to write: a tale in which references to modern technology add to, rather than detract from, the rising sense of unease.

It's so familiar now, that grainy digital footage of the lions' den. We've rerun it a hundred times, picked over it obsessively, advanced it frame by fuzzy frame. I'm sure all the experts, the psychologists, the security consultants that were brought in to a.n.a.lyse the clip (but who failed entirely in their glib attempts to explain it all away), feel in some way that they themselves experienced the whole thing. It's easy to forget that only a few people actually witnessed the incident first-hand, that Thursday afternoon in the late autumn of the last year of the old century. I was one of them. My colleagues and I saw it all firsthand. It gave us the edge on all the rest; we saw and heard and felt things no camera could catch, let alone one being operated by an overexcited amateur. But even we remain at a loss to explain exactly what happened...

Perhaps we're all trying too hard. Most people have written it off long since as fundamentally inexplicable just one of those things. The boy was mad, they said, to do what he did: simple as that. But since when has madness been synonymous with simplicity? Granted, the incident was simple enough, on the face of it. Maybe it was precisely that simplicity which for some of us made the whole thing impossible, even then, to dismiss.

The zoo sits amongst quiet leafy suburbs, out where the city begins to lose interest in itself. Built in the 1960s, its enclosures are adequate at a pinch to the animals' needs, in terms of size and layout. Iron railings and concrete moats surround modest expanses of gra.s.sy slope and pruned-back leafless trees. An artificial river runs through the grounds, with an observation barge that sails on the hour, every hour; there are nocturamas for the insects, aviaries for the birds. On a day like that November day, a dull grey weekday nipped with the coming of winter, there will be only a handful of visitors. And I remember there were no school parties of screaming preteens, no coachloads of the elderly: only a handful of people wandering the broad tarmac paths between the enclosures, consulting their guides, adjusting the lenses on their cameras as the animals blinked listlessly back at them through the bars.

In the observation tower above the main block is the surveillance post, with its panoramic view across the whole of the compound. Further out, beyond the perimeter walls, the rooftops of a thousand bungalows, chimney-tops and satellite dishes peeking through the screens of quick-growing leylandii; beyond these, raw winter ground-mist on the plain, and the grey smudge of the distant city tower blocks. The view always depresses me, during my s.h.i.+fts in the tower. Maybe anyone who spends long enough around cages, whether as captive or keeper, will sooner or later feel the need for liberty, for transcendence; will at the very least catch himself gazing beyond the bars, meditating on the interconnected concepts of inside-outside. Reminding us where our duties lie, the CCTV cameras flick monotonously through their cycles of the main perimeter, pen to pen, avenue to avenue. Up in the G.o.d-seat we follow the sequence, indiscriminately surveilling animal and human, spectacle and spectator.

As familiar as some of the animals are the regulars, those people who visit the zoo so frequently as to become instantly recognisable to the security staff. We have nicknames for them, and in some instances their photos pinned up on the cork-board, with cautionary Post-It notes attached. It's our job to watch them and decide whether their interest in this or that animal goes beyond innocent curiosity; the endless enthralment of seeing a creature in its cage.

Inevitably, you see, a zoo will attract certain types of people, over and above its core visitor group. These range from the mostly harmless the lonely and inadequate, the homeless, the community-care brigade through to the more problematic types, the obsessives, the neurotics, and in extreme instances the dangerously, even suicidally unhinged. With the former, our job consists mostly of moving them on at closing time, rousing them if they try to sleep in the dark musty tunnels of the nocturama or the vivarium, making sure they don't present a nuisance to the staff or to other zoo users. With the latter, it can be very different.

Most identify with a particular animal, usually to the exclusion of all others. Often, it'll be monkeys, of which we have several species, or the great apes. They stand gripping the bars, watching as the simians dangle from their tyre swings or munch their way phlegmatically through buckets of bruised fruit. Occasionally, one will try to make contact: a hand will be thrust through the bars, and we need to be sure nothing is being pa.s.sed that might be harmful, intentionally or otherwise. We took off one such woman a notepad and pencil; perhaps she expected the ape to communicate with her in some way or another, to provide some signifying rebus of his existence. On the pad she'd drawn herself, to a high degree of anatomical detail, in the pose of Leonardo's Universal Man. Above the self-portrait she'd scrawled the words look monkey. In the enclosure the ape sighed, settled back into his flaccid hairy old-man's pelt, scratched at his fleas with melancholy acceptance. Who knows? Perhaps he felt resentful that we'd confiscated the pad and pencil, denied him even this meagre opportunity for self-affirmation. They say an ape in the Paris zoo, given paintbrush and paper, once made a painting of the bars of his cage. But that's another matter entirely. We're keepers, first and foremost, not art critics. Before anything, it's our job to keep the animals out of harm's way.

Some people, you see, come armed with more than pencils. We've confiscated knives from people, air-rifles; apples with razor-blades stuck inside them, more than once. Out-and-out mutilators are pretty uncommon, thank G.o.d, but all zoo staff are perpetually on their guard against them. Why would anyone do a thing like that? It's well known that sadism presents early in life as a predilection for harming animals, but I've wondered sometimes: might there be a weird sort of jealousy mixed up with it too?

Consider for a moment the lot of your average zoo animal. They need no affirmation, know no doubt; existentially, they've got it cracked. Even without the identifying plaque in front of its enclosure, an ape is still an ape, unchallengeable in the fact of its apehood. No insecurity, no inadequacy to speak of outside the basic social dynamics of the group: the ranking ladder, who gets to mate with which females, who's in charge and who's not. And what have these sad sacks of humans got, the ones who mock and throw stones? Not even a plaque in front of their enclosure. Perhaps it's easier being a caged monkey then a caged man? But even so, it'd still be a pretty weak excuse. Just because an ape may have the existential edge on you is no reason to feed it a sandwich full of rat poison. We're always on the lookout for these suspect types, the vagrant ones, the loiterers, the sunken-eyed prowlers round cages and pens.

That day that day and a thousand others, before and since I was up in the G.o.d-seat, cycling through the CCTV feeds around the site. It was late in the afternoon; another two hours and we'd be closed. It hadn't been a particularly busy day, and there were fewer than thirty people spread out across the whole expanse of the zoo. A minibus-full of teenagers with Down's syndrome from a nearby sheltered-housing group; half-a-dozen students from the local college of art with folders and easels; two or three elderly couples; and a handful of uncla.s.sifiable adults. The kids were well-behaved enough for me not to worry about them getting up on top of walls or climbing fences, and the pensioners looked about ready to call it a day. I was concentrating on picking out the loners, the singletons.

And that's how I came to notice him on the CCTV: the boy, standing alongside the wall of the lion compound. He seemed young, not much older than a teenager, and at first I took him for one of the art students. But he had no sketchpad, no portfolio. As I looked, two or three of the students went past, and none of them acknowledged him, nor he them. I activated the manual override on the camera controls, and zoomed in on the boy.

He was facing slightly away from the camera, so I tried another angle from a different side of the compound. That didn't give me enough of a close-up. Back on the original camera, all I could make out was his clothing. He was wearing jeans and a camouflage jacket, and his sunbleached hair was hacked into a spiky straggling brush. Come on, sonny, I found myself muttering, show yourself. Obligingly he half-turned, and for the first time I got a look at his face.

Stubble, a sc.r.a.ppy sort of beard; but it's been a while now since stubble signified anything. He might have been sleeping rough, or he might have been a fas.h.i.+on model. It cut both ways. He was gaunt-looking, hollow-cheeked, but reasonably clean. His behaviour didn't strike me as particularly furtive, which went in his favour, but neither did he seem like one of those people who stand by the cage long enough to watch the animals do their tricks, then wander off in search of the cafeteria and the gift shop. I was sufficiently interested to keep the live camera on him, while at the same time spooling back through the last half-hour of lion-enclosure footage on the auxiliary monitor.

There he was. He'd hardly moved in all that time: as I glanced from the main monitor to the auxiliary, only the time-stamp on the latter showed up the difference. I was going to call it down on the walkie-talkie to one of the guards on the ground, but we were a man short that day anyway, so I decided to have a look myself. I handed over the control system to my colleague Graham Morris, told him where I was going and why, and picked up an on-charge walkie-talkie from the rack. I did briefly look at the firearms cabinet, where the guns and tranquilliser darts were kept, but decided against it. No sense in alarming anyone.

Clanking down the metal steps from the surveillance post I had three or four possibilities in mind concerning our mystery visitor, a.s.suming that he wasn't some innocent sightseer who just happened to have a thing for lions. One, believe it or not, was drugs. I know it sounds ridiculous, not to say sick in the extreme, but we've had that problem in the past. A few years back one of our chimpanzees was slipped a dose of LSD, we think inside an apple. She went into an extended psychotic fugue, kept slamming her head into the bars till the vets had to put her down. That was radical by any standards: not particularly common, granted, but I hated to think what a tripping lion might do before we managed to sedate it.

Another (and you shouldn't get the wrong idea about this) was s.e.x. Now I don't mean to suggest I thought the boy was going to try anything directly with a lion though it's happened with most of the smaller mammals in the past, and at sea zoos practically all the time with porpoises and dolphins, so I'm told. There are all sorts of ways to get your jollies, and we've dragged our fair share of flashers and masturbators away from the railings, before and since. What all that's about I don't pretend to know, except that s.e.x is at the bottom of so much, one way or another. When something goes wrong inside, then it's as likely to show up in a s.e.xual context first as it is any other way, I suppose. But a lion...surely a lion would be a daunting enough proposition to make most people think twice?

Of course there was the animal-rights angle, which from what I'd seen on the CCTV seemed a distinct possibility. The boy did have that look of the zealot about him, I thought, as I swiped my smartcard through the security lock on the way out of the staff compound; a definite whiff of high ideals and crazy dreams. But then the timing was all wrong for an attempted release. Animal-rights activists tend (for obvious reasons) to hit a zoo at night, but since we'd beefed up our perimeter security with trip alarms and night vision, the Animal Liberation Front might find it a more tempting option to hide in the light, so to speak. Or it might not be a jailbreak, but a demonstration of some kind though to whom he was planning to demonstrate, in an all but empty zoo, I couldn't quite imagine.

As I crossed the main piazza there was still another possibility in the back of my mind, grimmer than the others, probably the one which was worrying me the most. Every day someone out there comes to the end of his tether, decides he can't carry on any more, and starts looking for a really good method to end it all. How do you do it? Let me count the ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two or three other people had come over by now, drawn by the commotion. One of them owned a hand-held camcorder, and was filming continuously throughout what happened next. Looking at the film, this is what you see: Jerks and blurs, then a wobbly balance as the autofocus kicks in. The boy has reached the top of the inner wall: he stands on the concrete lip a while before letting himself down into the compound proper. Nothing is hurried about him, nothing hesitant; he glances from side to side, almost expectantly: where are they?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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