LONDON
I
Four creatures squatted by the edge of the river and waited to see what it would bring them today.
Although not bound by blood, this quartet – the hyena-man, the cheetah-woman, the pig-boy and the platypus-girl – were in essence a family. They had found that survival was much easier when they stayed and worked and hunted together, and this was no small discovery, survival being a hard thing indeed in this strange world.
I have called them hyena, cheetah, pig and platypus although this is not, in truth, altogether accurate for by this time, a century after the outbreak in the Grosvenor Hotel, the hybridity of the peoples of the world had become so tangled that almost every creature who walked upon two legs had within them a multiplicity of origins. Now the lineaments of one species could be discerned in a single face, now another, then yet another. Every creature on the planet was a mixture of the most complicated, glorious sort.
This particular quartet were waiting that afternoon by what had once been the Embankment, next to the river that had formerly been known as the Thames. This knowledge, together with so much else, had long since been lost, and all who dwelt here knew these things by other, weirder names.
Now that humanity had ceded its dominance, much of the city had been given over to nature. Waterloo was wilderness, Piccadilly all jungle. Hackney was marshland and Pimlico a stronghold of the tiger-people who had made of it by far the most dangerous zone in all the perilous, verdant wreckage of the old metropolis. Fantasists and seers of earlier times had often dreamed of an eventuality such as this. Suffice to say that such visionaries would be unlikely to survive a single day in what the place had become.
Our family of four watched the dark water flow by – water which was cleaner, of course, than at any other time in its history, at least after the Romans had come. There were always fish, and they could eat one of these if hunger drove them to it. The cheetah-woman would have done so immediately, being of an impatient temperament, though the hyena-man urged them all to wait in case something better came along, as he felt sure that it would. This was communicated amongst the group both through expressive gestures and by an odd, guttural manner of speech which I shall not endeavour to replicate here.
In the event, the cheetah-woman put up rather less of a fight over this issue than might typically have been expected. None of the others spoke up in defence of her idea, not even the platypus-girl who generally agreed with her upon everything. It was as though they all sensed it, that today was a day of significance, that they should not leave the river yet, that they should, in however inchoate a fashion, elect to bear witness.
And so they waited. In the sky, all manner of strange birds flew and cried. In the distance, beyond the water towards what once had been the southside of the city, far-off roars and cries could be heard. The family ignored them, well accustomed to the sounds of the ruined metropolis, knowing that they would be aware should anything which wished them harm come near.
The light was just beginning to fade when they saw it. It was the platypus-girl who noticed first. Excitedly, she pointed with her right paw upriver, towards the low dark shape that was approaching. A looming shadow moved steadily closer, a thing which, although it seemed at times to be trying to cling to the banks, was being buffeted nonetheless by the water.
Although, in this wild world, the strange was an everyday phenomenon, what advanced towards them was something unprecedented. It was a big, dark, tentacular thing, something like an octopus but with a variety of appendages and odd, additional limbs. Even the kindest naturalist of the old world, the most open-minded of zoologists, the most fiercely opposed to freak shows and circuses, could not have done other than to suggest the being was a monstrosity.
At the sight of its halting progress, the pig-boy cowered into the side of his sister, something atavistic causing him to shy as far away from the intruder as he could. The hyena-man thought that they should leave this thing – which was most likely dead, or if not dead then certainly mortally wounded – to float on and surrender it up to the river. Yet the cheetah-woman could not let her curiosity go unsated. Together she and the platypus-girl, with the grudging assistance of the hyena-man, waded to the water’s edge and when the creature floated within touching distance they grabbed at the thing and pulled it in, up onto the bank. Its skin was cold and slimy. The hyena-man remarked that it would most likely not be good to eat. The pig-boy watched nervously from a safe distance, an awful anxiety coiling and uncoiling itself deep within his chest.
The others were tired by the time that they had the thing laid out before them on the grass. There was only the sound of their panting as they looked down at the creature and saw, through the delicate, fitful motion of its bulbous body and the occasional twitch of its tentacles, that it was still, if barely, alive. The cheetah-woman beckoned over the pig-boy, reassuring him that it was quite safe.
It soon became plain that there was nothing which they could do for this strange creature. Although there was no sign of obvious physical damage it was evidently close to death. They had no way of knowing for certain but it was the platypus-girl’s suggestion that it was simply extreme old age that was killing it, a thing so rare in the city now as to be all but mythical. The black octopus twitched a little more, mere minutes of its long life remaining.
The pig-boy wondered aloud if it might provide some comfort for the thing to be surrounded by others at the last. His sister chided him for his sentimentality, a trait, she declared, which would be likely to shorten considerably his own life expectancy.
Then they heard, as had M’Gari and Coral Mayfield and Josephine Galligan before them, the voice of the creature inside their head, a sibilant, alien thing. It still spoke in English which had been the language of its long-dead creator and its words meant nothing at all to the family. They looked around them in bemusement at the sound, at the gibberish that echoed, uninvited, in their minds.
“My friends, I thank you for your kindness. You have done well. You are a fine set of inheritors.”
The faces of the family twitched and scowled in confusion.
“He would be proud of you. The creator of us all. He who laboured on the island to brought us all into being. This new world is his legacy and you must all…”
There was a good deal more of this in a similar vein but since the family took no further notice of it I am not sure that we should either. It was, after all, only babble now, for the creature from the water, the last living original experiment of Dr Moreau, was the only surviving speaker of any human language upon the planet.
A minute or so later and this too was gone. The creature died, quietly and ingloriously. The voice in the heads of the family had ceased a short while before.
They all four looked at one another in evident confusion, wholly uncertain as to what had just happened. Although she did not go so far as to admit that she had been wrong, the cheetah-woman nonetheless suggested that they place the dead thing back into the water and let the river carry it away, towards that sea from which, they dimly supposed, it had first swum.
This they did, in silence and without ceremony. They stood and watched as the final vestige of the old world floated away into the distance. And then, hungry now, the family turned from the river and went towards the hunting grounds beyond, in search of fresh meat.
Yet the family ought, perhaps, to have waited just a little longer. For this is not how our story should end, nor does it represent the final fate of the great continents of Earth.
Twenty-five minutes after the family had disappeared back into the undergrowth, off on their search for sustenance, something appeared upon the twilit horizon, something new moving along the river. Had the family waited they would have seen its slow but determined progress. It was a small, makeshift boat, a kind of coracle formed of cloth, wood and rope. It looked something like a mariner might have constructed out of desperate ingenuity had they been stranded too long upon a desert island. It looked, for that matter, a very great deal like the boat which once had been made by Mr Edward Prendick as he made his escape from the first stronghold of Moreau. It was a leaking, limping thing for sure but it had held together just long enough to bring its small crew to this place of hazards. By coincidence, the boat came to a stop at the precise spot where the octopus-creature had just been dragged by the family from the water. There were on board this improvised vessel two adult beings, one male and one female, and it was the first of these who leapt ashore from the prow and secured the barque with rough urgency to a tree stump on the bank.
He was a tall, rangy creature, rather simian in aspect (although, of course, his lineage was much more complicated than that). He was covered with fur but, unlike the peoples of new London, he was dressed in clothes, in trousers and shirt, neckerchief and a cap. Panting a little from his exertion, he called out to his companion who was still aboard the boat:
“This looks good enough. We can get food here! Even make camp for the night.” He, of course, did not speak any human tongue, though it was one vastly more complex than that spoken by the family, the equal at least of the old, dead languages of, say, English or Icelandic.
His partner called back to him. “Food, yes, but can we camp here? Truly? It can’t be safe!” She was furred also and dressed in similar clothes, although her ancestry was visibly closer to the bear than to the ape. There was something strapped to her chest, a small but bulky thing, which she handled with the greatest of care.
“But where’s safe now?” called back the beast creature on the shore. His tone was not despairing but rather possessed of a kind of wise rationality, suggestive, perhaps, of one who sees the world as it really is and not as he would like it to be. “Where exactly is safe for us?”
The beast woman conceded the point with a tilt of her head, a gesture that seemed appealingly wry. “Well, I can’t say I wouldn’t like to get my paws on solid ground for a bit. Help me up?”
Her companion came to the water’s edge, lifted her up out of the boat and, with great, if rather ungainly, delicacy placed her upon the earth. He had to be extremely careful in the course of this procedure not to touch or damage that very precious thing which was strapped to her chest.
She smiled at him with love in her eyes. “Thanks,” she said.
In the distance, they heard a rumbling, minatory roar.
“Maybe we shouldn’t tarry…” said the male. His right paw went instinctively to a small curved knife which hung in a sheath around his waist. But the roaring got further away, as whatever had made the sound moved now into the distance.
“I don’t know,” said the female. “Perhaps you were right and that nowhere’s really safe. We have to make our home somewhere, don’t we?”
“Somewhere, yes…”
“Since the City won’t have us.”
The male beast-creature grunted in annoyance at the mention of this. “Let’s see,” he said. “We could explore tomorrow. See what’s here. In whatever this place used to be.” He gestured rather vaguely about him at the ruins and at the uncultivated vegetation, as though he felt he really ought to know the name of where it was that they stood but that the details were proving to be maddeningly elusive.
“This may be as good a place as any.”
“You were fearful just a moment ago.”
The ape-creature smiled. “One of us is generally afraid.”
“True enough. And all is well so long as the other is brave.”
“We take turns, then?”
“We take turns.”
In the wilderness of London, by the banks of the Thames, the two Beast Folk smiled at one another.
“Let’s see then,” said the male. “Let’s see if we can’t find sanctuary here, at least for a while.”
“One day at a time,” said the female.
The thing which was strapped to her chest stirred now, woken by all the noise and excitement. A small, inquisitive cry was heard. The baby’s eyes had flicked open and she wriggled in sleepy curiosity in her papoose. The female cradled her close. The male came nearer and peered down with mingled pleasure and concern.
“Oh so you like it here, do you, little one?”
A gurgle and a smile from the baby, as if of appreciative confirmation.
“Seems to me like it’s settled,” said the bear-woman.
“Seems to me that you’re right,” said the ape-man.
And the little baby cooed, starting to get hungry now, peeping out wonderingly at the world around her. For a moment, as though to form a tableau in bold defiance of this unforgiving environment, the family embraced: a woman and a man whose ancestry came from the Beast Folk together with their only child, a girl who somehow, against all rules and expectations, had been born different.
She was an infant whose very existence had caused their exile from the City. She was a baby with smooth and hairless skin; a baby with deep brown eyes, eight plump fingers and two plump thumbs; a baby who was, in every respect, palpably and without question, human.