Chapter Fifteen
Sometimes when Frida, Antony and Hamish had been tasked with dreary jobs like cataloguing the manticore’s stool samples, they’d played a game called Zoo Apocalypse, trying to one-up each other with fantastic scenarios.
There’s a mass electricity failure causing the fences to lose their power.
The wards all die and the animals escape à la Jurassic Park.
Cliff gets impaled on Issy’s horn and Gloria finishes him off with a machete.
Fireheart grants you three wishes, a flying turtle bites your arm off, Hamish blows up Ground Control.
That kind of thing. By the time she’d pulled up in front of the unassuming grey door of Dragon’s Deep, she’d come up with at least fifty new gruesome possibilities: basilisks in the shadows, hangferns in the branches, homicidal box trees hiding in the yew hedges.
If they ever played the game again, she consoled herself with the thought that she’d have a lot to contribute.
From the leshies to the grootnecks to Issy, she’d slalomed through corpses, listening in disbelief as the snores echoed from the rafters, not just humans, but animals too.
Dozy’s sleep spell had overtaken the world, insidious and inexorable.
And yet. Impossible as it was, there were still wards.
Humming on every door, fence and enclosure that she passed.
There was still electricity.
There were still roads and oxygen and streetlamps.
But for how long?
Feeling as if she was traversing a rope bridge that might give way at any second, she walked purposefully towards where she knew Lucky would be waiting for her.
Lucky, a baby dragon of infinite power. Lucky, who’d started this.
Lucky, who would fix this. Quickly, she hurried down the rabbit warren of soundproofed corridors.
When she stepped onto Lucky’s sulphur-blasted avenue though, and moved up to the glass, the headache that had fallen to a background hum blazed, making her grab her temples with a scream.
She’d never thought the sight of a sleeping dragon would be so devastating.
Lucky lay there, behind his humming wards, purple and gigantic and snoring.
She stood there for a moment, frozen to the spot. Then she turned and fled, her head on fire, thinking nothing but the fact that she had to get out of there.
She stood there for a moment, frozen to the spot. Then she turned and fled, her head pounding, thinking nothing but the fact that she had to get out of there.
Blindly, she drove, pinching herself again and again, praying that she’d just wake up.
But there was no salvation, and when a jam of bodies in Forest blocked her way, she had to detour again through Lake where the Welsh afanc, half crocodile, half beaver, glided lazily on his back through his muddy river.
At least the climate controls were still working, she told herself giddily as she tested the chilled cerulean waters of the Lagarfljót Worm with one hand.
Three years pregnant and counting, if the Worm died from exposure . . .
She couldn’t finish that sentence.
At the Extraordinary Plaza, the carnage took her breath away.
Knocked-over popcorn booths, spilled purple Elf Juice, trampled pumpkin pie stalls.
The plaza had been turned into a giant sleepover, a Glastonbury Festival of deafening snores.
Encircled by a giant thorn hedge where the gates had once been.
Blackthorns, those most tenacious of trees, had broken through the cobbles, along with an army of roses, exquisite enough to have given Antony flower-orgasms.
Of all the foliage the fairy could have chosen, Frida thought as she let her eyes drift over the cascades of sunshine yellow petals.
Yellow had been her mum’s favourite colour, of course.
As if this whole nightmare wasn’t bad enough, it was like Dozy had seen inside her brain and crafted it especially for her.
Management never liked to use the word ‘cage’.
Enclosure was better, habitat or exhibit.
But this was a cage. Muffling all scraps of data, WIFI, phone service.
She may as well have been at the bottom of the ocean.
Slowly, she drew closer, stepping over the bodies of guests and keepers alike.
When she finally reached the place where the gates should have been, she started tearing at the vines, not caring that the thorns ripped her skin to shreds.
‘We’re in here!’ she cried. Her hands were bloody.
Petals carpeted the ground. ‘We’re not dead,’ she sobbed.
‘We’re here! I’m here! Get us out!’ Did the familiar streets of Melody still exist?
The grassy sprawl of Liberty Park? Her flat?
Were there people out there, wondering why the UK’s only Extraordinary Zoo had just turned into a green and thorny baked Alaska bigger than Heathrow Airport?
! She screamed until her voice was raw, but it felt like she was at the bottom of an ocean.
Or on the moon, hoping someone on Earth might hear.
There was just the roaring in her head, the thunder of the still growing wood as if it would keep going forever, and the echo of her own words bouncing back at her.
‘What do you want from me?’ she shouted.
Neither Dozy, nor the roses, answered.
She didn’t know if anything like this had ever happened before.
Maybe not since that basilisk had escaped Forge House and accosted Queen Victoria at dinner time.
Before that, she supposed it might have been the kraken massacre of 1786, when a band of the tentacular monsters had swum down the Thames and attacked London.
That single event had been so devastating it had caused a national crackdown on anything extraordinary.
So many extinctions had happened in the following decades, it was called the Great Disappearing.
Many creatures had been killed and many, some conspiracy theorists believed, had purposefully disappeared, seeing the writing on Earth’s wall.
Where they had gone though, nobody knew.
The LEZ had been founded to help the victims left behind.
Joshua Beaufort, his sisters and the other LEZites had created countless conservation charities, and it was under their patronage that Sir Henry Gladstone, the famous Enlightenment scientist, had started to research the technology that would eventually become the wards.
The wards that allowed humans to co-exist alongside extraordinary creatures, rather than massacre them.
Everything Dozy had done threatened this.
Maybe the fairy didn’t realise it, but by attacking the LEZ, they’d endangered the tenuous safety of all extraordinary creatures!
Frida could picture Jeff and Maisy on the other side of those thorns in their deckchairs, eating scones and saying triumphantly, ‘Well, it’s about time something like this happened, isn’t it? Good on that fairy, I say.’
She wanted to rip their scones out of their hands and set their deckchairs on fire.
With no idea what to do next, she slipped through a side door into Ground Control, shoving a sleeping corpse out of the way, and grabbed her Kiss the Keeper travel mug from her locker.
She wrapped her hands around the familiar feel of the handle, before filling it with cold coffee from the Watering Hole.
It tasted like shit, but at least it tasted normal.
Back outside, perched on Grace’s bonnet, she sipped the most depressing drink on the planet and ate three dry-as-dust energy bars she’d found in Antony’s glove compartment.
The LEZ was all she’d ever wanted since she’d been a tiny thing, no bigger than a grunkle.
It was her home. It had been her mum’s home, and now Dozy was killing it with yellow roses, of all things.
A furious sob escaped her, followed by a sharp kick to Grace’s wheel.
Then she kicked again, harder. As pain shot up her ankle, she hopped around, swearing and clutching her boot, just as a noise exploded from one of the little box trees planted along the road.
Frida cried out, lurching backwards in alarm. Homicidal box trees!
‘Don’t hurt me!’ she squealed.
When the tree made no reply, she felt embarrassed.
Well, that tops it, she thought, now I’m speaking to box trees.
She gave herself a stern talking to. She was a zookeeper, current holder of over thirty tattoos and proud owner of three trophies that said she could beat a stone giant in a staring match.
She was also the daughter of Ada Rose – waitress, single mother, friend-to-all-creatures (including box trees), and firm believer that anything was possible.
When the box tree rustled again, with a bit more determination this time, she studied the dense leaves seriously. She heard a pop, an animated crackle, a sharp sizzle – then out from the tree exploded a swarm of two-headed storm monkeys.
She almost dropped her coffee mug.
‘Rida, Rida!’
‘Jellybean?’ she cried.
Suddenly, the little layby was full of electricity. Monkeys swung around her, a squall of heads and tails and tiny paws, fizzling and crackling, shouting over and over,
‘Rida, Rida!’
‘Rida, Rida, Reeeee!’
‘Rida Reeeee!’
Was that her name they were saying?
She laughed and then snorted in unequivocable relief as the largest storm monkey (the approximate size of a fluffy cricket ball), plopped with a satisfied sigh onto her shoulder and stuck both his tongues in her ear.
His twin heads were haloed in miniature clouds, two marble-sized lightning storms crackling into being between his bat-like ears.
‘Ree! Snap! Big fires,’ he peeped as he nuzzled her neck warmly. ‘Awake! Yes, awake!’
She gathered him into her arms, blinking back tears of rapture and confusion as his electricity skittered through her.
Jellybean ‘Chaos’ Capone was a ghost-white furball with two perfect mohawks, matching moustaches and moon-yellow eyes.
His pupils were pinpricks as his two heads swivelled, the friction between them creating the tiny storms between his ears.
The other monkeys – Jellybean’s troop, aptly named the Jellies – flipped and catapulted, a dizzying blur as they swung from the hedge to Grace’s bonnet and back again, bursting with words and sounds and lightning.
Baked Potato, Cream Pie, Hamlet, Jan, Jonesy, Keanu, K-Pop, Marta, Mojito, Ned, Oops, Peanut, Shirley Temple, Twiglet and Wednesday.
A whirlwind of white, grey, black, copper and scarlet.
She craned her neck back to Jellybean in wonder, and gasped, ‘How? How are we awake when no one else is?’
‘Ree!’ he trilled, storms popping in delight.
The sound of her name mended something that, a few seconds ago, had been in danger of breaking.
But then he went on, his voice sizzling with unalloyed glee.
‘No sleeps! Lots of sleeps. Tree. World. Break. EXPLODE!’ One head crackled.
‘No sleeps. Big crash. Flee, flee! Big change! No sleeps!’ The other head fizzed.
His voice was storm-tossed poetry.
Lucky had spoken in full dragonish sentences.
Raz in colour. The Noz’s single hello had been a soft and shy staccato, brushing her frontal lobe.
Dozy, different again, had voiced things that blew through her mind like crackling leaves.
Each unique voice seemed to be a doorway to a world she’d never known existed.
But Jellybean? He flung his words electrically from one head to the other, as if every thought had to happen at once, the elated friction between his brains sparking lightning. Too fast, too raw, too everything. She could barely follow what he was saying, what any of the monkeys were saying.
‘Jelly,’ she asked, laughing. ‘Slow down! Do you know what’s going on?’
‘Fizz and pop,’ one head trilled as he shoved his long, fluffy tail into both his mouths. ‘Big sleeps. Big trees. Big dragon fire. Ree go into the dirt, down and down,’ chirped the other head through a mouthful of fur. ‘Pink crackles, pink crackles!’
And then Cream Pie – her fur entirely white except for her fuzzy brown ears – shrieked as she unearthed a discarded popcorn bag.
It was pandemonium after that. The monkeys descended in a whirlwind of teeth and thunder.
A stray spark set the bag on fire, and Frida found herself hopping around in quick frantic leaps to stamp out the flames whilst avoiding being bitten by food-rabid storm monkeys.
A wild bubble of joy welled up in her chest. It felt so good to deal with a problem she could actually solve.
To have a tiny chaotic order of the LEZ back.
She tried a few more times to ask Jellybean what was going on, but he didn’t give her any more information than he had already – it was all just wild crackles and jubilant thunder.
For a moment, she wondered if she should try and herd them back to their habitat but by then Jellybean had flopped onto Grace’s front dash as if he wasn’t going anywhere, and Shirley Temple had done a massive Number Two on Grace’s passenger seat.
Truly, how could she argue with that?
Slowly, she cleaned up the sloppy mess, apologising to Grace, and to Hamish as she tore a page from one of their mushroom books for the task.
Then she slid back behind Grace’s wheel and turned on the ignition.
Although being surrounded by the lights of the monkeys made her feel infinitely better, the wood’s deafening growth seemed to have quietened, and the stillness made her more afraid, as if the new growth was settling in for the long haul.
Around her, she could hear the groan of a fence straining under the weight of a fallen branch, the grumble of a wall being upturned by a new root system.
Maybe Dozy wanted to bury them all. But as she looked at Jellybean, his tiny paws picking pieces of popcorn out of his fluffy moustaches, there was a miniscule, shielded place inside her heart that remembered, too, the warmth in Dozy’s dark eyes when they’d looked at her, like forest pools that reflected the stars, and the gentle touch of their hand on her cheek.
I trust you.
The words were a ghost in the dark. For a second, it had seemed as if they’d wanted her help. Or had she imagined it?
She swallowed the lump in her throat and started easing Grace back onto the road.
‘C’mon Jellybean. I have an idea!’