Quantum Zoo Read online

  QUANTUM

  ZOO

  To all of the dreamers out there:

  You can do it.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  “A King in Exile” by Bridget McKenna

  “Echoes of Earth” by D.J. Gelner

  “Bestiarum” by Sarah Stegall

  “Ignoble Deeds” by A.C. Smyth

  “At Home in the Stars” by S.E. Batt

  “The Most Dangerous Lies” by Ken Furie

  “Playing Man” by Scott Dyson

  “You’ll Be So Happy, My Dear” by John Hindmarsh

  “Skipdrive” by Morgan Johnson

  “Demon Rising” by R.S. McCoy

  “Your Day at the Zoo” by Frances Stewart

  “Serpent’s Foe” by J.M. Ney-Grimm

  A King in Exile

  by Bridget McKenna

  Lady Penelope Smythe-Everton is dead. In point of fact she succumbed more than seven years ago to a chronic illness that had distressed and weakened her for some time, but until today when my train pulled away from Ashford station in Kent, I had never truly felt it in my heart. Now I can feel nothing else.

  I am, I believe, the one person who can truly be said to have known Penelope—and I intend no offence by this familiarity—but despite the disparity of our social stations she was my dearest friend and I believe I was hers. So it is that I take it upon myself to set down the record of the extraordinary events of her life as they relate to the magnificent creature who went to his own grave today, still mourning his mistress to his final, laboured breath. I know how fantastic these words may seem, and I may never show them to another living being, but I know I must write them.

  Penelope Smythe-Everton was the only daughter of Sir Anthony Smythe-Everton and his wife, Lady Eugenia. Two sons had died in infancy, but a third survived to plague them. Penelope came late in their lives, as these matters are reckoned, and as soon as she began to walk, talk, and wreak havoc about the household it was evident that this was the child they had been waiting for.

  When Penelope was six years old, and her brother Richard nineteen, Sir Anthony tired of reading about the wonders of the world from deep in the interior of a leather chair at his club. He announced his intention to take his family on a voyage round the world. Lady Eugenia, uncertain about the wisdom of this plan, but willing to risk it for her beloved husband’s sake, packed their trunks and made the arrangements.

  They were not to return for four years, or three of them were not, at least. Richard put his foot down after six months of sailing on tramp steamers, and trekking through unfamiliar terrain, and wandering farther and farther from the London society that was his by right of birth. He sailed home to live with his maternal grandmother. His parents were, by this time, delighted to see him go.

  It is probably not necessary to point out that Penelope was not reared in quite the same manner as most young Englishwomen of her generation; indeed, at her father’s insistence, she was raised to be a self-sufficient human being, exposed to the ideas and customs of a dozen exotic cultures, and thus rendered quite unfit for society. Lady Eugenie used often to bewail this fact, to which Sir Anthony was wont to reply, “Then perhaps she will emigrate to America, where a lack of social graces seems to be a sort of social grace.”

  Though Penelope’s education was exhaustive and wide-ranging, it managed somehow to skip right over such niceties as fancy needlework or the rendering of floral arrangements in water-colour. She could, however, stitch up a laceration like a surgeon and depict wild animals with her pens and pencils in startling detail, often from far closer range than she ever let on to her mother. She learnt to ride like a man and to shoot, though she never took to killing her fellow-creatures, preferring to befriend living things of one toothy kind or another in whatever remote part of the globe her family’s travels took them. Sir Anthony’s wanderlust tended to return most years with the coming of spring, and they would be off for one of the shrinking number of places they had not yet been.

  I didn’t know Penelope as a child, though I often used to wish I had; I made the family’s acquaintance some years later through the firm of Breffny, Blythe, & Warrington, where I had recently become the most junior of solicitors. I was sent to the Smythe-Everton household in Belgrave Square on an errand for a more senior man, and was received at the door by Sir Anthony himself, a breach of etiquette that would have had a proper Englishman fainting dead away on the doorstep, but then I was not an Englishman, proper or otherwise.

  “You must be young Mr Maguire!” boomed Sir Anthony in a hearty and quite uncivilised voice. “Come in, lad, and have a whiskey with me!” We became fast friends that day, and within the week he had transferred all his legal affairs into my keeping.

  I stayed to dinner at Sir Anthony and Lady Eugenia’s insistence, and my first sight of seventeen-year-old Penelope was a streak of dirt-smeared white as she ran in from the garden and upstairs to make herself presentable. When she came down again she wore a pale green dress that matched her eyes, and her light brown hair was pulled up in a loose knot from which little curls escaped to brush against her neck. I couldn’t breathe for a good five seconds, but I like to think I recovered before anyone noticed my predicament. “Our daughter, Penelope,” her father informed me, “though we call her Penny. Mr John Maguire.”

  Penny smiled and held out a small, sunburnt hand. My heart thumped painfully, and I muttered something I hoped acceptable about being pleased to meet her before reluctantly releasing it.

  My occupation, and therefore my social status, was not mentioned, but my accent was a clear enough indication of my origins, and I could feel the gulf between us, though I must admit the Smythe-Evertons didn’t pay it any mind. Dinner was a casual affair, served by a housekeeper and a single maid with whom the family kept up a lively conversation as the meal was served and eaten. I’d never seen anything remotely like it, or not since I’d left Ireland, anyway.

  By the end of the evening I was totally and hopelessly in love with Penelope, a condition from which I have never recovered. My social position, or lack thereof, required that I never mention it. Over time we went from being “Mr Maguire” and “Miss Smythe-Everton” to the familiar intimacy of first names.

  The following year Sir Anthony was taken with a longing to see some dark and seldom visited region of South America south of the great wide Amazon down which they had journeyed on a previous voyage before I had met them. Leaving in the early spring meant being conveniently absent for the height of the London social season and the endless succession of sporting events, parties, balls, and concerts that consumed upper-class English life until August.

  The whole point of the season, after all, was to find husbands for daughters, and no young man of social consequence would have dared consider Penelope as a wife, no matter how much he might appreciate her unstudied loveliness or be secretly bewitched by her wild spirit. The family’s fortunes were respectable without being extraordinary, and lacking a great deal of fortune indeed a wife like Sir Anthony and Lady Eugenia’s odd and outspoken daughter would do a young man of blood and connections no good at all, and quite possibly a great deal of harm.

  For Penelope’s part, she found the young men boring and the older ones to be looking for well-moneyed wives to pay their debts. The legal and social restraints that marriage placed on women, at least in England, were not suited to her, or she to them. Her grandmother had insisted she be presented at the Court of St James the previous year, but no-one could force staunchly proper London society to invite Sir Anthony’s shockingly improper daughter to meet their
sons, or at least not more than once. If Penelope were ever to marry, it would have to be to a different kind of man than she would meet in London. “Next year’s trip,” Sir Anthony told me in confidence, “will be to America.” But first they would journey once more to the far corners of the world.

  I was on the docks that day in March to watch their ship depart and receive last-minute instructions as to the overseeing of Sir Anthony’s affairs while the family were abroad. Penelope waved at me from the railing as the ship moved away. I waved back, sorry as always to see her receding from my sight. “I’ll write!” she called to me. “See you in the autumn, John!”

  In fact, she would be back before summer, a virulent jungle fever having taken both her parents’ lives, and another life—the strangest I have ever known—having been placed in her care.

  * * *

  I had planned to visit the house in Belgrave Square a few days after Penelope returned to extend my condolences at the passing of her parents, but before I could do so she sent a messenger to my office, asking me to call on her.

  She met me in the parlour. She was dressed in black, but she would have seemed pale in any colour, still weakened as she would be all her life from the illness which had struck down Sir Anthony and Lady Eugenia, and still subdued by sorrow.

  There was so much I wanted to say, but the only words I could manage were little more than the formalised expressions of comfort she might have heard from anyone. I touched her arm cautiously, then withdrew my hand, helpless to do or say anything meaningful and ruefully aware of my inadequacy. Penelope rescued me from my discomfiture. “Come with me to the drawing-room,” she said. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  “What do you think of him?” she asked, having led me by the hand to a place near the drawing-room fire where a small, naked, green reptile lay squirming in a tangled nest of blankets on the hearth.

  I withdrew my hand from hers before I could betray the consternation her intimacy produced. “He?”

  “At a guess.” She knelt down by the little creature and pulled me down beside her. “Isn’t he the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

  An unfair question, I thought, looking at her out of the corner of my eye, not at the least because this scaly infant would certainly be regarded by any civilised person as a reptilian nightmare. “Very nearly,” I admitted. “But what is he?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m still looking through father’s natural histories, but I haven’t come across anything remotely like him.”

  Penelope had been given an egg, she told me, big as a bread-bin, by a tribe of natives deep in the interior of the South American continent. These same people had nursed her through the fever that had cost her parents’ lives, and after their deaths had performed funeral rites for them with all appropriate local custom. Then, as Penelope was leaving with the other members of their party to rendezvous with their ship at the nearest river-port, they gave her a gift to show their sorrow at her leaving and their hopes for her return. The eggs were exceedingly rare, they informed her, hazardous to acquire, and remarkably good eating.

  When she felt movement inside the leathery covering, she wrapped the egg in layers of cloth and kept it close to the heat of her body for the remainder of the voyage home. It had hatched only this morning, and she had sent a messenger to summon me to the house.

  The creature was no larger than a skinny hen, and resembled one markedly save for the absence of feathers and the rich green of his skin, over which was a sprinkling of paler spots not unlike the markings of a fawn. His skull was over-large, with huge golden eyes. His hind legs were stout, with birdlike feet, but in place of wings were two ridiculously small forelimbs, too tiny even to convey food from his two-fingered claws to his enormous pink-lined mouth, which it now opened and shut in an obvious appeal for nourishment. He had never taken his gaze from her face.

  “What do you suppose he eats?” she asked me.

  I regarded the razor-sharp teeth that gnashed against one another as he opened and closed his mouth with a sound like dozens of little needles rubbing together. “Meat,” I ventured. Penelope herself was a vegetarian, but it was certain her young charge was not.

  “I shall send for some,” she replied, and a short time later I was helping her drop bits of finely minced raw beef into the little fellow’s gaping mouth. He gulped them ravenously, vocalising his pleasure with soft grunts and squeals while gazing at her in what I imagined was adoration.

  In days to come the beastly infant would follow his mistress about the house like a toddling child. He adopted a curious running gait with his head held back atop his curving neck and his heavy tail straight out behind for balance, over-sized chicken feet striking the ground toes first, far more graceful than any description of mine could convey. His natural predilection for hunting was evident in the way he would crouch down on his haunches, swivel his head, and fix his eyes on any moving object, and he had signalled his graduation from chopped meat by smashing through a lath-and-wire cage in the kitchen and claiming one of the chickens that had been intended for Sunday’s supper.

  Surely no employer save Penelope would have been able to avert the en masse resignation of household staff that very nearly followed that scene of horror, and from then on Agnes, the housekeeper, ordered a steadily increasing number of chickens.

  “He needs a name,” Penelope said to me one afternoon over tea. Since the hatching I had been visiting almost daily, at her assistance, and the duties outlined for me in Sir Anthony’s will of looking after his daughter’s legal and financial interests had expanded to include the giving of guidance and advice in reptilian affairs. I could scarcely complain if it brought me more often into Penelope’s company, and I was forced to admit that I was growing fond of the little terror who was seldom out of the shadow of her skirts.

  “Well he’s very regal, isn’t he?” I mused, watching the subject of our conversation following the flight of a housefly with rapt concentration. “Victoria would never do, though she’s a predator, right enough. How about Albert?”

  “You haven’t an ounce of respect for the crown, John,” Penelope chided, shaking her head, but her lips turned up in a smile, and her eyes twinkled. “You’re so incorrigibly Irish.”

  “I might have to act like an Englishman to earn my living, but that doesn’t make me one,” I replied, returning her smile.

  “Well, you needn’t put on an act for me,” she assured me, “it’s one of my favourite things about you. No, not Victoria, nor Albert either. Keep trying, though.”

  “We might try another language, then. Let’s see … The Greek for ‘king’ is tyrannos.”

  “Too ponderous.”

  “The Latin,” I suggested, “is rex.”

  “That’s it!” Penelope laughed with delight. “I had a dog named Rex when I was little. Even he wasn’t as faithful a creature as my little beast. Rex it is.”

  Rex’s jaws closed upon the hapless fly with a loud snap.

  * * *

  Richard—now Sir Richard Smythe-Everton—was never a frequent visitor to the house in Belgrave Square, preferring to keep a safe distance from his sister’s unorthodox habits, but fortune occasionally frowned upon her in the form of a dutiful visit laden with disapproving remarks and seemingly endless and pointed conversation about social propriety and some people’s lack thereof. Penelope was certain that it was an inborn talent for malice that caused these visits to occur at the most inopportune moments, but it may have been attributable only to bad luck that his final visit chanced to occur on the afternoon I accompanied her—driven in Penelope’s carriage by Jim, Agnes’ husband—to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham.

  On the grounds surrounding the palace, itself a large and impressive edifice of sparkling glass, an artificial lake held three artificial islands featuring life-sized replicas of prehistoric plants and animals rendered by the celebrated sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. We walked around the park, while Penelope gazed intently at the rh
inoceros-like Iguanadon with legs like mighty tree trunks, the Dicynodon, a sort of tortoise built large, with protruding tusks, and other examples of long-extinct reptilian life, soberly arrayed in sombre colours of dun and greyish-green.

  “They’re so stodgy,” Penelope remarked. “Tedious, in fact.”

  “Like plump English gentlemen after consuming too much Christmas goose,” I agreed. “One wonders how they managed to move faster than a sedate walk.”

  “I’ll admit I entertained the idea that Rex might be related to these dinosaurians,” she sighed, “but reptiles are cold-blooded, sluggish by the nature of their metabolisms. He isn’t anything like them, is he?”

  “No,” I agreed with a smile, remembering the little monster chasing Bernadette the parlour maid and her dinner up two flights of stairs from the kitchen. His playing—near constant during his brief waking hours—was enthusiastic, energetic, and usually pursued at break-neck speed. “Your Rex is a beast unto himself.”

  “Our Rex,” Penelope corrected me, slipping an arm through mine. “You’ve been almost as much a parent to him as I have.”

  I turned my head to study a model of a Plesiosaurus, half-submerged in the lake. By the time I turned back again I had regained most of my composure. “Perhaps we should be getting back,” I said. “You told Agnes to expect us for tea.”

  As the carriage turned from Grosvenor Crescent onto Belgrave Square we were greeted by the sight of Sir Richard running towards us, hat in hand, trousers in tatters. Rex was a few steps behind in full-out bipedal gallop, jaws open, and behind him were Agnes and Bernadette in mad pursuit.