Mystery

They moved away down the path toward a high dark building at the farthest end of the zoo. A sign at the entrance announced that it was the REPTILE HOUSE. “I don’t feel like going to the Reptile House, do you?”

She shook her head. “Well, what did they say?”

“When I told my mother, she was too sort of stunned to say much, but she was pleased. She liked him too.”

“Pleased,” Sarah said. “She should have been pleased.”

“She had to sign a lot of papers, but she didn’t really know what they were. What concerned her most was that I wanted to move out, but it was just across the street. I go home for meals, and to talk to her. She’s getting better. And my father didn’t say anything, because he wasn’t around to hear about it. He just kind of disappeared. He took off. I don’t think we’ll ever see him again.”

Sarah’s face had expressed shock, concern, and dismay as he spoke, and when he was done, she said, “But you don’t act like you care if he comes back!”

“I do care—I hope he never does come back. We’re all a lot happier this way.”

“Your mother’s happier?”

“She misses him, but yes, I think she’s a lot happier. He didn’t actually like either one of us very much.”

“Everything’s so different now!” Sarah cried.

“Everything was different before, only nobody could see it.”

“But what about you and me?” Sarah asked.

“We know each other better.”

“That isn’t all,” she said. “Oh, we missed the sea lions. We’re back at the start again. I heard the sea lions, but we never saw them.”

“There was a path we didn’t take,” Tom said.

They had come out at the other side of the panther’s cage, and the pacing creature looked through the bars and met Tom’s eyes with a quick, questioning look that stopped him cold. The panther was crazy, but it was beautiful in a way that even the craziness of imprisonment could not diminish. The animal possessed a native, unconscious splendor—it was helpless before this splendor, it could only helplessly express it, like the tired lions in the next cage. “Do you want to go back?” he asked Sarah, but he was looking at the panther.

“It’s only a sad little zoo, isn’t it?” she said. “No. Tom, let’s get out of here and go somewhere else.”

The panther’s eyes flicked away from his, and the panther prowled once more around its cage and turned back and met his eyes again. The panther’s eyes were huge and inhumanly yellow, filled with their urgent question, which might have been Who are you? or What are you going to do?

“Tom!” Sarah said. “That panther’s looking at you!”

Who he was and what he was going to do were the same thing, Tom realized.

“Are you laughing at me?” Sarah asked. “Tom?”

The panther made another circuit of its cage.

PETER STRAUB

Peter Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen novels including, most recently, A Dark Matter. Two of his novels, Lost Boy Lost Girl and In the Night Room, are winners of the Bram Stoker Award. He lives in New York City.

www.peterstraub.net