The Tyger Read online

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  The museum was Jules’s favorite place in the world, and the Path Through Time was the best part of the museum. It gave him the major creeps, though at twelve he was too old for it to be actually scary. But the Path’s dark corners held the promise of feeling something besides the anger that had been silting up inside him for months. He wanted to feel little-kiddish again, that safe kind of scared that didn’t seem to exist anymore.

  Stepping onto the Path’s nighttime street was like being picked up out of normal life and set down in olden days, and then, as you walked, older and older days, and all the way back to when animals were huge and everything was tusked, with the short-faced bear at the very end of it all, Arctodus: slavering, shaggy and clawed, his roar filling the room, teeth and tongue slimy and eyes like holes in ice, monster-king of the Path.

  Arctodus was in every kid’s nightmares; once you walked the Path he was with you forever, like a god. The Path led you to him, whether you hurried or didn’t. Half the pleasure was knowing the horror you were headed toward.

  Sounds drifted along the Path from Aunt Lydia’s wedding reception: clinking glasses, little cousins shouting, laughter, and the clipping of heels on cobblestones. That should have made the Path less uncanny but it didn’t. There was a sense of awful possibility draped over everything, chill and clammy. Tonight Arctodus would exist in its truest, purest form. Seeing the bear without distractions, without having to share it—anything might happen. Jules wasn’t sure if he was brave enough to do it.

  Even though the reception was in his favorite part of his favorite place, and even though Aunt Lydia was Jules’s godmother and his favorite adult in the world, he felt awkward. A year ago, he and his mom would have been in the wedding. He didn’t know what had happened between his mom and her sister but it had cost him, Jules, a lot. Aunt Lydia hadn’t even written his name on the invitation, just “Emily Kominski and family,” as if his mom had anyone left besides Jules. As if Jules shouldn’t be invited in his own right.

  Jules wasn’t sure he was supposed to be in the museum lobby alone. It had a sour-bitten smell, like an attic, like things in jars: the alchemy of preservation.

  The Path was rented for the party, but everything else was off-limits. The other hallway in the lobby, to ancient Egypt and the gem room, was roped off and the lights were out. That was creepy, too, knowing all the mummies were still there in the dark.

  He’d get someone to come with him to Arctodus. Maybe Aunt Lydia would go.

  Jules stepped onto the Path Through Time.

  He passed a factory with dirt-fogged windows, the faint clanking of machinery inside. He’d never noticed that before. That was the sort of thing that made the Path so satisfying. There was always a sense of something going on just out of sight: doors left ajar, lights going on and off behind curtained windows, legs ascending a staircase into the dark.

  Jules passed an old-fashioned car parked outside the Barker Street Station, where a train whistle blew, then rounded a corner. The lobby was no longer visible. He was on an empty, lamplit cobblestone street lined with shops and homes, glass glowing softly with reflected light.

  Jules went to the window with the little girl in it. She was the first of the Path’s citizens. Mannequins, but it was hard not to imagine them as participants in some hoax, playactors who, when the last field tripper wandered off in search of the ancient Romans or the Amazon Rainforest, would let out a breath and slump into a chair. If Jules moved fast enough, or maybe slow enough, he could catch them at it.

  Much of the Path was real: antique furniture in the houses, clothes on the frozen people. You could smell the molder and furniture polish. Even the animals were real: taxidermied dogs and horses in town and wild animals on the prairies and in the woods. Must and formaldehyde. They’d been alive, once, and now they were dead but pretending they weren’t. The little girl in the window had that same dead-not-dead look.

  The girl was waiting for her mom and dad. She was ringleted and innocent; she looked cold. She clutched a doll, a porcelain-faced shepherdess with a long crook in one hand. Not the kind of toy for hugging. The girl didn’t look like she’d ever been hugged, either.

  Jules didn’t like that window much, but it didn’t matter. He had to look. It was a ritual, doing obeisance to the Path and the whole museum. The little girl was always the beginning, just like Arctodus was always the end.

  Something convinced Jules, suddenly, that the girl was glaring, that she hated him for keeping her there like a pin-pierced butterfly. If he turned his head she would come unstuck and … what?

  Jules stared into the girl’s eyes. Don’t look away. Reflected light glossed her black pupils. Her eyes were cold and focused like a hunting cat’s. Don’t look away. Maybe her parents wouldn’t ever come home. People died all the time back then; they sank on the Titanic or died of the flu. Maybe Arctodus got them.

  Jules’s toes curled. Nerves bubbled inside him. Something else, too: a hot feeling left over from his earlier argument with his mom. She hadn’t wanted to come to the wedding, and Jules had to yell to get her to listen. Aunt Lydia was his godmother. She was his mom’s best friend. Or she had been.

  “Your parents are dead,” he whispered to the girl in the window.

  Something flickered across her eyes and it looked—for a second it really looked—like she’d glanced behind Jules. His heart stuttered. But of course when he turned it was just Aunt Karen passing along the cobblestone street toward the lobby. He turned back to the window.

  The girl’s tiny pearl teeth were bared, nose ridged with wrinkles like a snarling animal. At first he believed he actually saw that, and he even stepped back as though the girl might smash through the window, tiny doll-fists reaching for his dress shirt. But he didn’t. She was just the same boring, frilly little girl.

  Jules staggered off the curb. He wanted to run, which was ridiculous. He had a good imagination and that made it easy to scare himself. He turned away from the window and started walking toward the party, though he still felt the girl’s stare.

  A squeal interrupted the quiet, and some little dressed-up cousins ran down the cobbled street. Sofia chased them. She was Jules’s age, in a flowery dress with a babyish yoke of lace around the neck. Sofia’s fingers were bent like claws and she was growling, and when she caught one cousin around the waist the little girl dissolved into hysterical giggles. “I’m gonna eat you,” Sofia said, and shook her cousin back and forth.

  Jules thought about going back the way he’d come, but it was too late. “Hey!” Sofia called to him. “Come play with us.”

  The 1800s hotel was at the end of the street, right before the next twist in the Path. It was busy with voices and movement. J
ules pretended he hadn’t heard Sofia and slipped onto the hotel’s porch. Inside was a fancy bar where you could buy sarsaparilla, which tonight was a real bar for grown-ups. There were dusty plush chairs you could sit in, and old-fashioned music playing from hidden speakers. Adults were everywhere.

  Immediately, Jules heard his mother’s voice. She was crying, leaky and whiny, on the far side of the room twisted into an overstuffed chair with an empty wineglass in one hand. She had her brother Tomas’s shoulder clutched in her other. “He’s an animal,” she said. “When I married him I never would’ve thought he was such a goddamn animal!”

  Jules felt himself winding up tight, vaguely aware that Sofia had followed him into the hotel. He turned away, hooked his arms over the bar’s edge, and stepped up on the brass kick rail. He asked the man behind the bar for a Coke.

  “Coming right up,” the bartender said.

  Sofia climbed up next to him. “I’ll have a Sprite. I’m not supposed to have caffeine.” She rolled her eyes and then leaned back, testing her balance on the rail. Jules ignored her.

  The bartender gave them both their sodas. Sofia sucked her straw into her mouth while still balancing on the rail. Conversationally, she said, “Sorry about your parents.”

  From the corner of his eye he saw his mother lean in to Tomas’s arms. He couldn’t hear the crying anymore; maybe she was done. “Thanks,” he said, looking at the glass of Coke in front of him. What were you supposed to say when someone said they were sorry your parents got divorced? Sofia couldn’t understand. Jules didn’t care if she was sorry. It didn’t help. Better if his dad said sorry, since the affair was his fault, but at least his dad didn’t shout at Jules and cry in public all the time. His dad didn’t talk about the divorce at all, or his pregnant girlfriend, or what it would be like when Jules had a half-sibling, which Jules’s mom only ever called the little bastard. His dad just showed up every other weekend to take Jules to movies and things, and acted normal.

  Normal wasn’t right, either—something was broken, seriously broken—but at least his dad didn’t act crazy. Jules’s mom was crazy. She had some feral, furious, grieving thing inside her which she refused to tame. So if anyone should be sorry, it should really be Jules’s mom.

  But then he saw her coming toward him, Tomas in tow, face composed despite red-rimmed eyes, and whatever was cut loose in Jules swung toward her. The magnetism that had pushed him away reversed, and he wanted to be close to his mother, feral or not.

  Tomas leaned against the bar. Jules’s mom smiled and stroked Jules’s back. “Hey, Sofia. Being good, Julian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was telling your uncle about you going to State for poetry,” Jules’s mom said. She pushed her empty wineglass toward the bartender. “You should do your poem! You want to hear him, Tom? He’s so good.”

  “Mom,” Jules said. Behind him, Sofia sucked the last of the soda out of her cup, liquid slurping past ice.

  “Come on,” his mom said. Then, as if he’d forgotten how it went, she said, “Tiger, tiger…”

  Jules sighed, exasperated. Now if he didn’t do it she’d just do it herself, or try to, and ruin it. He stepped away from the bar. Uncle Tomas and the bartender both turned expectantly.

  “‘The Tyger,’ by William Blake,” he said.

  He did the poem. He did the gestures—what dread hand? And what dread feet?—explaining the story with the way he told it, and by the time he got to Did he who made the Lamb make thee? his expression had grown puzzled, a little fearful, a little amazed. All those things at once. He was acting, and because he had won District for sixth graders and was going to the state competition, he guessed he was pretty good at it.

  There was an essay he’d written and memorized, too, explaining the poem, how in Blake’s time people didn’t know about dinosaurs, so a tiger was the scariest thing they could imagine. How back then everyone believed that God made everything, and God was supposed to be like a loving parent, so it was confusing that He’d make something like man-eating tigers. It meant you had to accept the bad, scary parts of life if you wanted to really appreciate the good ones. But Jules’s mom never cared if he did that part.

  When he said the second fearful symmetry that ended the poem his mom clapped, and Uncle Tomas and the bartender had to clap too. Sofia hopped down off the rail clapping too hard.

  “Wow,” Sofia said. “Tiger, tiger!”

  “Isn’t he good? He got the acting from me,” his mom said to Tomas. “Remember my senior play? I never got a chance to do any of that after high school. After I married Rob.” She looked at Jules appraisingly. “Don’t get married young.”

  “Yeah, Mom,” he said. “No problem.”

  “Oh, there’s your Papa Jan,” his mom said. “I’ll go get him and you can do it again.”

  “Mom!” Jules said, sliding out of her reach. “I just did it.” He grabbed his Coke and hurried toward front door of the hotel, relieved that she didn’t call him back.

  Sofia followed. On the porch, she did a dramatic jitter. “I drank my soda too fast. Sugar rush!”

  The street was empty again, the little cousins gone. Jules turned the corner around the front of the hotel. Puddles glistened in the gutter. The Path here was further back in time, no longer cobblestones and gingerbread trim but dirt roads and rough boards, like a Western movie. Jules sat on a bench across the street from the saloon—distant, jangly piano music came through its dusty window—and set his Coke next to him. He didn’t want it anymore. He waited for the magical, held-breath feeling to come back, but it wouldn’t.

  Maybe Sofia kept the feeling at bay, her heels banging on the plank sidewalk. He didn’t want her coming with him to Arctodus; she’d ruin that too. But he didn’t think he could look at the bear alone.

  A group of people were gathered at the end of the street, doing something wedding-official on the general store’s porch. Jules saw the blaze of his Aunt Lydia’s white dress. She hadn’t even said hi to him yet. Jules wanted to go up to her and slide inside her arms for one of her extra-squeezy hugs, hear her say Julian in her bubbly voice, like she was so surprised and delighted that he existed.

  He looked away.

  Sofia plopped next to him on the bench. Jules felt his body go tight, teeth crushing together. He waited a few seconds, then gasped. “Sof,” he whispered, frozen. “Don’t move! Someone’s watching.”

  Sofia scrunched up her face. “What?”

  Jules knew the secrets of the Path Through Time, or most of them. Behind them, in a second-story window, a witchy old woman with a crooked nose was posed peering out at the street. He didn’t have to check to know they were on the right bench, in the right spot, and he bet Sofia didn’t know about her.

  “Don’t … move.”

  The skeptical look on Sofia’s face was melting toward uncertainty, but she didn’t look scared yet, either. Jules whipped around and pointed at the window where the woman watched.

  “There!”

  He’d been ready to jump up and run, hoping to spook Sofia back to the party, but he dropped his hand. Nobody was in the window. The curtain was drawn.

  “Nice try,” Sofia said.

  “There’s supposed to be…” he muttered. Why wasn’t Sofia catching on? He might have to just tell her to go away. He got up and stalked toward the general store.

  The Path had always been the same, all Jules’s life. Why would they change something? Especially something cool, like a creepy witch spying on you?

  A flash snapped from the general store, an epileptic crack-crack of light. Aunt Lydia and her new husband posed for photos. Aunts and uncles had gathered, along with Papa Jan and Busia Gloria. Uncle Tomas and Jules’s mom came out of the hotel. His mom tripped on the step but managed not to spill anything from the tumbler she carried. Jules heard his uncle say something, and his mom laughed. They joined the picture group.

  Jules looked back at the curtained window. If he looked hard, he thought he could see a silhouette ag
ainst the fabric. The old lady was there, but with the curtain drawn. Maybe the fabric had come loose. He thought maybe the curtains were moving. In, out, like something was breathing against them. Jules felt his breathing sync with the sway. In, out. In, out.

  A laugh from the photo group broke his reverie. His mom hugged Lydia and said something, patting the groom on the arm like he was a little dog. Then she turned to everyone and shouted, “Let’s hope he’s not a cheating sonofabitch like mine! Ha!”

  She might start crying again. When his mom cried people always expected Jules to do something about it. He glanced at the window one last time before putting his head down to slip past his gathered family.

  There was a sharp twist to the Path beyond the store. Here the road turned muddy and rough, or at least was made to look that way while still being wide and flat enough for strollers. There was a rustic schoolhouse and a prairie diorama with a covered wagon train leading off into a painted background of high grasses. It was supposed to be early morning but the lights here were dim. Maybe this area wasn’t part of the rental, or maybe it was just different at night. Jules leaned against a split-rail fence that bordered a marsh and looked at a frozen naturalist sketching a hawk.

  Sofia caught up with him. “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere. Just following the Path.”

  “You aren’t going all the way to the end, are you?”

  “I don’t know. Why not?”

  “My mom said we’re supposed to stay by the hotel.”

  Sofia’s mom made up a lot of rules. “My mom didn’t tell me that. But you should go back, or you might get in trouble.”

  “Are you gonna go look at the bear?”

  He imagined her pretending fear in front of Arctodus. A grunt of irritation crawled out of him. “Sofia. Why don’t you go play or something?”

  Her face crumpled with anger. “I can stay if I want!”

  Jules sighed and pushed away from the fence.

  Next on the Path was a settler house nestled in the woods. Jules could smell woodsmoke, though probably that was something from the wedding. There was the sound of someone chopping wood and a taxidermied cat curled up on the porch. Jules wondered where they’d gotten the dead cat. Two pioneer kids, a girl holding a little boy’s hand, were frozen among the trees that besieged the house, a thick forest of summer green and nighttime blue made darker, denser, in the low light.