“Or the keeper had gotten bigger. Or both simultaneously.”

“And you didn’t tell this to the police?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “I’m sure they wouldn’t have believed me. And if I had told them I was watching the elephant from the cliff at a time like that, I’d have ended up as their number one suspect.”

“Still, are you certain that the balance between them had changed?”

“Probably. I can only say ‘probably.’ I don’t have any proof, and as I keep saying, I was looking at them through the air vent. But I had looked at them like that I don’t know how many times before, so it’s hard for me to believe that I could make a mistake about something as basic as the relation of their sizes.”

In fact, I had wondered at the time whether my eyes were playing tricks on me. I had tried closing and opening them and shaking my head, but the elephant’s size remained the same. It definitely looked as if it had shrunk—so much so that at first I thought the town might have got hold of a new, smaller elephant. But I hadn’t heard anything to that effect, and I would never have missed any news reports about elephants. If this was not a new elephant, the only possible conclusion was that the old elephant had, for one reason or another, shrunk. As I watched, it became obvious to me that this smaller elephant had all the same gestures as the old one. It would stamp happily on the ground with its right foot while it was being washed, and with its now somewhat narrower trunk it would pat the keeper on the back.

It was a mysterious sight. Looking through the vent, I had the feeling that a different, chilling kind of time was flowing through the elephant house—but nowhere else. And it seemed to me, too, that the elephant and the keeper were gladly giving themselves over to this new order that was trying to envelop them—or that had already partially succeeded in enveloping them.

Altogether, I was probably watching the scene in the elephant house for less than a half hour. The lights went out at seven-thirty—much earlier than usual—and from that point on, everything was wrapped in darkness. I waited in my spot, hoping that the lights would go on again, but they never did. That was the last I saw of the elephant.

“So, then, you believe that the elephant kept shrinking until it was small enough to escape through the bars, or else that it simply dissolved into nothingness. Is that it?”