all three flights, but when I got to the front of the building, the statue of the Centaur was gone, and the stairway to the bell tower was boarded up, as it always had been. I raced back down to the main floor to the building manager’s office, and burst in the door – the receptionist must have thought I was crazy, which in a way I was. I breathlessly demanded where the shop called The Clothes Horse had moved to. She said, “I never heard of it. No place like that in here.”

I said, “No, it’s right upstairs – or it was last week. Third floor, at the front, in the old bell tower.”

She looked at me like I was definitely crazy, and said, “There hasn’t been anything in that space but bats since we rebuilt this place, and there never will be – it’s not safe up there. Whatever store you are looking for, it wasn’t in this building – and you had best be getting out of here too, before I call Security.”

As I stood outside her office, between the rows of columns that spanned the length of the building, it seemed for just a moment that the floor turned sandy beneath my feet, and as I looked up at the tops of the columns, I caught a faint whiff of an unidentifiable but pleasant incense, and heard a low, throaty chuckle, and near the third-floor railing, I caught a glimpse of a crouching panther…