Chapter Six
Weeks passed. Jack left, Ned had progressed to Book 4, and Fi and I were becoming closer and closer friends. Carey grew more and more childish; Clu still refused to eat much of anything. I continued my appointments with Dr. Bell, but I could tell that she was no seeing any improvement. I still had no "diag-nonsense", as Fi said. But the funny thing was, I didn't care too much any more. The funnier thing was, I was actually starting to really like my life. It was better than my life before I came to the asylum, and even weirder was another discovery I made. Everyone here was sane. In their own ways, they were. It was the outside world that was insane. Life was near perfect until one day, it all shattered to the ground.
Free as a bird…
The song always comforted me. And again, we were running through the jungle, just me and my panther. "You're always here for me," I murmured. I looked beside me just to see that he was still there. Only he wasn't.
"Where—where are you?" I asked, my voice shaking, as I came to a halt and spun around. "Where did you go, my panther?" I cried.
A translucent image of him flickered before me, and I screamed. He disappeared. Everything disappeared. The trees, the grass, the sky—black. I was in total blackness. "You don't need me anymore," came a low, deep voice.
"NO! I NEED YOU!" I screamed. "Please, come back!"
"You don't want to be free," he continued. "You don't want me!"
"NO!" I yelled. "It isn't true! It isn't true!"
"Goodbye, Annie…" the voice said, fading. "Goodbye…"
"No! My panther!" I screamed, shaking with terror. He couldn't have left me, he just couldn't have.
"Annie?" The light was coming back. I could see a blurry figure before me. "Annie, are you okay?"
"Panther?" I asked weakly.
"No, it's me, Ned."
"Ohhh…" I said groggily, as his face came into focus.
"You were having a bad dream," Ned informed me. "You kept yelling."
It was only a dream, I thought, hope surging back to me. It wasn't real. "I'm… I'm okay now," I told him.
He nodded and crawled back into his bed, falling asleep almost as his head hit the pillow. I let out a shaky sigh and looked down at the floor beside my bed, where I just knew my panther would be. He was always there with me at night.
But as I stared down at the bare wooden floor, the realization hit me like a slap in the face: my panther was really gone.