This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMayo.

The old woman, kneeling at the altar in the flickering candlelight, lost in prayer,

didn't hear the bear pat into the Church of St. Thomas. And so her death, which came as the

grizzly's teeth sank into her throat, while horrible, was sudden and swift and therefore

relatively merciful, as these things go.

The young nanny holding close her young charges in the back of a horse-drawn carriage

couldn't protect them from the lion when he pounced and took all four children away.

The young women, seamstresses, who had put down their needles and thimbles and

scissors, to stroll for a spell in the sun, didn't expect to see a rhinoceros tear through the park,

nor its horn tear through their friend Danny Thomas. The New Yorkers who woke up on a November

Monday in 1874 to a headline in the herald that screamed of,

A shocking Sabbath carnival of death, were stunned to learn what had taken place in their city mere hours before,

as they read about the rhino at the Central Park Zoo,

and the zookeeper who poked it with a stick through the thin bars of its cage,

taunting it for no good reason,

just as the last visitors were filing out through the gates at the end of the day,

until the rhino started ramming its body against the bending bars until they broke.

As did the bones of the zookeeper, as the beast barreled over him, and rampaged on, smashing the cages of other animals

until the panther and the lions and the tiger and the bears, grizzly and polar, and wolves,

there were wolves too, were all somehow let loose to run amok, cackling hyenas, shrieking

monkeys and apes, swinging free, swinging for the trees beyond the

wrought iron fence. The details were shocking. The old woman in the church, the nanny and the

...