The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The next day, Christopher’s father tells him he’s sorry for hitting him, and he helps him dress the cut on his cheek. To help make up for the fight, his father wants to take Christopher to the zoo. The zoo won’t be too crowded because it’s a rainy day, which pleases Christopher.

At the zoo, they look at everything. Christopher especially likes one of the monkeys, the Patagonian sea lions, and an orangutan named Maliku that lies on a hammock that it made out of pajama bottoms.

At lunch, Christopher’s father repeats his sorrow about the fight and tells his son that he loves him very much, but that sometimes he loses his temper: “I worry about you, because I don’t want to see you getting into trouble, because I don’t want you to get hurt” (87). They do their I-love-you finger touch, Christopher’s left fingers pressed against his father’s right-hand fingers.

Christopher tests himself by drawing from memory the zoo’s layout; he includes that in the book.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, but Christopher doesn’t like him because he believed in the supernatural. He joined the Spiritualist Society to talk to his dead son, and he said photos of faeries were real. The pictures obviously are fakes, and the people in them later admitted it: “this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth” (90). 

Siobhan asks Christopher about the bruise on his face, and he explains what happened. Siobhan asks if he’s afraid to go home, and Christopher says no. At home, Christopher searches the dustbin for his book manuscript, but it’s not there. He searches the house, using a flashlight and mirror in the tucked-away spaces, and finally dares to search his father’s room, where he finds the book in a shirt box in the bottom drawer of a clothes cupboard. He decides to leave it so his father doesn’t discover it missing; he’ll continue his book in another notebook and sneak back and visit the first notebook as needed.

Under the shirt box, he finds several envelopes addressed to him. He hears his father’s van pull up, so he grabs one envelope, puts everything else away, and sneaks out of the room. Downstairs, he greets his father, sits on the sofa, and continues reading a science book. Later, he opens the mysterious envelope in his room. It’s from his mother, who writes from London about moving into a new flat with Roger Shears, and she hopes he’s no longer mad at her and will write back. The envelope is postmarked October 16, 1997, 15 months after she died.

This is a new puzzle to add to the dog-murder mystery. Christopher likes that. He resolves to read the rest of the letters when his father isn’t home. 

Things that appear mysterious usually have answers. People sometimes see ghosts, but eventually science may learn that the ghost phenomenon “might be something about people’s brains, or something about the earth’s magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether” (100).

Sometimes animal populations go up and down unpredictably, but it turns out this is due to the math, and Christopher shows the formula for population, which contains a constant that, when it gets large enough, causes the rise and fall of an animal population to become chaotic. Thus, some things appear mysterious “just because that is the way the numbers work” (102). 

On Wednesday at school, one student—who eats everything, including small plastic toys, money, paper, and string—defecates on the bathroom floor and starts to eat it. The mess is cleaned up, but Christopher refuses to use that bathroom for two days.

Nothing of interest happens for the next three days. On Sunday, it rains really hard, which soothes Christopher because it’s white noise. Monday evening, his father goes out on an emergency call to fix a boiler that had flooded in the rain. Christopher returns to his father’s room, finds the hidden letters, and opens one. In it, his mother reminisces about a train set she and his father gave him one Christmas, and how he played and played with it and developed a timetable for all the trains.

In the next letter, his mother apologizes for her impatience, how she became short with him when he had collapsed in a panic on the floor of a crowded store during Christmas season, and how she tried to pry him up and expensive things got knocked over. She also explains how she and his father argued over him, and this made them stop talking, and she finally fell in love with Roger, but she wouldn’t leave Christopher. Then, she and Christopher had argued about the food he wasn’t eating, and she had thrown some food, and he had thrown a chopping board that broke her foot, and how she came to realize that Christopher’s father was much better at taking care of their son than she was, and that she should leave with Roger. Christopher’s father got angry and forbade her to enter the house again, so instead she writes these letters.

The next letter tells how she got a new job with a real-estate survey company, and how the boss is creepy, and the pay is bad, but she’ll look soon for a better job. The letter after this explains how she had two teeth removed.

Christopher suddenly feels sick and dizzy. His mother didn’t die; his father lied about it. He curls up on his father’s bed, throws up, and passes out. Later, he wakes to the sound of his father calling to him from downstairs. His father comes up and finds him there, realizes what Christopher has been reading, and begins to cry. He explains that he didn’t know how to explain that Christopher’s mother had left, so he said she’d gone to the hospital, and the lie got out of hand. He saved the letters so Christopher could read them when he was older.

His father runs a tub for Christopher, then gently helps his son out of his soiled clothing and guides him to the bathroom. Despite all the touching, Christopher cooperates: “And I didn’t scream. And I didn’t fight. And I didn’t hit him” (115).