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slumped, and hands dangling—wishing I was dead, I sensed him there. The tall fellow. The clown on stilts. I tried to look up, but my vision was blurred, made misty by reason of my watering eyes. In the near-distance the fairground was like some foggy Xanadu, like a luminous pavilion floating on a black velvet sea. And silhouetted darkly against its soft glow, this tall, tall figure, as motionless as some freakish scarecrow in the night.
    I saw him there, however dimly, but even without seeing him I would have sensed him, would have known his smell. And my pal Woofy knew it, too. Off he went, zigzagging and yapping, stiff-legged and bouncing, making more noise than you’d believe possible from such a small creature, into the darkness. And as for me: I threw up again…
    Something brought me out of it. I don’t know what it was; a sound, perhaps? A cry, a yelp, a brittle snapping, the sound of crunching bones? I can’t say, but something.
    I still couldn’t stand, and so clung to my post. And there in the night I saw a strange thing. No, let me try that again—I thought I saw, and heard, a strange thing: a shadow, flitting on high, whirring as it passed overhead. A winged shape, like a great dragonfly, clutching a small still bundle in its weirdly-jointed appendages. Then a sudden, sharp swerve—the plangent sound of plucked telephone wires where they were strung between tall poles—and silence. But not for long.
    “Woofy! Woofy! Where are you, Woofy?” The rude, ragged girl-child, running under the stars, sobbing, searching in some kind of frenzied desperation. She raced across the field, her shrill voice gradually fading into the distance, until I was left with my thoughts where I sat shivering, but no longer from sickness, and certainly not from any physical chill. And the thought uppermost in my mind, which even then I couldn’t or didn’t want to pursue or explore or explain, was this:
    You’re not going to find Woofy, you snotty little girl. No, I don’t think you’re ever going to find Woofy…
     

     
    And Diary, that’s just about it. We’re almost done.
    Eventually I was able to stand up again, by which time the fairground’s lights were going out, its main generators silent. Then, remembering—things—I looked across the field. Darkness, nothing, now. But in my mind’s eye pictures were forming, and they were such that I knew I’d never rid my memory of them:
    The stilt-clown’s too long tail-coat, with its stiff, shiny-black swallow-tails. The way he had handled his stilts, if they were stilts. And the way he’d smelled…for surely the stench had been his? Worse still, the picture in my mind of him weighing that overfed, shrieking infant…which he might well have considered too heavy for his fell purpose. For even poor little Woofy had proved to be a problem, weighing him down and causing him to run afoul of the telephone cables !
    Those last two were the thoughts that did it: chilled me to the bone and sent me running, stumbling to the roadside where I flagged down a taxi to carry me home. But I couldn’t sleep. And yet—just like that earlier episode in Barrows Hill—neither could I be sure, not even then, not one hundred per cent sure , that it wasn’t the drink or my warped imagination or…or…or I didn’t know what else!
    Which is why, Diary, I called in Monday morning to tell my boss I was ill but I’d be in a.s.a.p., then went out and caught a bus back to the fairground. And wouldn’t you know it? It was raining, and the place was as drab and unwelcoming as any fairground in the rain. But far more so to me. Frighteningly so, to me.
    Hands in pockets, I wandered among the rides and stalls and wagons, just me and a bunch of urchins who must have been playing truant from the local schools. The only thing that was open was a slots arcade, where two tiny old ladies were arguing over whose go it was on one of those claw machines, though what they would do with one of the hideous