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Aftexcludor had told him and Tad believed him. He was Bob Snarby. He had no choice.
     
     
    Another week passed and the fairgrounds prepared to close. Eric and Doll Snarby were planning to travel north to join another, larger carnival in Great Yarmouth. Tad had almost laughed when he heard that. Great Yarmouth was only forty miles from Snatchmore Hall. He was actually moving closer to home! But at the same time he knew that it might just as well have been four hundred miles for all the difference it would make.
    He sold almost two hundred tickets on the last day. It was a weekday afternoon and he had been left on his own. Eric and Doll had opened a bottle of wine at lunchtime and had gone back to the caravan to sleep it off. He had watched the caravan shaking on its wheels and had heard their screams of laughter as they chased each other around the bedroom, but now it was silent and he imagined they were asleep. Tad picked up the bucket of tickets and shook them.
    “Come on! Try your luck . . .” he began. Then stopped.
    A man had limped up to the stall and was standing in front of him, looking at him strangely. Tad’s first impression was of a shark in human form; the man had the same black eyes and pale, lifeless flesh. Although he wasn’t physically huge, there was a presence about him, something cold and ugly that seemed to reach out and draw Tad helplessly toward him. The man had gray hair, cut short to match the gray stubble on his chin. He wore a shabby suit and a pair of perfectly round wire-frame spectacles.
    And then he turned his head and Tad gasped. His face was normal on one side, but the other was completely covered by a tattoo. Somebody had cut an immense spiderweb into the man’s white flesh. It stretched from his ear to his forehead to his nose, to the side of his mouth and down to his neck. The tattoo was livid black and—most horrible of all—it seemed to be eating its way into the man’s flesh. Somehow it was almost more alive than the face on which it hung.
    “Try your luck . . . ?” Tad muttered, but the rest of the words refused to come.
    “Hello, Bobby-boy!” The man smiled wickedly, revealing a line of teeth riddled with silver fillings. He had more fillings in his mouth than teeth. “I hope you’re well.”
    “I’m okay.” Tad looked at the stranger warily.
    “I asked if you was well,” he said. “Are you one hundred percent? ‘Okay’ is not good enough!”
    “I’m fine,” Tad answered, mystified.
    “That’s good. Because I hear—I’m reliably informed—that you been ill,” the man said.
    “What about it?” Tad had learned that the ruder he was, the more people would accept that he was Bob.
    The man smiled again. He had been leaning on a black, silver-capped walking stick, but now he leaned it against the stall. “Glue was what I heard,” he murmured.
    “What about it?”
    The man shook his head slowly. “You modern kids,” he said. “When I was your age, you wouldn’t have found me touching stuff like that. No. Gin was good enough for me. A half bottle of gin in my schoolbag, that’s what got me through the day.” He took out a cigarette and lit it. “Mind you,” he went on, “gin could be a treacherous friend too. It’s gin I got to thank for this . . .” He tapped the tattoo on the side of his face.
    “What happened?” Tad asked, feeling queasy.
    “I was drunk. Drunk as a lord. And some mates of mine took me down to the tattooist for a laugh. When I woke up, this was what he’d done to me. The web and the spider.” Tad glanced at the tattoo. The man laughed. “One day I’ll tell you where he put the spider,” he said. He blew out smoke. His eyes behind the round lenses were suddenly distant. “Anyway, I had the last laugh, so to speak. I went back to the tattooist and gave ’im what you might call a piece of my mind.”
    “You told him what you thought of him . . .” Tad said.
    “I wrote him what I thought of him. That’s what I did. I