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were heading back toward the first concourse and were going to make another circuit. But they went left instead, off toward the grandstand and the mile-long racetrack, ultimately to the barns and stables where the livestock shows and competitions were held.
    In spite of the August heat, my teeth were chattering. My heart hammered so hard and loud that I was surprised they hadn’t heard it above the rumble of their sedan’s engine. My breathing was as noisy as a bellows. I was a regular one-man band, specializing in rhythm unsullied by melody.
    I slumped back against the booth, until the shakes passed, until I trusted myself to deal with the corpse I had left in the Dodgem Car pavilion. Disposing of the body would require steady nerves, calm, and the caution of a mouse at a cat show.
    Eventually, when in control of myself once more, I rolled up my sleeping bag, cinched it into a tight bundle, and carried both it and the backpack into the deep shadows by the Tilt-a-Whirl. I left everything where I could find it again but where it could not be seen from the concourse.
    I returned to the Dodgem Cars.
    All was still.
    The gate creaked slightly when I pushed it open.
    Each step I took echoed under the wooden floor.
    I didn’t care. This time I was not sneaking up on anyone.
    Moonlight shimmered beyond the open sides of the pavilion.
    The glossy paint on the balustrade seemed to glow.
    Here under the roof, thick shadows clustered.
    Shadows and moist heat.
    The miniature cars huddled like sheep in a dark pasture.
    The body was gone.
    My first thought was that I had forgotten exactly where I had left the corpse: Perhaps it was beyond that other pair of Dodgem Cars, or over there in that other sable pool beyond the moonlight’s reach. Then it occurred to me that the goblin might not have been dead when I left it. Dying, yes, it had definitely been mortally injured, but perhaps not actually dead, and maybe it had managed to drag itself to another corner of the building before expiring. I began searching back and forth, through and between the cars, gingerly poking into every lake and puddle of blackness, with no success but with increasing agitation.
    I stopped. I listened.
    Silence.
    I made myself receptive to psychic vibrations.
    Nothing.
    I thought I remembered under which car the flashlight had rolled when it had been knocked off the bumper. I looked and found it—and was reassured that I had not dreamed the entire battle with the goblin. When I clicked the switch, the Eveready came on. Hooding the beam with one hand, I swept the floor with light and saw other proof that the violent encounter I remembered had not been the events of a nightmare. Blood. Plenty of blood. It was thickening and soaking into the wood, deepening to a shade between crimson and maroon, with a look of rust around the edges, drying up, but it was undeniably blood, and from the sprays and streaks and pools of gore, I could re-create the fight as I recalled it.
    I found my knife, too, and it was spotted with dried blood. I started to return it to the sheath inside my boot, then looked warily at the night around me and decided to keep the weapon ready.
    The blood, the knife . . . But the body was gone.
    And the tool pouch was missing as well.
    I wanted to run, get the hell out of there, without even delaying long enough to return to the Tilt-a-Whirl for my gear, just bolt down the concourse, kicking up clouds of sawdust, to the front gate of the county fairgrounds, climb over that, and run some more, Jesus, run without stopping for hours and hours, on into the morning, on through the Pennsylvania mountains, into the wilderness, until I found a stream where I could wash off the blood and the stink of my enemy, where I could find a mossy bed and lie down in the concealment of ferns, where I could sleep in peace without fear of being seen by anyone—or any thing .
    I was only a seventeen-year-old boy.
    But during the past few months my fantastic and terrifying