And I thought, God, don’t eat that, little fellow!
Time passed unnoticed…
And while I sat there on the broken fence—propped against a post with my head down, shoulders 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 fluffy toy prizes—if or when they won one—was anybody’s guess.
Eventually I made my way to the Freak Show tent, closed for the day, whose sodden eaves dripped rain on the flattened grass and whose gangway floorboards oozed mud. I looked through a gap in the tarpaulin door but there was no sign of the Freaks themselves.
And finally I did what I had to do—what I’d come here to do—and walked out between the perimeter wagons into the empty field. Over there, the fence with the broken rail; and there on the grass, a slimy looking solidified soup which I no more than glanced at because that might set me off again.
And nearby, there on the ground under the looping telephone cables, something limp and wet and furry. At first I thought it might be Woofy, but it wasn’t. Six or seven inches long by four wide, it had fur or hair of a sort, yes—but nothing that ever came from a dog.
For the fur, set on a backing of thin chitin or pearly grey overlapping scales, was striped grey and green…horizontally, I believe. And it stank like poor Stanley when he came down off those Flying Chairs.
Diary, I make no claim to understand any of this. No claim whatsoever…That’s probably because I’m drinking again and can’t seem to think straight…Or maybe I’m just too sensitive, too easily disturbed.
I mean, I really don’t want to understand it, you know?
I don’t want to, but I think I do…
I’ve often heard it said that lightning never strikes twice. Oh really? Then how about three times? Or perhaps, in some unknown fashion, I’m some kind of unusually prominent lightning conductor whose prime function is to absorb something of the physical and psychological shocks of these by no means rare events, thus shielding the rest of humanity and keeping them out of the line of fire. Something like that, anyway.
Or there again perhaps not. My being there didn’t much help Barmy Bill of Barrows Hill that time in old London Town. It was more like I was an observer…except even now I can’t be sure of what I saw, what really happened. Perhaps I was drinking too much, in which case it could have been a very bad attack of the dreaded delirium tremens. That’s what I tell myself anyway, because it’s a whole lot easier than recalling to mind the actual details of that morning when the police required me to identify Barmy Bill’s dramatically—in fact his radically, hideously—altered body where it had been dumped in that skip on Barchington, just off The Larches…
Anyway, let’s stop there, because that’s another story and somewhere I really don’t want to go, not in any detail. But if we’re still talking lightning strikes, then Barmy Bill and the Thin People would be numero uno’s Numero Uno: my personal Number One, my first but by no means my last.
Or maybe we should be talking something else. There’s this dictionary definition that comes to mind: “nonesuch: a unique, unparalleled or extraordinary thing.” And if we break that down into its component parts:
“Unique.” But doesn’t that describe a one-off? So how many nonesuches are there supposed to be? I mean is a nonesuch, like a lightning strike, only supposed to occur once? Well not in my case, brother! No, not at all in my case. But as for “unparalleled” and “extraordinary thing(s)”: those at least are parts of the definition that I can go along with. But definitely.