baby! My little baby!’ screamed the thought of Mrs. Tridden.

‘A brain!’ thought Gramps.
The coloured man jigged his fingers. ‘Middibamboo Mama!’
A fisherman pursed his lips. ‘Jellyfish!’
‘Kitten! Here kittie, kittie, kittie!’ the thoughts drowned clawing in Juke’s skull. ‘Kitten!’

‘Everything and anything!’ shrilled Granny’s weazened thought. ‘The night, the swamp, the death, the pallid moist things of the sea!’
Silence, and then Gramps said, ‘I wonder. Wonder if it’s a he — or a she — or just a plain old it?’

Charlie danced up, satisfied, tamping his cigarette, shaping it to his mouth. Then he looked at Tom Carmody, who would never smile again, in the door. ‘I reckon we’ll never know. Yeah, I reckon we won’t.’ Charlie smiled.

It was just one of those things they kept in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you. . .

The end