That her dad had never pressed her for details about this was still one of the things Nita thought about when counting up the reasons she loved him. But even his silent support couldn t do anything about the nightmares thatfollowed, nightmares full of leering clown faces and the musky smell of big cats. Finally the nightmares faded away and left Nita wondering what in the world had been the matter with her. Yet she never went to another circus. And even now, sometimes the mere sight of a spotlight aimed at an empty floor, with darkness lying silent beyond it, was enough to induce in her a feeling of tremendous foreboding that would darken her soul for hours.

Sometimes she tried to work out in more detail why she d been so scared. She kept coming back to the clowns. To Nita, there was a fake quality about them, nothing genuinely humorous. It was strange to think that someone seriously thought that makeup could make you funny. But there was no question in Nita s mind that makeupcould make you scary. The stylized clown face, too generic, toocartoony : That really bothered her.The baggy, motley costume, disguising the real body shape so that it could have been a bare steel skeleton underneath instead of flesh and bone. The slapstickjokes, endlessly repeated, which were supposed to be amusingbecause of the repetition all these left Nita cold. There was something mechanical about clowns, something automatic, a kind of robot humor; and it gave her the creeps.

It was doing so again, right now, because here in the darkness, followed around by one of those sinister spotlights, was a typical clown act the clown riding around and around in circles on a ridiculously small bicycle, in ever decreasing circles. There was nothing funny about it to Nita. It was pitiful. Around and around and around, in jerky, wobbling movements, around and around went the clown. It had a painted black tear running down its face. The red-painted mouth was turned down. But the face under the white greasepaint mask was as immobile as a marble statue s, expressionless, plastered in place. Only the eyes were alive.They shouted, Ican t get off!I can t get off ! And, just this once, the clown didn t think it was funny, either.