That’s when the nightmares started again. I’d started to have them when Bunny died. Nightmares about drowning, and nobody coming to save me. Sometimes I used to wake up in the night and realize I’d wet the bed. Of course I knew Miss McDonald wouldn’t eat her baby. But I sometimes imagined her giving birth, and that too gave me nightmares. I tried to keep those bad thoughts away by staging mass drownings of rats and mice. But the bad thoughts kept coming back. Thoughts, and dreams, and terrors. I started to feel it was all my fault. That the demons I’d given birth to were coming back to eat me.

And then, without warning, Mousey turned up one sunny day at the clay pits. I was sitting by the Pit Shaft, looking into the water, when I heard him come up behind me. He’d never been all that talkative, so I wasn’t expecting an apology or anything. Still, I thought there might have been some reference to what had happened between us. Instead, he just came to sit on the bank beside me, looked into the Pit Shaft, and said: “I know where we can get a dog.”

I mean, a dog. It was tempting. “What kind of dog?”

“A Jack Russell,” he said.

“Whose is it?”

He shrugged. “A stray, I guess. It doesn’t have a collar.”

By then, I was thinking hard. Not about killing a dog, though. Those demons were talking to me again, and this time, I was listening.

I said: “How soon could you bring it here?”

He thought about it for a while, and then said: “I could bring it tomorrow. It comes to me. I’ve been feeding it.”

I pretended to hesitate. “I dunno.”

Mousey waited patiently. He must have known I’d come round. But why had he come to find me? I thought. Was this his way of making amends?

Finally, I nodded and said: “Tomorrow morning, before school. Bring the dog. Don’t tell anyone.”

I hardly slept at all that night. I was too excited. I went over my plan again and again, imagining every scenario. I knew I had to get it right. I knew I’d only have one chance. And I knew that if it worked, then all my demons—a legion of them—would vanish for good in the clay pits.