My plan was pretty simple. Miss McDonald had told us in school about the danger of playing near water. You could fall in, she told us. Even if you could swim, you might not be able to get up the bank. There are things under the water: old cars; fridges; traps. A kid could get his foot caught. It could happen tomorrow. And we’d all seen that Public Information Film, both at school and on TV. I am the spirit of dark and lonely water; ready to trap the unwary, the show-off, the fool. When I first saw it, it gave me nightmares. But after the clay pits, I realized that I was the Spirit of Dark Water. My victims—the mice—were all part of my plan. And now I had another plan. I was going to get Mousey.

I got up early the next day. I had some preparations to make. I told my parents I’d promised to get to school early to water the plants, and then I ran to the clay pits and waited there for Mousey. At eight o’clock sharp he arrived, with a dog trotting at his heels. It didn’t look much like a Jack Russell to me, more like a kind of mongrel, but it seemed happy enough to be there, eating biscuits from Mousey’s hand. Dogs are pretty stupid, I thought. Still, so are most people.

Mousey came up to me with the dog. “How are you going to do it?” he said.

“We’ll throw him in the Pit Shaft. The bank’s too steep for him to get out. He’ll swim around a bit, I guess, but in the end he’ll drown. It’ll be like—” I racked my brains for a good analogy. “It’ll be like the Titanic,” I said.

“The what?” said Mousey.

“Never mind. Did you bring enough biscuits?”

Mousey nodded.

“All right. Bring him here. Right up to the edge of the pit. I’ll tell you when.”

Mousey went right up to the edge of the flooded Pit Shaft. The water was so deep it was black. The bank was like an overhang; not too high, seen from above, but I guessed that even for a boy, it might be very hard to get out once you’d fallen in.

“Bit closer,” I told him again, and Mousey bent down to call the dog, pulling out a handful of biscuits from his pocket.

All I had to do was push. That had been the plan, at least. But Mousey was stronger than I’d thought. I tried to lunge forward, to push him in, but he must have guessed somehow. He grabbed hold of my hair and pushed back, yelling and swearing like a mad thing. The dog got excited and started to bark. Then it bit me on the leg.