“Shit,” I said again. At this rate, Ratboy would be out in no time. I looked around for something to use. There was an old shopping trolley nearby. It was missing its wheels, but it was still good. I started to drag it toward the pit. It was pretty heavy. I’d almost got where I wanted to be, when I heard the sound of footsteps. It was Goldie, looking alarmed, as if he’d expected to see someone else.

“Ziggy, what are you doing?” he said.

For a moment I wanted to push him into the water too. Then I had a better idea.

I said: “He wanted to do things. Charlie pushed him, then he ran.”

Goldie’s eyes widened. “What sort of things?”

“Sexual things, you moron,” I said. “The kinds of things that perverts do.”

Some kids are scared of Satanists. Some are afraid of their teachers. Some live in fear of bullies, the Bomb, or of getting cancer. With Goldie, it was perverts. To be fair, his dad was always warning us in Church about perverts hanging around the clay pits, trying to pick up little boys. And to be fair, Goldie’s dad was half right. Except that the problem was never the clay pits, but somewhere much, much closer to home.

I said: “I think we might have found the reason for Charlie’s Condition.”

Goldie’s eyes widened still further. “You mean—you think he knew him?”

“I’m pretty sure they were meeting here. That’s why Charlie kept coming round. But recently, he’s been trying to change, and I think that’s when things got nasty.”

In a few words I painted the scene. It actually all made sense. And finally, when Goldie looked over the side of the Pit Shaft and saw who Charlie’s abuser was—a boy from the slums, no less, a dirty Sunnybanker—

Ratboy had managed to haul himself almost out of the water by then. But the clay bank of the pit was steep, and he was too heavy with water to climb. The sticking-out tree root had broken off, and now he was trying to use his hands to dig himself a place to stand. You had to hand it to Ratboy. He was pretty tough, all right.

Goldie and I looked down at him—covered in mud from head to foot, only his eyes looking out at us from behind a mask of yellow clay. If he’d said a word—just one—I don’t think we would have done it. But behind that mask of clay he didn’t even look human, and the sounds that were coming from his mouth—wheezing, chattering, choking sounds—didn’t sound human either.

Goldie was watching him, mesmerized. I think he was playing it in his head, counting the possibilities. There were only two. One: we let Ratboy go, or—

“We can’t let him go. He’s seen us,” I said.