Esme sighed with irritation and turned to go back in, almost bumping into her two potential customers who were on their way out. The man touched her arm.

‘Thanks. We’ll be back.’

Esme’s heart sank. No they fucking wouldn’t. She tried to look like it didn’t matter, wished them a nice evening and watched them retreat up the main street. Esme looked in the window at the painting that had lost her the big one of the week, and cursed the Indian under her breath in language that would never appear in a fine art catalogue.

Sam could hardly breathe. He leaned back against the shallow alcove of brick that separated the Japanese-owned Okay Gift Emporium from the Silver Book Den, and let the skin of his sweating back grate on the jagged mortar as he slumped to his heels.

Tricks. It was all tricks. He tried to focus his eyes through the falling snow to the cars parked in the street. Normal cars. Normal street. He had to keep remembering that none of this madness was real. Those figures in the gallery window had not really been alive. He’d seen them before they started to move and they were just ordinary stick figures, playing their sad part on a piece of shit, phoney ethnic art. Loathsome junk for the tasteless wealthy but no different really from the bead key-rings and trashy kids’ embroidered moccasins they sold in the gift shops as ‘Kinchuinick crafts’. But as he passed, he’d heard something call out to him through the window in what sounded like a chorus of tiny piercing voices. He’d turned his head slowly and gawked through the glass.

The ochre stick figures had become expertly painted images of his family. Blinking didn’t help, didn’t clear the picture, but then he knew it wouldn’t. So he’d looked. There was Katie, arms out trying to protect her children behind her, and they were crying out to him as they cowered from the great beast that towered above them, its jaws widened in an outlandish gape, drooling with the anticipation of its prey. They moved and squealed like tiny cartoons, but they were calling to him nevertheless.

And he called back, put his hands on the window to show them he was there, until the tiny, painted nightmare beast turned to look at him and laughed a laugh like a death rattle.

Sam had fallen to his knees, saliva drooling slightly from his open bottom lip, until the picture faded back into the dumb hunting scene it had been. No, not had been. Always was.

Tricks. Just a bunch of tricks.