“I don’t think he’s oak anything!” I replied. “Come on!”

We scrambled to our feet just as the clown set off across the grass, speeding toward us in a tiny, multicolored car. I looked ahead with a sinking heart. We really were in the middle of nowhere, with grass all around, the river in the far distance, and nobody else in sight. Anybody who had come to the park at that time of night would now be at the circus, watching the show.

“Run, Tim!” I gasped.

The clown was getting nearer. I could see his face, even less funny than usual, the greasepaint livid in the moonlight. In seconds he would catch up with us and run us down. But then there was an explosion. The hood of the car blew open, the wheels fell off, water jetted off the radiator, and smoke billowed out of the boot. The clown must have pressed the wrong button. Either that, or the car had done what it was designed for.

“Which way?” Tim panted.

I turned and looked back. For a brief, happy moment, I thought we had left the circus folk behind us, but then something whizzed through the darkness and slammed into the bark of another tree. It was a knife—but thrown from where? I looked up. There was a long telephone wire crossing the park, connected to a series of poles. And, impossibly, a man was standing, thirty feet above the ground, reaching for a second knife. It was a tightrope walker. He had followed us along the telephone wires and was there now, balancing effortlessly in midair. At the same time, I heard the sudden cough of an engine and saw a motorcycle lurch across the lawn. It was being driven by one of the brothers in white leotards. He had two more brothers standing on his shoulders. The fourth brother was on top of the other two brothers, holding what looked horribly like an automatic machine gun. The motorcycle rumbled toward us, moving slowly because of the weight of the passengers. But as I watched, it was overtaken by the three sisters on their unicycles. The moonlight sparkled not only on their sequins but on the huge swords that one of the other performers must have given them. All three of them were yelling in high-pitched voices, and somehow I knew that I wasn’t hearing a Russian folk song. The man on stilts came striding toward us, moving like some monstrous insect, throwing impossibly long shadows across the grass. Somehow he had got ahead of us. And finally, to my astonishment, there was a sudden bellow and a full-sized adult elephant came lumbering out of the trees with a girl in white feathers sitting astride its neck. This would have to be the lovely Tina Trotsky. And despite the law, the Russian State Circus did have an animal or two hidden in its big top.