Page 16 - Sample Flip Builder Project

be seen again; sold, perhaps, in some village far away,

along with clothes pegs, horses and fortunes.
And there was the man; the silent, scowling, black-

aura’d, child-hating man who lived wild in the forest,
venturing forth only to beg bread and frighten children. The

children would cry out warning of his approach, hide to

watch and thrill, then run shrieking to their mothers when he
spied them, as he always did. He could smell children, the

villagers said, like the cannibalistic giants of legend.
There were no telephones, no routes to speedy

salvation. At dusk, the villagers went indoors. Curtains were

closed, doors barred and bolted, fires huddled around. An
unexpected knock on a night-time door would elicit instant

panic. Women and children would cower in corners,
husbands and fathers arm themselves with pokers, axes and

courage and whisper, through wood, ‘Who’s there?’
Nights were coal mine black, and silent. People-silent,

not creature-silent. Owls and cats came out to do duty in the

peopleless blackness. If you listened carefully, the dying
screams of mice could chill your blood, or you might hear

their courtships and couplings in the rafters and skirting
boards. A multitude of prowling, hungry cats was too small a

force to keep down the armies of mousedom which bred
generation after generation in those rackety barns and

cottages.

The children, lying abed listening, wide eyes peeping
out from tented blankets, heard everything, child senses

aided by child terrors as acute as any wild creature’s. They

listened for the Sandman, who would come, they’d been
told, to take them away; the Sandman with a sack over his

shoulder, like Santa Claus, to carry off any child not

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