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He’d clenched his fists. Clenched them hard, so his knuckles were turning the colour of chalk. Now Sarah could see blood, trickling out from between his fingers. She guessed that he’d dug his nails into his palm, that he’d actually cut himself open that way, although…

Although that wasn’t why the people had started gurgling. The surprising thing wasn’t the fact that there was blood, but that there was so much of it. It was running in streams from each of his hands, thinner than any healthy being’s blood should be, as if he’d just turned on a tap and let it all flood out. There was a heavy spat‐spat‐spattering sound as the blood hit the wood of the platform, forming dirty red puddles among the piles of sawdust.

Sarah could feel her throat doing something funny. The words ‘heart in mouth’ sprang to mind, and she wondered whether the various internal parts of her body were deliberately rearranging themselves, just to stop her feeling ill. A conjuring trick, she told herself. A particularly sick and icky one, but a conjuring trick anyway. There was no way anybody could have that much blood in his…

…oh dear.

I.M. Foreman was opening up his fists now, revealing the wounds in his palms, two identical holes in the surface of his skin. Perfect circles. Sarah waited for the smell of blood and sand to hit her nostrils, but somehow it never did.

‘Stigmata,’ I.M. Foreman explained, with his face still turned up to the sky ‘My own field of expertise. Not much, I know, but it suits me. Blood’s my business. Blood’s what makes me different from everyone else, and call me a show‐off, but I don’t mind letting the world know it.’

Then he clenched his fists again. The blood stopped flowing in a second, and the crowd started breathing again, launching a wave of halitosis and gum disease across the arena. I.M. Foreman casually reached into one of the pockets of his waistcoat, removed a pair of shoddy white gloves, and began to pull them on. There were brown stains on the gloves, suggesting that this was the pair he usually wore after he’d bled for his art.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ I.M. Foreman told the crowd, although Sarah had difficulty imagining this audience worrying about anybody. ‘Plenty of life blood left. Sometimes I think I must be bigger on the inside than on the outside. For now, though, my part’s over.’

Satisfied, he cracked his knuckles, and the sound rang out around the arena. That done, he swept his dead eyes around the crowd again, and for some reason Sarah wasn’t at all surprised when he ended up ‘looking’ right in her direction.

‘Enjoy yourselves,’ the showman said, in the most serious‐sounding voice Sarah could possibly have imagined. ‘And, if you can’t enjoy yourselves, enjoy as many other people as you can. If you can’t do that, just remember what you’ve seen here. It’ll be important. Believe me.’

The next thing Sarah knew, the man was moving again, leaping into the crowd in a seemingly random direction. The people in his way made a variety of muffled grunting noises, but moved aside and let him land in the dust. A few moments later, he’d vanished into another part of the arena altogether.

Sarah was one of the last to drift away from the stage. She found herself gaping at the pools of blood I.M. Foreman had left behind, and wondering what might happen if she took a few drops of it back to the TARDIS, if she got the Doctor to do some kind of analysis. Whether it’d be as big an enigma as the blood that had seeped out of the console room floor.

* * *

There was, as Sarah had surmised, a definite architecture to the layout of the travelling show. There were the tents, there were the lines of people that made corridors between the tents, and just as importantly there were the empty spaces. Some of the show’s performers were standing in those spaces, and the people were moving around them, giving them room to go through their routines.

And they definitely needed room. Lots of room. The first performer Sarah passed was blowing fire, which she thought seemed fairly tame compared with