How do you fight an entity invisible to adults but not much to children? How do you stop a creature which comes through darkness and preys upon the young, enticing those who do see it to come with it into that darkness?

Not quite a clown or jester or anything in between, the creature known as The Harlequin comes once darkness has fallen, appearing friendly, a little strange perhaps but friendly indeed within its own appearance.

It speaks in song; it speaks in rhyme, and it speaks of a place where only children can go, and she can bring them there. It prances, it leaps, and it physically rotates as it promises of a place you just have to go see.

If and when a child speaks of monsters and of all thing things strange hiding in the closet or lying under the bed, how quick are we as adults to dismiss that as being something created by a child's own overactive imagination? It is easy just to have a look in the closet and check beneath the bed and say that all is fine when the child knows for sure that it isn't all fine.

A father brings his six-year-old to bed though the six-year-old does not wanna go, saying that she will come again as she had done more than once before, and he does not like her, she frightens him. He doesn't want to go anywhere with her. Dad says no one will come and take anyone anywhere though dad should know better, for as it goes, he has seen her too, however he does not remember.

Leaving the room and hearing the boy speak the work 'Harlequin' he perhaps does remembers or at least begins to. When dad had been a boy, when he had been six-years-old, he had been visited by an entity calling itself The Harlequin. In time he forgot, how could he have forgotten her over-sized eyes, her singing, rhyming, and prancing?

Just the thoughts of her make him shiver. She may not have been frightening but still, she is real? Nah, she can't be, but what if she is? And his son now sees her? His heart sinks upon returning to his son's bedroom for he is not there; the boy is nowhere to be seen. Has he gone with The Harlequin?

Next time a child tells you something extraordinary, will you dismiss it completely? Will you believe the child? Maybe you will consider the possibility that what they perceive to be real actually is something very real indeed.