Walking amongst the stands, you soon come across one selling balloon animals. Several are tied to it, floating freely in the wind, silently wavering in the air as though trying to escape some evil emanating from this place. Obviously, that's not what's going on here - it's just a circus, and they're just balloons - but the absence of a vendor, customers, or most any people at all, combined with the dead silence of the night (aside from the howling wind), has your imagination traveling in strange directions.
Inspecting the balloons in closer detail, you find that they aren't ordinary balloon animals. Rather than being twisted into shape from a single long balloon, each appears to have been made so that it'd take on the shape of whichever animal it was meant to be as soon as it was filled with air (or, as the case may be, helium). There isn't much of a variety - you can see a blue elephant with a noodle-like trunk and large plate-shaped ears, a red fox with a large and puffy tail, a yellow giraffe with a towering neck, and a black cat that sits on the air in a mischievous sort of way are all that there is. You would have expected more variety, or at least more copies of those same four balloons, but can find neither no more than you can find whoever is actually meant to be selling them.
At first you think of just walking on, but something draws you to the balloons. There's something strange about them. Not bad, nor good, just... strange. Besides that, you haven't so much as touched one for years, and certainly not any animal-shaped ones. What could be the harm in taking one of these?