The short story "Click Clack the Rattle Bag" by Neil Gaiman is narrated by an aspiring but unpublished writer who is waiting for his girlfriend and her friends to arrive with some wine and food. In the meantime, he is spending time with a boy who purports to be his girlfriend's younger brother. The boy asks the narrator to tell him a bedtime story that is scary but not too scary. All that we know of the boy is through the viewpoint of the narrator.

The first description of the boy is that he is precocious. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, this means that he is "exceptionally early in development or occurrence; exhibiting mature qualities at an unusually early age." In this case, the narrator seems to think that the boy is unusually intelligent and perceptive for someone his age.

As they go upstairs towards the boy's room, the boy tells the narrator about click clack the rattle bag stories. They feature innocent-seeming monsters that lure people to their lairs and then feed on them. At first the details of the story merely seem to be another example of the boy's precocity. The boy even holds the narrator's hand, supposedly for reassurance. He carries on with his click clack story until he and the narrator reach his room. Here the story takes a dark turn, as the narrator hears the click clack "like dry bones in thin bags" and the boy pulls him into the room.

The end of the story reveals a sinister aspect to the boy's storytelling, but we don't really know what happens. Perhaps the boy feeds on the narrator, or perhaps the boy is simply good at telling stories. When you analyze the boy's character, you need to decide based on your reading of the story whether the boy is a harmless, precocious child who merely wants a story and some company, or a sinister monster.