The Ringmaster's Revenge

THe Ringmaster's Revenge: Phase Three

Phase Three

1month: 7days: 5hours

Until the Ringmaster’s Revenge

Grift

The boy sat curled against the wall of his cage.  It was hard to keep his face away from the feces spoiling the crunchy paper beneath him, so he rested his face between the bars hoping his master wouldn’t see.  There was a hurt between where food went in and where it came out.  A hurt that came and went and hid behind the knobby little knot in the very center of his body.  He rubbed it, whining.  Sleep was hard to come by on account.  To help ease the pain he nibbled at the least soil articles under his feet.  When the boy was satisfied he finally fell asleep but only for a moment.  There was a noise outside, though he couldn’t tell if it was the master because there was a blanket blocking the view.  He closed his eyes again then felt something brush his face.

The boy jumped back with a shriek that rattled the bars.  There was something in the cage.  Something awful.  It hung from the roof and hissed.  A wiggling green stick with a tiny pink tongue ready to taste the boy.  He screamed and the monster fell in beside him with a thump.  Another appeared.  It dropped too.  The boy howled drowning out the laughter answering his panicked shouts.  As the blanket disappeared he squinted up to see the thin silhouette of the Master, grinning beyond the bars.  As the latch on the door clanked, the boy sank back to stay with the lickers.  Better them.  But it was too late; the cold stick hand was reaching and reaching and reaching for him.

****

Grift jerked, smacking his head on the porch he was hiding under.  He cursed himself first for having the nightmare then again for what it meant.  He’d been sleeping on the job.  Poking his head out of a hole in the latticework, he surveyed the street to the left followed by the right.  The sight on that side was not a comforting one.  He had missed the wagon.  They’d been tracking its route through town for days, waiting for the best time to strike.  Now they would have to leave empty handed or stay another three days.  That and there was the pending yelling to consider.

“I don’t know, Ol’Grifter, maybe we can catch it,” he said to himself while brushing the frigid dust off his knees and the cobwebs from his hair.  He took to the shadows cast by the sunlight failing over the faraway fields and skipped down the main road.  Grift couldn’t have been asleep for more then fifteen minutes, judging by the sky, and a wagon carrying that many goods would be weighed down.  Too slow to travel too quickly.  He moved at a speedy pace until he caught sight of it bouncing along on its way towards the main gate out of town

Since he’d slept through his one surefire chance at security, the trick would be to get inside the wagon without being seen.  The cart wouldn’t stop again like it had in front of the post office, so he’d have to jump and pray.  When he got close enough, he searched for witnesses and, finding none, took a running leap into the covered wagon bed.  He didn’t weigh much but still it creaked.  hoping it had gone unnoticed, Grift reached for a silver pen-set tucked among the bolts of silk while remembering his father’s advice to take as much small packages as he could carry.  Then he heard a yell as the screen blocking the driver’s box was torn aside.  Startled, Grift dropped everything and stumbled off the back of the wagon, falling in the dirt.

“Thief!  Stop him.  Thief!  Wagon bandit!” shouted the merchant.  Lanterns flickered to life on either side of the road as the boy ducked into the protection of the fields.  Though he’d never been to the tropics, Grift had often taken to cornfields when attempting to evade trouble and imagined hiding among the cornstalks was a great deal like being in the jungle.  Foreign bugs.  Dense foliage that bit the flesh.  Itchy rashes.  It was a good place for a former beast-boy.  Unfortunately, the harvest had reduced his favorite hideout to barren land.  Amidst the remote ramblings of an angry village, he skirted the broken backbones of the cornstalks and headed for the woods.