by Mark Jacobs
*****
“It is safest for you in there, young master. Trust me.” The Purloiner’s sugary voice seeped into the bottle and reverberated cyclically until it seemed he had bellowed his placations into a cave of a thousand echoes. Trust me, they called, fading amorphously, trust me, trust me, trust me…
“I couldn’t very well keep you on my hat when we undertake the tunnel road,” the Purloiner interrupted his own echo, “there’s no room left in my bag, and I don’t believe in keeping pockets. I’ve lost far too many pennies to holes in pockets. Don’t sulk–you’re going to meet a princess! Could be your courage will earn you a kiss.” The Purloiner gave Pence a chance to reply, but with his legs pumping all the while and the iron tires screaming, he heard nothing the boy may have said.
“I don’t know why you’re so put out. I should like to be dunked in a bottle of brew.”
The bicycle squealed as the pedals raced the chains and the rusty gears spun like tops, but the ride was ever smooth. “Truly, the tunnel road is no place to be gallivanting around up there like a sightseer,” said the Purloiner. “It’s as black as the Kingdom of Crows all the way, except where you can see the barest outline of the road by the glowing red eyes of blood-sucking vampire bats. There are pits a thousand leagues deep and turns and twists that make corkscrews look straight, most on roads as narrow as your nose. Nightmarish monsters may devour us. Fire bursts from the cracks in the walls without warning. There is not a safe breath the entire way, and it will take us all the night to go it. I have crossed safely in the past but that gives us no advantage today–so plentiful, so terrifying are these perils. There is no strategy to survival, but to wing it and hold our breath.”
From the woods there came a howling.
“When I touched your head with my bare thumb, young master, I felt something… familiar… old… something I have felt before.” He paused. “It was… like a pulse. As though I held a bird in my hand and felt its heart flutter as I crushed it. What was that? It tugs at my memory…”
The Prince could still not hear if Pence spoke, near though his ears were to the boy. “Still brooding, eh? Believe me, it’s darker out here now than it is in there. We near the mountains.” A moment later, he asked, “Would you like to hear a tale, young master? Perhaps it will keep both of our minds off the long road.”
Inside the bottle, Pence perked up. “Oh yes, tell me the one about the boy in the garden, that’s my favorite! Salty wenches. Liberal bloodshed. But change the ending so that the Prince loses.”
“The entrance approaches shortly,” the Purloiner said solemnly. “The garden may be lost to us forever now, you know; it jumps about so. And the Princess may very well be dead and decayed. Here… we are entering the tunnel. The hour for a scare is come…
