"Take care," I said, turning aside and breaking eye contact.
"You too," she croaked, then sobbed loudly and stumbled away. With a quick "Goodbye", Alice hurried after her, and the two women slipped through the trees, back to the city, supporting one another as they went.
That left just me, Harkat and Evanna.
"Any idea where the Cirque's playing?" the witch asked. We shook our heads. "Then it's lucky that I do and am going there," she smiled. Standing between us, she looped her arms around my left arm and Harkat's right, and led us through the forest, away from the city and its underground caverns of death, back to where my voyage into the night first started the Cirque Du Freak.
CHAPTER TWO
ALEXANDER RIBSwas sleeping in a large tyre hanging from a tree. He always slept curled up it kept his body supple and made it easier for him to twist and contort when he was performing. Normally he kept the tyre on a special stand in his caravan, but occasionally he'd drag it outside and sleep in the open. It was a cold night for sleeping outdoors the middle of a wintry November but he had a thick, fur-lined body-bag to keep the chill out.
As Alexander snored musically a young boy crept towards him, a cockroach in his right hand, with the intention of dropping it into Alexanders mouth. Behind him, his older brother and younger sister looked on with impish glee, urging him forward with harsh hand gestures whenever he paused nervously.
As the boy neared the tyre and held up the cockroach, his mother always alert to mischief stuck her head out of a nearby tent, ripped her left ear off and threw it at him. It spun through the air like a boomerang and knocked the cockroach from the boy's pudgy fingers. Yelping, he raced back to his brother and sister, while Alexander slept on, unaware of his narrow escape.