“Ten palette loads of prime greased leather, and you tell me they were dragged into the sewers by RATS??!! What in blazes are rats going to do with TEN palette loads of MY best greased leather?!”
The foreman looked sheepish, but stood his ground, “Well Sir, there’s what looks like rat tracks, and drag marks like, and they go straight to the storm drain, Sir, so……”
“You imbecile! Some gang has stolen the lot, and I’m not too certain you arn’t in on it too! Double the night guards and start asking round the men, someone MUST have seen something!”
In another part of the port, a baffled group of workmen gazed at the space where their hut had stood… “Well, it were only old bits of scrap wood, but who would want it?”
At the ironworks, the owner was trying to explain to his irate customer why his consignment of five hundred kitchen range oven windows would be late. “We had them ready, all five hundred, with the special glass and everything, all packed for shipping, loaded on a rail wagon, just waiting for the engine to pick it up… Next time we looked, the wagon was gone, not a trace……”
Down at the coal merchants, the mystified man turned to his wife and said “I know we don’t use much, and got stuck with all those barrels, but… how can twenty full barrels of granulated charcoal just vanish like that?”
Throughout the warehouse and port district other things disapeared from the face of the earth. A barrel of rivets, a bale of cotton wadding, a crate full of extra strong thread spools, pots of glue, an assortment of varied and unusual items.
In a disused, abandoned and forgotten old warehouse, the empty space rapidly filled, and shortly there was the sound of industry and high pitched voices calling to one another, but what, unnoticed and hidden, was going on?
[This is going to be good! ^_^]
Awesome work….er…..the rats ;)
The spice merchant looked along his work bench at the neat, conical piles of powders lining it’s surface, then at the back door, slightly ajar, it’s lock sprung. Turning to face his assistant, he asked
“ALL the spice shakers?”
His assistant nodded and looked down at his feet..
“and the spices.. still here, and in tidy piles..?”
The assistant nodded again, and his shoulders drooped as he realised what the next question would be..
“Errrrr……… seperate piles?”
A few barely distinguishable mumbles were all the young man could manage, before the inevetable explosion.
“BY COLOUR?!!??!!”