The Curious Case of the Cursed Crucible

by Constance Barker

“You think so? He didn’t act like that, when you get down to it. Not that I saw.”

  “I think he was protecting you. He knew how dangerous being an Antique Dealer was and didn’t want to involve you. Or he might’ve been afraid that if he did involve you, the two of you might’ve disagreed about his methods, the way Enid disagreed with him and he didn’t want to lose you too.”

  Clarence looked up at the ceiling, considering those ideas, it seemed. Finally, he sighed. “Maybe so. I guess now we will never know.”

  I laughed. “The way things go around here, with our nonlinear existence, you might find out the truth someday.”

  “What do you mean by our nonlinear existence?”

  What I meant was that I was certain we were dealing with multiple time lines, an assortment of possibilities of our existence. This wasn’t a good time to raise that possibility with Clarence, though. I wasn’t sure there would be a good time for me to mention it, unless some proof was staring us in the face. He knew something of it, but not how deep my worries ran. “Oh, I’m just thinking of the way Walter tried to alter the entire fabric of time with the Antikythera mechanism.”

  “Right. That was close.”

  “Little things like that were what I was thinking of.”

  Clarence laughed. “Fortunately we stopped him.”

  “Fortunately.” But I still wondered. Was he the only one to want to use that artifact and change time? Had there been anyone around to stop Daniel Twill, or perhaps Uncle Mason? Or... I had no idea where that line of thought led me. I did know that the allure of artifacts, the desire to use them was strong. That was the reason we, as Antique Dealers, hid them away—to keep them from being used. But how did we know if we were successful? Lots of artifacts got used over the ages. How many people had gotten their hands on the Antikythera mechanism? It was only discovered in 1901 but it was an ancient device. It could’ve been used numerous times. It was believed to have been designed and constructed by Greek scientists in 87 BC.

  I sighed and began to arrange push pins on the map according to date, using different colors for each year. When I finished, I stepped back and saw a lovely line, with the pins ascending by color.

  “Look what we have here,” I said, pointing to the map. “You’ve gone back six years and we have twenty different... what are they? Sightings? Incidences of miraculous cures?”

  “You color coded them?”

  I nodded. “ A different color for each year and look—most are fairly recent. And the eight from this last year draw a meandering line that heads almost due East.”

  “And when you add this one....” Clarence hopped over and poked one last pin in the map, “...it’s only two months old. This could be where the traveling doctor performed the last life-extending miracle.”

  “The last that we know of. And if the reporting is correct, then the patient, this Alice Shirmer, should have about four months to live.”

  “It’s in the same direction from here as Ralph’s place—further West.”

  “Then we need to go have a talk with her—Alice—right away. Maybe this early in the process she’ll be more willing to share some real information than he was.”

  Clarence nodded. “And in the interest of efficiency, I suggest we swing by the estate sale again on the way.”

  I made a face that let him know the idea wasn’t bringing up pleasant feelings. “We already did that, remember?”

  “Yes, but I was just getting started looking at things. We had to run off before I bought anything.” He poked my arm. “Oh don’t worry, sad sack, you don’t have to shop and I won’t take long. I saw a few excellent and reasonably priced items there that I think we can sell profitably. I’ll just dash in and make an offer on those items—since it’s on the way...”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll wait in the car.”

  “They are some really nice things and they are reasonably priced.”

  “And they’ll be the same price if I wait in the car.”

  “I’d like to go in again,” Edgar said. “Some things felt homey.”

  I grinned. “You’re welcome to go as far as you can without me, but I don’t think you can make it in the door.”

  Clarence sighed again. “I was hoping that we’d do this together and make these outings more fun as well as good for the business. You are being such a drag.”

  “The things in that house smell of death, even more than at Ralph’s. I don’t need more reminders of how short life is, how little time we have to do everything we want to do.”

  Clarence didn’t answer. He poured the last of the coffee from the coffee maker into a thermos and we headed out to talk to the beneficiary of the latest miracle cure, by way of the estate sale.

  Chapter Six

  “You said you wanted to get a few items,” Edgar said. His voice sounded accusing. I glanced back at him from the front seat and saw he was perched on a small footstool. “This car is packed awfully tight.”

  Clarence chuckled. “I only got a few things.... at least relative to how many I wanted to buy. The cuckoo clock alone will pay for this trip. Besides, you said you like being around old things from the house.”

  “Around them, not on top of them. You filled the entire back seat with these musty old things and didn't leave me a place to sit.”

  I laughed at that. “Edgar, you are a ghost. You are insubstantial and don’t require physical space. You can sit anywhere.”

  “Being piled in with this junk makes me feel more substantial.”

  “Then you should like it,” I said. “You’ve been complaining about the inconvenience of being insubstantial, right?”

  He sniffed. “Some of these things smell dreadful. They are impregnated with years of pipe smoke and who knows what else.”

  “That’s the wonderful smell of old things, Edgar,” Clarence said.

  “It’s the wonderful inconvenience of sharing a seat with them,” he said.

  I was fairly sure Edgar’s less than delighted mood was mostly a reflection of his desire to find a miracle cure for whatever ailed him, or at least whatever made him so ethereal. It had to be tough not knowing exactly what he was. If you were a human dying, at least you could understand the situation. If you found yourself in a physical world and you were ethereal... that had to be difficult. So the idea that maybe you could find something to put you in harmony with the world you were in had to be a draw.

  When Clarence pulled up in front of a smallish house on a biggish lot, we went up and knocked on the door. No one answered. “I guess we’ll have to stake her out,” Clarence said.

  “You want to sit in the car and wait for her, with no idea of how long she’ll be gone?” I asked.

  “Well, we don’t seem to have any other hot leads,” Clarence said. “And the clock is ticking on this one.”

  “Do we have to smoke cigarettes and drink bad coffee?” Edgar asked.

  Clarence gave him a puzzled look and I laughed. “He and I were watching an old cop show on television the other night. He asked why they smoked cigarettes and drank coffee all the time when they were staking out a suspect.”

  “And you said it was part of the code,” Edgar said. “They had to do it.”

  “I was teasing you,” I said. “I thought you’d realize that.”

  “How would I figure that out?”

  “Never mind,” Clarence said. “The truth is that there is no code for stakeouts, Edgar. Cops might have rules about important things like doughnuts, but we are freelance stake out people.”

  “Stalkers,” Edgar said.

  “We aren’t stalking anyone.”

  Edgar tented his fingers. “A stalker is defined as a person who pursues game, prey, or a person stealthily. I believe an objective observer would conclude that that’s what we are doing here.”

  “Okay, then we are stalkers,” I said. “Let him have the point, Clarence. It’s a technical win.”

  “Still a win,” Edgar said, beaming.

  “We won
’t be stealthy,” Clarence protested. “We are just going to sit in our car, in front of her house, and wait for the woman to get home, okay?”

  “Fine,” Edgar said.

  I’d never had children or any siblings, but I was quite sure that this was something parents had to deal with on a regular basis.

  So we sat in the car and stalked, or staked out the house in an unstealthy manner, depending on who was telling the story. Eventually, the strategy paid off. We watched a woman turn her car into the driveway, get out of her car, and disappear into the house.

  “Let’s go say hello,” Clarence said.

  We got out and walked to her front door just as she was coming back out.

  “Miss Shirmer,” I called out, “can we ask you a few questions?”

  “No time,” she said. "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!"

  “I think we just found Alice’s White Rabbit,” Edgar said.

  “We just have a few questions. It will just take a minute.”

  She wrinkled her nose and Edgar’s comparison seemed even more apt. “I really, really, don’t have the time, I’m afraid.”

  “Is that because you only have four months to live?” Clarence asked.

  “None of us really have the time, you know...” Then she stopped, stunned into immobility. Then she regained her composure. “How do you know about that? Are you with those other people?”

  “Other people?” I asked. "What other people?"

  “The other people pestering me about this. And I’ll tell you exactly what I told them—I don’t have time to talk about what happened and I’m not interested in talking about it anyway. Goodbye now.”

  “Some other people came by and asked you about the cure?”

  She looked ready to stomp her foot with impatience. Of course, we were blocking the path. She snorted. “Yes, of course, they asked about the cure. What do you think they wanted to know?”

  “Can you describe them, the people who asked?”

  The woman looked flustered, even more flustered than before. “What they looked like?"

  "Yes."

  "Which ones?”

  “All of them.”

  “There were several groups,” she said. Then she rattled off several vague descriptions that made me sure she hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the people at all. Who could blame her? Still, even from that, I was sure that some of them had to be tabloid reporters. Some sounded like cops. One man’s description didn’t sound like any of those, however—he stood out. “The one before last was a tall, thin, very white bald man, almost albino. He was incredibly polite. I rather liked him in an odd way.”

  “That has to be Belial Hohenheim,” I whispered to Clarence.

  He gritted his teeth. “I know.”

  “It’s very important we find out about the magical object,” I told the woman.

  “The object? What makes you think...” then she snorted. “Well, your friends said the same damn thing. There must be a story on the internet or something. They all talked about the importance that they be the ones to get their hands on some artifact or another and humanity benefiting... it’s crap, of course. I have no idea what that means.”

  “I only want to help my auntie,” I told her. “Humanity is on its own, but my auntie raised me and now she’s dying.”

  She looked down her long nose at me, suspicion in her eyes. “A dying relative? That’s why you are here?”

  “She sent me. She read about your cure on some blog that described you and other people who’d been helped. She told me that she’d heard there was someone, a doctor, who cured people miraculously. She begged us to find him for her.”

  She held herself stiffly. “Well, if you know that I’ve only got four months to live, then you know it isn’t a cure... The talk of being cured was just that stupid doctor of mine; he’d been trying an alternative treatment and decided this was his chance to be famous. He’s the one that said all that. Not me. As you seem to know, all I got was a reprieve.”

  “My auntie understands that. Like you, all she wants is a little more time. She wants to make arrangements, say goodbyes, and spend those last days with her infant daughter.”

  Clarence was giving me a somewhat astonished, but also pleased look as I weaved my fictional tale of woe.

  “All right. All right. If you will just leave me alone.”

  “We will,” I promised. "Just point us in the right direction."

  She looked toward the street. “All I can tell you is that this old man, this doctor or shaman, whatever he is, wasn’t much to look at. He was mild-mannered and nicely dressed. You’d never pick him out in a crowd... not at all. And he was honest. He told me he could give me six months extra, but that I would certainly die then. I said fine. He cooked up a potion of some kind, I took it, and he left. There wasn’t any magic or magical object involved. Not even a magic wand.”

  My heart sank.

  “What exactly did he do?” Clarence asked.

  “He mixed up a potion in a very old looking bowl.”

  “A bowl? What did it look like?”

  She shrugged. “Like a piece of junk. It was thick and heavy and he put some ingredients in it from a bag, and then put it over a flame. The stuff melted down into a paste. He fed me the paste. It tasted awful but I have to say that it made me feel great instantly. He said I’ll feel that good until.... well, until I keel over.”

  “This bowl, do you know what it was made of?” I asked.

  She obviously hadn’t been that curious. “Metal, I think. It looked a lot like hammered metal to me. Crudely made. But I didn’t touch it so I can’t be sure. It looked a bit like lead, not that I was worried about getting lead poisoning at that point.” She chuckled.

  “Where can we find him?”

  She shook her head. “I have no idea whatsoever,” she said, sounding relieved that this was true.

  “How did you find him?”

  “You’ve got that wrong. He found me. He showed up on my porch one day. He told me he knew my situation and offered me this... he called it a little respite from death.”

  Clarence looked at her. “But he really said up front, before he gave you the medicine, that after you took it you would only have six months to live?”

  She nodded. “Yes. He was very clear about that. He said that even if I would’ve gone into remission without the potion, if I took it I wouldn’t have even one day more than that and, if I noticed the time carefully, not even one minute more than six months. But the important thing is that I’d be healthy the entire time—not even catch a cold. So, instead of wasting away...”

  “Tell me,” I said, “what are you doing with that time?”

  She smiled, and opened the door to her house. Inside were suitcases. “I spent two months redoing my will, selling my house, and saying goodbyes. Now I’m going on a trip.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She waved a hand. “Everywhere. All the places I’ve wanted to go. I'm heading for Bali now, but in six months I’ll end up in the Greek islands. I already rented a sweet little place with a gorgeous view. If I meet nice people maybe I’ll have a final party.”

  That sounded like a rather delightful way to go, and I told her so.

  “I’m lucky,” she said. “And now I need to get to the airport. I intend to live every day I have left to its fullest and you are interfering with that so get the hell out of my way.” She pointed at Clarence. “I answered your questions, now you can help me put those bags in my car.”

  I stepped back. “Yes, Ma'am,” Clarence said.

  When Clarence had helped her load the SUV, she climbed in and drove off without one look back.

  “Another dead end,” Edgar said.

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “No?”

  “No. We’ve learned that we have competition. Belial Hohenheim and some unknown people are after the artifact as well,” I said. “Obviously, Ulrich has sent Bel after this artifact. It’s an odd coincidence.�
��

  As well as having garnered a healthy respect for coincidence, we’d encountered Bel before. He was a homunculus, a created being, a living artifact, although a rather nice one. Unfortunately, he served a man named Ulrich Steele, who wasn’t nice at all. He was polite to your face, but he was a gentleman mobster who worked and possibly was part of, the Cabal. He certainly spent time acquiring artifacts for them. We also knew that he was a killer. The fact that we were still alive only proved he was fallible.

  “I wonder what mischief the Cabal intends to wreak with this bowl?” Clarence said. “As far as we can tell, it seems to only do good.”

  “To give people false hope?” Edgar suggested. “That would be mean.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” I said. That didn’t seem to fit the facts or the way the Cabal operated. Being mean was just a side effect of the things the Cabal did.

  Clarence walked toward the car and we followed. “Do you think Bel has a GPS we can access?”

  “I can’t say for sure, but I doubt that is one of his traits.”

  “Then we will have to find him the old-fashioned way.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Other than just continuing to track the doctor and trying to do it faster than Bel, I have no idea.” Clarence looked at Edgar. “How’s the artifact sensor working, Edgar?”

  I smiled. As a created creature, Bel was also an artifact, which meant Edgar could be helpful in locating him. But Edgar just shrugged. “I imagine it’s doing fine, but if so, Belial isn’t anywhere around us now. No artifacts are.”

  Clarence nodded. “Then we need to go where he is.”

  “That’s inefficient. We need to find this doctor and his crucible before Bel does. That way we don’t have to fight the Cabal for it. As you’ll recall, that might not go well. So we’d do well to avoid him entirely if that’s possible. Besides, I’d rather see if we can get our hands on it before they do; maybe then we can be spared the trauma of having to find out what their plans are. That would be nice.”

  “Back to the original plan, then,” Clarence said delightedly. “All we have to do is find the doctor and his crucible first.”