The Curious Case of the Cursed Crucible Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Curious Case of the Cursed Crucible

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Curious Case of the Cursed Crucible

  Constance Barker

  “The Crucible is essentially an open vessel, a dish, a mortar, or a cauldron, open to the outside world yet capable of containing material. Substances and energy patterns can be put into the crucible and be acted upon by some agent, and some part of this substance can also be drawn off or removed so enacting a kind of purification.”

  Adam McLean, The Alchemical Vessel as Symbol of the Soul

  Copyright 2018 Constance Barker

  All rights reserved.

  Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Chapter One

  Destiny’s Point was in the middle of a gorgeous spring that filled me with its infectious enthusiasm. Flowers were blooming everywhere, birds were flitting about, and in all the yards, weeds were growing like... weeds. It looked fresh, but I have little patience for yard work. Fortunately, the shop had only a small patch of grass and some hedges that Clarence seemed to enjoy trimming.

  So, instead of tending the hyper blooming universe, I decided to go to Enid’s house to play a game or two of chess. It was a game that neither of us was very good at, which made losing no big deal, and we generally had a good time.

  This day, however, even holding my own against Enid’s mediocre game seemed to be a difficult challenge. “My goodness, Cecilia,” Enid said. “If you want to just give me your queen, then I’m sure I will take it, but unless you’ve gotten incredibly crafty, I’m afraid I don’t see the point. Am I missing something? Is this some astounding sacrifice play?”

  I looked at the board and finally saw what she had seen. “That, Enid, is my patented ‘Queen blunders into endgame’ move. It gets its name from the obviousness of the blunder and the fact that it inevitably ends the game. It just doesn’t end it in my favor, unfortunately.”

  “That’s rather sweet of you, Cecilia, throwing the game that way,” Enid said. “But it doesn’t count if you are just distracted. I think something besides bad playing is bothering you. Would you like to talk about it?”

  “She does seem that way,” Edgar said from his seat by the front window. I looked over at him and more or less through him. It made me marvel, as I often did, at the fact that I had a ghost for a companion—like it or not. Me, who’d never even had an invisible friend as a child, had a constant companion that most people couldn’t see or hear. I found that remarkable.

  For those of us who could see him, Edgar appeared to be a dignified man of about forty, who wore Victorian dress. Depending on the conditions and his energy level, his appearance ebbed and flowed. Sometimes he looked rather substantial and other times less so, almost ethereal—a gaseous presence that clung tenaciously to form. Contact with the physical world took away his strength and made him harder to see and so did strong light.

  Nonetheless, he was a substantial presence in my life and apparently would remain one for some time.

  Despite being unearthly and vaporous, Edgar tended to get edgy whenever I was engaged in anything that kept me sedentary for too long. He preferred to be out doing things. Partly that was curiosity and it made a certain amount of sense when you considered that, before I accidentally released him he had been locked up for who knew how long in a cursed pen box. Even he didn’t know how long he’d been in there... or why. I’d found him in the back room of the store Uncle Mason left me and opened the box to see what was in it.

  Edgar was in it.

  Opening the box released Edgar, but he came with a minor curse that tied him to whoever opened the box. So now he was tethered to me and I to him. He could only go a few hundred yards from me... or I from him. Although none of us had a clue what the curse was about, we did know it made him my ghostly shadow and me his ball and chain. And we were both tied to the box.

  Fortunately, Edgar and I got along pretty well. That was a good thing, considering the circumstances. But he could get snippy, even sarcastic. According to him, I had my faults too, but who can trust what a ghost says?

  At the moment, relevant to the current topic—me—both Edgar and Enid were right, of course. I was distracted. I had thoughts and concerns spinning around in my head. That shouldn’t have surprised anyone, least of all me, given that since Uncle Mason’s death, I’d been spending most of my days chasing down and storing safely away cursed object—magical artifacts.

  Uncle Mason had been an Antique Dealer and that’s what they did. Enid had been one too. Somehow, I had wound up assuming his mantle. That thrust me into a world I barely understood. A world of magic and spells and things I’d never really given much thought to. Naturally, that made for a confusing life that frequently presented me with challenging decisions, some of which constituted moral dilemmas.

  Unfortunately, although I’d shared some things with Clarence Copperfield, my partner as an Antique Dealer and the manager of the curiosity shop Uncle Mason had left me, I wasn’t ready to share my current concerns with Enid. Talking about what was bothering me would just unsettle her. There was too much I didn’t understand. To put it simply, I was rather mixed up.

  I even had trouble explaining it to myself. You see, because of some things I’d noticed, I wasn’t at all certain that we were in the correct present. How weird does that sound? How can a person even suggest that with a straight face? But it felt real, to the extent that there can be any reality in that idea. I’d started experiencing some memories, recalling things that came out of a past that flat didn’t fit with the way things were now. They didn’t even fit with me being who I thought I was. How could you talk through that over chamomile tea?

  My concerns came to a head, got a sharp focus, when we, Clarence and I and Lila Twill had gone to London in pursuit of a cursed mirror. The mirror was a magical artifact that allegedly showed the viewer alternative time lines—world’s that might have been, or did happen, but parallel to this one. We’d already dealt with an artifact that could change the time line. We thought we’d stopped Walter, my ex-fiancé, from using it, but what if we had been too late? Or what if someone else had altered the time line? Maybe there was another artifact that changed timeliness in a different way.

  The mirror represented a chance for me to see if the memories I had fit a different time line.

  See where this is going?

  When we got our hands on the mirror, I fully intended to use it to get some hard answers. But there was a problem. There is always a gotcha. We’d learned, at times at great cost, that using the artifacts, even rather innocuous ones, inevitably has consequences. You pay a price for using the magical power. Every time. And the more powerful the artifact, the higher the cost, the more dire the consequences. Of course, withou
t some kind of reference, you have no idea how powerful any given artifact is. Some surprise you.

  The point is... when it came down to it, I didn’t have the courage to take a long hard look. But I did take a short peek. I looked into the scrying glass and witnessed myself walking down the aisle at my wedding. I looked happy, but when the view shifted, and I saw my groom, I cried out. The groom was Walter, my ex-fiance. I shuttered the mirror, not willing to look at it any longer. I don't know if I made it down the aisle in that other time line or not. I couldn't bare to find out. Whatever happened, I reluctantly turned the mirror over to Beatrice and Albert. They are Antique Dealers too and have been at it longer than Clarence and I. They wanted to hide the mirror safely away in the Grand Storehouse, which is where we store the most dangerous artifacts. And that was the end of that. I’d let that opportunity slip by.

  I remembered thinking that learning the truth that way, if it would actually tell me the truth, entailed a number of risks that outweighed the relief I’d get from knowing. I still didn’t know if that was true or if I’d just been rationalizing my cowardice.

  In my defense, during that trip things had gotten complicated. I’d learned that Lila’s father, Daniel Twill was lost in the Grand Storehouse (and a surprisingly easy thing to happen.) Even that story got complicated and soon everything about the mirror was mixed up with Daniel Twill and another craziness.

  Worse, if my thin grasp of reality, or my sense that there might be more than one reality, to be precise, was correct, that meant Enid herself was entangled in all the loose ends of unfinished time line. She and Uncle Mason. I even had memories of them as my parents. That was just one of the loose ends that seemed to by flailing about and not even the nastiest one.

  I wanted to tell her all this. She knew a lot of the history, she’d been Uncle Mason’s sweetheart and partner until they parted ways over some important issues. I thought she would have thoughts or insights. But I’d decided to wait. I wasn’t going to talk to Enid about those matters until I had some idea what was going on. Assuming that ever came about.

  So, given that I refused to tell her what was really bothering me, I came up with a plausible story, which is a nice term for a lie. “I’m just worrying a lot about the curiosity shop,” I said. Along with the thankless task of keeping the world safe from miscellaneous artifacts, the shop was my inheritance.

  “What’s wrong with the shop?” she asked.

  “I’m not a business person, but Clarence tells me we are in trouble financially. He’s very stressed out about that. So I need to figure out what to do.”

  “What’s the problem?” she asked.

  “Time, mostly. We’ve spent so much time chasing after artifacts so that we can lock them away, that the store stays closed most of the time. Our customers can’t buy if the store isn’t open, so we aren’t making ends meet.” I’d actually inherited Clarence along with the shop; he’d been running it for Uncle Mason and now ran it for me. That was a good thing. A very good thing. What I knew about operating a retail establishment wouldn’t have filled one of Enid’s fragile china teacups.

  “Oh, dear me,” Enid said. “That’s unpleasant news.” She wrung her hands for a moment. “Would you like some more tea?” she asked, holding up the china pot. Chamomile tea was her staple and her tonic. She served it as a panacea that solved all ills and made an erratic world right again. Sometimes it even seemed to work.

  But now I was certain my bladder was about to float away as it was. “No, thank you. I couldn’t drink another sip.”

  “What on earth will you do? Here, have a cookie. You know you can’t stop hunting artifacts. That simply would not do. Not at all.”

  I’d resigned myself to that rather quickly. Amazingly fast, now that I thought about it. “No, I suppose we can’t do that. But Clarence tells me he has a plan to get us back into the black, if not into the green... if you get my meaning.”

  She nodded. “He can make it break even, but not necessarily be profitable.”

  “That would give us breathing room.”

  “And just what is this master plan of his?”

  “It has two parts. First, he said, rather reasonably, that while we are chasing artifacts there is no reason not spend a little time acquiring inventory for the store.”

  “I can see that, but I thought the problem was the store hours... keeping it open so you can sell them?”

  “It’s more a case of where,” I said. “He wants to sell items online—he wants us to have an eBay account.”

  “Is that a store?”

  Edgar materialized on the couch. “That’s the name of a virtual store,” he said.

  “Insight from a virtual person,” I teased.

  “Yes, it is.” He stared longingly at the teapot. “I do miss tea,” he said.

  “I’m surprised that being a ghost doesn’t diminish the desire for something like that,” Enid said. “I’d think that you’d forget about concepts like taste or hunger.”

  “You would think it would,” he agreed. “All I can imagine is that I must’ve loved my tea so much that the feelings still linger.”

  “A ghostly desire.”

  “Exactly.”

  The idea that he loved tea is speculation. Actually, Edgar doesn’t remember anything significant about his life before being a ghost. Things come up from time to time, but he doesn’t seem to remember much of his life before I found him, unleashed him really, by opening the pen box in which Uncle Mason had stored him.

  “Please don’t tell me any more about this online world,” Enid said. She made a wrinkled nose face and put up a hand, waving it as if a bad smell had permeated the room. I didn’t smell anything but lavender. “Please don’t tell me anymore than that. I’m finding the things that we deal with disorienting enough without even thinking about virtual places. The real places we go to are sometimes unreal enough, so excuse me if I say I’ll just take your word for the idea that Clarence has discovered a place to market them that doesn’t require a salesperson.”

  “That’s a good way to think of it,” I told her. “A way to imagine it and remain sane.”

  Enid was a good soul and again I felt the urge to talk to her about other things. This was a perfect opportunity, but raising the specter of Daniel Twill, who it seemed might be trapped the Grand Storehouse, and the possibility that the mirror might show us that things were not at all the way we thought they were... that was far too much for me to bring up. Especially when I knew little or nothing factual.

  As often as we jumped into the unknown, my caution seemed out of place, yet there was a nagging sense of wrongness about it all that I needed to explore on my own.

  As I sipped the inevitable chamomile tea we heard a car pull up out front. It was Clarence. “Well, perhaps he can tell you some of his more concrete ideas himself,” I suggested.

  Enid looked uncertain. “Everything is disappearing inside boxes, it seems. We put artifacts in magical boxes to contain them, to keep them from exerting a malevolent influence, and everyone else is putting things in electronic boxes to spread them like wildfire.”

  Edgar shrugged. “And you put me in my box periodically to keep me out of the way.”

  I laughed. “It’s a crazy old world.”

  “And a rather insane new world,” she said, rather stiffly. Then she went to let Clarence in.

  “I’ve got a lead,” he said. As usual, Clarence was overdressed in his blazer, an ugly plaid bow tie, and circular framed glasses that made him look older than his twenty-something years. I was never quite certain if he thought he looked dashing, or eccentric, or what. But he looked like Clarence.

  “Sit down, have some tea, take a breath, and tell us all about it,” Enid suggested. As always, Enid was eager to hear about artifacts. Although she’d retired from actively hunting them, she gave us information and insight, and often did things from her house to help us.

  As she'd let Clarence in, she’d made three suggestions, but Clarence only man
aged the first of those tasks before he started waving a tablet computer in our faces. “This blog post...”

  I took the computer and started reading. It was a rather sleazy looking blog that was allegedly about alternative medicine, but actually sold a number of varieties of snakes oil. There was a claim about a man who was cured of terminal cancer by an alchemical mixture that had been handed down from an ancient shaman. Conveniently, the cure was available in liquid and salve forms, right from the website or their outlet. Free shipping for online customers with orders of $99 or more, too. What a steal!

  “You aren’t buying the claim that this mixture cured him, I hope?” I asked.

  Clarence made a face. “Of course not. But there are all sorts of claims of miraculous cures on this blog.”

  “So?”

  “We’ve often found artifacts by tracking down what everyone assumed was bogus claims. There might be a healing artifact producing those apparent miracles.”

  Enid chuckled. “Where there’s smoke...”

  “We have to assume that these miracles are an illusion of some kind,” I said. “The curses the artifacts have don’t usually have beneficial effects.”

  “Yet, we do know that a concentration of claims of events that seem illogical, or even supernatural, often lead us to an artifact,” he said.

  “You seem awfully excited about chasing down the possibility of a maybe,” I said. “That isn’t like you. I count on you to be our resident skeptic.”

  “Well, the truth is that there is a second reason to make a field trip. There is an estate sale going on this weekend that looks like it might have some good items available. And it’s the same little town where a man who was miraculously cured six months ago currently lives. I suggest that we can go talk to him; even if it is nothing, if it’s bogus, then we go to the estate sale and acquire some goodies.”

  I snorted. “We get to track down the purveyor of a bogus miracle cure and then go to an estate sale on the same trip? Whoopee. I can hardly wait.”