ANSEN
Copyright©2007 by Ed Howdershelt
ISBN 1-932693-32-7
9781932693324
Chapter Two
Taking a penny from my pocket, I let it slide into the bowl. Ingrid hissingly took a breath and almost moved to stop me. The penny hit the glimmering patch and jumped an inch or so, then rapidly flipped a few times and ended up spinning on its edge in the center of the glimmer. The jumping paper wad hit it and was knocked out of the bowl.
Chuckling again, I said, "Cool." Looking at Ingrid, I said, "Not really worth a hundred bucks to me, but kind of neat, huh? What else does it do?"
Her left eyebrow arched high at me, then her gaze returned to the bowl.
"It makes things disappear," she said softly. "Or, it did. Before it was broken."
"Disappear? You mean like drop them in and they vanish?"
Nodding, she said, "Yes. It was as if they just fell through the bottom."
I watched the penny spin for a moment, then asked, "Ever get anything back out of it? Have you tried?"
Looking at me as if I was nuts, she very firmly said, "No."
"Why not?"
She didn't answer, but her startled, 'that wouldn't be proper' demeanor told me the bowl probably had some sort of religious significance to her. Right. Well, each to his or her own, and all that. I set my coffee down, spread some newspapers, and picked up the mold. When I turned it over, the penny fell out. I placed the mold upside down on the paper and began wrapping it.
"Uhm..." said Ingrid, her hand half-raised to stop me.
I stopped wrapping. "Yes'm?"
"You... ah... you don't have to do that. Not if..." her sentence trailed off.
"You want me to finish making the replica?"
Ingrid met my gaze for several moments before apparently coming to a decision and answering, "Yes. But I have to be here while you do it."
I started wrapping again with a slight shrug. "Okay, so bring it back tomorrow and we'll see about getting the bowl out without screwing up the mold. When you get home, unwrap it and set it in front of a fan."
Standing up and walking halfway around the table to place a hand on mine and again stop my wrapping effort, Ingrid softly asked, "Ed, how much more would you want to... to work on this bowl -- and nothing else -- until it's finished? And to let me stay here while you work on it? This is important to me. Very important."
'Ed?' She'd used my name for the first time that I could remember.
Her right hand rested on mine and her left hand rose to touch my shoulder for further emphasis as her breasts brushed my arm. I looked into her beseeching gaze and saw that her eyes didn't seem to match her gestures. There was no softness, no warmth, and her pupils had contracted tightly.
Glancing at her hand on mine, I met her gaze and asked bluntly, "Exactly what are you offering, Ingrid? No offense, but I think this Marilyn Monroe act is just a bit of manipulatory pressure to keep a man from saying no to you. I also think you're very uncomfortable doing it. Your eyes damned near turned to stone."
Ingrid's expression became almost impassive and her hands returned to her sides as she looked at me. After a moment, she said, "The question stands. How much?"
"Add another fifty and order a couple of large, no-anchovy pizzas for tonight's dinner because I'll be using the oven to dry the mold."
Her eyebrows went up, then her gaze narrowed. "That's all? Fifty dollars?"
Pulling the paper off the mold, I shrugged and said, "If you want to pay more, I won't mind."
I put the mold in the oven, set it to one-fifty, and clamped a little fan on the open door to keep the air moving. Ingrid handed me another fifty bucks. After gathering up the newspapers, I pointed to the calendar on the refrigerator door.
With a grin, I said, "Village Pizza's number is on the fridge calendar, milady. You can call for our dinner around six."
She followed me out to the back porch and watched as I set a couple of worn-out altar tile molds on the plastic-topped work table and filled them with scrap slip, then covered them with plastic wrap.
Touching the wrap, Ingrid said, "The details aren't very clear in these molds."
"Nope. They're shot, but I'll have a couple of quarter-inch thick clay tiles to work with later."
"Why are you covering them?"
"To keep the tiles damp and soft. They'll be ready for rolling by the time the bowl mold is dry enough."
"Rolling?"
"Like cookie dough. It'll speed things up a bit if we don't have to wait for liquid slip to solidify in the mold. Won't soak the mold, either. A ten-minute fill to establish a skin, then I'll dump the slip out and press the tiles around the inside."
Shaking her head, Ingrid interrupted me with a firm, "No."
I looked up and grinned at her as I chuckled. "No? Just like that; no?"
"Just like that. Don't ever put your fingers inside the replica bowl. Not even into the bottom of the mold itself, I think. Just don't. Just in case."
Shrugging, I said, "No problem. I was going to use another bowl to press it into place, anyway. That way I'll have a smooth interior from the start."
Ingrid seemed to consider that for a moment, said, "Oh," and then sat down heavily on one of the plastic chairs near the porch table and sighed.
"Ingrid," I said. She looked up and I continued, "I've handled weapons, explosives, wild animals, and other things that would have cheerfully taken my fingers off. This is no different. You let me know there was a risk. I saw the penny and I believe you and now I'll just work around it. Okay?"
She nodded, then sighed again and stood up to walk back to the kitchen, where she assembled another coffee and sat down at the kitchen table. I sat down across from her and sipped my own coffee as I wondered what sort of company she'd be during the mold-making process.
When the silence seemed to become awkward, I excused myself to turn on the computer and check the day's haul of email, which was somewhat more than I'd expected. WiccaWorks had several small retail orders and a wholesale order, as well as several catalog requests.
The Abintra Press email box held nine ebook orders, mostly for Palm format, and orders for two ebook CD's, which I made while I read the other messages and the newsgroups.
As I was bashing out a reply to a message about converting HTML ebooks to LIT format, Winston, my tortoise-shell cat, parked herself on a corner of the computer desk and looked at me intently.
"Yes, ma'am?" I asked.
"Aaahhh," she said. I reached to ruffle her chin and she looked at the kitchen door as she again said, "Aaahhh," this time in a questioning tone.
"Yeah, she seems okay. Hey, you're the security officer around here. Go check her out while I handle this stuff."
From the direction of the kitchen, Ingrid asked, "You have two cats?"
I didn't look around as I continued scuffling Winston and said, "I have three of 'em, but you won't see Charlie until ol' Winston, here, tells him you're okay."
Moocher saw that Winston was getting some attention and instantly decided he wanted some, too. When he hopped up to the desk, Winston gave him a desultory look and then looked at Ingrid before again looking at me.
"Yeah, go ahead," I said. "She probably doesn't bite."
Winston hopped down and headed toward the kitchen as Mooch took her place and leaned into my fingers. In the reflection from my monitor screen I watched Winston amble over to Ingrid and sniff cautiously. Ingrid leaned to pet Winston, then knelt to continue petting her.
"Don't pick her up," I said. "She doesn't seem to like that. She may get on your lap, though, when you happen to have one. That's a hint."
"Ah. Okay. Why don't I use that chair by your desk, then? Unless you'd rather I didn't see what you're doing?"
"Heh. File conversions aren't real personal stuff. I'm just sending an ebook to someone."
As she sat down, Ingrid asked, "What?"
Finishing my reply message, I said, "File conversions. How to make ebooks that'll work in a proprietary reader gadget."
"Like a Rocket eBook? A friend of mine has one of those."
"Yup. Or a Pocket PC, or the Palm gizmos."
"I have a Palm... gizmo. A Visor something. Someone gave it to me for my last birthday. I never use it."
"Reason?"
She grinned and shrugged. "I don't need it. I remember everything well enough."
"Same here for most stuff. Notes for the rest."
I clicked on the next message and found it to be essentially the same question, so I back-paged to the reply I'd sent and copied my answer.
Paging forward to the new message, I hit 'reply' and pasted the contents of the copy buffer into the open space, then adjusted the message somewhat for that individual and attached the ebook to the message.
When I hit the 'send' button, Ingrid said, "Wow. You made all that look so easy."
"It was easy. And it saved me from typing all that again."
"That doesn't look like my browser."
"It probably isn't, if you're still using what came with your computer. This is Mozilla."
"Mozilla?" She didn't seem to recognize the name and said, "I don't know very much about my computer yet. I've only had it for a month."
"Well, sit tight and watch, then. I have to add some stuff to my web pages."
The surprise in her voice bugged me as she asked, "You have a web site?"
"Yes'm. Two main sites and two that I use as backups. WiccaWorks has two and Abintra Press has two."
As I talked, I watched her faint reflection in the monitor screen. Her startlement seemed genuine enough; she'd stopped petting Winston and stared intently at my monitor as I switched programs.
Bringing up my browser, I loaded the WiccaWorks index page from the hard drive and let Ingrid see it for a few moments before clicking the 'stoneware pendants' link. Once the page had loaded with all the pictures, I clicked to view the source file and the page's HTML code popped up as text in an editing window.
After adjusting the italic and bold wordings in a few places, I saved the results and reloaded the page in the browser. It looked right, so I clicked up my FTP program, then sent the changed page to the two WiccaWorks websites. As a last step, I used the browser to go to the website and view the new 'stone pendants' page. All good.
I closed the FTP program, closed the editor and the browser, and turned to face Ingrid, who was still focused on the screen.
"Like I said," she said wryly, "You made that look easy."
"And like I said, it is easy. I could teach you enough to get you well-started with computing and the net before that replication bowl is finished."
She shook her head. "My computer came with a different kind of... main page, I guess."
"That's just the splash screen. Do you mean the 'operating system'? The main program that runs the computer?"
"Yes. This one doesn't look at all like mine."
Clicking up the screen settings, I set the format to mimic the most common operating system's screen and asked, "What about now?"
"Now it looks kind of like mine. What did you do?"
Setting my screen back the way it had been, I said, "They all do the same things the same ways. Icons. Mouse clicks. There's very little difference in that regard."
"Then why are there so many versions of the same thing?"
"Proprietary marketing, mostly. Making the product look fresh and new and forcing people to 'upgrade' their software and hardware fairly frequently to keep up with each others' version changes."
"You don't upgrade?"
"Nope. It's all about making money and it's completely unnecessary for about ninety percent of all computer users; people who putz around with word processors, spreadsheets, graphic programs, and like that, never using more than ten percent of a machine's capabilities."
"But aren't some upgrades about closing security holes?"
"Those are fixes, not upgrades, and don't let anyone tell you differently. If you have to download security patches, they put out a defective or incomplete product."
Ingrid read aloud the word "Xandros" from the screen and asked, "What's 'Xandros'?"
"It's my operating system; the program that runs all the other programs. It's built on Linux. It's never crashed on me and the viruses and worms that periodically plague everybody else can't touch me. They aren't made for Linux."
"Can just anybody use Xandros? I mean, is it hard to learn?"
Shrugging, I answered, "You put the CD in your computer and fire it up. A few clicks and half an hour or so later you're running Xandros. From there, it's just a matter of clicking on what you want to do, just the way you've always done it."
She looked dubious.
I said, "Used to be, Linux was for geeks who could write their own programs. Xandros was designed for everybody else; the non-programmers of the world. Everybody already knows how to mouse-click an icon." Getting out of my chair, I asked, "Want to try it? Click up the file manager."
Settling into my chair, Ingrid swirled the mouse pointer around the screen, then sent it to the files icon. Her double-click opened a window that showed her my music directory. After scanning the list, she clicked on 'Magic Bus', by The Who.
Up popped the player program and music filled the room as Ingrid studied the list and added 'Happy Jack' to the play list.
"I pulled those off my 'Who' CD," I said, "So I could make an expendable backup CD for the car. Later I got an MP3 player and now I only need one CD for a hundred and sixty songs."
When Ingrid looked up at me in surprise, I said, "When I drive up to DragonCon in Atlanta, I only need to carry two disks; one for rock and dance and the other for classical."
She seemed appropriately impressed. I watched her click up my word processor, then open one of my ebook spreadsheets. She closed those and opened Mozilla, which made the autodialer open and dial. She closed those, too, then looked up at me.
"It works just like mine," she said as if she couldn't quite believe it, "Only the program names and the background pictures are different."
Sipping coffee, I said, "Yeah, that's about the size of it."
Ingrid's eyes traveled from me to the computer, from the computer to the kitchen doorway, and then they fell on Winston, who rather questioningly looked back at her as if to ask, 'Why did you stop petting me?'
As her hands again began to move for Winston, Ingrid looked up at me and asked, "You do a little of everything, don't you? Kind of a Jack of all trades?"
Shrugging, I answered, "That's how things have worked out, I guess. I figure you're the same way, though."
"What makes you think that?"
"Just do. You're a witch, for one thing, and witches tend to have more than one talent to draw from."
"How did you come to the conclusion that I'm a witch?"
"Any woman who thinks outside the lines is considered a witch in this society."
Ingrid snickered, then said, "True, but you're evading the question."
"You found me, didn't you? WiccaWorks, that is; right down to this phone number and street address that I didn't have to tell you and that isn't in the phone book. That means you're a 'someone' among local witches or you're with the government, and I really don't believe you're with the government."
She laughed. "No. I'm not with the government, but you really weren't that hard to find."
"Right. You just happened to run into someone who told you to see me about fixing your bowl. Nah. Not the most likely scenario, ma'am. More likely you're something of a local honcho up in Crystal River; one of the quiet ones who show up at the Firebird events and maybe only a dozen VIP-types know them by name, if that many."
I sipped my coffee and added, "You're the reclusive village wisewoman. The one even the most arrogant 'High Priestesses' turn to for advice now and then. Bet you know what there is to know about herbs and natural medicines and such. You know how to test people, too, and you tested me in the kitchen with that Marilyn Monroe act. Tell me, Ingrid, are test results valid if the testee realizes he's being tested?"
With a small smile, she said, "That depends. And I'm not all that reclusive."
"Mind if I ask another question?"
Shrugging, Ingrid said, "Sure. Ask away."
"How long has that bowl been broken and why are you a hundred and fifty bucks' worth of interested in getting a copy of it made by Thursday?"
After a few moments of silence, Ingrid asked, "Do you know much about astrology, Ed?"
"Nope. Astronomy, some. Astrology, not much."
She nodded. "How about demonology?"
"Nope. Never bought into stuff like that."
Her smile became somewhat larger as she asked, "If I could call up a demon -- right here and now -- would you buy into it then?"
Regarding her quietly for a short time, I said, "I don't believe in demons, but I'd prefer that you attempt something like that on the back porch, where there's nothing too breakable."
Ingrid's laugh was melodious for a moment, then she seemed to realize that I wasn't kidding.
She asked, "If you don't believe in such things, why worry about where I call one up?"
I held up an index finger and sagely intoned, "Safety first. I don't know how you intend to try it. And why would you want to call up a demon in the first place?"
Sighing, Ingrid said, "He isn't really a demon. It all comes back to the bowl, Ed. I found it at a public auction in Germany some years ago, back when I collected almost anything unique or unusual, and that bowl certainly qualified. Anyway, it only cost me a bit less than five dollars at an auction, but when I got to the Czech border, the Germans suddenly decided it was an 'antiquity' and demanded twice its value as customs duty. Then the Czechs nailed me the same way for bringing it into their country. I was on a train, so I couldn't do anything but pay up or surrender the bowl. I paid the customs and tax duties on it and continued on to Prague."
Saying nothing about the fact that her story already didn't ring quite right, I waited as she sipped her coffee and continued, "Like everything else I sent back, it sat in storage until my year of study ended. When I returned, I discovered that the bowl's lid had been broken in transit. At the time I was disappointed, but I didn't know about the bowl's... hidden properties, you could say. The reason there had been a lid."
She chuckled. "I put the bowl on a table with the intention of filling it with peppermint candies for a small homecoming party that night. Imagine my surprise when I poured candies into it and they seemed to fall right through the bottom."
Her hand mimed holding a candy and dropping it.
"As soon as they hit that shiny spot, they passed through it and disappeared. I tried dropping other things into the bowl, too; coins, buttons, pebbles... Everything disappeared when it hit that shiny spot. Then my cat, Daphne, started to reach into the bowl. I panicked and yelled and Daphne scrambled off the table. The bowl landed on a chair and broke."
Again sipping her coffee, Ingrid seemed to have finished her story about the bowl. I considered a few things quietly and turned to the computer, then clicked up the net connection.
"Mind if I look something up?" I asked.
"No, but I may already know what you want to know. Why not try asking me?"
I shook my head. "In a minute, maybe. I want to see what's on record."
Click, click, click. Maps. Eastern Europe, pre-1989. Yup, I was right, and from working in Europe as a semi-spook, I knew how tough it could be to cross a Commie border, even to another Commie nation.
Turning back to Ingrid, I said, "Ingrid, people couldn't cross an East German-Czech border without some very special permits -- even since the Iron Curtain came down -- and you likely wouldn't have gotten those permits as nothing more than a college student."
She stiffened and said coolly, "I was an archaeology student. I spent a year gathering on-site experience at several digs throughout Europe."
"Name one in Germany, please."
"Why?"
"I'm curious."
Sighing, she said, "Gera. We found traces of cave dwellers along the river and stack-stone ruins on some hilltops."
Nodding, I entered the name 'Gera' in the search engines. Yup. Several digs around the city and the river, and all of them closed in 1939 due to serious floods and the war effort. None of the sites had been accessible during WW-II because the Nazis had been on a racial root-finding binge and couldn't allow foreigners to confound their ancestral fantasies with facts.
For safety reasons, neither of the sites had been reopened to further excavation since 1939. No way did Ingrid get dig permits, not even after they'd pulled the wall down. Things had been too chaotic and there'd been no money over there for anything but absolute essentials.
Was it worth the aggravation to argue the disparity with her? No. I had her money and she'd get her replica bowl and we'd part company. I hadn't known her the day before and I likely wouldn't see her again.
I nodded without comment and turned off the computer, then went to tap on the mold to check its drying progress. Ingrid followed me into the kitchen a few moments later and stood watching as I rotated the mold on the oven shelf.
"You think I lied to you," she stated. "Don't you?"
"I know damned well you did," I said without looking at her. "Doesn't matter. You'll get your bowl and I'll get my money and that'll be the end of it."
She snapped, "It does matter, damn it!"
"Then you shouldn't have lied." Resetting the fan for best effect, I turned to face her and asked, "Why does it matter, Ingrid? You'll get your new bowl and be gone tomorrow, if all goes well. Zap. Done."
I noted her stance, the set of her jaw, and her sharp gaze. She was a damned good looking woman with an impressive demeanor. And she was getting pissed, as demonstrated by her sharp tone as she snapped, "Why do you think I lied to you?"
"I was a low-end spook in Europe for over a decade, Ingrid. Border crossings were tough enough when we had real papers to show the border guards. Westerners didn't so much as take a leak in the East without an escort, and they damned sure weren't allowed to putz around in closed archaeological sites. A student visa to Gera? Hoo-hah. Not since 1939."
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