Closing Time
Contents
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The little brass bell above the door jangled with the entry of the day's final customers. The bell's discordant peel caught the attention of the proprietor who sat at his desk of age darkened oak tallying the days business in a black leather-bound ledger. Pankraz Voss moved with steady and practiced efficiency as he blotted the last of his entries with fine white sand and set aside his quill and stoppered the ink pot. Rising from behind the desk he nodded to himself upon seeing everything was in its correct place.
Voss smiled a small smile as he listened to the Kitin Bell's harsh chime sound four separate times. The bell was green with age, about the size of an average espresso cup, and inscribed with cuneiform characters. Were that bell able to speak it could tell a tale of three-thousand years or more. The bell had been cast beneath the temple of a now forgotten god from a lost city in south-west Iran. The city, Chogha Zanbil, had been stumbled upon by a geologist and amateur archeologist in 1935. That fortuitous find had allowed Pankraz to acquire the bell and a number of other rare items and had in a way set him on the road to San Francisco.
Pankraz stood at the top of the shadowed stairs and watched the quartet of disaffected youth as they began to explore the shop and its contents. For the last week he had been keenly aware that these four has been casing Graven Goods and his spies in the surrounding streets had reported this band of disaffected youth asking a lot of questions about the antique business and the kind of money being spent for old items..
Characters
- Pankraz Voss -- Owner of Graven Goods a antique store in the Castro.
Drifter Posse
- Colt Anderson -- Gangbanger from Chicago
- Virginia & Stevie Johnson -- Teen runaways from Johnsons Corners, Ohio.
- Asher Davis -- A grifter from New Orleans
Sources
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humban
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chogha_Zanbil
