Closing Time
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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 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.
Sources
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humban
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chogha_Zanbil
