Import, Export V

As far as I can tell, God has not yet discovered the whereabouts of my reclaimed secretary, and appears to be losing conviction that she's near me. In the last few weeks we've have no rains of poodles, no saintly manifestations and no plagues of cockroaches. That said, Scotland has had a couple of rains of poodles, St. Boniface has put in an appearance in an abattoir in Leamington Spa and brought the slaughtered cattle back to life, and Hastings has had repeated cockroach plagues. St. Boniface got reported on the BBC -- a solemn report with an artist's impression of St. Boniface -- and the cable news channels -- a live feed from the abattoir with flayed carcasses lurching about and trying to moo. The BBC are looking smug.
I've not found a sales angle on my engineer who can turn things to mould when he touches them, but I have made use of his anyway by sending him round to competitors. He can get into just about anywhere by turning locks to mould, or, with enough time, entire walls. I can foresee possibilities with this now, but first I have to break him of having a conscience.
We've had a shipment of chocolate teapots, which we've wrapped in tinfoil and sold on as antiques. The foil can be easily distressed, and when the teapot melts after the hot water's been poured in, we claim that it's age and stress related. We had a moment of worry when we saw that one of then had made it onto Antiques Roadshow, but luckily it melted under the studio lights before it could be examined.
In fact, they've been such successful sellers that I've decided to take the plunge and sell the silverware I've had in storage for the last couple of years. It's all made of arsenic with a very thin tin coating, but now that I've know I've got a target market that believes that antique silver can melt when it has tea poured into it, I know they'll buy the cheap silverware too. And if they die of arsenic poisoning, as my secretary pointed out, they can't sue for mis-selling.
It's a slow month, but business continues!

Import, Export IV

I have my secretary back, though I'm not sure how long for. I have her in a witness protection programme, although keeping her identity secret for long is probably impossible. I'm hoping at the very least that I can hang on to her for long enough for her to train up her replacement, but it's all very touch-and-go at the moment.

I got her back a few days ago. I sat the board of directors of the firm round the table (a good Redwood round table I got for a song at the Kamisole Karaoke Klub somewhere near Bond street; while I was singing and people were wincing, a couple of my guys were taking the table out the back way), manacled their ankles to the legs of the chairs (upholstered with genuine penguin skin), and put a Ouija board on the table on front of them. We were going to hold a seance.

The Ouija board was one I'd bought specially for the occasion. I did have a small stock of cedar-wood boards I've been selling through eBay, but as the wood was made from the exhumed coffins of unbaptised children (you just need to know the right hospital morgue) I was aware that there was anecdotal evidence that they tended to invoke vengeful spirits. The board was matte and unimpressive, even the font used for the alphabet was boring old Helvetica. The planchette, which I'd coated with adhesive to make sure that the board couldn't take their fingers off it, didn't even sparkle in the brightest of lights.

I checked that the board all had a finger each on the planchette, and sat back from the table, and began the session with the typical invocation,

"Is there anybody there?"

The planchette duly trundled over to the word Yes. I raised an eyebrow, wondering if the board were playing games with me.

"Can you speak?" I said.

Yes indicated the planchette again, but no-one did. My eyebrow stayed raised, and I took a dull brown stone out of my pocket and laid it on the table. I was pleased to see that the planchette seemed to flinch.

"Do you know what this is?" I said.

Yes

"Tell me, then."

An Auquiwak exorcism stone indicated the planchette, hurrying from one letter to another fast enough that the board members were grunting in pain.

"Yes," I said. "Used to inflict a lot of pain on the spirit that's misbehaving. Fetch me my secretary and have her manifest herself. Now."

There was a sensation of tension leaving the room, and the board of directors seemed to slump slightly in unison. One or two tried to let go of the planchette at that point and discovered the adhesive. The bravest of them opened his mouth, but before he could speak I pointed at the exorcism stone.

"It works on the living too," I said, and he closed his mouth again and stayed quiet. It was sort of true -- it was surprisingly heavy for its size and would certainly have hurt him when I threw it at him. And I would have kept throwing it at him.

My secretary appeared silently behind one of the older, greyer members of the board, who had a soul-patch that belonged on a man thirty years younger than him. She seemed more silvery that when I'd last seen her alive, and her jaw had been reattached which was quite a relief. She looked at me calmly, the same way she did when I was trying to remember which set of income tax papers to submit.

"I need you back," I said without preamble.

"I've been called to a higher task," she said. "God himself needs a secretary, and I have been chosen."

"He gave you cancer of the jaw in order to summon you into his office?" I said, surprise causing my mouth to gape like a yokel. "What was wrong with the rapture? Hell, Jehova's Witnesses don't get to suffer for six months before they go, and they deserve it!" I didn't mean that last bit, I use the JWs a lot to sell my japanese pornographic manga bible to schoolkids. They never bother to open it to find out what kind of bible it is.

"Well," said my secretary looking a little bit startled, "I hadn't thought of it like that..."

"And is it really fun? Heaven's supposed to be perfect. What do you do all day? Do you have to handle irate customers coming in and voiding their warranty all over the shop-floor? Or do you just make the tea and compliment the angels on their wings?"

"A little bit dull, compared with working for you..." she was wavering now, and I pounced.

"Then come back and keep working for me, at least for a little bit. I can't cope without you, you know!"

"I had noticed that you seemed to be having a hard time hiring my replacement," she said, smiling at last.

"Come back then!" I said.

I had to watch her face like a hawk at this point, and the instant she relaxed her smile, showing that she really did like the sound of the idea, I picked up the exorcism stone and hurled it at the youngest board member. It bounced off his forehead onto the table, and something off-white spilled backwards out of his head. It billowed in the air for a few seconds, trying to find a shape. My secretary was simultaneously sucked forwards by the sudden spiritual vacuum left in his body, and was absorbed. The board member's body collapsed, and I watched anxiously.

"I say," said the newly homeless spirit. "What happened there?"

"You've been made redundant," I said. "Good luck with the rest of your existence."

My secretary sat up slowly, stretching her new body and glaring at me. When she started swearing in three languages I knew that I had her back, body and soul.

There have been some oddities since then though, strange little sick miracles, that make me think that God is on the look-out for where my secretary has gone. I came in one morning to find that one of the mechanics had developed a kind of Midas touch, and everything he touches turns to mould. I have him in cold storage while I figure out the selling angle on this one. Another morning we had a rain of dogs, so I have a corral full of large hairy woof-ing things with assorted broken limbs. At least I don't have to worry about a sell-by date there.

But business is back to normal, at least for a little while!

Import, Export III

Business is probably doing well at the moment, but I'm finding it hard to tell. I came into a shipment of terrapins about a week back, none of which were expected to survive more than a month or so. Marketing first suggested we sell them as disposable pets, but the last time I had a run in with the RSPCA I discovered that they have a paramilitary branch. I can still remember being pursued across moorland by two very angry Doberman Pinschers and a poodle with a remotely detonated bomb strapped to its chest. So I nixed that idea.
Their next idea was a good one though; we're selling them as instant turtle soup. You pop the top on the can that hold them, pour in boiling water and use a hand-held mixer to whizz the soup up, then drink it. We've had to shell the terrapins, obviously, but the shells make reasonably good casings for splinter grenades, and there's still a market for small explosives.

The problem is that my secretary succumbed to her cancer of the jaw two weeks ago, and I'm having trouble without her. The amount of paperwork that comes our way is mountainous, and a lot of it needs attention to make sure that the right set of carefully reconstructed documents is sent back with it. Send out the wrong set, and there's a whole world of people who need persuading to look the other way again. And I can't cope with it anymore, I just don't do paperwork well.

I've gone through five replacements for her in one week, and none of them have been up to the job. The first one let the clockwork penguin out of the locked safe and it waddled to the middle of the goods yard and stood their ticking to itself again until I sent a couple of the explosives lads out to recapture it. That thing gives me the creeps. I locked the new guy in the safe with the penguin, to see if that casts any light on the enigma.
The second one somehow managed to staple himself to the photocopier half-way through his first morning. The third one decided to inventory the warehouse and we found him deliquescing near the holding pens we use when we're sending giraffes out.
The fourth one is actually the second one again -- I unstapled him and performed a quick'n'brutal lobotomy to see if we could curb curiosity without damaging too much higher-brain function. For a few hours everything seemed to be going well; he was more of a mouth-breather than before, but at least the email was shifting and the postsacks were starting to empty. Then we found him stapled to the photocopier again. This time I left him there for anyone who wants him.
The fifth one tried emailing copies of everything to the local tax office (which thankfully still hasn't recovered from the EMP pulse). The mail server spotted the unauthorised email address and electrified the keyboard. The office smells pleasantly of roasted pork.

So I'm missing a secretary, the paperwork is mounting up, and my stress levels are through the roof. I have had a bit of a brainwave though, about how I might be able to get my old secretary back. I shall need to do some planning.

Silent Spring

Thirty years ago
The workshop is long and narrow, each wall lined with benches, which are covered with body-shells, boxes of gears of various sizes, springs, screws, and much smaller boxes of tiny gemstones. Tools, sized perhaps for children, are gathered together in soft leather pouches, each held separate from its neighbours so that they don't damage each other. There are anglepoise lamps at regular intervals along the benches, and natural light comes into the room through skylights. There are no windows in the walls, instead there are corkboards mounted on which are pinned schematics, delivery invoices, and other paperwork. There is a metallic smell in the air that you can taste if you spend long enough in the room, with notes of old wood and hot oil forming a background.

At one of the benches sits a young man wearing a long white button-up coat with no collar over a grey shirt and matching trousers. A nearby lamp is angled over the part of the bench where he is working, and its bright, actinic light casts his face into harsh relief. He is using the tiny tools to bend and hammer a strip of glistening bronze into shape, making a repair to the body-shell just in front of him. This shell is that of a turtle, its eyes glinting rubies and its open body revealing detailed clockwork within. Surprisingly the clockwork is functioning, springs winding and unwinding against each other, gears whirring and ratchets ticking away counting time in a steady, if alien, chronology.

Another man comes into the workshop from a door at the far end which leads out to the shop. He is older, his hair is white at the temples and the sides, and there are deep lines etched into his face. He too wears a white, collarless, button-up coat, but there is no clue as to what he wears beneath it. As he walks the length of the workshop to his apprentice, the clockwork in the turtle sudden stops, and the only sound in the workshop now are his footsteps.

The apprentice turns and looks at the older man, his face pale with shock, and the hand holding the tiny pliers shaking.
"I never-" he begins, but the older man shakes his head and the apprentice shuts up.

"You didn't," says the older man. "Mr. Ethward was struck by a falling tree this morning and has been with the doctor since. It is no fault of yours."

The apprentice starts to put the pliers down, the relief on his face as visible as his nose, but the master stops him.

"You must still complete the repairs," he says. "Burying Mr. Ethward without that would be like taking out his organs and burying his without them."


Twenty-four years ago
The workshop has not changed much in six years, but the apprentice is now a journeyman, and has in front of him on his bench his first commissioned piece. A clockwork raccoon crouches, waiting to be started. Small yellow gemstones create the eyes of the raccoon, and a line of even smaller gemstones run down its belly and catch the light oddly, seeming almost to flicker independently of where the light is. A tiny hole in the back of the head is where the key would go to wind the clockwork, but there is no sign on the key.

Footsteps again, and the master walks up the workshop carrying an infant in his arms. When he reaches the bench, he gently pulls the child's arm up and holds out its hand, and the journeyman quickly pricks the child's finger with a bradawl kept sharp for just this purpose. The child is too startled to cry at first, and the droplet of blood that wells up is quickly wiped over the keyhole of the raccoon. As the child starts crying, the clockwork inside the raccoon starts ticking, and the raccoon turns its head, almost as if it trying to look at the child.

The journeyman picks the raccoon up and places it on the child's chest, who stops crying and seizes it in both hands. The master turns to leave with both child and artefact, but the journeyman asks a question:
"When will I learn how to make the keys?"

"When the need is greatest," replies the master, and walks away.


Fourteen years ago
The journeyman, a talented craftsman now, has been away from the workshop for four days exhibiting the clockwork that the workshop produces at a regional fair, and now he returns. He enters the shop, which is locked and quiet at this early hour of the morning, and walks through past shelves of clockwork. All that is sold in the shop are toys for children, and the occasional labour-saving gadget for busy people, though these are most often commissioned. He goes into the workshop, and stops still in the doorway. A bird, disturbed, flutters noisily up through an open skylight.

His master is slumped across a bench, unmoving, with his neck at an unnatural angle. When the journeyman can bring himself to approach, he checks for a pulse, but the coldness of the skin tells him before he has given up trying to find one that the master is dead. A little way along the bench is the master's clockwork familiar, an elaborately beautiful dragonfly, and held loosely in his dead hand, is the key to the winding mechanism.

The journeyman's hand tremble as he fits the key into the dragonfly and turns it. The mechanism is smooth and turns easily as though it had been made and oiled only yesterday. When the key has made its fourth turn the dragonfly quivers and the clockwork starts ticking.

"Every craftsman must see this for themselves," says a voice, and the journeyman turns, knowing the voice as that of the master. The master is sat up again, pushed now away from the bench. His face is almost as the journeyman remembers it, but his eyes have been pecked out by the bird that fled when the journeyman entered. Foetor spills from the master's mouth, and the journeyman knows that he has probably been dead since he left.

"This is why the key is only made when there is great need," says the master. "This is not a life for the living, this is only undeath. The mind rots away, and though the key will animate whatever remains, it will not last long, and it will be a most imperfect tool."

The dragonfly shudders and the clockwork stops, and the master's corpse falls heavily back to the bench. The journeyman takes the key from the dragonfly and locks it in the safe beneath his workbench. He knows that he has been granted mastership, but somehow it is not the joyous occasion he had hoped it would be.


Yesterday
The master looks up as a short woman enters his shop and smiles at him broadly. Her teeth are mostly yellow, though a few are black and possibly rotting.

"I want you to make a clockwork penguin," she says. "One of the special ones."

Import, Export II

It's been a busy few months, what with the tax year ending and have to sort out the rebate we'll be getting this year from the IRS. Thanks to the financial wizardry of my accountant this is the third year we'll have received money back from the government instead of having to pay any to them, but I know it can't last forever. I've got my contingency plans in place, and although my accountant thinks he's going to drop me in it and skip the country to South America, I know better than him. But it's business, and that's all part of the fun.

We had a bit of scare earlier in the week though when a clockwork penguin waddled into the loading yard and stood there, rocking from one webbed foot to the other, buzzing and clicking to itself. I immediately suspected that one of the zoos we'd been shipping 'giraffes' to had sent me a warning message so I sent a kamikaze nun out to check it over for bombs. Neither of them exploded, and a routine EMP failed to disable it (although due to an accident of positioning we did fry all the electronics in a nearby tax office; I sent them a commiseratory bunch of dead daffodils). I have the penguin securely locked in a bomb-proof safe for the moment while I try to figure out what its purpose is.

My secretary is looking no better than last time I wrote, though I have now found out what the issue is -- she's been diagnosed with cancer of jaw. As I've said before, I can't afford to lose her really, so I've made provisions to assist her treatment, but so far it's not looking great. I did manage to catch her in the EMP when we checked the penguin out, but that doesn't seem to have helped.

Business is looking up though: we're processing low-level nuclear waste into luminous paint for childrens' toys and shipping the end product out to China, complete with the faulty Geiger counters that I picked up for a song at a recent 'auction.' Since we're getting paid for everything but the Geiger counters, we're turning a healthy profit there. We're using the same facility to irradiate food intended for nursing homes as well, which is even more profitable now we've worked out that we can cut the slaughter houses out of the loop by using sufficient irradiation! This has co-incidentally caused a drop in our line of boil-in-the-colostomy-bag pre-digested foods, but that's a job for sales and marketing now.

Things are looking up!

Import, Export

Last month was not a great month for business. My business is... well, it's eclectic. I import stuff, I export stuff, and somewhere in the middle there's a margin and I take a small percentage of that. I'm a middleman, very definitely. Butter won't melt in my mouth, snow won't melt on my chest, and my fingers aren't sticky, they're just not squeaky clean. Which is good, because who'd trust a man whose fingers squeaked?

But yeah, last month. Not so good. First of all I got a tip-off from my friend in Customs and Revenue that they'd had a tip-off about an import of mine, and so we had to abort the mission. That meant eighty-five nuns parachuting out of a 767 over a Pacific atoll, and that made the headlines. The nuns are cool, they're survivalists, and radio contact tells me that only 3 of them have drowned or been eaten, so most of the merchandise will get back eventually. But it doesn't count towards my bottom line for this month, and that does hurt a little.

After that, our efforts to shift a ton-and-a-half of irregular piping ran into problems again. All we need to do is get somewhere to legislate than the mathematical constant Pi is now equal to 4, and we're home and dry. You'd think it would be easy, but even the American states are dragging their heels now. I'm having to reopen my options on using them to make mortars and selling them to the dimmer variety of terrorist, who probably won't notice the unfortunate taper at the firing end.

And then there's the penguin problem. We've been painting penguins brown and orange and training them in acrobatics so that they can assemble themselves into a giraffe shape. Then we're selling these giraffes to zoos around the colder parts of the globe, where giraffes are rare and penguins thrive. We ship the penguins in suitcases as carry on luggage, and make a tidy profit out of it. Only now we're getting questions about giraffes that spontaneously disassemble and eat fish rather than leaves, and frankly, I'm running out of excuses.

Finally, my secretary's been acting pretty oddly lately, and that has me more worried than anything else. Without her, I'd be in a real pickle and no mistake, she could organise a charity chastity evening at an orgy and have everyone looking happy about it. I've been reading her email and her text messages to see if she's being headhunted (I have a couple of exploding poodles to deal with this kind of thing) but there's nothing there. I'd fret, if that didn't involve woodwork.

So I'm looking for business ideas for the coming month, something with no heavy lifting that a good-looking guy with a silver tongue can really turn into something hot. The laxative pancakes for Shrove Tuesday sold well (feast and purge! The only food that'll really set you up for Lent!), and we've passed off the hair loss as divine revelation (yeah..., turns out they were laxative because of the heavy metal content...) and might yet be able to sell off some of those Latvian bibles I've got in the back room (the only bible that'll give you the gift of tongues! Babble with the best!). But I need a killer sale, something that'll really knock people off their feet.

Best keep thinking!