by P. D. Kalnay
Gran refused to talk about that night at all, and I’d been left trying to piece together the little I did know. I also tried to remember whatever clues I might have missed over the course of the summer. All I was sure of was that a lot of things most people don’t believe in existed, and that everybody at, or around, Gran’s house knew more about them than me. I was waiting for summer, when Ivy and Mr. Ryan were supposed to come back—so I could demand answers. I knew a little about Mr. Ryan, but Ivy’s past was a closed book. Everything I knew about her came from first-hand experience. She was an amazing archer, gardener, and all around weirdo. I missed her. I missed Ivy even more than Mr. Ryan, and I missed him a fair bit.
Before finding the jewellery-making materials, I’d already set myself the task of crafting Ivy a new bow and having it ready for her return. I could have bought one for less money, but I’d never made a bow before. The old longbow, Ivy had used, was broken. She’d never liked the fibreglass recurve that remained. After doing some research, I ordered a kit online. It was basically just strips of different woods that I’d laminate together and carve a bow from. Finding the right trees in the forest, harvesting, and prepping the wood would’ve been cooler, but not practical. I chose the middle ground between that and buying a finished bow. The wood strips, glue, and clamps were all waiting in the basement ready to start. I’d been saving the project for the three weeks I’d have off at Christmas.
Saying that I didn’t know anything about jewellery, or its manufacture—would have been accurate. I decided to research and plan over the holiday while I worked on her bow. The weekend before the break, I glued and clamped the strips of wood together, leaving them to dry. I was eager to begin.
Chapter 2 – Bows and Magic
There’d be no holiday celebrations at Glastonbury Manor, so I hunkered down in the workshop, pondering Ivy’s presents. During this time of jewellery contemplation, I worked on the bow. I took my time with it, using only hand tools. Drawknives and spoke shaves removed the bulk of the wood. Then I switched to rasps and files. When I got close to the shape I wanted, I attached a temporary string, and tested it in a jig I’d built for that purpose. The bow hung parallel to the floor, and I used a digital luggage scale to test the draw weight. Ivy was a small girl, but stronger than you’d guess, looking at her. I wanted to make the bow as heavy as she could comfortably pull. I could remove more wood, once it was nicely finished, but that would suck. Finally, with extensive tweaking, and rechecking that the limbs bent evenly on each side, and that the weight was right, it was time for final sanding. While the bow would’ve worked fine the way it was; no style points would have been awarded. The sanding took a whole day. I worked from rough papers to smooth and continually examined the overall piece. Some of the wood laminations were thin, and it wouldn’t take much to make the bow pull crooked, or make the finished piece ugly. With no reason to rush, I took my time. By the end of that day, the bow was silky-smooth and was flawlessly symmetrical where it should be. Something was still missing; I pencilled interwoven lines of delicate ivy running up and down from the handle. After a smoky evening with a wood burner, the bow was complete, minus the finish.
The next day, New Year’s Day, I began applying the oil finish. It would be a long process of applying oil, rubbing it in, letting it dry, and repeating. Making furniture had taught me about finishing wood. Nothing beats a hand-rubbed oil finish. Rubbing oil on a bow doesn’t take long, and most of the time would be spent waiting in-between coats. That meant I was ready to begin the next project. I still had over a week of Christmas vacation left.
I’d decided to make Ivy a necklace. A more sensible person would have tried for a ring or maybe earrings (although her ears weren’t pierced). Me… I jumped in with both feet. My initial vision had been to make a string of rose blooms, each separated by links shaped like leaves. Fairly ambitious—considering I hadn’t even made a simple round link yet. Not knowing what I was getting into, I figured I’d have the necklace mostly done before going back to school. Cleaning off one workbench completely, and bringing over extra lights, including one with a big magnifying glass in the middle, I set up my little jewellery shop. Did I have a lifelong interest in jewellery? No. I didn’t understand the appeal at all. But I’d never made any before either. My reading and research had taught me that goldsmithing was a little like blacksmithing on a smaller scale. There were hammers, anvils, chisels, and swage blocks (steel blocks with shapes cut out that you form metal against). There were also mandrels (cone shaped anvils for shaping things). The small ring-making mandrels were a far cry from the waist-high iron floor mandrel out in the smithy. A forge isn’t necessary, but sometimes one comes in handy. A small torch had been in with the jewellery-making supplies. Bigger torches hung from the pegboards, but I wasn’t planning on using any of those in Gran’s basement. Burning down the house seemed like a bad idea. A small bottle of propane and another bottle full of oxygen were in a cupboard. The fittings on ends of the hoses matched the little torch—I was good to go.
Starting with something simple, I took one of the baby-finger-sized gold bars from the case. I needed to make sheets of gold and platinum for what I had in mind. The best way to do that was using a miniature rolling mill designed for the purpose. I didn’t have one of those. That left doing it old-school and flattening with a hammer. A small anvil had been mounted on the bench I’d chosen, and I began a long process of hammering the gold flat. It was amazingly ductile. After an hour’s work, I had a wonky sheet of gold wider than my hand. Fine tuning of the process was still necessary, but it looked possible.
My concern was that it had been too easy and the gold too malleable. I suspected the little bars were pure. Most jewellery is made from an alloy, a mix of gold and other metals. It makes it more economical and a lot more durable. I wasn’t set up to refine and mix metals, and I only had a vague understanding of the process. Flexing a corner of the gold sheet back and forth, I appeared to have reached an impasse. Sure, I could make things out of the gold, and do so relatively easily. The problem was, they wouldn’t be very durable, or they’d have to be so thick they’d be heavy. I couldn’t imagine Ivy wearing thick, clunky jewellery. Not willing to admit defeat, I set down the sheet and poked through the materials case.
The reddish metal was still a mystery. There are alloys of gold and copper called Rose Gold, but this metal was redder and dull like lead solder. It was also as heavy. Tired of making gold sheet, I decided to mess around with a piece of the unknown metal. Holding a tiny nugget in a pair of pliers, I applied the torch’s flame. For a few seconds nothing happened, and then… the reddish metal dissolved in an instant. The pliers clicked shut faster than I could react, and a quicksilver droplet of molten metal fell onto the gold sheet sitting on the bench.
Instead of solidifying instantly into a glob, as one would expect, given golds conductive properties, the strange metal spread swiftly across the entire sheet, changing its colour to a rich yellow green. It was like the gold was paper and the new metal… ink. I turned off the torch and tentatively touched the now greenish gold. The sheet felt cool to the touch. Flipping it over, I discovered the back had been completely coated too. Considering how small the chunk of the unknown metal had been, the coating had to be incredibly thin. I absently tried flexing the sheet. The once malleable gold now resisted my fingers. I used increasingly more force until I had no more to give. It seemed impossible that a thin coating of anything could give the gold such rigidity. I set the sheet across the open mouth of a machine vise and hit it with a ball-peen hammer. The sheet flexed very slightly and then sprang back, flying a few feet across the room. Amazing! I picked up the sheet and tightened it half in the vise. Torch in one hand, and pliers in the other, I ran the flame down the sheet where it met the vise and pried with the pliers. The sheet bent easily to ninety degrees. Without the heat from the torch, the bent sheet proved as strong as before. All kinds of notions were swirling through my brain. Delicacy and durability might be possible.
Nothing online explained the reaction of the strange metal and the gold. Part of what makes gold so special, besides its rarity, is that it doesn’t rust, tarnish, or generally react with other elements at all. Extensive experimentation followed. I tried dunking short lengths of wire made from the various other metals in a molten pool of the unknown reddish metal. The liquid metal turned platinum blood red and silver shiny black. Both also became stronger, like the gold had done, and impossible to scratch without applying heat. More amazingly, when I finally managed to cut the silver wire in half (which wore out a diamond-coated cutting disc) I discovered it was black all the way through. Metals aren’t porous, and I couldn’t find any science to explain it. There was, I discovered, a saturation point. A second dunk in the molten metal had no effect.
I always used the original plyers that I’d used to melt the first little piece of the reddish metal. I hadn’t realised at the time, because they were so dirty, that the metal had affected the plyers too. At some point, I must have bumped them against the vise, because the jaws of the plyers showed a bright shiny scratch. That scratch wasn’t in the metal itself, but had merely cut through the grimy coating. A quick cleaning revealed that the steel underneath now shone like deep blue polished chrome. Having only about a fist’s worth of the reddish metal, I was careful to always use the same plyers. I didn’t need a shop full of shiny tools.
Chapter 3 – Dirty Pool
The amazing reddish metal was just that… amazing. I knew little about chemistry or metallurgy, but I felt certain the things my experiments with it revealed were impossible. Impossible—in the same way that talking wolves and dragon-eyed women were impossible. Whether it was magic or freaky alien science remained unknown. No search of the internet had provided as much as an urban legend about the stuff. The metal looked dull until I heated it, similar to oxidised lead. I wondered if it likewise had a thin coating of dull, covering a shiny interior. Not wanting to create toxic fumes, or explosions by accident, I decided to try adding a piece to water to see if it reacted. I filled an empty glass jar in the concrete laundry sink at the far end of the workshop. After a minute or two of running the tap, the water still looked rusty-brown, but I wasn’t drinking it, and I took the jar back to the bench.
Since I only had a fist’s worth of the metal, and needed some to finish the necklace, I took the smallest chunk, about the size of the last digit of my baby finger, from the case. I put on safety goggles, and with arm outstretched, dropped in the chunk. Nothing happened. By which I mean: it fell into the jar, sank to the bottom, and sat there. I swirled it around searching for signs of bubbling or other reactions. Nothing. After a five minute wait, I fished out the chunk with a pair of long plyers and had a look. It appeared unchanged. Then an idea struck me. The strange metal didn’t react with other metals when you just touched it to them. Out came the torch and the plyers designated to magic-red-metal-work. On went the goggles, and I heated the chunk with the tip of the torch’s flame. A second later, the molten metal dripped into the water with a hiss of steam. Instantly, the brown water became crystal clear. Three smaller chunks of the metal sat in the bottom of the jar, solid once more.
I fished out the first piece with the longer plyers. The plyers, previously covered in the dirty patina of decades of age and use, came out of the water looking like new. Not magically enhanced, just perfectly clean. Scratches remained on the surface of the metal and the edge of the plastic grip was still torn like before, but they appeared to have been scrubbed and polished. My first thought was that I’d made a strong acid, and I very cautiously tested other substances in the jar (after donning thick rubber gloves and a clear face shield). As far as I could tell, the enhanced water only cut away what didn’t belong and cleaned down to the surface of whatever I put in. Just to be sure, I dropped a very rusty nail and a piece of broken ceramic tile into the jar and left them overnight.
The following morning, the nail was shiny and bright, if pitted from the rust, and the tile piece was sparkling clean. They weren’t compromised in any way that I could see. I felt it now reasonable to attempt what I really wanted to try. I grabbed an old toothbrush from a tin on the workbench, and with brush and jar in hand, I went to the pool room. I’d looked in the pool room a few times since Mr. Ryan tested the pumps, but each time, the sight, and the thought of cleaning it, had defeated me. Now, I had magic cleaning water that cleaned the way some ‘As seen on TV’ products claimed to, but I suspected never actually did in real life.
Flipping the light switches brought the horror that was the pool room into perspective again. Every inch of tile was filthy, and the pool itself had inches of disgusting black sludge in the bottom. There was also a lot of gross slime growing around the room. Think giant petri dish meets toxic waste dump. I didn’t have to go very far inside to find a test subject. Squatting down, I poured a tiny bit of the water from the jar onto the floor between my feet and swished it around with the toothbrush. The little tiles came up bright green, and the grout between them shone dazzlingly white. No scum decorated the brush, and that tablespoon of water cleaned a good fifteen tiles.
Cleaning the pool room seemed like a more doable project. It was time for a big test. I walked to the edge of the pool and looked down at the nasty black sludge. Making the magic water was easy enough, and if the jarful had used up any of the reddish metal, I couldn’t tell—though I hadn’t weighed it beforehand. I poured in the whole jar. The result was impressive as the clear liquid ate (or drove back) the black. The jar didn’t come close to cleaning all the nasty. That would have been a lot to expect, even from magic water, but it turned about a quarter of the pool bottom crystal clear. It cleaned the tiles in the centre too, and that’s how I first discovered the mosaic picture on the bottom of Gran’s pool. All I could make out at that point was a fish’s green tail.
Even with magic cleaner, the job wasn’t insignificant, and I left the task for the following Saturday. With conventional means, it would have been necessary to suck out, or mop up, the sludge. I started by filling the pool. That wasn’t what my grandmother had in mind when she said I’d have to clean the pool if I wanted to use it. Something told me she wouldn’t approve of my method; I didn’t mention it to her. Our whole not-talking thing made that easy.
It took longer to fill the pool than I expected. Gran has a good well, but the flow of water slowed down by the halfway point. Even a mid-sized pool uses a lot of water. Most of the cleaning would have to be done on Sunday. I put the time into Ivy’s necklace and waited. Mr. Ryan said the filter system wouldn’t last an hour with the crap in the pool, so I left everything but the filling valve turned off. The pool was full by the end of the day. The diluted water wasn’t as black, but still spectacularly nasty. Loose chunks of unknown stuff floated on the surface.
Stage two began the next morning. I took the tanks and small torch down to the pool room, along with one of the remaining chunks of reddish metal from the first test in the jar. I held torch and chunk-filled plyers out over the pool and made with the melting. As soon as the first drip of molten metal hit water, the pool cleared like magic (by then I was pretty sure it was). The clear pushed back about half of the gross. On hands and knees at the edge of the pool deck, I looked for the re-solidified metal on the bottom. Nothing sat on the clean tiles below me, which meant that the metal had been consumed in the process. The amount lost in the jam jar had simply been too small to notice. Figuring there was no turning back, and that a half clean pool was of no use; I fetched the rest of the original chunk. It took both of the other pieces to clean the water and the submerged pool tiles. Only a tiny fleck of the last piece sat on the bottom when the deed was done. I turned on a pump that moved the pool water through a filter system. Then I grinned like a fool for a good half hour, staring down into the clean water. Three topless mermaids—depicted in a beautiful tile mosaic—smiled back up at me.
The mysterious metal had shaved off a good three quarters of the work. I used a big bristle brush,
on the end of a long pole, to clean the rest of the tiles in the pool and the deck around it. Eventually, the pool water became a less impressive cleaning agent, and the brush began introducing grime back into the pool. By then, most of the work was already done. I didn’t want to use any more of my limited supply of the metal, so I switched to normal cleaning products to finish the rest of the room. It took another few half days to scrub up to the ceiling and really get the pool room spotless. It was well worth it. I had my own private indoor pool!
The pumps and filters seemed to do their jobs. A heat exchanger attached to pipes from the boiler could heat the water by adjusting valves. After some trial and error, I had everything set just right. It was time to swim. The water looked pristine, and I’d ordered chlorine tablets online that would arrive any day. You shouldn’t swim alone, but the pool, being four feet deep everywhere, didn’t have a deep end. I figured in the worst-case scenario, I’d stand up. There were metal ladders in the mechanical room, and I put them into the holes in the deck at each end of the pool. After testing the water with a big toe, I slipped in to my chest. The water felt warm, but not bath warm, and I floated around for a while enjoying the fruits of my labour. Then I swam laps for about twenty minutes. For the first few times I swam, before the chlorine tablets arrived, the water had an unusual taste. I didn’t take a drink, but it’s hard not to get a little in your mouth, swimming laps. The taste wasn’t unpleasant or metallic, and almost subtle enough that I could have imagined it. It kind of tasted like maple syrup, with a flavour as faint as if a single cup of syrup had been poured into the pool. Chlorine was all I could taste once I added the tablets to the filter.
