The middle-aged peddler drew on his pipe while the small flock of girls giggled over the jewelry spread out on the table. They fawned over necklaces of paste and gold plate and crowed over earrings of semiprecious stones set in low-grade silver.
“Oh, I just have to show my mother these!” one of the girls chirruped. “Can you hold them for me until tomorrow?” This was directed at the peddler, and the small Chinaman removed his pipe from his lips and shook his head.
“Sorry, my dear, but tomorrow I will be in Japan.” The girls pouted and prodded him for a few more minutes, but eventually went back to their fawning. The peddler knew that these would be easy sales.
Even now, a small voice in the back of his head urged him to take out the urn from his bag and sell it to one of the glib filles, but the peddler suppressed that thought, knowing such an attempt would be futile, no matter how gullible the customer. He glanced down under the table at his overstuffed bag, sighing at the thought of what was contained there. Over the years, he had come to lose hope that he would ever find the person to whom he must sell it, and never even bothered to set it out anymore.
He had bought the piece of glazed stoneware off a temple monk many years ago in the heart of China, without even knowing himself why he wanted it, being a jeweler by trade. Soon after, though, he had come to realize its strange power of influence.
He had been much younger then, and had not yet perfected his art of chicanery, and as such was in a rather sorry financial state. He would have been delighted to sell the urn for a decent sum, whether it equaled its actual worth or not, but somehow whenever a patron took an interest in the urn, he would say “That’s not for sale,” or “You can’t afford that,” before he even got the chance to smile at his good fortune.
In time, he had figured out the urn’s mind-controlling ability and of course panicked. He ran through towns trying to get rid of the demon pottery, but no matter what he did, it always ended up back in his travel bag before long. First off, no one would buy anything from a person they perceived to be a raving lunatic, and secondly, he could never have mustered the force of will to abandon the urn. He always went back for it before he got too far away.
Once he had come to accept the will of the urn, things had gotten much easier for him. He had come to realize that whatever was possessing the urn was waiting for a certain person to which it would be sold, and that gave the peddler hope that he would be rid of the thing eventually. In the sixteen years since he had acquired the urn, however, he had traversed the Chinese mainland many times over, and had yet to find whatever the urn was seeking out through himself.
He took another drag from his pipe and exhaled slowly, ignoring the squeals from the gaggle that still hovered over his table. Maybe a few years in Japan would lead him to the urn’s rightful owner.