Another couple of weeks later, in the middle of the night after a batch of ceramic vases was complete, I awoke to the sound of howling wind and clattering windows. It sounded like a mighty storm, but it was calm outside my bedroom window. I glanced at the ashtray.
“Kazz, is that you?”
“Aaargh no, go back to sleep! You were just about to get eaten by tigers, it was great!”
I ignored him and his protests and hurried through to the workshop. There I found a swirling vortex of dust centred on a newly finished pot surrounded by the smashed remains of about six other newly finished pots. I would have fallen to my knees and wept at my destroyed work if not for the more pressing concern of dealing with this miniature storm. I forced against the wind, shielding my eyes against the dust, and managed with struggle to get the windows closed. The wind died down a bit. Maybe it needed the outside air? It weakened further to a gentle swirling, no longer strong enough to knock over any more pots - not that there were any nearby left to knock over. I glared at the pot.
“Right then. What are you? Storm Demon? Poltergeist? Come on, out with it.”
It did not respond verbally, but the wind stopped immediately as if in response. I waited half a minute, still glaring with hands on hips and one foot tapping impatiently, but still no response came.
“I’m putting you somewhere you can’t smash anything else,” I told it.
Still silence. Whatever spirit or demon was in this vase either couldn’t talk or it was giving me the silent treatment. Well let’s see how it likes being wrapped in towels with no fresh air to make a storm from! I shoved it in the towel cupboard, carefully wrapped up. I wasn’t sure if the towels would make a difference. If it could blow over a clay urn it could probably blow a few towels out of the way, but it was two in the morning and I had no other ideas. I stomped back upstairs and threw myself grumpily onto the bed. I lay face down. I didn’t bother lifting my head to speak, letting the pillow muffle my voice.
“Hey Kazz, heard anything about any wind spirits? Storm demons?”
“I’m made of smoke! I hate wind. I might get blown away to nothing!”
“Don’t go in the towel closet then. There’s something which may or may not be a storm demon trapped in a clay vase.”
“Smash it! Destroy it! I don’t want to be blown away!”
“Won’t that just free the spirit to roam around as a travelling storm?”
Kazzifrezz grumbled in consideration. He didn’t have any ideas either. In that case, it would have to wait until morning. I tried to settle back down to bed, but between the annoyance and shock, I struggled to sleep again. I tossed and turned for a while, then flicked the bedside lamp back on and tried to doodle in one of my notebooks. Kazzifrezz was very vocal about his disapproval of that, complaining that I can’t have any more nightmares until I fall asleep, and that it was very inconsiderate to be awake so much of the time. He suggested that perhaps I should get a cat, since they sleep more than sixty percent of the day and sometimes dream of awful encounters with angry dogs. It wasn’t a bad suggestion to be fair. I did sort of want a cat, only I didn’t want to be responsible for looking after another living being. That said, I seemed to be managing okay with Kazz. He was basically a pet by this point. Not the sweet loveable pet a cat would be - an annoying, evil, grumpy, cloud of foul-smelling smoke was certainly not pettable, but you take what you can get.
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Thankfully I didn’t hear any more wind that night. I don’t remember how or when I fell asleep, but I awoke mid-morning with a notebook bent and ruffled under me. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, really. Most of my notebooks ended up in such a condition sooner or later, if not by me falling asleep on them, then by me messing them up with wet clay-covered hands or dropping them onto a damp beach or muddy forest floor. I straightened out the pages and got up. Kazzifrezz had reduced himself to a gently smouldering layer in the ashtray. That meant he’d been well-fed and was enjoying a nice post-meal nap - he frequently insisted he didn’t technically sleep, but I could hear him snoring, so I wasn’t convinced.
As always, I had no idea what I had dreamed about that night, but it must have been at least somewhat horrible if it put him to such satisfied-looking rest as that. I dressed and headed downstairs to check the towel cupboard.
Everything was as I left it, so I cautiously unwrapped the vase. I put my ear to it, like one might with a shell at the seaside, and listened. The sound of blustering winds was clear. Distant, but clear. I thought I even heard the rumble of thunder and the crash of ocean waves, though it is entirely possible that my imagination was running a step ahead of my ears. I decided to risk taking it back to the workshop, but made sure to place it a good distance from any other pots. I couldn’t handle another load of my hard work being destroyed. It hit me then that any one of those smashed pots could also have been possessed. I spent half the day doing a search of the house in case there were any lost spirits floating around before my concerns felt suitably alleviated.
I decided that having the wind-vase out of its towelly prison was a big enough risk already and that I shouldn’t leave it out of sight until I was sure it was safe. Whenever I went to the bathroom or the kitchen I carried it with me. There was a slightly awkward moment when a delivery guy came to the door and gave me an odd look for holding a large vase while signing for a package, but otherwise it was a mild inconvenience at worst.
The sound of wind was constant from within, though I never felt more than a barely perceptible breeze that day. It started to feel a bit breezier in the evening, but didn’t escalate to a problematic level so I let it continue. It sounded almost like a bad TV drama using a stock recording from the archives’ weather sound effects. That thought set me a little at ease, like the thing was trying too hard to sound scary without actually being particularly dangerous. Of course, the pile of smashed pottery in the workshop proved that it could make serious problems if it wanted to - that is, assuming it was sentient. I still hadn’t figured out if it was an actual demon like Kazz or something more like the mug of infinite blood, like a mindless force of nature trapped in a vase. Would that make it better or worse? A demon could be malicious, but nature could be at least as dangerous and twice as unpredictable. I could almost reason with Kazz, but no one can argue with the wind. It had already destroyed a whole load of vases and I had no reason to believe that was the limit of its power. The only option for now was to put it back in the towel closet during the times when I couldn’t actively supervise it and hope it wouldn’t cause any more damage. The ridiculousness of expecting a towel to block a storm was not lost on me, but I had no further trouble with it that week while I worked on my next projects. That was a relief of course, but it didn’t give me much to talk about on the podcast. We recorded an episode, but it was boring filler material not worth repeating here. It only earned forty listeners this time.