The Wolf Man

In the soot-choked kilns of an unnamed pottery town, Grinde—sharp-eyed junior partner—covets a glaze so incandescent it promises to gild the entire industry. Benjamin Lord, a stooped alchemist of porcelain, distills the secret in a vial that glows like fox-fire; his grandson David, all earnest trust, ferries the elixir to Grinde’s desk. The promise of consideration curdles into conspiracy: foreman Mole, a man whose silhouette seems cut from chimney smoke, is dispatched to pilfer the formula. Instead of thievery, he delivers murder—Benjamin’s skull cracked against a kiln brick, the workshop torched to mimic catastrophe. When David recoils from selling his birthright, the partners imprison him and his beloved in a brass-lined vault, flooding it with verdigris-tinged gas. Yet greed metastasizes: Grinde turns on Mole, blade flashing under gaslight, while a boardroom of geriatric shareholders drone over balance sheets, unaware that their empire is about to be usurped by a man whose soul already bears the craze lines of cracked crockery.