The Coin Collector

Three weeks after the harvest festival, on the last night of the season, we found the old schoolhouse at the edge of the orchard. It was a tourist trap, but the guide, a thin woman with a voice like dry leaves, promised we would hear things. My partner, Dana, and I were skeptics, but we went anyway.

The schoolhouse was a single room, with dusty desks and a chalkboard still showing a faded alphabet. The guide had us hold hands in a circle, and she spoke of a boy who had died there in the 1920s, a child of a farmhand, who had been beaten for stealing a silver coin from the teacher’s desk. They never found the coin, and the boy had haunted the place ever since.

We did the usual: EMF meters, dowsing rods, a Ouija board. Nothing happened for the first hour, and I was bored, fiddling with the camera. Then Dana’s EMF spiked, and the dowsing rods crossed violently. The guide asked for a name, and the rods spelled out ‘T-H-O-M-A-S.’ She asked what he wanted, and the rods moved to point at Dana. ‘FOLLOW,’ they spelled. The rest of the tour was uneventful, but I noticed Dana looked pale, and she said she felt a cold spot near the back wall.

A week later, at home, I was on the couch, watching late-night TV, when I saw a shadow detach itself from our bedroom doorway and slip into the laundry room. It was a small, hunched shape, like a child. I told Dana, and she said she had been having trouble sleeping, that she felt something standing on her side of the bed, and she had dreams of a little boy just staring at her. She admitted she had felt a presence in the orchard too, but she didn’t want to scare me.

We tried to ignore it, but then our keychain went missing when I was about to leave for work. I searched everywhere, and when I came back, it was sitting in the middle of our bed, with a silver coin underneath it. The coin was old, weathered, but I could make out a raised ‘T’ and the letter ‘H’. I thought it was a prank, but Dana said she had never seen it before.

That night, I had a dream. I was in our bedroom, but everything was faded, like an old photograph. I felt a presence behind me, and I turned. There was a boy, translucent, his face smudged, his eyes empty. He held out his hand, palm up, and in it was a single silver coin. I laughed, taunting him, saying, ‘What are you going to do? Steal my change?’ The boy tilted his head, and then he vanished.

I woke up to Dana’s scream. She was pointing at the ceiling, where a black mark had appeared, like a shadow of a small hand, spreading like a stain. And on the floor, there was a pile of silver coins, all old, all with the same raised ‘T’. I knew then that we had brought something home, and it was not done with us.

The next morning, I went to the orchard, to the schoolhouse, to ask for help. But the guide was gone, and the building was locked. I found a note taped to the door: ‘He collects what is owed. He will not leave until he has his coin.’ I drove back, a cold dread settling in my stomach. When I entered our apartment, Dana was sitting on the bed, surrounded by a circle of coins. She was crying, holding a small, tattered silver coin, and she said, ‘He says we have his coin. He says he wants it back.’ But when I looked at the coin, it was new, just a quarter, from our change. And then I realized: the boy, Thomas, had been following us, hiding our things, not to scare us, but to ask for his coin. And in my dream, I had taunted him, and he had taken that as a challenge.

Now, every night, the shadow stands by our bed, and the dreams are darker. Dana dreams of a boy digging in the dirt, his hands bleeding, and I dream of a silver coin buried in my chest, growing cold. We have tried to give him the coin we found, but he wants the original, and we don’t know where it is. I have started to see the boy in mirrors, always holding out his palm. And I have started to feel an itch in my hand, as if something is trying to take root. The last thing I remember clearly is waking up at 3 AM to find Dana gone, and on the bed, a silver coin, wet with something dark, and a note in her handwriting: ‘HE SAYS I AM HIS COIN. IT IS DONE.’