The Wooden Token Collector

I was nine when I first noticed the tokens. Grandpa—my mother’s father, the only grandfather I ever knew—had a glass jar on his nightstand filled with small, dark wooden discs, each one carved with a different symbol. I asked him about them once, and he smiled his crinkly-eyed smile and said, ‘Just my little collection, Emmy-bug. Souvenirs from places I’ve been.’ I accepted that, because Grandpa Edwin was a retired train conductor who had seen more of the country than anyone I knew, and it made sense that he’d pick up trinkets along the way.

The summer I turned thirteen, my mother remarried and we moved from our cramped apartment in Charleston, West Virginia, to a quiet, dusty town in the high desert of New Mexico. I hated it. The heat, the endless sand, the way the wind howled like a living thing at night. The only bright spot was that Grandpa Edwin, who had always lived in a tidy bungalow in Columbus, Ohio, decided to move in with us a few months later. He said he was getting too old for Ohio winters, and he wanted to be near family. I was overjoyed.

grandpa was still the same—same warm laugh, same love for baseball, though now we listened to games on the radio instead of going to a stadium. He still called me Emmy-bug, a nickname he’d given me because my real name, Amelia, was too long for a little girl with a stutter. I’d had speech therapy, but when I was excited or scared, my words still tangled. Grandpa never minded. He’d just wait, patient as the desert sun, until I got the words out.

But there was one change. He started collecting the tokens again. Every week, a new one would appear in his jar. I’d see him come back from his afternoon walks—he always walked the perimeter of our property, a wide, dry lot with a crumbling adobe wall—and he’d hold up a small, dark disc, turning it in the sunlight before adding it to the jar. I asked where he got them, and he said, ‘The desert gives gifts to those who walk it, Emmy-bug.’ I thought it was just a quirky old man thing.

The first time I saw him use one, I was fifteen. My mother was at work, and Grandpa and I were listening to a game. The radio crackled, and through the static, I heard a woman’s voice—not the announcer—whispering in a language I didn’t know. Grandpa’s face went pale. He reached into the jar, grabbed a token with a spiral carved on it, and held it tightly. The static cleared. The announcer’s voice returned, and Grandpa let out a breath. ‘Just interference,’ he said, but his hands were shaking.

I didn’t believe him. I started watching him more closely. I noticed that the tokens were always carved with one of six symbols: a spiral, a triangle, an eye, a wave, a flame, and a star. And whenever Grandpa was near them, he seemed more alert, like a dog listening for a whistle I couldn’t hear. He also started muttering to himself in that same unknown language. My mother thought he was losing his mind. I thought something else was happening.

One night, I couldn’t sleep. The wind was particularly loud, and I got up to get a glass of water. As I passed Grandpa’s room, I saw a glow under the door. I pushed it open quietly. Grandpa was sitting on his bed, the jar open on his lap, and he was holding a token with a flame carved on it. The token was glowing a soft orange, and in the air above it, a small, flickering shape—like a firefly, but made of fire—was dancing. Grandpa was whispering, and the shape seemed to listen. Then he put the token back, and the glow faded, and the shape vanished.

I must have made a sound, because Grandpa looked up. His eyes were sad. He patted the bed beside him. ‘Sit down, Emmy-bug. I think it’s time you knew.’

He told me that the tokens were not souvenirs. They were locks. Each one represented a door, and each door led to a thin place where the barriers between our world and something else were weak. He had discovered them during his years as a train conductor, when he’d pass through certain stretches of track where the air felt wrong. He learned to carve the tokens from wood of a particular tree—a stunted, twisted juniper that grew only near the thin places. Each symbol was a key, a way to reinforce a door or open it. He’d spent his life traveling, finding thin places, and sealing them. Now that he was older, he had to keep patrolling the ones that opened near our new home. The desert was full of them.

I didn’t know whether to believe him. But over the next weeks, he showed me. He took me to a dry arroyo at dusk, and he placed a token with an eye symbol at its center. Immediately, the air shimmered, and I saw, for just a moment, a vast, dark landscape with huge, alien structures, and something looking back at me with too many eyes. He pulled the token away, and the vision vanished. ‘You see?’ he said. ‘We can’t let them through.’

He taught me how to carve the tokens, using a small knife and a piece of juniper wood. He said I had a knack for it. I made my first spiral token, and he placed it near the back wall. A week later, a hailstorm hit the desert—unnatural, with hailstones the size of golf balls—and Grandpa said my token held the door shut. I felt a swell of pride, and also a deep, creeping fear.

But Grandpa was getting weaker. He had a cough that wouldn’t go away. My mother took him to the doctor, and they said it was emphysema, years of breathing train smoke and dust. The doctor said he had maybe six months. Grandpa took the news with a grim smile. He told me he had one last job: there was a door under the house, in the crawl space, that he’d been containing with a special token, but it had weakened. He needed a new one, made from a specific juniper that grew near an old Pueblo ruin twenty miles away. He asked me to drive him there. He said I was the only one he trusted.

I borrowed my mother’s car. We drove through the desert, the sun beating down. Grandpa directed me to a place where the road ended, and we walked the rest. The juniper was there, gnarled and ancient. Grandpa showed me how to cut a branch, how to thank the tree. We returned home, and he helped me carve a new token—this one with a star, the most complex. He said a star token was the strongest locking charm.

We went down to the crawl space. It was dark, dusty, and smelled of earth and something metallic. Grandpa held a flashlight, and I saw the old token set in a small stone shelf under a beam. It was cracked. He told me to swap them out, carefully, to place the new token where the old had been, and to press it firmly. I did as he said. As soon as I set it in place, the ground trembled slightly. I heard a sound like a deep, satisfied sigh. Grandpa nodded. ‘It’ll hold.’

He died a week later. My mother buried him in a cemetery on a hill, with a view of the desert. I kept the jar of tokens. I didn’t know what to do with them, but I couldn’t let them go.

A few weeks after his death, I was in the crawl space, checking on the star token. I heard a scratching sound above me. I crawled out, expecting to see a rat or a bird. But there was nothing. That night, I heard the scratching again, but this time it seemed to come from the walls. My mother didn’t hear it. She said it was just the wind. But I knew better. The tokens were losing their power without Grandpa to tend them.

I started learning the language he had spoken. I found his old journal, filled with symbols and words in a script I didn’t recognize, but I used a dictionary he had hidden behind his books. It was a language not of this world—a language of doors and thresholds. I practiced the words until they felt natural on my tongue.

One night, I was in my room, holding the jar, when one of the tokens—the eye—started to glow. I felt a pull, as if something wanted me to come closer. I walked to the back wall, the one near the arroyo. I placed the eye token on the ground, and I whispered the unlocking phrase from the journal. I don’t know why I did it. Perhaps I wanted to see my grandpa again. Perhaps I wanted to know what was on the other side.

The ground split open, and I looked into that dark, alien landscape. And I saw, not monsters, but a figure—a man with my grandpa’s silhouette, but his eyes were black, and his mouth was a thin line. He was walking toward me, and as he got closer, he whispered, ‘Emmy-bug, let me in.’ It sounded like Grandpa, but wrong. I felt a cold terror grip me.

I dropped the token and stepped back. The crack sealed itself, but I knew what I had almost done. I gathered every token, put them in a leather bag, and drove to the juniper tree that had given Grandpa his last branch. I buried the bag at its roots. I said another prayer, one of sealing, and I walked away without looking back.

But sometimes, at night, when the wind is high, I hear a faint scratching at my window, and I see a small shape in the shadows—not quite a firefly, not quite a moth, but a thing that flickers like a flame. And I know that Grandpa’s collection wasn’t just a hobby. It was a burden, and now it’s mine. I just hope the juniper holds.