lickhaven

[This week’s contribution was passed through me. I’ll explain about that down at the end. —D.]

As I was walking the seashore one day, I discovered, lying atop the sand, a golden coin of such size that I stopped to look out to sea, expecting a sailed galleon might be riding the breakers. But I saw no ship and, on the beach, no ancient, wave-battered driftwood. Only seashells, the empty carapaces of horseshoe crabs – and the coin.

How, I wondered, could such a disk come to be reposing so conspicuously on the shore? I picked it up. It felt too dense for the waves to have tumbled it in, and it was singularly unworn. Gold, though dense, is soft, often eroded even by a fingernail. This circlet looked freshly minted, alive with detail, though it had no date inscribed that I could discover.

I knew next to nothing of numismatics, but something Spanish lurked in the design and the dour righteousness of the monarch’s face. The small clusters of letters had a Romance cast, especially on the obverse, but none formed what looked to be full words, rather abbreviations or references, the hasty shorthand of an overwhelmed treasury.

How much might it weigh? Two ounces, three? Assuming it pure gold, as much as a thousand dollars in bullion value alone, and God knows how much accreted from possible historical associations. I slipped it into the waistband of my trunks and poked slowly along, quartering the beach for further hints and glints, but uncovered nothing more.

I am by no wise a rich man, but though this discovery represented potential cash in hand, I ignored its existence for almost a year after returning to my office and semi-urban home. It was as though it carried its own reality, like a visitor from a parallel universe. If I had not needed money for one of my sudden technological yearnings – a desire to update my aging stereo system by adding a graphite equalizer to contour the frequencies escaping my receiver – it might well have lain quiescent for the ages in my “scatter” drawer, the effluvia that accretes to a bachelor unconsciously tied to his past, lest the present swallow and digest him.

Resurrected from its cluttered nest, the coin shone bright and unlikely in the half light of an evening. The foundling had a hold on me, and I was loathe to let it go. But I am basically a realist – or am I?

I had often passed Fabricio’s Circular Antiquities, a coin shop and sole caterer to such hobbies for many leagues (to retain the nautical flavor), without the yearning to enter. I think of myself as a student of history, with emphasis on naval disasters and lost or mythological pasts, but the hoarding of such state-regulated items strikes me as a dry, withered avocation. Were I a collector, I would strike for more enlivening pursuits – goat tails, labels from imported liqueurs – but on this occasion I approached Fabricio’s with a light and inquisitive heart, eager to uncover the worth of what the deeps had coughed up.

The man behind the counter was mouselike in all aspects – short, somewhat stooped, with protruding upper teeth and a sparse, whiskering mustache. He held stubby arms forward at chest level, like paws.

I set the coin on the counter and released a knowing smile (a mild cheat on my part).

The rodent turned the coin over, over again, studied the inscriptions, turned it a third time. His nose twitched.

“Where did you get this?”

“From the sea.”

He repeated the coin’s revolutions yet again, aided by a magnifying glass. He polished the item’s front with a soft cloth, possibly a gesture to gain time.

My smile ebbed. “How old is it?” I asked. “Spanish? Portuguese?”

“We have never seen another like it… From the sea?”

“On the beach. On a clear day. A week of solid sunshine.”

“It does not have a date.”

“It looks almost new.” Unworn, I expanded.

His paws raised from the counter and reverted to their repulsive at-rest position. “One moment.”

He skittered into a back room and quickly returned, accompanied by a grotesquely fat man in stained clothing. The substances on his once-white shirt adhered in layers, each pushing the preceding farther into the weave. You might have traced his lifelong habits through its close analysis.

He picked up the coin between tubular thumb and forefinger and held it a few inches forward of his chin, tilting it slowly as if to see how it reflected light. Then he released it from some eighteen inches onto the counter. It thumped with almost no rebound.

“Solid gold by its feel,” he said, “eighteen karat or better. Or some odd, dense alloy. Sixteenth century Andalusian inscription technique, Leon figuration, but in no language ever spoken on earth. Quite impossible.” He handed me the coin.

“I’d like to sell it.”

The fat man shrugged. “Assuming gold, I can give you base metal value, nothing more.”

“But a sixteenth century coin….”

“A chimera. A bit of this, a smidgeon of that, all slopped together into a dog’s dinner. It’s unique, but worthless for that reason. Someone knocked this together as a jape. A counterfeit at best, or a Spanish doodle. One of a kind’s of value only if a remnant of an official issue.”

I felt confused, also annoyed. “Why on earth would a single coin from five hundred years ago pop out of the ocean? There must be others like it.”

“Never,” said the fat man, shaking an encrusted finger, “underestimate the machinations of chance.” He placed the orphaned disk on an electronic scale and made rapid calculations on a pad, his hand trailing sweat and filth across the paper. “Eleven twenty-five for the gold, if it tests pure, a hundred for curiosity value. Twelve and a quarter.” He looked at me with languid expectation. The mouse hovered at the far end of the counter, his face nodding in short jerks.

“What if I find more of these?”

“Bring them in.”

“Wouldn’t that increase their value? Prove that they were from a legitimate currency?”

The fat man swiveled like a log on end until he came to rest leaning against the wall. “Unless we can trace it to a known region of a known era with a known government that issued a known currency, this is a freak, and if it has friends, its friends are likewise freaks. I can have it tested, as I said. But even should it prove gold, if it comes up modern, I’m out my hundred, because there is zero curiosity value in a modern fake.”

“You think I made this thing?”

He shrugged, and I could sense the air shy away from him. “It looks old, it feels old. I’ve seen hundreds of ancient counterfeits over the years, but if so, it hasn’t worn. It’s an unlikely, an absurd piece of work.”

Almost unwilled, my hand dropped onto the counter and palmed the coin. What could I desire it for? A graphite equalizer, if sold. Yet my hand appreciated retaining its rude weight.

“I’m gong to keep it. For now.”

“A chimera,” said the fat man again.

I have no use for the ocean or the beach. I find the waters frightening and empty, the sand unmanageable for walking or enjoyment. I annually visit the shore for one three-day weekend, as a form of cultural imperative, and to remind myself, lest temptation suggest otherwise, that the experience is every bit as vacant as I recalled. My interest in naval history is divorced from the reality of the sea itself.

As for my official place in the world, I am a financial analyst, in the broadest encompass of that term; in truth, something closer to a compiler of data. About that work I have no interest whatsoever. Only an income substantial enough to support my actual interests, coupled with my demand that I work no overtime, ever. At my “job” (that currently flexible noun)  I am considered surly or difficult, when considered at all. So be it.

The following year, I had spent the first week of my elastic month’s vacation reading through the accumulation of books creeping across my livingroom floor, until obsession fell upon me, and the coin hung heavy in the pocket of my shapeless trousers as I poked a metal detector into the sand over a half-mile run of beachfront.

Days of prodding had brought me nothing. Worse, I had spent more than the equivalent of the coin’s potential value on the detector and the exorbitant rent of a minuscule shore apartment. Not one cent on a graphic equalizer. Then, on the last day but one of my vacation, as I walked the beach almost resigned, I saw, just above the foam line, a disk of reflected sun – a second coin, as like the first as any two guppies.

Through simple association and man’s desire for mystery, I had assumed that the first had come from the sea, though nothing had suggested the ocean floor. Much more likely to have fallen from the hand of a lubber. So too with this addition. Yet, though I spied four couples on blankets, a party of three in an unsettling amorous arrangement, a scattering of cellulite widows, and a frolicking gaggle of adolescents, the coin, restive in my hand, muttered, I belong to none of these; I resent the implication.

I withdrew to the boardwalk, where a small, disheveled food counter sported two rusty tables and four rusty chairs, from any of which I could survey the beach. After purchasing a sickeningly sweet orange soda, I settled into one of the chairs, its arms tacky with substances half human, half comestible. I was protected from the sun by a faded umbrella, askew in the table’s center socket.

There I sat until near sunset, and there I returned the following morning to continue my vigil on my final day of vacation. Would I know my man (or woman) if I saw him (or her)? The owner of these rare and, to me, priceless relics should stand out as surely as a trash collector in a tuxedo.

Every hour or two I made my way to the tiny counter, peering over my shoulder lest I lose a second of potential revelation, to order some liquid or solid refill: iced tea, root beer, hot dog, ham sandwich, doughnut – each more unpalatable than the last, as though the stand’s owner possessed a philosopher’s stone that transmuted all food to dross. Where, I wondered, was that owner, and how could he make a living from this unfrequented dead-end? The tremulous counter woman, the spirit of a mollusk reanimating a corpse, could hardly keep any business functioning.

My attention was riveted, as always, on the beach, when a chitter of conversation broke out behind me. Had some fool come to join me in being poisoned? But the arousal of my neck hairs alerted me to a subliminal recognition. I knew that squeak.

I turned so suddenly that I almost parted the decaying elements of my seat. Exiting from behind the counter scuttled the very rodent from Fabricio’s. I bellowed at the troglodyte waitress and pointed to the rear doorway. “Who is that?”

“Whatcha mean?”

“Is that man the owner?”

“Naaah, him?”

“What is he doing here?”

“Whatcha mean?”

Panicked that the mouse might elude me, I dashed round the counter,  through the doorway, and into a miasmic space with the odor of a crypt.

Yes, there were worse things about this establishment that the food. One was the fat man lounging like a discarded bolster in a flattened easy chair, his unimaginable rump not four inches form the floor. The mouse shrank against the wall, as though I had come armed with broom or trap.

The fat man coughed, raised a hand and chuckled.

“Found us,” he said.

“You’re Fabricio.”

He waved the comment off like a persistent fly. “There is no Fabricio. Italians know nothing of numismatics, can’t hold a coin without spending it. It is simply a name. Fabricated.” He chuckled again.

“How often…?” I gestured toward the beach, unable to sort my words.

“We allow ourselves one catch per season. You are this year’s – as you were also last year’s – an unmatched sequence. A year of anticipation, then contact renewed, like the embrace of a lover.”

His lover!? “You are a pig,” I said.

“Oink and curly tail. At your service.”

A vision arose of his chair ablaze with him sunk into its defeated springs, too corpulent to flail his way to freedom as the flames fed on his grease. This apocalyptic image sobered me. I was, after all, but the victim of a practical joke.

“I suppose you will want your coins back,” I said.

He looked peeved. “The coins must remain with the finder. That’s the hook.” He reached to a shelf and, with a grunt, pulled a wide-mouthed crock toward him. “I have more than enough.”

The crock, of greater than gallon capacity, was half or more filled with coins, the pinch-faced royal figure staring from each.

“My God.”

“You are the first to track me down.”

“Then why did he show himself while I sat there?” I said, pointing to the rodent.

The fat man shrugged. “He was hungry,” then to the lapsed creature, “Sit down, Willard, for God’s sake, he doesn’t care about you.”

The mouse skittered to a wobbly bentwood chair set at a card table, frothing with anger: “No one understands Willard. Lard! Lard!”

“You dare call me that?”

“I call you that. Lard!”

“Piteous squeam!”

“Lard!” Then Willard began to cry. A more horrendous sound has never reached me, not simple sorrow, but a misery that delved to a depth I hope never to know.

The fat man made patting motions in Willard’s directions. For comfort? Restraint?

“Lard,” the mouse repeated, but in a receding voice, as though swallowing back his failed rage.

“The air conditioner’s broken,” said the fat man to me. “Why don’t you sit down also?”

I distrusted the rickety seat across the card table from the mouse, but my knees felt weak from the heat, so I acquiesced. The odor of the place ate into my nasal lining.

“I don’t understand the point of this. What are you looking to achieve?”

The fat man held up a coin. “Reaction. Finding one of these lies outside the experience of anyone alive. How will the finder place it in his internal landscape, explain it, adapt to it?”

“You can’t know their reactions, they can’t all come to you at Fabricio’s.”

“Some do. And I have my helper.” He wave a hand to the mouse. “Also Louisa, out front, serving drinks. She has eyes, and she works a camera. This stand has but one true function, to register each find, by sight, by photograph when possible.”

“How long has this been going on?”

The fat man laughed and slapped the table. “Fifteen years. That long. A shelf of folders and notebooks. But that is none of your concern.”

“It costs you. The stand, the food, the tine to forge these things. The gold.”

“All that is worth doing costs, whether it be in money or time or… whatever. The metal passes from me and returns, in one form or another.”

“You spout facile babble,” I said, realizing, in saying so, that I had let anger get the better of me.

The oleaginous lump bristled. “Do you think you know me? No one can know me.”

“I was impertinent,” I said. “Forgive me, if you will. So then, you keep continuing record of these reactions?”

“Some finders I lose track of, others I see changed in subtle or not so subtle ways. Converted, you could say, by a truth they did not realize they had embraced.”

“Truth?”

“Have another of our marvelous confections. A hotdog!” He leaned forward and slapped the table, as though his abysmal food lay there, ready for my consumption. “You believe there is no such thing as truth? Of course, the truth of truth itself cannot be proved. Then let me amend my facile babble to, ‘internal assumption.’ Something changes within those who find the coins.”

The mouse, seated with his elbows on the card table, raised his paws to his mouth to nibble at a sandwich of wilted lettuce and cheese.

Breaking the extending silence, the fat man made an astonishing proposition. “Perhaps you should join us in our rewarding avocation. There is little – almost no – remuneration involved, as you have succinctly indicated, but the fascination, the insight into human behavior! Seeing your fellow humans at their most disoriented, approaching expansive discomfort. Hmmm?”

What an appalling suggestion. Seeing my reticence, like a comic-book villain he scooped a handful of the golden coins from the crock and dribbled them through his fingers in clacking cacophony. He tossed one to me, which I clamped to stillness on the tabletop.

”Hold it, lift it,” he commanded. “Can you not feel its influence?”

I could feel the same need to possess that had attached to my own find when I saw it threatened with loss at Fabricio’s. I flipped the would-be doubloon high and caught it in my outstretched hand. “I cannot work with you,” I said. “We would make a ludicrous couple or trio or quartet, as it might be. We would tear at each other and progress nowhere.”

Yet I fought a strong pull to acquiesce. I have long thought that there is more width and depth to the winds of the world than we choose to accept in our quotidian lives, and I acknowledge unnamed influences that others reject. Something – perhaps its assumed centuries – burdened this metal with astonishing weight. Uncharted history pressed into my palm, the timbers of wooden ships groaning beneath an undulating surface.

“It ill-suits your temperament?” smirked the fat man.

“It ill-suits the situation and the personalities involved. Did you mint – create – these? How could you have produced them? Where?”

He shook his swine-jowled head. “They were left to me, along with the shop and – of that, later. The coins came to me” – laying an almost fondling hand on the crock – “complete, as you see them, the container near full before I decided to… release a few, piecemeal.

“If I cared for such things an had left them complete, I could have become wealthy! The gold in its entirety, like an enchanted sampling of a lost Spanish fleet. Instead… you see me! I gained no wealth, and these malicious fakes… have served only to further my monstrosity. I have no memory to prove my conjecture, but once, I  believe, I was limber – not a figure of grace, but a human of perceptible form. These coins” – again patting the crock with obscene affection – “have made me what you see.”

“How is that? What effect on your person could they have?”

At the card table, the rodent loosed an obscene chitter of laughter that propelled me upright, overturning my chair. He pointed to the fat man, to himself. 

“Willard! I will cut your rations!” snapped the fat man. The mouse ducked his head under his paws, still holding his sandwich, deflating to a hissing intake of breath. What  might have invaded the rodent’s past to leave him an eviscerated mind in a collapsed body? Except for that day in the coin shop, I had never heard him speak an extended sentence. He acted as the fat man’s familiar, a leftover from times of witches and minor devils.

“Pay no attention to him,” the fat man admonished. “In him, in me, you see the coins’ effect. Not how or by what force that effect has been accomplished, but the result. They twist, gutter, snake, deny, reduce, envelope – the result tailored to the individual. Or to circumstance, perhaps.”

“You knew Willard before, enough to witness this change?”

He waved a dismissive hand. “That makes no difference. What you see is what you would have available to work with should you join us.”

I shuddered at that assertion. “I have no desire to ‘work with’ any of it, any of you, under any circumstances”

“It is ordained. Two coins you found! That makes you an accumulator – the only one besides ourselves. And thus one of us.”

I was torn between a cloud of negative responses – ignorance, confusion, disgust – and intense attraction. Were the coins having effect on me, or was it all manipulative nonsense? I reached to release the coin. But it did not (would not?) leave my hand.

“So,” said the fat man. He smiled almost sensually and tapped the table as though it could supply information. “You have not asked my name.” 

“And you have not offered it.”

“Because I do not know it.”

I was sideswiped.“You don’t know your own name?”

“I do not. You are now permitted to ask me why.”

“I do not want or need your permission! That would be a scurrilous requirement. I ask on my own: How can you not know your name?”

“I found myself in the shop, some years ago. Of the time before that I retain nothing definite. The years of my past – I say ‘my,’ though I have no proof whose past it might have been – lie a vacancy.” He raised his hand in negation or restraint. “Words do not paint the picture. What I mean to say is that something… awoke, without a sense of being or concept of its own origin. It must have been, yet what it may have been is lost. Isolated memories percolate through me, presumably from my self, though how can I consider a connected self? These flashes of previousness could as well be a collectivization of another’s memories… though that I refuse to entertain. How – think it – could another’s memories invade me, and how appear to be mine? What remains, the question that bedevils me, is what was I before, how did that ‘I’ become lost, and how had it returned to its shattered home? All I have of self is what you see. If that is not enough for you, think how much less it is for me.”

I could add nothing of substance, so I asked, instead, “The shop? Do you see it as having been yours, before… whatever?”

“It could always have been mine, but then, where could they have come from?”

“They…?”

“Willard and Louisa appeared with me, with the shop, in the shop. I… became, as a sudden vapor, in a place I knew not, them with me, two addled creatures I knew even less of than I knew myself. Together, we four – myself, the shop, the two of them – we form an inescapable whole. Four and one other. The crock, with its coins.”

“What have you learned of their origin, Willard and Louisa, what –”

“Ask nothing more of them because there is nothing more to answer.”

“But what of the coins?” I persisted.

“At first I attempted to track them as thoroughly as possible, their age if old, who had cast them if new, but gradually such details became of less importance. They simply were, these false jewels of mystery, they are, which is their sufficiency. I am not given to uprooting the esoterics of history. I am a merchant, like any merchant. What I sell is expected to be bought – to pass through my hands and be forgotten once sold. In normal circumstances, they are items of trade, of little value beyond that. But these? No date on them and nothing of their kin known from the ancient trading world. I could have the metal fully analyzed; there would be no ethical breach to shave one and present the bits removed to a chemist. That I have not done so stems from internal restraint, and were you to apply external measures – tie me to this seat – I would burst the bonds to prevent your going further. Is such a reaction an effect of the coins themselves? I believe so. They have so altered my mind that I remain barely an independent being. What is left to me is to play my game of drop and retrieve.”

I turned over my hand and released the coin it had been holding, clenched. Why could I not do so before? I had merely fallen for a line of hypnotic patter which no longer constrained me. I felt certain that this repulsive man had attempted the same manipulation with others before me, employing the coin as a talisman to bind my attention.

“Is it not a likelihood,” I said in attempted diversion, “that these coins are, in effect, ‘real’ fakes, modern specimens masquerading as ancient copies to create peculiar value precisely from the murkiness of their origin?”

“There is the likelihood of almost anything in this confounded world, but as it happens, I know that they are modern, as I could prove to you. But I have said enough.”

“Do not play games with me,” I bellowed, as though I could have legitimate power. “You may have lost interest in their origin, but to me their origin is essential – who made them, and for what purpose?”

The greaseheap heaved a prolonged sigh and rummaged through the coins, placing handfuls on the table, shifting them. “Feel their rims. Discover anomalies and misdirections of the metal.”

I glared but did as he asked. After perhaps twenty minutes of making comparisons, noting similarities and differences, I announced my findings.

“There are sharp abrasions along the edges of all, and several have a dent of sorts on the back, the obverse. Those are the main peculiarities. Beyond that, they have only the individual ticks of difference you might expect to find in any collection that has known use.”

He waved his hand like a flag. “Be specific! What sort of abrasions? What ‘dent’? What percentage have one or the other?”

Somewhat chagrined, I examined the coins again, more slowly. “Some have the abrasions on the bottom edge only, below the figure, some abraded on both top and bottom. I have found none showing only top abrasions. The rear depressions seem exclusively on some with the bottom-only roughness, but not all. I cannot determine exact percentages. I would have to examine all the coins – and from doing that, what would I learn of their origin?”

“It is not their origin, it is their formation, how they were cast. Since I have sorted through the entire, I can state quantitatively that one-half have abrasions top and bottom, one half only on the bottom. Of those with the bottom anomaly, one-half feature the obverse depression. What does this information tell you?”

I was becoming rankled. “As someone unfamiliar with the manufacture of metal castings, it tells me exactly nothing. I imagine you will now delight in illuminating me.”

“It tells me that the items were cast in sets of four, the metal poured into or, more correctly, through two segments of a mold while it was set downward on its top edge, not flat – one coin above the other in each segment. One segment had a slight bump on the upper form, which would produce a depression in that coin, and which the designer perhaps did not see as significant. The metal was poured into what would become the lower coin in each segment, running its way down to what would become the top coin through a gap between the two, similar to the entry gap where the pour originated. The top coin has only the bottom abrasion, the place where it was broken loose from the lower, once cooled. The lower coin has the reciprocal rough spot from that break, plus an opposite break from removing a short entry funnel. Look carefully and you will see that the bottom abrasion of the doubly abraded is less jagged than the upper, with slight striations where the original, more jagged snap has been softened, using a tool such as a file, or by being rubbed against a stone. It would appear that the edge sharpness, like the depression – caused by an error in the mold – was again considered of little importance.”

I tried to absorb this unfolding explanation, but admitted myself overwhelmed by the wealth of detail. 

“How do you come to know so much of casting?” I asked.

“I know little of foundry specifics. I work from logic. My deductions are what I – or you, if so inclined – would conclude from the evidence presented. I have seen nothing similar in the formation or manufacture of any ancient coin. What may look, to the casual eye, like usage wear is essentially duplicated on each example of the coin cast, according to one of the four positions in the mold. Therefore the ‘wear’ is bogus. Thus, the coins are a modern cast.”

I was astonished that this gelatinous creature could produce so full an explanation of a problem that I would not so much as notice. If inherent, why should his ability remain intact while his physical form slid toward dissolution? 

I swept the table clear of coins and hauled them by handfuls to the crock. One or another dropped to the floor, the fat man and I nearly colliding heads in our rush to retrieve them.

“If I had the means, I would melt them to ingots,” I growled.

The fat man swiveled like a spun bowling ball. “They are mine, where they came from or why is of no matter. They were given to my keeping!”

“Let them be damned!”

Why should I have taken such rapid and violent exception to the very existence of those coins? That they offended me at some deep level was obvious, but what brought out my extreme reaction? I have nothing that you might identify as a spiritual component. The soul, which appeals to so many as a separate realm residing within us, is to me the coordinated working of neurons and other cells assembled as a human machine. Perhaps this might seem lifeless, but to me it is the essence of life as lived, day upon day.

However, I have long been intrigued by elementals, those supposed nature-entities that lie behind so much of folklore: pixies, the “good folk,” kobolds, and the like. There has been the off-and-on question of whether they represent the communal memory of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles, for example. Sometimes the Stonehenge folk are thought to have been the original Britons. As often, these figures of near myth are looked upon as proto-Britons, a short, squat people lost to history, to archaeology, even to paleontology.

But “elementals” may be an unfortunate term to have unleashed. I mean to indicate neither scurrying dwarves or beings of pure spirit: souls without a body to inhabit. I intend rather a broadened definition of what constitutes a living being, which might include those two extremes, but also any life form not clearly akin to our human. A distinctly “other.”

What, really, is a non-believer such as me, a mechanist, to make of such things? Let us posit that one may not believe in something but still make assumptions about what might be possible if one did believe.

In effect, I feel that I have fallen into an in-between place of neither belief or dismissal. Could it be that Willard and Louisa, those humanesque absurdities, are a form of co-existent, non-human life? Forming a bridge between the spiritual and the mechanistic, could they result from some mechanism that provided them with “bodies,” as surely as we, but based on principles we cannot conceive?

I do not mean this to sound dismissive of Willard and Louisa. So far I have said too little of Louisa, portraying her as a semi-autonomous functionary not worth consideration. Over time I came to see her as a fiercely frightened being, though one of a higher order of mind than Willard. I can’t say where her fear springs from, but it is intense, extreme, and does not appear to result from any misuse by the fat man, who, after all, provides her with work and food (if the proper term for what she ingests and prepares for others), as well as shelter. In return, she acts as lookout, with a remarkably keen and discerning eye.

Willard, by contrast, exists at his own whim, only occasionally serving as intermediary for the fat man, much as a dog might bring in the morning newspaper. Both he and Louisa teeter on the collapsing edge of terror, but each, I think, nurtures a distinct personal terror of their own. If they spring from an alternative, elemental world, it is one that has afforded them no solace.

There matters might well have rested undisturbed, as things often do once concentration has passed, had I not gone back to the fat man’s hidden back room to sort through the coins once more. I have no idea why he kept them there, rather than in the shop, and did not ask. But there the crock sat, otherwise undisturbed, on the shelf where he had first identified it to me.

Pawing through the flow of metal once again, I uncovered something unnerving. Among the coins with only a lower break, they divided equally between those with the casting dent and those without. Among those with both upper and lower abrasion, they divided in equal numbers between two groups. In what way did these divisions show separation? All the breaks of each subset were exactly identical, yet wholly different from each other subset.

Let me try to frame this in a more explicit telling. (The fat man had trained me well in the care of expressing my observations.) Within each of the four groups – the two upper, the two lower – the correspondence in breaks was exact, snap for snap, sharpness for sharpness, skew for skew – yet completely unlike the break in each of the other groupings.

Now, take any collection of identically cast items, break the bond between their connection, that break will not be identical across the collection. Each sundering will have minute differences when compared side by side. Not so here: Even under my 20x microscope, I found it impossible to uncover a significant variation, one from another.

The first question is, how could this be even theoretically possible? The second, why had the fat man not pointed this out to me? The final question, assuming he had indeed noticed this oddity, why would he have constructed such an elaborate diversion, positing a casting mechanism which, clearly, could not have taken place?

I was at first reticent to approach him, assuming he would fob off on me another complex and unlikely explanation. How angry would I then become – or how divorced from reality, should I accept his new explanation?

Instead, I waited a week, two weeks into my already overextended “vacation,” to the point of threatening my employment until, after downing another of the execrable sandwiches prepared by Louisa, I emptied the crock to repeat the comparison. I expected to see my obese companion exhibit signs of suspicion or discomfort, but he did not.

What did I find this time around? That each of the four groups was again uniform in its abrasions, yet different from each of the other three. But I also saw, to my heightened amazement, that the precise pattern of each break, under microscopic examination, was different from my previous observation.

The coins had mutated, both individually and by group!

I shook in my seat. Some things are acceptable, others are conjecturally possible, if unlikely. Others simply cannot be.

It was past time to confront the fat man with my findings. But could I trust what my mind told me I has seen? Why had I not arranged to take photographs to bolster my claims, rather than prepare to rattle off blatant idiocies that would, at best, only provoke laughter?

It was of course conceivable that the fat man himself had made these substitutions, but why and how? It would have involved numerous hours of trading every single coin for another. I can say for certain that the crock containing the coins had not been switched for another; I was by then familiar with its individual defects, its chips and idiosyncrasies of pattern. No, the entire lot which it held would have had to be substituted, including the precise denting defect in one-quarter of the total. 

Inconceivable!

I had been fiddling with my conjectures on “elementals” long before my initial explosion with the fat man. Now, a yet stranger conjecture rested itself upon me, an extension of my consideration of Louisa and Willard.

What if I were to turn my original assumption on its head? Not only might an elemental take a form similar to ours through bodily mechanisms wholly foreign, but might a completely different internal formulation produce an external semblance that we might recognize as familiar but not consider alive? Furthermore, might this unrecognized living thing change outward form as it grew or mutated?

Now, you say, I’ve gone fully off my nut. But I prefer to think instead that, like the fat man, I am working from logic. Thus, if you can accept my basic unlikely assumption as logically sound, by extension its successors should not be considered logically false.

Or to sum up: An elemental of an extreme type might take on the form of a cauldron of coins, and that these apparent coins could adjust their construction at will.

Oh, a range of problems accompanies such a rash conjecture, and I have since attempted to focus on them. For example, how much can I believe of what the fat man told me of his partial amnesia and his, shall we say, peculiar bequeath of the coin shop? I must admit that I found him strangely convincing in his presentation. That is, I believed in his own belief in them. What may be the actual case is anyone’s guess. And, counterintuitively, his apparent failure to note the identical “breaks” within the four collections of coins, or their transformations over time, somehow reinforced my acceptance of his tale: While astute, voluble and informed, he is yet capable of the same critical blindness as any of us; myself, in profusion.

Beyond all that, if I agree to accept my observations and my conclusions springing from them, I must go another step further. Were the four coin assemblages originally identical, or could they have changed “on the fly”?

Finally – though there is no end to such questions – are the coins, if living things, a single elemental – the source of their own creation – or a “family” of individuals?

I did not see the problem then – and do not see it now – as one of physically defining these things, living or not. Rather, it all, taken together, fills me with a monstrous dread that I cannot parse or properly transmit. I see that I am on the verge of running off into tumbled verbiage again. So, leave it that I am frightened. Terrified. Not so much of what these things are, but of what they might portend if let loose on the world.

They should be destroyed, obliterated! That is my gut response. But when I step back to consider what this might entail, the terror only rises to a higher level of intensity. How might they, it, react to any attempt at destruction, and how might failure to achieve this destruction create a wider catastrophe?

Though I dare not make such an attempt, I can, or so I assume, secrete them in a way that makes their discovery as unlikely as the ascension of human decency.

It would be best, perhaps, that I not even mention their existence, as I have done here in too painful detail. But should they, or their ilk, reappear, someone must be their recognizer. Thus it is that I have selected five email addresses of people, unknown to me in any manner, to receive these excretions of my mind. You, receiving this, are one of the five. Hopefully, nothing you read or otherwise hear will require action on your part, but I am  hedging my bets.

Why not simply hurl these conjectures into the leaky net of social media? Read what I have sent here, read it again with attention and intention. In the social wilds, it would read as another conspiracy theory with which to bludgeon the public, then fall into righteous ridicule.

No, this is much too serious a matter to be left to the porous inattention of those fishing the stagnant depths of the human mind. However absurd all this may sit with you at the moment, at some later date, it may reassert itself in ways that you will shudder to recognize.

[So, you see, I was somehow appointed one of the five that he, whoever he is, picked to receive this absurd tale. It may be a mistake for me to send it out to this group, since the guy is pretty ambivalent about what wider effect its distribution might have. Still, I like taking chances – at least at a distance. But tell me if you’re aware of any similar experience to the ones described here. – D.]