Chapter 4: The First Echo

The nightmares started three days after the email.

Not the familiar dreams I'd carried for fourteen years—those hazy replays of that night at the dojang that my mind had worn smooth through repetition. These were different. Sharper. More like memories than dreams, except they were memories of things that had never happened to me.

I was walking through narrow corridors made of brick and shadow, the metallic scent so thick it coated my throat like syrup. Children's voices echoed from somewhere ahead, calling names I didn't recognize, pleading for help that would never come. And always, just at the edge of my vision, was a tall figure that seemed to bend and stretch in ways that human anatomy shouldn't allow.

The worst part was waking up. Because each time I jolted awake in my sweat-soaked sheets, gasping for air that still tasted of copper pennies, I could see him. The figure from my dreams, standing in the corner of my bedroom, perfectly still and watching.

He was never there when I turned on the lights. But in those few seconds between sleep and wakefulness, when the darkness felt alive and hungry, I could make out his impossible height, the way his limbs seemed too long for his frame, the complete absence where his face should have been.

By the fourth night, I'd given up on sleep entirely.

I sat at my kitchen table with every light in the apartment blazing, surrounded by printed emails and photographs that I'd enhanced using image editing software I'd taught myself to use. The face in that grainy photo—the one that might have been Lucas—haunted me more than any nightmare.

The sound came at 3:17 AM: a slow, deliberate knocking on my front door.

Three knocks, evenly spaced, echoing through my apartment like gunshots. My blood turned to ice water as I remembered another door, another set of three knocks, another night when curiosity had led to disaster.

I didn't answer. I sat frozen at my table, listening to my own heartbeat thundering in my ears, waiting for whatever was on the other side to give up and go away.

The knocking came again. Three deliberate raps that seemed to shake the walls.

Then silence.

I waited for twenty minutes before creeping to the peephole, my bare feet silent on the cold linoleum. The hallway outside was empty, lit by the familiar fluorescent buzz of my building's ancient lighting. Nothing unusual. No tall figures lurking in the shadows.

But when I returned to my table, there was a new email waiting on my laptop.

You can't ignore us forever, Azuman. We know you remember.

This time, the attachment wasn't a photograph. It was an audio file, fifteen seconds long, recorded in what sounded like an echo chamber or tunnel. I almost deleted it without listening, but that familiar compulsion—the same need for answers that had driven me for fourteen years—made me click play.

Lucas's voice filled my apartment, thin and distant but unmistakably him: "Azu? Are you there? I've been waiting so long. It's cold here, and I can't find the way out. Please come find me. Please don't forget about me."

The file ended with the sound of footsteps moving away, fading into silence.

I played it seventeen times before my hands stopped shaking enough to function. Then I did what I should have done years ago: I started looking for the one person who might have answers.

Finding Master Kim—now just Daniel Kim, according to public records—took six hours of database searches and phone calls to numbers that were mostly disconnected. He'd moved around a lot since the dojang closed, working at various martial arts schools throughout New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania before apparently giving up teaching altogether.

I found him at a motel on Route 1 in Edison, working the night desk and looking like a man who'd spent the past fourteen years trying to forget something that wouldn't let him go.

He recognized me immediately, despite the years that had passed. His face went pale, and his hand instinctively moved toward what I assumed was a panic button behind the counter.

"Azuman." His voice was hoarse, worn down by time and whatever demons he'd been wrestling with. "I wondered when you'd find me."

"Master Kim—"

"Just Daniel now. Haven't taught in years." He glanced around the empty motel lobby, then came out from behind the counter. He'd aged badly, his once-strong frame now gaunt and hollow, his eyes carrying the weight of someone who'd seen too much. "We shouldn't talk here. Too many windows."

He led me to a storage room behind the office, a cramped space filled with cleaning supplies and broken furniture. The single bulb overhead cast harsh shadows that seemed to move independently of their sources.

"You still smell like him," Daniel said without preamble. "The Penny-Pincher. I can smell it on you from across the room."

The casual use of the name hit me like a physical blow. "You know what it is."

"I've always known." He sat heavily on an overturned plastic crate, suddenly looking decades older than his fifty-something years. "My grandfather told me the stories when I was young. Warnings about the thing that lived in the spaces between buildings, that fed on children's dares and foolish bargains. I thought they were just stories until I leased that building."

"Then why did you tell us about Harold? Why did you—"

"Because I'm a fool." His laugh was bitter, self-loathing. "Because I thought if I acknowledged it, gave it a name and a story, maybe it would leave us alone. Instead, I gave it exactly what it wanted: children who would seek it out."

The storage room felt smaller suddenly, the shadows pressing closer. "What happened to Lucas?"

Daniel's hands shook as he reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a small leather pouch. Inside were dozens of old pennies, green with age and corrosion. "These appeared in my apartment the night after Lucas disappeared. One for every year that thing has been hunting in this area. Seventy-three pennies, Azuman. Seventy-three years of children who knocked on doors they shouldn't have touched."

I stared at the coins, my mind struggling to process the implications. "You mean there were others before Lucas?"

"Others before, others since. The thing doesn't stop, doesn't sleep. It just waits for the next child brave enough or foolish enough to seek it out." He closed the pouch with trembling fingers. "I've tried to warn people, tried to research ways to stop it, but every time I get close to answers, it finds me. It lets me know it's watching."

"The smell," I whispered.

"Gets stronger when you're getting close to something it doesn't want you to know. It's been following you for weeks now, hasn't it? The nightmares, the visions, the messages." Daniel's eyes were bright with a fever that might have been madness or terror. "It's toying with you, Azuman. The way a cat toys with a mouse before it strikes."

"But why? Why me?"

"Because you were there. Because you remember. Because every time you dig deeper into its history, you're advertising yourself as someone who knows the truth." He stood abruptly, pacing the small space like a caged animal. "You need to stop. Delete everything, burn your research, move somewhere far away and never speak of this again."

"I can't do that."

"You can and you will, because the alternative is joining Lucas and all the others in whatever dark place that thing calls home." Daniel grabbed my shoulders, his grip surprisingly strong. "I've spent fourteen years running from this, changing names, moving every few months, and it still finds me. It still sends me reminders that it hasn't forgotten. You're walking the same path, and it leads nowhere good."

But even as he spoke, I could smell it—that metallic, copper-penny scent seeping through the walls of the storage room. Daniel noticed it too, his face going white with terror.

"It's here," he whispered. "God help us, it's here."

The single bulb overhead began to flicker, casting the room in strobing shadows that seemed to move with purpose. In the darkness between flashes, I caught glimpses of something tall and wrong standing just behind Daniel, its too-long limbs reaching toward him with fingers that bent at impossible angles.

"Run," Daniel said, his voice barely audible over the growing buzz of electrical interference. "Run and don't look back. Don't make my mistakes. Don't let curiosity kill you the way it killed that boy."

The lights went out completely, plunging us into absolute darkness. I heard Daniel scream—a sound of pure terror that cut off mid-breath as if something had wrapped around his throat.

I fumbled for the door handle, my hands shaking so badly I could barely grip it. Behind me, there was a wet sliding sound, like something heavy being dragged across concrete, and the metallic smell became so overwhelming it made me gag.

I ran through the empty motel lobby and didn't stop until I reached my car, my lungs burning and my heart hammering against my ribs. In the rearview mirror, I could see the motel's neon sign flickering erratically, and something tall and dark moving past the windows of the storage room.

Daniel Kim was gone by morning. The motel owner found only an empty room and a small pile of old pennies scattered across the floor where we'd been talking.

But his warning echoed in my head as I drove home through the pre-dawn darkness: Don't make my mistakes. Don't let curiosity kill you the way it killed that boy.

The problem was, it was already too late for that. The thing that had taken Lucas—the Penny-Pincher, as Daniel had called it—knew I was getting close to something. And instead of backing down, instead of taking the smart path and running like Daniel had tried to do, I felt something else growing in my chest.

Determination. Anger. And underneath it all, a desperate hope that maybe, just maybe, I could still save my best friend.

Even if it killed me in the process.