Chapter 5: The Collector's Ledger

Daniel Kim's disappearance made the local news as a brief human interest story—Night Clerk Vanishes from Route 1 Motel—but I was probably the only person who understood what had really happened to him. The police found no signs of struggle, no evidence of foul play, just an empty room and what the report described as "scattered coins of unknown significance."

I kept one of those pennies.

The motel owner had swept them up and thrown most away, but I'd managed to pocket a single corroded disc before the scene was cleaned. It sat on my kitchen table now, green with age and somehow heavier than copper should be, a tangible reminder that everything Daniel had told me was true.

Seventy-three years. Seventy-three years of children disappearing into whatever dark space the Penny-Pincher called home.

But Daniel had been wrong about one thing: Harold wasn't the beginning of this story. He was just another victim, another collection in a pattern that stretched back much further than anyone had realized.

I'd called in sick to work for the past three days, spending every waking hour at the Mercer County Historical Society, a cramped building that smelled like old paper and institutional coffee. The staff knew me by name now—the quiet young man who'd been requesting increasingly obscure archival materials with the obsessive focus of someone working on a doctoral thesis.

If only they knew what I was really researching.

The breakthrough came on Thursday afternoon, buried in a collection of 19th-century newspaper clippings that had been donated by a local family and never properly cataloged. Most of the articles were mundane—agricultural reports, social announcements, advertisements for patent medicines that probably contained more alcohol than actual medicine.

But tucked between a piece about a church social and an advertisement for "Dr. Hartwell's Miraculous Elixir" was a single column that made my blood run cold:

STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF LOCAL CHILD October 15th, 1887

Young Timothy Morrison, age 9, son of blacksmith Robert Morrison, vanished without trace from the vicinity of Elm Street yesterday evening. The boy was last seen playing near the old Hendricks property, where workmen report a peculiar odor described as "metallic" or "copperous" in nature. Despite extensive searches by local constabulary and volunteer parties, no sign of the missing child has been discovered. Anyone with information is urged to contact Sheriff Williams immediately.

This marks the third such disappearance in the vicinity over the past five years, leading some residents to speak of curses and supernatural influences. Sheriff Williams dismisses such talk as "superstitious nonsense" but acknowledges the unusual nature of these cases.

The Hendricks property. I cross-referenced the address with modern maps and felt my pulse quicken. The old Hendricks lot sat at the exact location where the dojang would be built nearly a century later.

I spent the next six hours digging through every archive the historical society possessed, following a trail of breadcrumbs that led back through decades of carefully buried stories. The pattern was always the same: children disappearing near the same location, always accompanied by reports of metallic odors, always dismissed by authorities as runaways or tragic accidents.

But the deeper I dug, the more I realized that someone else had been tracking these disappearances long before I was born. References to a local legend, whispered stories passed down through generations of parents warning their children away from certain areas after dark.

They called it the Penny-Pincher.

The name first appeared in a 1923 interview with elderly residents about "local folklore and superstitions." According to the article, the Penny-Pincher was described as "a tall figure that dwells in the spaces between buildings, drawn to the sound of children's dares and the scent of their fear." The entity was said to "collect" those who were foolish enough to seek it out, storing them in "a place that exists alongside our world but separate from it."

Most telling was this quote from one unnamed source: "My grandmother always said the Penny-Pincher feeds on bargains and dares. It can't take you unless you call to it first, unless you knock on its door and invite it to play. But once you've made that invitation..." The interview cut off there, the journalist noting only that the subject became "too distressed to continue."

The pieces were falling into place with horrifying clarity. This wasn't just about Lucas or Harold or even the seventeen modern cases I'd identified. This was something ancient, something that had been feeding off children's curiosity and bravery for well over a century.

But why children specifically? And what did it do with them once it had collected them?

The answer came from an unexpected source: a master's thesis written in 1976 by a Rutgers folklore student named Margaret Chen. Her paper, titled "Urban Legends and Collective Trauma in Post-Industrial New Jersey," contained an entire section devoted to what she called "liminal predators"—supernatural entities that were said to exist in threshold spaces and feed on transitional moments in human development.

According to Chen's research, entities like the Penny-Pincher were drawn to children specifically because childhood represented the ultimate liminal state—the space between innocence and experience, between safety and danger, between the known and unknown. Children who actively sought out supernatural encounters, who made dares or accepted challenges that brought them into contact with these entities, were particularly vulnerable because they were voluntarily crossing those thresholds.

"The predator doesn't hunt," Chen wrote. "It waits to be invited. It cannot take what is not freely offered through the victim's own actions. But once that invitation is extended—through a dare accepted, a challenge met, or a door knocked upon—the entity claims its prize according to rules that predate human civilization."

I photocopied every page of Chen's thesis, my hands shaking as I read her conclusions about what happened to the children who were "collected." According to the folklore she'd researched, they weren't killed in any conventional sense. Instead, they were taken to what various sources described as "a place of endless waiting," where they remained conscious and aware but unable to escape or communicate with the living world.

Except for Lucas's voice on that audio file. Somehow, he'd managed to send me a message.

The historical society closed at 6 PM, but I convinced the elderly librarian to let me stay an extra hour to finish my research. By the time I finally left, I had three boxes of photocopied materials and a theory that made my stomach turn.

The Penny-Pincher wasn't just collecting children randomly. It was specifically targeting those who fit a certain profile: curious, brave, willing to accept dares and face supernatural challenges. Children like Lucas. Children like the seventeen modern cases I'd identified. Children like I had been at age eight.

But there was something else, something that Chen's thesis had only hinted at. The entity seemed to operate on a territorial basis, claiming a specific geographic area as its hunting ground. The disappearances I'd tracked all clustered around the same general location, suggesting that the Penny-Pincher was bound to the land where the old Hendricks property—and later the dojang—had been built.

Which meant that whatever dark space it used to store its collection was probably somewhere nearby. Somewhere accessible to our world, but hidden from normal perception.

I was walking to my car when the metallic smell hit me again, stronger than ever before. The parking lot behind the historical society was empty except for my Honda and the librarian's ancient Buick, but I could feel eyes watching me from the shadows between the buildings.

My phone buzzed with another message from the H.Collector account: You're getting warmer, Azuman. But knowledge has a price. Are you prepared to pay it?

This time, there was no attached photo or audio file. Just a single line of GPS coordinates that, when I looked them up, pointed to the exact location of the old dojang.

I sat in my car for twenty minutes, staring at those coordinates and thinking about Daniel Kim's warning. Every rational part of my mind screamed that I should drive home, delete all my research, and find a way to disappear before the Penny-Pincher decided I knew too much.

But Lucas was out there somewhere, in that place of endless waiting that Chen had written about. Along with Timothy Morrison and all the other children who'd been collected over the past century and a half. If there was even a chance of reaching them, of finding some way to bring them home...

I started the car and drove toward the coordinates, the smell of pennies growing stronger with every mile.

The furniture store that currently occupied the dojang's old building was closed for the night, its parking lot empty except for scattered shopping carts and wind-blown trash. But the alley behind it—the same narrow space where Lucas had vanished fourteen years ago—seemed to pulse with malevolent energy.

Standing at the mouth of that alley, surrounded by the overwhelming scent of copper and corrosion, I finally understood what Daniel Kim had been trying to tell me. The Penny-Pincher wasn't just hunting me because I knew too much.

It was hunting me because I was exactly the type of person it collected. Curious, obsessive, willing to walk into obvious danger in pursuit of answers.

I was bait that had been preparing itself for fourteen years.

And now, finally, I was ready to take the hook.