Chapter 6: A Message from the Other Side

The breakthrough came from an unexpected source: a forum buried in the depths of Reddit called r/NewJerseyParanormal, where people shared grainy photos of supposed ghosts and debated whether the Pine Barrens really harbored a Jersey Devil.

I'd been monitoring every online discussion about local urban legends for years, setting up Google alerts and crawling through social media posts that mentioned anything related to missing children or supernatural encounters in central New Jersey. Most of it was garbage—teenagers making up stories for internet points or urban explorers trying to manufacture mystery where none existed.

But this post was different.

The username was TR15TAN, and the thread was titled "Anyone else remember the dojang incident from 2010?" The post had been up for exactly forty-seven minutes when my alerts flagged it, and I nearly choked on my coffee when I read the first few lines:

This is going to sound crazy, but I need to know if anyone else remembers what really happened at that Taekwondo school in Hamilton. Not the official story about the runaway kid. The real story. About the door and the smell and what we all saw but were too scared to admit.

I was there that night. I was one of the kids who dared Lucas Chen to knock on that back door. And I've been living with the guilt and the nightmares ever since.

My hands were shaking as I scrolled through the rest of the post. TR15TAN—clearly Tristan Park, though he hadn't used his real name—described that night in vivid detail. The ghost story about Harold. The dare. The door opening from the other side. Lucas disappearing into darkness while the rest of us stood frozen with terror.

But what made my blood run cold was what came next:

The thing is, it didn't end that night. Whatever took Lucas has been... checking in on me ever since. Dreams where I'm walking through dark corridors that smell like old pennies. Messages left in places only I would find them. And lately, it's been getting worse.

Last week, I found thirteen tarnished pennies arranged in a perfect circle on my kitchen table. I live alone. I know I locked my doors. But there they were, along with a note written in what looked like a child's handwriting: "Ready to finish the game?"

I'm posting this because I think it's coming for me soon, and I need someone to know the truth about what happened. If you knew Lucas Chen, if you remember that night, please reach out. I can't be the only one who's been living with this.

The post ended with a throwaway email address and a plea for anyone with similar experiences to make contact.

I stared at the screen for a full minute, my mind racing. Tristan was alive, which meant the Penny-Pincher hadn't collected him that night despite his role in what happened. But it had been tormenting him for fourteen years, the same way it had been tormenting me.

Why keep us alive? Why not take us all that night when we were young and vulnerable?

The answer hit me like ice water: we were witnesses. Living reminders of its power. Trophies it could terrorize whenever it grew bored with its other collections.

I was halfway through composing a response when my phone rang. Unknown number, but I answered anyway.

"Azuman?" The voice was older, rougher than I remembered, but unmistakably Tristan's. "Please tell me you saw my post."

"How did you get my number?"

"Same way you probably got mine—fourteen years of obsessive research and too much time on our hands." There was a bitter laugh on the other end of the line. "You have been researching, right? Please tell me I'm not the only one who's been going crazy trying to figure out what that thing is."

"You're not." I found myself gripping the phone tighter than necessary. "Tristan, I need to know—have you been getting messages? Emails from someone calling himself the Collector?"

The silence on the other end stretched long enough that I thought the call had dropped. Then: "Jesus Christ. You too?"

"How long?"

"Started about six months ago. Just little things at first—pennies left in weird places, the smell showing up when I was alone. But lately..." His voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "Lately, it's been sending me pictures."

"Pictures of what?"

"Children. Kids I don't recognize, all standing in what looks like the same dark place. And always, in every photo, there's one face I do recognize. Lucas. He looks exactly the same as he did that night, like he hasn't aged a day."

My apartment suddenly felt twenty degrees colder. "Tristan, where are you right now?"

"Home. Jersey City. I moved here after college, thought maybe distance would help, but it followed me anyway. It always follows—" His voice cut off abruptly.

"Tristan? Are you there?"

"Oh God." The words came out as a strangled whisper. "Oh God, it's here. I can smell it. Azuman, it's in my apartment."

"Get out of there. Now. Go to a public place, somewhere with lots of people—"

"I can't. The door... the door won't open. It's locked from the outside, but that's impossible, I live on the third floor and there's no balcony and—" His breathing became rapid, panicked. "It's moving through my apartment. I can hear it knocking things over, but I can't see it. Just shadows that are too tall and the smell of old pennies everywhere."

I was already grabbing my keys, heading for the door of my own apartment. "Stay on the line. I'm coming to get you."

"No!" The word came out sharp with terror. "Don't you understand? This is what it wants. It's been herding us, Azuman. All these years, all the messages and the torment—it's been driving us toward each other so it can collect us all at once."

The line went quiet except for the sound of his ragged breathing. Then, in the background, I heard it: the slow, deliberate sound of knocking. Three knocks, evenly spaced, exactly like the knocking I'd heard at my own door.

"It's at my bedroom door," Tristan whispered. "The knocking is coming from inside my bedroom, but I'm in the living room and I know that room is empty. I checked it ten minutes ago."

"Tristan, listen to me. You need to break a window, scream for help, do whatever it takes to get someone's attention—"

"There's writing on my wall." His voice was flat now, shock setting in. "Written in what looks like rust or old blood. It says 'Time to pay the debt, little dare-maker.'"

The knocking stopped. In the sudden silence, I could hear something else through the phone: a wet, sliding sound that I recognized from nightmares, like something heavy being dragged across a floor.

"Azuman." Tristan's voice was barely audible now. "If something happens to me, you need to know—CJ Rodriguez. He was there too that night. He moved to Portland after high school, but I found him on social media last year. He's been having the same experiences we have. The dreams, the messages, all of it."

"Tristan, don't—"

"It knows I talked. It knows I reached out. That's why it's here." There was a sound like a door creaking open, followed by footsteps that seemed too heavy and spaced too far apart to be human. "Find CJ. Warn him before it's too late. And Azuman?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry. For that night, for the dare, for letting you take the blame when the police questioned us. I've been carrying that guilt for fourteen years, and I should have—"

The line went dead.

I called back immediately, but the number went straight to voicemail. I tried again, then again, my hands shaking as I imagined what was happening in that Jersey City apartment.

Twenty minutes later, I was speeding down the turnpike toward Jersey City, my phone on speaker as I tried every contact method I could think of. Tristan's social media accounts had gone dark. His email bounced back as undeliverable. Even the throwaway account he'd used for the Reddit post was already deleted.

But before I'd lost contact entirely, he'd managed to send me one final message through the forum's private messaging system. Just three words and an address:

It got me.

347 Grove Street, Apt 3B, Jersey City

I made it to the building in forty-three minutes, running red lights and pushing my Honda harder than I'd ever dared. The apartment building was a converted warehouse in a neighborhood that had seen better decades, the kind of place where people minded their own business and didn't ask questions about weird smells or strange noises.

The front door was propped open with a brick, and I took the stairs three at a time to the third floor. Apartment 3B's door was slightly ajar, hanging open just wide enough to reveal a slice of darkness beyond.

The metallic smell hit me before I even crossed the threshold.

Tristan's apartment was a mirror image of my own obsession: walls covered with maps and photographs, string connecting various points of interest, newspaper clippings dating back decades. But unlike my organized chaos, this looked like a tornado had torn through it. Furniture was overturned, papers scattered everywhere, and in the center of the living room floor was a perfect circle of old pennies.

Seventy-four of them, I counted. One more than Daniel Kim had described.

On the wall above his computer, written in what looked like rust-colored paint but smelled like blood, was a message: Two down, two to go. The collector always completes his sets.

Tristan was gone. Just like Lucas, just like Daniel Kim, just like all the children who'd disappeared over the past century and a half. Taken to that dark place Chen had written about, where time stood still and collected souls waited in endless silence.

But his warning echoed in my head as I stood in that destroyed apartment: Find CJ. Warn him before it's too late.

I took photos of everything, pocketed a handful of the pennies, and got out of there before the neighbors started asking questions. Back in my car, I pulled up every social media platform I could think of and started searching for Carlos "CJ" Rodriguez, Portland, Oregon.

I found him on Facebook within minutes: a dental hygienist living in the Pearl District, married with two young daughters, his profile full of family photos and check-ins at local restaurants. He looked happy, normal, completely unaware that something from his childhood was hunting him across three thousand miles.

His last post was from six hours ago: a photo of his family at a local park, with the caption "Beautiful day in Portland! Kids are loving the playground."

But as I stared at the image, zooming in on the background, I noticed something that made my blood freeze. Standing just at the edge of the frame, partially obscured by a tree, was a tall figure that seemed slightly out of focus despite the crisp quality of the rest of the photo.

And scattered around the base of that tree, barely visible unless you knew what to look for, were the telltale glints of old copper pennies.

The Penny-Pincher had already found CJ Rodriguez.

Which meant I was running out of time to warn him, and running out of allies in a game where the rules had been written long before I was born.