🪙 GOLD COIN CHRONICLES: Shadows That Follow

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🎙️ THE STORYTELLER — Opening Monologue

Some fears don’t age.
They grow sharper.
Smarter.
Patient.

People comfort themselves with the idea that the Boogeyman lives under beds or in dark closets.
But monsters don’t need rooms.
They need moments.

Moments when a child learned that safety was just something adults said so they wouldn’t feel guilty later.

I’ve seen creatures return to those who tried to grow beyond them—
monsters who learned their prey’s voice, their grief, their routines.
Light doesn’t save everyone.
Sometimes it just lets fear study its prey.

Tonight, the Library whispered about a man who believed he’d outrun his past.
But trauma has teeth.
And sometimes…
it comes back hungry.


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📚 THE LIBRARY: Shadows That Follow

The air in the stacks is heavy and unmoving, smelling of dust, glue, and cold stone.
The shelves tremble—not from wind, but from something brushing the unseen spaces behind them.
A lone lantern flares, casting frantic shadows and revealing a narrow path ahead, boxed in by darkness too thick to be natural.

The story begins the moment Josh chose kindness.


---

Day One — The Echo of a Hand

Josh didn’t think twice when he helped the elderly man across the street, lifting two bags of groceries for him.
The man’s skin felt unnaturally slack, like wet fabric sliding over bone.

He thanked Josh with a trembling, too-wide smile.
A smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

Eyes too wet.
Too terrified.
The color of bruised ice.

“You shouldn’t walk alone,” the old man whispered, voice cracking like dry leaves.
“Things notice when you offer an opening.”

Josh laughed politely.
Tried to shrug off the chill sinking into his jacket.
Went home.

Until the scratching started.

Not outside.
Inside the walls.

Slow.
Deliberate.
Claws carving a path directly toward him.

Josh froze in the center of his living room, heart roaring in his ears.

A voice seeped out from the dark, thin as a thread and cold as winter breath:

“Founnnnnnd you…”

And Josh remembered—
just for an instant—
being eight years old, lying awake as something crouched beside his bed.
A soft weight on the mattress.
A wet breath against his ear.
A whisper promising:

Grow up. More to carve.

The voice hadn’t changed.


---

Day Two — The Invasion of Senses

Morning did nothing.

Josh tried to drink coffee, but it tasted metallic, like pennies and old blood.

At the bus stop, the sun stretched the shadows wrong—
too thin, too long, each one pointing directly at his back.

In the café window, his reflection lingered half a second too long.
And in that lingering frame…
a tall silhouette stood behind him.

At work, something brushed his arm—
cold, soft, damp, like seawater-soaked cloth.

Josh spun, gasping.
No one was there.
But the spot where it touched him was already numb.

Around lunchtime, the whisper returned, right beside his ear—
wet, sucking, intimate:

“Big now… still soft inside. Still hides.”

By evening, every sound betrayed him.
The fridge hummed like a throat trying to speak.
The ceiling creaked in a dragging, inhuman rhythm.
The air vents sighed with impossible cold.

He blocked the door with a wooden chair, knowing it meant nothing.
Turned on every light, flooding the apartment with false safety.
Held a kitchen knife, its handle slick with sweat.

It didn’t matter.


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Night — The Darkness Devours

The lights didn’t just go out—
they burst.

Every bulb in the apartment exploded in a chain of sharp, violent pops.
Glass showered down.
And the dark didn’t return—
it arrived, swallowing the room like a living thing.

Josh didn’t hear the Boogeyman enter.
It was simply there.

A hole in the darkness.
A silhouette jerking like a puppet suspended by brittle, invisible strings.

The smell hit first—
rotting milk left in the sun.
Burnt parchment.
Something sweet, decaying.

Its mouth opened vertically, a black tear lined with teeth like broken ceramic.

“You raaaaan,” it croaked, the sound vibrating inside his skull.
“You forgot. But I re-mem-ber.”

The attack was silent.

A wet, tearing slice—
and fire ripped across Josh’s ribs.
Cold air rushed into the wound, obscene and wrong.

He collapsed into shattered glass, choking on pain, panic, childhood terror.

Then—
a sound.

A heavy clink.

Metal on glass.

Something slid out of his wound.

A coin.

Golden.
Blood-soaked.
Pulsing faintly like a trapped ember.

The jackal-headed seal of Anubis emerged as the coin rolled free.

Then it began to spin.

Fast.
Faster.
Faster—
until the air twisted around it.

The Boogeyman shrieked, limbs blistering with smoke.
Its outline fractured like a broken mirror struggling to hold its shape.

“Not a-llow-ed…” it hissed, recoiling.
“Not yours to keep… not this coin… not this debt…”

It wanted the coin.
It had been following him for it.

The creature collapsed backward through the wall, melting like ink into brittle paper.
Leaving only a streak of black sludge and the cloying scent of rotted flowers.

Not dead.
Never dead.

Just waiting again.

The coin slowed.
Stopped.
Face up.
Silent.

The Library took it from Josh’s trembling, blood-slick hand.

He lived.

But survival is not rescue.

And now the Boogeyman knows his scent again.


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🕯️ THE STORYTELLER — Closing Steps

The story ended.
The lantern dimmed to a thin, trembling flame.
Something breathed behind the nearest shelf—
slow, wet, patient.

When I reached the door, just before it shut with a heavy thud, I saw it:

A single long scratch across the Library floorboards.
Fresh.
Blackened.
Pointing toward the exit.

Some shadows don’t stay in books.
Some follow.


---

🕯️ OUTRO — Ritual Ledger

The Library is hungry for more.
Leave your legend in the ledger below—your favorite scary movie, urban legend, or horror memory.

Every story feeds the stacks.
Every comment is a coin.

Stick around. Subscribe. Share.

X (Twitter): @NightlyStoryTel

Instagram: @NightlyStoryteller

Bluesky: nightlystoryteller.bsky.

Email. thenightlystorytellerblog@gmail.com
  
We’re just getting started—
and the shadows are already moving.

thenightlystoryteller.blogspot.com



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