THE GOLD COIN STORY — “THE OTHER SIDE OF YOU”

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📚 THE LIBRARY  

The Library is not silent. Its shelves lean inward like listening ears, the ceiling tiles weep slow, cold moisture, and the air tastes faintly of petrichor and iron—like old blood mixed with rain on ancient stone. The corridors do not breathe; they sigh, scraping parchment on parchment. Every artifact hums faintly, a low, resonant note that vibrates in your molars, as if remembering the hands that touched it last. Some objects are locked in chilled glass, others buried under fine, stinging salt, and a few… refuse to stay where they’re kept.  

I am the Nightly Storyteller, sworn to log what surfaces here—whether artifact, curse, or echo. I don’t choose the stories. The Library does. I only tell them.  

I had been logging the daily fluctuations in the Archive of Lost Thoughts—ensuring the prayer‑etched bindings of the Codex Maleficium remained secure—when the absence registered. A quiet shift in the perpetual hum of ancient magic.  

A certain gold coin.  
One that had been sitting beneath a glass dome, secured with prayer‑etched lockpicks and a ring of salt that needed refreshing every three days.  

The coin was gone.  
The salt ring broken.  
And a smear of something—not quite mud, but a dark, damp stain—leading away from the pedestal. Out of the Library.  

This tale is the echo of what followed.  
A warning.  
A confession.  
Or perhaps, just another record filed in the endless catalog of things best left undisturbed.  

Take a breath before reading further.  
This one crawls.  

---

THE GOLD COIN STORY — “THE OTHER SIDE OF YOU”

Marcus Hale never believed in curses. Not when he was a kid, not when he was a college dropout, and certainly not now—an exhausted night‑shift janitor dragging a mop across an office building that smelled faintly of printer ink and loneliness.  

His shift ended at 3:00 a.m.  
And that was when it saw him.  

A gold coin.  

It didn’t just gleam; it seemed to breathe, inhaling the break room’s stale fluorescent light and exhaling shadow. Perfect, impossibly out of place on the tile floor. One face was a serene visage, haloed in blinding light. The other was a gaping maw, devouring its own shadow. A coin minted from the raw stuff of morality itself.  

He picked it up.  

His breath fogged the air, though the room wasn’t cold.  
For a moment he saw something—himself, reflected in the coin’s sheen.  
But off.  

Wrong.  

The reflection smiled.  
Marcus wasn’t smiling.  

He nearly dropped it right then—but the coin clung to his palm like it wanted to be held. It pulsed with a faint, internal heat, as if inhaling his reflection and exhaling something else entirely.  

---

THE FIRST SLIP

The edge of his life began to fray. First, small things were lost—his keys, the drink he’d set down, a sweater. Then, larger pieces: entire hours he couldn’t account for, conversations he dimly recalled as a third‑party observer, memories that tasted like someone else’s experiences. He started running into moments he’d already lived, but with the perspective slightly shifted—like watching a poorly spliced film.  

Coworkers whispered that he seemed “different.”  

One swore he’d laughed at her in the stairwell, though she’d been alone.  
Another swore he’d stood outside her door at night, humming a tune he hated.  

He hadn’t been there.  

But someone had. And the coin in his pocket felt heavier, warmer, almost pleased.  

---

THE SECOND SLIP

He started seeing… himself.  

Crossing the street just as he turned the corner.  
Standing in his apartment window when he was outside locking his car.  
Walking into a store moments after he’d already walked out of it.  

Every version wore his face.  

Every version smiled that same unnatural smile he’d first seen reflected on the coin. The coin seemed to thrum with a low, predatory hum against his skin, as if feeding on the confusion.  

He tried to throw it away.  
But it returned.  
In his pocket.  
His shoe.  
Under his tongue while he slept.  

---

THE CONFRONTATION

It happened on the sixth night.  

Marcus entered his apartment—only to find himself standing in the middle of the living room.  

Same clothes.  
Same haircut.  
Same breath.  

But the coin glimmered on the floor between them, spinning slowly, choosing. Its light seemed to pull both versions of Marcus like a magnetic force.  

The other Marcus bent down, picked it up, and whispered:  

“You dropped me.  
You shouldn’t have.”  

Then the lights exploded—popping one by one until only the hallway lamp remained, flickering like a dying pulse.  

The second Marcus moved first.  

They collided—two identical bodies folding into each other like broken mirrors. Marcus felt fingers claw at his throat, a knee in his ribs, the heat of breath that wasn’t his own whispering:  

“You’re the shadow. Not me.”  

It wasn’t a fight; it was a violent attempt at re‑assembly.  

They crashed into the hallway wall—then through it.  

Plaster gave way to something impossible: not the neighbor’s living room, but a vertical mouth of cold earth and utter darkness. The air rushing out of it was stale and ancient, smelling of wet clay and forgotten rot. They didn’t fall down into the pit; they simply ceased being tethered to the floor and tumbled into the nothing.  

Both of them.  

Grappling, screaming, twisting in freefall, the gold coin spinning between them like a judge, like a verdict, like a sun shedding light on two warring worlds.  

And then—  

Silence.  

A thud.  
A gasp.  
Footsteps—or echoes of footsteps—climbing up the shaft.  

One pair.  
Or two.  
Or none at all.  
Perhaps I imagined them.  

All I know is the coin was found again—  
on a break room table,  
gleaming as if it had never been touched,  
waiting for another hand, another fool… and another smear of something dark leading away.  

---

OUTRO

The gold coin is out there.  
Dormant.  
Harmless.  
Behaving itself.  

For now.  

But some nights, long after the lamps dim and the shelves whisper, I hear footsteps that sound like two people walking in perfect rhythm.  
One heavy.  
One soft.  

Balanced.  
Opposites.  
Waiting for the next hand willing—or foolish—enough to pick it up.  

And if you hear footsteps tonight, don’t look.  
One of them might be yours.  

Until tomorrow’s tale…  

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X (Twitter): @NightlyStoryTel

Instagram: @NightlyStoryteller

Bluesky: nightlystoryteller.bsky.

Email. thenightlystorytellerblog@gmail.com
  
And if you dare… drop a comment and tell me your favorite scary movie, urban legend, or horror memory.  
We’re just getting started—and things are about to get dark.  

thenightlystoryteller.blogspot.com  




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