The leather purse

Journal Entry – October 29, 1871

The coins are fewer tonight. I counted them again by candlelight — six where there should have been seven. One gone, without sound or thief. Only a faint hollow on the bar where it once lay, as if the wood itself remembered the weight.

Baxter Adams stopped by this afternoon, sleeves rolled and jaw tight. He said he’d heard something strange near the hotel before sunrise — metal against earth, like someone working a shovel in wet clay. He tried to laugh it off, but the sound never reached his eyes.

He lingered a moment too long at the counter. His gaze drifted to the pouch beside the register.

“You keepin’ someone’s treasure there?” he asked.

“Payment,” I said.

“Looks heavy for that,” he murmured, before straightening and leaving me with the faint scent of tobacco and rain.

By dusk the town had a whisper moving through it — a weekend hum cut thin. They found Mr. Harlan by the creek just after the lanterns came on. He was a drayman, carried goods between farms, a man who swore too loud and laughed too easy. His cart lay overturned near the culvert; his hat was still on the seat. They say he walked off the road and never returned. They found him face down in the mud, hands clenched like he’d been digging. No wound, no blood, nothing dramatic — only the kind of stillness that smells like wrongness. The coroner shrugged at supper and called it exposure, or some cursed luck. People exchange explanations to make the dark bearable.

When I touched the remaining coins, the pulse thrummed under my skin — slow, deliberate, like something counting. The sigils have shifted again.

I tried to bury the pouch behind the stables, thinking the earth would take back what it had given. The ground shuddered beneath my fingers — not cold, but alive — and when I looked up the pouch had been set on the step, dry as bone.

Every gift demands a price. Every debt collects itself. Tonight it collected Mr. Harlan.

When I sleep, I hear the steady rhythm of shovels in wet soil — sometimes beneath the floorboards, sometimes behind the walls, sometimes rising like a tide from my own blood. Sometimes I think it’s coming from me.

— K