My family live in a small village called Bablock Hythe, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of England. My fathers family own a silver coin. It is kept in a locked box, and I would occasionally look at the coin when no one was around out of curiosity. It is a normal, silver shilling of George III, dating from 1805. It is by all accounts an ordinary coin, save for a black thumb print that is burnt into the head side of the shilling. It fascinated me. My father caught me one day with the coin, and silently and calmly walked up to me, took the coin from my hand and slammed the box shut. NEVER touch that he said to me, and I was so scared by how serious he was I didnt ever again. When I turned 18, my father sat me down, downed his glass of whisky and muttered lets talk about the coin. I hadnt thought of it for years, and I was excited to finally get to know what the hell it was about. He told me he would only ever tell its story once. It is the story of the Devils Coin. The legend goes that John Ashby, a distant relation to my father, was walking to the market in Witney, a nearby town, to sell two prize pigs. Along the way he encountered on old man, sat on a stone wall. He offered John a bag of coins in exchange for his animals, well below the value they would fetch at market. So John politely refused, but the old man assured him he would be waiting on the wall when John came back from the market, still encumbered with his pigs. Sure enough, John didnt sell his pigs, and to Johns disappointment he saw the old man, as he had promised, still on the wall, waiting. Reluctantly, seeing as the price was so low, he handed over the pigs to the old man. As he he received the coins however, the bag split, sending the coins flying across the road. John frantically gathered up the many shillings that had spilt from the burst bag.The old man had watched this whole event without so much as saying a word, when suddenly he leapt from the wall with a leap that John always said was, for an old man, surprisingly energetic. The old man picked up a single coin, and placed it in Johns hand; as he did this the old man whispered until we meet again my friend and with that vanished into thin air. John suddenly realised the coin felt unusually warm, and as he looked at it he saw the unmistakeable thumb print on the shilling. Now John stuck to his story until the day he died, and maintained that he had met the devil that day, and was terrified that the Devil had promised they would meet again, and he vehemently held that he had been damned because of his greed. He passed the story and the coin to his son, and soon it was the family tradition that the story and the coin would pass on to the eldest son, as a reminder of the fate that John was convinced he would face. And over 175 years later, the Devils Coin found its way into the hands of my father. This is where in the story my father stood up and placed the coin on the table between us. He poured himself a whisky, and you could see him thinking of how to phrase what he would say next. My father, Edward Ashby, was very much down on his luck. Newly married, a young child to feed and poor as a church mouse. Reluctantly he started to sell off various possessions at a garage sale. A young couple expressed an interest in the coin, they themselves were collectors and were Intrigued by the tale my father told them about it. Perhaps bolstered by this story, they offered him £75 pound, much more than my father had hoped for, and reluctantly he accepted. They pocketed the coin and a small piece of his history went with him. Fast forward a week and my father was watching the news. There had been a double murder just a few miles away. The owners of the house had been tied up, tortured and had their throats slit. My fathers stomach sank when he saw the victims picture; it was the young couple he had sold the coin to just days before. About a month later he was in town and to his surprise he saw the old family coin in an antique shop window. He couldnt quite believe what he was seeing. He immediately went inside and bought back the coin for £100, practically bankrupting it. But my father told me that as soon as he saw it he felt an urge to have it back that swept over him, and was uncontrollable. As he walked outside the shop keeper, an unassuming older man who had been quiet throughout the transaction, said to my father in a soft, almost melodic voice until we meet again my friend. My father paused in the door, and turned to look at this old man who stared right back at him. Not a word was said, just an old man staring at my father. He rushed home, locked the coin away and hadnt breathed a word of it until that night. I could tell in my fathers eyes that those perhaps innocent word of an old shop keeper had frightened him, to the point where the coin is locked away in a box. He looked at me square in the eye and said as I left that shop I knew, knew, that when I died, I was going to hell. And that is a very frightening thing to hear your father say. by Diablo27 ~Yukio
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 05:00:00 +0000
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