Sun drenched skin, browned with age and looking like the old wrinkled leather that it was, stretched over hands that were more tendons and prideful obstinance than strength. Jasper turned the pan in a smooth, easy motion that he had taught himself over the last forty years panning for gold. He didn’t really care if it was the right way to do it. It had worked for him and he didn’t care to learn another way. The sound of the river, like the windy laughter of a thousand leaves crashing together, filled his ears and helped his thoughts to wander.
His beard, gray with time and countless hours of hard labor, hung low over the buttons of his faded blue overalls. His hands turned, the slow motion of his panning allowed water and dirt to slide free and continue down the endless river. Settling at the bottom of his pan was a perfectly white, crown-shaped object. His beard moved with the whispered mutterings of his thoughts.
“More teeth?” he asked himself.
He plucked the small object from the pan and inspected it. It was a tooth. It was the third he had found that day. He threw it onto the far bank, amid the countless others he had turned over in the week working this bend in the river.
“Maybe a hollow upstream?” he mused. “Could be that. Damn useless, time wasting, foulness.”
He wondered if there were further bones in the river. He didn’t like the idea of turning up a skull or some other desiccated remains. His eyes, old but still sharp as any fox, looked upstream in consternation. He saw a figure crouching low, the subtle movement of a pan in their hands as they shook free water and dirt, looking for gold.
“Hey there now,” Jasper called up to them. “Get on out of here, I was here first!”
The figure glanced up as Jasper splashed his way over. Jasper got within a stone’s throw, taking in the stranger’s features to judge if he knew them from town. Long white hair hung in straight damp lines from the balding head. The man was clean-shaven and had eyes the color of fresh-turned soil. He was reed thin and of an age with Jasper. His clothing was mostly ragged, but Jasper admitted anyone who looked them both up and down would assume they had the same tailor.
“You hear me?” Jasper asked, a bit of heat at the edge of his words.
“Nah, we both got the same right to be here, which is to say none at all,” the figure replied without looking up. His voice was smooth as midnight mist and incongruous with his haggard appearance.
“I’m working on a claim,” Jasper insisted, his own voice sounding loud in comparison, and petulant.
“Oh, me too,” the stranger replied. There was a hungry growl at the end of his words, like an animal stalking its prey. The thin veil of silk cut the edge of his voice.
Jasper chewed his beard for a time, wondering what to do. In truth, he wasn’t registered to any claim. He was prospecting, searching for the right place to set down a chance at fortune, but that didn’t give him any more right than this man.
He saw the stranger stop and inspect something in his pan. A smile pulled the stranger’s thin features, a hunger rippled through his movements as he plucked a small object free. Jasper stood a bit taller to see the prize.
“You find a nugget?” he asked, hopeful.
“Nah. Just more of these little jewels,” the stranger held up a white tooth for Jasper to see before pocketing it with a hungry lick of his lips.
“Yeah,” Jasper replied, crestfallen and more than a little confused. “I keep finding them, too.”
“Good hunting this turn of the river,” the stranger said as he dug another patch of mud.
“Good hunting if you’re looking for teeth!” Jasper said with half a laugh. The stranger shrugged, his own veiled and smiling eyes focused on the task before him. Jasper recognized the pan the stranger was using. The shape of it meant it was mainly utilized for smaller bits of gold, dust really.
“You’re really panning for the small stuff there, eh?” Jasper asked, trying to ignore the man’s odd behavior around the tooth. “I only go for the larger nuggets myself. Nothing smaller than my thumbnail is a keeper, that’s what I say.”
“Ha!” the stranger replied, a crow’s laugh at the end of a whip.
“You think that small stuff is worth your time?” Jasper retorted, a bit indignant now that he had been called out on the lie.
“I find it easier than trying to catch those single big ones you’re on about. I just cast a wide net, real wide. Then I get them all, big and small. They all come back to me and I get ‘em.”
“I don’t have time for those small ones. Only the keepers,” Jasper said.
“See this here?” the stranger asked.
He pulled the pan up and it glittered, dozens of sparkling flakes of gold shone through in the pan. It was more than Jasper had ever seen in a single pan. Jasper eyed them greedily and felt his face turn towards a frown at the stranger’s good luck.
“Good find, that. Close to what I found just earlier today,” he boasted as bile ran through his veins.
“Nah. This is more than you found in the last three months. This might be a year’s worth of findings for you. Likely more though. Each of these specs of gold could have been a happy memory with your kin, culminating into quite a rich life. Instead you’re out here looking for the literal specs of gold. Worse still, the ones you do find, you are discarding, much like the time you spent collecting them, carelessly. Only waiting for the nuggets, those are only the ones worth saving you said? I’d wager that all those specs pulled together would weigh more than any nuggets you ever found, or ever are likely to find. What a waste that was, eh? I wonder how many lonely nights you’ve spent without friends or family, and all so you could wait for the perfect golden nugget.”
Jasper chewed on those words. He chewed on the truth of them hard. He tasted blood, turned his head, and spit to the side. His face was heated with anger. He wanted to hit the stranger. He wanted to attack him, force him to shut up. He wanted to commit violence to quell the tidal wave of emotion he felt building inside him.
But more than anything else, he wanted the years back that he lost. He wanted them back more than he could say. A deep ache settled behind his throat, choking any words he might say in response. If he had those years, he could spend them with his children, maybe even their children after that. He could find Lacey and give her the time she deserved, the time he denied her during their soured marriage. He could find another life instead of living on a river’s edge, wasting years hunched over and sifting through the mud. He wanted those years back with a ferocity that made him peel his lips back in a silent snarl. He deserved those years.
The stranger continued. “Nah, you lost them years. Threw them downstream like all the little dusted gold you decided wasn’t worth saving. You can’t have those years back, not ever. I’ll tell you what though: you could have a different forty years, and this pan to boot. I’ll trade you forty years of life, and this entire pan of gold. All of it.”
“You can’t do nothing like that,” Jasper whispered.
“I can do whatever I want,” the stranger whispered back, a glint of red flashed through his eyes and the same animalistic growl drove a razor between his words.
“What you want in return?” Jasper asked.
“Mmm,” the stranger mused, and the cut of a smile colored his cheeks. He reached down and plucked another tooth from his pail and dropped it into his pocket. “How about just one of your pearly whites? Whichever one you prefer? You let me take it, and I’ll give you forty years and this pan of gold.”
“You must be crazy,” Jasper said.
Neither of them moved. Jasper looked into the stranger’s eyes, and it was like looking into the eyes of a hungry wolf. They remained locked in that stare for several slow breaths.
The stranger reached down and pulled a tiny rock from the riverbed. He inspected it carefully, his mouth turned down in disdain. “You’d be surprised how many pebbles find themselves in the same crook of the river, no matter how far they’re carried.”
“That won’t be me,” Jasper said through a too-dry throat.
“Nah, I suppose not, now that we’re talking. I can see you are different. You aren’t like all the other little pebbles, chained to your nature, a slave to your obsessions. You must be different. So we have a deal then?”
Jasper nodded, then slowly lowered himself down, tilting his head back and opening his mouth wide. The stranger approached, his long, stick-like fingers reaching forward. The river rushed past them and was the only witness to their accord.
Jasper tasted ash as the stranger’s fingers explored his gums like the legs of a curious, oversized spider. Apparently he found the singular gem he was searching for as his fingers stopped and started to work their way into a firm grip on one of Jasper’s lower front teeth. A tremendous pressure, accompanied by pain, exploded through Jasper’s jaw as the stranger bore down onto him with the strength of ten oxen pulling a cart. Just as quickly the force was removed and Jasper fell back into the river.
Water rushed onto his face and up his nose, choking him and causing him to flail in the river. Years passed in the breath of a moment before he clawed his way free of the water. He wiped his eyes roughly with hands that were too smooth, unblemished with age or hard use. Blood ran down his chin and made him shiver as a subtle wind kissed his bare neck. He ran his fingers along his cheeks. The grizzled beard he once neglectfully wore was gone.
His tongue explored the barren socket of his missing tooth. There was a strange emptiness that he felt down into his chest, deeper still into what might have been his soul. He silently wondered what it was he had traded the stranger. Some secret part of him knew who the stranger was. That same part of him knew exactly what he had traded.
Jasper cast around for his mining pail. He found it overturned by the bank, the gold the stranger had promised glittered just below the surface of the water. He scooped the river bottom and started panning once more, intent on reclaiming the prize he was promised. Laughter carried on the wind, drowned by the rushing of the river. Pebbles shifted and turned in the current, most of them finding themselves where they had started. Maybe it was just their nature.
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Jeff Thompson still believes in ghosts and hopes you will too. When he’s not board gaming with friends or hiding from midnight spooks he’s sequestered to his small writing nook with a happy lap cat and wonderful wife. Jeff has several publications, most recently in Kinsman Quarterly and Wordfire Press’s Cryptid Anthology.