Bargain backpacks

As promised, The 2024 Memorial Day Camping Gear deal thread is here to help our fellow readers some money for this upcoming holiday break. I have requested the mods keep this post a sticky until June 2, which is when most retailers end their Memorial Day sales. Keep in mind that not all US retailers will ship internationally and any savings you get can be wiped out from import duty, tariffs and taxes from your home country.
Keep in mind inflation has caused many items to have 10-30% price increases as warned by 's post from 2021. Prices will continue to go up as inflation gets out of control, so this could be a better time to buy camping gear than waiting till later in the year.
New for 2024 I am streamlining the deals thread so we can add additional retailers and cut down on clutter. I will list the retailer, example deals and if the retailer participates in cashback sites. Return policy, company background, credit card offers, free shipping etc will no longer be listed as that can be looked up on the retailer's website. This will make the threads appear on less posts and hopefully will flow a bit better. Thanks to several of you who offered this suggestion. I am also adding direct vendor sales as sales start (Marmot, Outdoor Research, Sierra Designs, Outdoor Vitals etc).
This thread focuses on retailers and e-commerce sites in the United States who sell multiple brands, are reputable businesses (ie not scam sites) and they ship and sell to anywhere in the US. I encourage you to check with the vendors directly and to use cashback sites like Activejunky.com and Topcashback.com to save as much money as possible in addition to these links.
Checkout Cashbackholic.com and cashbackmonitor.com to see what cashback sites are offering the highest cashback for whatever site you wish to shop at. Typically activejunky.com is the highest paying cashback site, but sometimes Maxrebates.com , topcashback.com and rakuten.com can be higher.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this sales thread for last year. I hope to have helped save fellow Redditors as much money as possible to help get more people into camping and the Backcountry. If you find additional retailers of note or sales please comment below and I will update this thread.
Academy Sports:
Academy Sports has not started their Memorial Day sale yet.

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.
• Credit Card offers: 5% cashback from US Bank Cash+, Huntington Business VOICE and Academy Sports credit cards

Adventure Supply Company (www.adventuresupplyco.com)
Adventure Supply Company has a few RV and car camping furniture items on sale.

• Cashback: None

Adventure Supply Company (www.supplyyouradventure.com)
Adventure Supply Co has not started their Memorial Day Sale yet

• Cashback: None

Als.com
Als.com has their summer clearance and yard sales started with up to 50% off last season's items.

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates

Amazon
Amazon has not started any specific Memorial Day sales yet. Expect them to match Moosejaw, Backcountry and REI's sales when they start in addition to Amazon exclusive items like FlexTail Gear, Bulin, Fire Maple etc.

• Cashback: No

Ascent Outdoors
Ascent Outdoors has not started their Memorial Day sales

• Cashback: None

Backcountry.com
Keep in mind several people dislike this retailer due to them being shilled by Dan Becker, Backcountry Exposure etc and they sued a ton of people in 2019 who has the Backcountry name. Backcountry Edge had to change their name to EnWild because of this.
Backcountry has started started their Memorial Day sale with up to 30% off site wide. There are a few really good deals, such as the Marmot Limestone 6p 2022 model for $225 - which is over 50% off the original MSRP.
Backcountry

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates

Backcountrygear.com
Backcoutrygear.com has 25% off Mountainsmith items.

• Cashback: none

Bass Pro Shops/Cabelas:
Note there is some negative sentiment against Bass Pro after their acquisition of Cabelas.
BassPro/Cabelas has started their "Summer Sale" with up to 30% off. Featured deals include large discounts on the Garmin Fenix and Epix watches, $50 gift card for Yeti coolers and 10-30% off many campchef grills and stoves.

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.

BentGate:
Bentgate has not started their Memorial Day sale.

• Cashback: None.

Big Agnes:
Big Agnes has started their Memorial Day sale with up to 50% off clearance and 30% off regular priced items.

• Cashback: None.

Bivouac:
Bivouac has not started their Memorial Day sale yet.

• Cashback: None.

Bob Wards:
Bob Wards is offering 20% off most non MAP priced items with the coupon code NEW20.

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.

Camping World / Gander Mountain

• Camping World/Gander Mountain has their "grillfest" sale going on right now with up to 50% off Blackstone branded grills, smokers and griddles.
• They also have started their Truckload camp chair sale with up to 70% off chairs.
• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.

Campman.com
Campman has started their Memorial Day sale with up to 50% off. Exped, Jetboil Nemo, Deuter etc are all on sale.

• Cashback: None

Campmor.com
Campmor has their "customer appreciation sale" in store sale on May 18 from 10am to 5pm with special in store deals.
They are also offering their usual coupon codes: STARS20 STARS40 and STARS60 to take 20 off of 100, 40 off of 200 and 60 off of 300 (20% discount). No valid on MAP priced items and specific catagories.

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.

Campsaver.com
Campsaver has started their mega Memorial Day sale!

• 20% off a single full priced NON-MAP priced item and 20% your entire Outlet purchase using the coupon code MEMTW. Ends 5/27 at midnight MST.
• 15% rewards bonus on new featured gear. Ends 5/31 at midnight MST
• 30% off Merrell shoes and 25% off certain Black Diamond items.
• May "Blazing deals". Ends 5/31 at midnight MST. Many many items on sale from Marmot, Big Agnes, Nemo etc.

Cashback: None
Cascade Designs (MSR, SealLine, Pack Towel, Platypus, Therm-a-Rest)
Cascade Designs has started their Memorial Day sale on all their brands up to 50% off.

• Cashback: Yes. Check rates here.

Columbia:
Columbia has started their Memorial Day sale. Great deals on pants, jackets etc.

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.

Costco
Costco has several good deals on budget camping gear for Memorial Day:
*Cascade Mountain Tech Carbon Fiber trekking poles are $35 - These sell for $45-$55 on Amazon. One of the best bargains overall for camping gear.
Note you must be a Costco member or you must have a Costco member purchase a CostCO cash gift card to purchase. Many deals are in store only and YMMV on available inventory.
Cotopaxi
Cotapaxi has started their Memorial Day sale with up to 30% off current styles.
Cashback: Yes. Check current rates
Decathlon:
Decathlon has not started their Memorial Day sale yet

• Cashback: None

Dicks Sporting Goods / Moosejaw / Public Lands
Note: Dicks Sporting Goods purchased Moosejaw in February of 2023.

• Dicks has started their Memorial Day sale with many deals on camp cooking and heavier car camping equipment.
• Moosejaw is offering 20% off any non-MAP priced item when you sign in to your Dicks Score Card account. They are also offering up to 50% off site wide for Memorial Day.
• Public Lands has 20% off automatically on one non-MAP priced item at checkout.
• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates at Dicks,
• No cashback available for Public Lands.

Dunham's Sports
Dunham's has not started their Memorial Day sale yet.

• Cashback: None

Eastern Mountain Sports
EMS has a up to 80% off clearance event and is also offering a $10 gift card on $50 purchases and a $20 gift card on $100 or more purchases.

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.

EnWild (formally Backcountryedge.com before Backcountry.com demanded they change their name)
EnWild has started their Memorial Day sale. They are matching REI, Moosejaw etc with the same deals. Big Agnes, Marmot, Jetboil, Kelty are all on sale.

• Cashback: None

Everestgear.com
Everest Gear is offering JetBoil, Marmot, Darn Tough socks on sale.

• Cashback: None

Evo.com
Evo has started their Memorial Day sale with up to 50% off summer gear. They are matching many of the same deals from Moosejaw, REI etc.

• Cashback: None

Exped:
Exped is offering 25% off site wide with free shipping and has a couple closeout deals on the Exped Dura series of mats. Expires 5/27.
Exxel Outdoors (Kelty, Sierra Designs, Slumberjack)
Sierra Designs, Slumberjack and Kelty have started their Memorial Day sales.

• Kelty is offering 25% off site wide with the coupon code "MEMORIAL2024"
• Sierra Designs is offering 25% off site wide with the coupon code "MEMORIAL"
• Slumberjack is offering 30% off site wide with the coupon code "MEMORIALDAY30"
• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates for Kelty and Sierra Designs. No cashback available for Slumberjack.

Garage Grown Gear:
For the UL backpacker and hiking enthusiast, Garage Grown Gear is offering a big Small Business sale with anywhere between 5%-30% off various brands (Six Moons, Hammock Gear, LiteAF, Slingfin etc).
Cashback: none
Gossamer Gear
Gossamer Gear has not started their Memorial Day sale yet.

• Cashback: none

Half Moon Outfitters:
Half Moon Outfitters has not started their Memorial Day sale yet.

• Cashback: None

Hammock Gear:
Hammock Gear is offering 20% off site wide until 5/21 for Small Business Week.
Cashback: None
Helinox
Helinox is offering 25% off site wide. Helinox now MAP prices all their products so sales are rare. Good till May 27.
Cashback: Yes. Check current rates
Iceco
Iceco has not started their Memorial Day sale yet.
Johnson Outdoors (Eureka, Jetboil)
Keep in mind Eureka is being shut down by Johnson Outdoors, so after sale warranty support and parts availability may be limited in the future.
Eureka is offering up to 40% off site wide for Memorial Day
Jetboil is offering $50 off MiniMo, Flash and Genesis Base Camp models

• Cashback: None

Kaviso:
Kaviso, who is the exclusive retailer of Durston X-Mid tents, is offering 25% off site wide for all Nemo items until May 27.
Kittery Trading Post
Kittery Trading Post has not started their Memorial Day sale yet.

• Cashback: None

LL Bean
LL Bean has not started their Memorial Day sale yet.

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.

Marmot:
Marmot is running 30% off site wide for Memorial Day. Expires 5/27.
Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.
Merrell:
Merrell Shoes is running up to 50% off site wide for Memorial Day.

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.

Miyar Adventures:
Miyar Adventures has not started their Memorial Day sale yet

• Cashback: None

Neptune Mountaineering:
Neptune Mountaineering has not started their Memorial Day sale yet.

• Cashback: None

North Face
North Face is offering up to 40% off many items site wide

• cashback: none

OMCGear
OMCGear is matching several of the same prices and deals from Moosejaw, Backcountry, REI for Memorial day.

• Cashback: None

Outdoor Gear Exchange:
Outdoor Gear Exchange has started their Memorial Day sale up to 30% off. Matching the sale deals from Big Agnes, Moosejaw etc. Big Agnes, Nemo, Marmot, Osprey etc

• Cashback: Yes. Check current Rates.

Outdoor Research:
Outdoor Research has started their "May melt out sale" with up to 25% off site side.

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.

[Outdoor Vitals)[https://www.outdoorvitals.com)
Outdoor Vitals is offering 20% off all non Outdoor Vitals items for Live Ultralight members.
Live Ultralight is $10 a month. You get a $10 store credit, access to exclusive discounts and free Priority Mail shipping.
Cashback: none
Paragon Sports:
Paragon Sports has started their Memorial Day sale with up to 30% off site wide.

• Cashback: None

REI:
REI's Anniversary Sale for 2024 has started on May 17 and run until May 27. More details in my other stickied post:
https://www.reddit.com/CampingGeacomments/1couk63/rei_2024_anniversary_sale_catalog_is_now_live/
other details

• Cashback: None

Rock and Snow:
Rock and Snow has not started their Memorial Day sale yet.

• Cashback: None

RTIC
RTIC has not started their Memorial Day sale yet.
Sea To Summit:
Sea to Summit is offering their "bundle and save sale". Save a bigger amount the more sleep system items you purchase. 10% off of 1 item, 15% off of 2, 20% off of 3 etc.

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.

Salomon:
Salomon is offering 25% all shoes site wide for Memorial Day. Good to look at if you are eyeing a pair of trail runners or hiking boots.

• Cashback: None

Scheel's:
Scheels has many Big Agnes tents on sale for 20-30% off for Memorial Day.
Sports Basement:
Sports Basement has started their Big Camp Sale with great deals:

• Up to 30% off all sleeping pads
• Up to 30% off tents and sunshades
• Up to 25% off select hiking apparel
• Up to 30% off backpacks and kid carriers
• Up to 25% off many brands of hiking shoes

Note: To get the full 30% off you must be a member of the "Basmeteer" program, which is a one time $30 fee. This gives free shipping, longer return policy and free re-fills of the Flame King 1lb propane bottles (refills only offered in store). Otherwise the sale discount is 25% off.
Sports Basement currently has the best sale on Exped pads right now for 30% off if you are Basemeteer; even better than Exped's direct sale.
Cashback: none
Sportsman's Warehouse:
Sportsman's Warehouse has started their Memorial Day sale. Up to 40% off all camping gear items from major brands (Sea to Summit, Granite gear, Marmot etc)

• Cashback: Yes. Check current rates.

Sunny Sports
SunnySports has not started their Memorial Day sale yet

• Cashback: Yes.

White Duck Outdoors
White Duck Outdoors is offering 10-25% off for Memorial Day. Expires 5/27.
ZenBivy
ZenBivy is offering up to 25% off site wide for Small Business Week.
Cashback: none

Ok, so, first of all, thank you all for coming.
I'm a former boy scout and backpacking instructor. As a teen I was mostly interested in the kind of gear that seemed flashy or a bargain, rather than the kind that would last me a lifetime or had some quality specs. I went through a handful of Costco "tactical" flashlights, headlamp multi-packs, cheapo knives, etc.
Half a lifetime later, I'm a sober alcoholic, recovered from several years of major depressive disorder that took a significant toll on my pursuit of things that interested me. As I've aged, I've become much less interested in purely flashy gadgets in favor of ones that have a warranty and some serious reviews and recommendations behind them. For example, while I don't have the ultimate in knife technology or artistry, I can confidently say that I have the best kitchen tools available.
That brings me to this subreddit, which I found recently after getting back into some EDC stuff. I found a nice light for quick illumination and everyday use - an Acebeam Pokelit. The one thing i learned is that the high lumen output has a relatively brief lifetime in one battery charge. What I'd like to find is something with more sustained high lumen output and a long battery life.
I need help with recommendations. The information is available here, no question - but I am overwhelmed by the sheer density of the data here, and I would love if someone could help me out.
What am I looking for in a quality flashlight? Should I anticipate this being a $50 purchase or a $200 purchase for a buy-it-for-life option? Is BIFL even a fair expectation? Am I better off buying five inexpensive lights in the next 20 years, or is there one option that will last me that long?
If there's a "beginner guide" anyone can point me towards, that would be sweet too - I'm a sponge for this information, but really, please do explain it like I'm 5.
Please and thank you! Have a great day, y'all.

First off, read the MM entree about skeletons. They listen to orders and are smart about them(And a example was given that when told to open a door, they will check the handle before trying to bash thru).They can do complicated tasks like operate a catapult. You can give commands like, 'Follow and listen to so-and-so's orders till i say otherwise'. That is pretty useful.
On top of that, YOU CAN TEACH THEM NEW TRICKS, so that 1d6 short bow could EASILY be traded for a heavy crossbow, jumping the avg dmg dealt by 2 damage each. At lvl 5 you could control 8 of them, 12 with a pearl of power. At level 5, my 12 skeletons were doing 70 damage a turn, but now i find 8 is the perfect number, an average of 47 damage.
Now, to further increase their survivability, you can even put them into plate armor. Skeleton died? NO PROBLEM! collect the armor and give it to the next skeleton you raise. You investment is 100% protected. And since they understand you, you can hit them with the feat inspiring leader, EASILY doubling their hp total.
Compare 8 skeletons to the other big lvl 3 spell, fireball. Lets say fireball his 4 creatures and 2 save and 2 fail. At level 3, the fireball would do an average of 32 damage to 2 of them and 16 to the other 2, a total of 96 damage per fireball, making it 192 damage with 2 cast. Might do better, might do worse, but that is a fair assumption. At AC 14, the skeletons hit 1/2 the time with range attacks. 1d10+2 damage would average out to 32 damage a round, not counting crits. 192 divide by 32 would give you the amount of rounds it would take for the skeletons to do the same amount of damage. Which comes to 6 rounds. In 2 average c/r fights, the skeletons would equal the damage the fireball does. On top of that, they have HP, a value that is hard for a fireball to equate. Sure, you will save hp by spending all your damage at once to drop the targets faster, but that won't equal 104 hp. Further more, after 6 rounds of attack, you are removing more creatures then fireball would, saving you hp the fireball wouldn't.
Some other tricks.
-Give them all backpacks as they can carry 150 pounds EACH.
-Use arrows of walloping. They are magical so they bypass a lot of resistances, and with each hit they have to make a dc 10 strength save or fall prone. Good amount of crowd control there. They are also common magical, and consumable so they are a bargain compare to uncommon items.
-Vials of acid have a short range but pack a mean punch at 2d6. 8 vials of acid hitting a ac of 14 1/2 of the time would do an average of 32 damage.
-You could give them a shield and rapier, but the shield would interfere with switching to range attacks. So, just go for the great-sword!
-Also, ask you DM, but they sometimes allow you to use wands that don't take attunement, making wand of magic missile an excellent choice to bring ALOT of firepower for cheap.
-Other buffs like bless and aid help too but they won't cover a group of 8, let alone 12, so the effectiveness is marginal.
Yes, they are squishy, and Yes they are susceptible to AOE damage. But, you can spread them out, and keep them back till weakesafer targets presence itself. They don't need to be in every fight to be effective. Keep them safe and use them when you would have the advantage.
My last point, ACTION ECONOMY. 8 extra pairs of hands is amazing. The uses is limitless, you can be creative as long as you are clear. I can tell you how many times I've abused this.
I'm sure you have your own experiences and opinions, but this is mine. I think it is easy to see how strong skeletons can be, rules as written. They have weaknesses, but no spell can solve every problem (well, besides wish...)

First off, read the MM entree about skeletons. They listen to orders and are smart about them(And a example was given that when told to open a door, they will check the handle before trying to bash thru).They can do complicated tasks like operate a catapult. You can give commands like, 'Follow and listen to so-and-so's orders till i say otherwise'. That is pretty useful.
On top of that, YOU CAN TEACH THEM NEW TRICKS, so that 1d6 short bow could EASILY be traded for a heavy crossbow, jumping the avg dmg dealt by 2 damage each. At lvl 5 you could control 8 of them, 12 with a pearl of power. At level 5, my 12 skeletons were doing 70 damage a turn, but now i find 8 is the perfect number, an average of 47 damage.
Now, to further increase their survivability, you can even put them into plate armor. Skeleton died? NO PROBLEM! collect the armor and give it to the next skeleton you raise. You investment is 100% protected. And since they understand you, you can hit them with the feat inspiring leader, EASILY doubling their hp total.
Compare 8 skeletons to the other big lvl 3 spell, fireball. Lets say fireball his 4 creatures and 2 save and 2 fail. At level 3, the fireball would do an average of 32 damage to 2 of them and 16 to the other 2, a total of 96 damage per fireball, making it 192 damage with 2 cast. Might do better, might do worse, but that is a fair assumption. At AC 14, the skeletons hit 1/2 the time with range attacks. 1d10+2 damage would average out to 32 damage a round, not counting crits. 192 divide by 32 would give you the amount of rounds it would take for the skeletons to do the same amount of damage. Which comes to 6 rounds. In 2 average c/r fights, the skeletons would equal the damage the fireball does. On top of that, they have HP, a value that is hard for a fireball to equate. Sure, you will save hp by spending all your damage at once to drop the targets faster, but that won't equal 104 hp. Further more, after 6 rounds of attack, you are removing more creatures then fireball would, saving you hp the fireball wouldn't.
Some other tricks.
-Give them all backpacks as they can carry 150 pounds EACH.
-Use arrows of walloping. They are magical so they bypass a lot of resistances, and with each hit they have to make a dc 10 strength save or fall prone. Good amount of crowd control there. They are also common magical, and consumable so they are a bargain compare to uncommon items.
-Vials of acid have a short range but pack a mean punch at 2d6. 8 vials of acid hitting a ac of 14 1/2 of the time would do an average of 32 damage.
-You could give them a shield and rapier, but the shield would interfere with switching to range attacks. So, just go for the great-sword!
-Also, ask you DM, but they sometimes allow you to use wands that don't take attunement, making wand of magic missile an excellent choice to bring ALOT of firepower for cheap.
-Other buffs like bless and aid help too but they won't cover a group of 8, let alone 12, so the effectiveness is marginal.
Yes, they are squishy, and Yes they are susceptible to AOE damage. But, you can spread them out, and keep them back till weakesafer targets presence itself. They don't need to be in every fight to be effective. Keep them safe and use them when you would have the advantage.
My last point, ACTION ECONOMY. 8 extra pairs of hands is amazing. The uses is limitless, you can be creative as long as you are clear. I can tell you how many times I've abused this.
I'm sure you have your own experiences and opinions, but this is mine. I think it is easy to see how strong skeletons can be, rules as written. They have weaknesses, but no spell can solve every problem (well, besides wish...)

What should I buy first? We see the, "I just passed my Tech, what radio should I buy?" question posted over and over again here.
There really isn't a simple answer, because it really depends on what you plan to do. And what you want to do will probably be different a year from now. The answers you’ll get from this question online will probably not serve you, especially if someone recommends a specific rig, based on the sentence or two that you post. You’re taking advice from internet strangers who don’t know you, and you probably don’t know enough about ham radio yet to know how to evaluate their suggestions.
One thing that is highly recommended is not to go out and spend money on new equipment right away. There are numerous barely-used rigs on the marketplace because of this. (Buying a Baofeng or other $25 radio is fine).
Your temptation will be to buy something more than a Baofeng that will give you more power, more features and better access to the VHF/UHF bands that you are now licensed to use. Best to wait.
Connect with experienced hams: If you can, join a club or find some experienced hams. Try to see their shacks, their equipment, and listen to their contacts with other hams. You’re probably younger than they are, but you’ll find that the experienced hams have the time and can share lots of information. They also may give you free equipment from their junk boxes or used rigs that they’ve maintained perfectly but no longer need. They might even fix a rig for you.
Go to field days, POTA operations and even those club meetings, which may or not be boring.
When you have an idea of what you want to do, then consider buying equipment.
Buying new: Buying new is great, if you have the money. But if your budget is limited, you may find a year from now that you have one transceiver that won’t allow you to work the bands or with the transmission modes that you want, and can't afford to buy anything else. Used equipment depreciates as soon as you turn it on.
Consider buying for the future: You have limited privileges now, but if you spend any time as a ham, you will probably get your General. At that point, you’ll have lots of privileges on the HF bands. You may decide that you want to stick to VHF/UHF. Most hams do want to go to HF as well, and some move to HF and never go back to VHF/UHF. Some stick to a single mode of transmission, some operate everything, most use a computer now, but some don’t have one they can easily connect or are sick of seeing a screen all day at work and don’t want to see one in their leisure hours. The only way that you’ll learn this is by learning ham radio, most likely with the help of other hams.
QRP and Portable Radios: These can be great, and radios like the XEIGU can have attractive prices. There seems to be no end of interest in these, possibly because of the lower prices. Once again, be wary. Check out the repair history on any of rigs that you buy new, especially if they are a good bit less expensive than are the competitors. QRP can work and people do work the world with QRP, but it can really be frustrating, especially if you don’t have a directional beam. With 5 or 20 watts on HF, you will be competing with 1500-watt stations with antenna systems that rival commercial radio stations. They won’t hear you as well, or at all, especially in a pile up. QRP operators can get frustrated and quit. Backpack portable can be fun, but until you’ve tried it with some other hams (and used their equipment), it’s not a good idea to buy one of these right away.
Buying used: For most, buying used is the best place to start. The best place to buy used is through a local club. A ham in the local club is highly unlikely to cheat you, and will probably sell you a used rig that is in good shape. They might even help you fix it if it breaks down, or fix it for you.
Most hams are persnickety and won’t sell you a damaged rig. Still, buyer beware. And used gear from a non-ham is risky. It’s like buying an airplane from someone who knows nothing about airplanes ("I turned on the ignition and it started, so it'll fly fine ...")
Used Equipment Sources:
Local Club / Local Hams: the best place to go, as mentioned.
***
QRZ.com (Swapmeet)
Eham.net (Classified section)
QTH.com
These sites only allow licensed hams to sell gear. Once again, hams aren’t very likely to lie or sell you a piece of junk – they usually tell you what is wrong with it. But like any piece of used gear, caveat emptor.
***
Online scams: The Ham Site listed above, as well as any other online site, have been subject to scammers. Some of these sites require photos of the call sign and the person’s name next to the equipment to be sold, but scammers have posed as hams and scammed buyers. These sites have posted guidelines to help you avoid this, and follow them to the letter, including having a phone conversation with the seller before you buy, and one that gets into the history of the piece, how it was used and how the seller operates. If he or she can’t speak ham and has an odd area code, don’t buy. Check out the phone number with Google search – you can often confirm that you are actually buying from Elbert Glomp, K4HAHA, in Turnip Creek, Tennessee, with a Google search of the person. All licensees’ addresses are public, so if they can’t tell you about the area they’re listed in, they aren’t Elbert Glomp, K4HAHA.
Ebay: Be more careful here. Make sure you can return it. Does the seller know anything about ham radio? Check their listings to see if they’ve sold other ham gear. Many times you’ll find that they have been able to turn it on, which tells you nothing. There is some good gear on here, but most is overpriced. And the operating condition can be questionable.
Japanese gear on Ebay: There are now a handful of sellers selling used gear at low prices that are shipped form Japan. There’s nothing wrong with a radio that is made in Japan, but one that ships from Japan is almost certain to be designed for Japanese ham laws. That means that it’ll be locked to smaller bands than we have. They have lower power limits and the rig will likely not transmit at the basic 100 watts on HF. These can be hard to unlock to make them so they can transmit on the full US bands. In addition, you may not be able to buy boards or parts from the Yaesu, Kenwood or Icom service centers in the US, as the boards are not available to them. Many hams have been disappointed with these. Unless you are ready to take on a significant modification project right away, stay away from these. If you are, do some research to make sure that the rig can be modified, and determine what the power outputs are, because these probably can’t be changed.
Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist: You can sometimes find some real deals on these sites. People get equipment from an estate and don’t know the value of what they have. I heard recently of someone getting an ICOM 706 for $100 and someone getting a Yaesu 757 for $75. Bring an experienced ham with you to check out the equipment, because these people will have no idea how to determine if the unit is functional. They say it works because they plugged it in and it lit up and made noise. Most of the time, however, the equipment on these two sites is overpriced and could still be non-functional. But if you have the time, keep an eye on these two sites for a bargain.
Older Used Gear
There are a number of categories here:
Vintage Collectibles, like Hallicrafter and Collins and Heathkit rigs that collectors like to buy and restore. Not a good place for most new hams to start.
HF Transceivers with tube finals: These actually will still work and the tubes in the final amplifiers usually have long lives (tubes could be hard to replace if they do burn out, however). These will require tuning as you change frequencies, which is a nuisance. Also, old rigs tend to have worn components. Electrolytic capacitors tend to wear out after about 40 years, although some will last much longer and some don’t last that long. Other components can go, too. These are lower-piced, but also a more difficult place to start.
Older solid state HF Transceivers: Starting in about the late 1970’s or early 1980’s, transceivers became all solid state, and required no tuning to transmit. These old radios actually will sound just as good on the air as a brand new rig and receiver performance can be almost as good. Features were gradually added that improved receiver performance over the years. The risk here, once again, is that something no longer works or burns out soon after you get it. Electrolytic capacitors are also a risk here, of course. Before you buy one of these, check out the reviews on Eham.net, which has reviews of virtually every piece of ham equipment posted by other hams, to see if the item you’re looking at was a dog. These rigs might not give you the newest transmission modes, such as digital, but they are not the worst place to start if you can get a unit that someone has cared for. Try to get one in which they have changed out the electrolytic capacitors. These are certainly small enough and light enough to use as POTA, unless you’re backpacking. Bear in mind that you can usually resell these for what you paid for them if they are functional, so it is easy to trade up.
Older VHF/UHF transceivers: Same pluses and minuses as above, but don’t get something with tubes in it. These will have few or no memory functions and rarely if ever can be programmed with something like Chirp.
1995 radios or later: These are now 30 years old, but at about this time the shack-in-a-box rigs came out. These can be a great place to start, because you could get one with HF plus 6 meters, 2 meters and perhaps 70 cm. You might also get one with a remote head that can be used in your shack or mobile. They gradually added functions and programming abilities from this point until now, so the newer equipment, the more up-to-date will be its features.
Antennas
Remember that antennas are critical, and leave some money in your budget for them. These can be bought or home brewed from wire, plumbing equipment or junkyard pipes. The RF doesn’t know if it is passing through a clothesline rod or an expensive beam antenna, but it won’t go anywhere if the antenna isn’t resonant, with a good ground plane/counterpoise. Transmission line is critical and can’t be fudged, however. These take a lot of time to get right, regardless of whether they are homemade or brand new from a prominent manufacturer. Remember that the little things like transmission wire, lightning arrestors, meters, ground planes and insulators do add up, one trip to the store or online order at a time. And bear in mind that many hams are working from wire dipoles and similar, simple antennas that work well when installed properly and that are made to be resonant.

Three years ago, my aunt Charlotte and cousin Sonya went to their family campsite (a disused gold claim property called Camp Arnold) for a long weekend. They didn’t return from their trip. Search and rescue volunteers located their backpacks and lots of tracks, but no bodies were ever recovered.
It gets weirder.
My cousin received these emails last week. They appear to be from his mom, detailing the days before she disappeared. He started reading them, then sent them to me because he was worried they would ruin his memories of her. We can’t figure out why the emails just now appeared. His mom’s phone and tablet were not recovered with the rest of her gear.
He wants me to tell him the sanitized version of what she wrote. He wants to know if anything in the emails explains why they vanished. I don’t think I’m going to be able to tell him the truth, if that’s even what this is.
(I’m removing the dates and specifics from the emails so they can’t be identified from news articles. Names have obviously been changed.)
Thursday
Sam,
We made it to Camp Arnold. Sonya got carsick on the drive out and still felt rotten through the hike to the cabin. She went straight inside to set up her sleeping mat as we made it just before dusk. We didn’t bother with anything more than granola bars for dinner, although I did get the wood stove going and we had enough water left for tea. Copper was a little anxious, but he settled down once the stove had warmed everything up.
The weather was wonderful for our hike – the wildflowers have quadrupled since I was here in April. You and Jimmy did a fantastic job finishing up the cabin. I was very glad to see we have a roof and a door now! Please let the girls know I saw the painted stones they left to mark the last fork in the trail. Beautiful! We could use a few more in the garden. I brought some bamboo to help outline the new beds, and I’m sure the compost from all the clearing we did last year will be good enough by now. Planning to work on the garden through the weekend and then head back to town on Tuesday morning for Emerson’s baseball game.
Sonya brought a map of the original gold claim on this property and is convinced she’s going to locate the entrance to a mine. I bet it’s all collapsed by now, if they ever even broke ground. I remember, way back when Dad bought the property, he searched for it too but never found anything.
The cell service has been worse than usual, but actually that’s part of the charm for me. I know if your Dad could be here he’d be out on the rocks with his easel first thing tomorrow, painting the view into the canyon and getting a sunburn on his neck. I feel him with me everywhere, but especially here. None of us ever really leave this Earth, do we?
Mom
.
Friday
Hi Sam,
I am dog tired but I got two very cute little garden beds dug out on the South side of the cabin. The soil is uneven – some areas are too hard to do more than scratch away at, and others are much easier to dig into. Occasionally there’s an obstruction – stones and buried wood I guess – and most of these I leave because the garden doesn’t need to be dug deep. I planted zinnias and sunflowers right in front. The birds will like the sunflowers, although it’s so dry out here it’s unlikely any of it will survive long enough to bloom.
Sonya made eggs and noodles on the wood stove today and we had a good feast for lunch. Good thing too, because Copper was a little crazy all afternoon. She hiked him as far as she could to try to wear him out, but as soon as they got back in the cabin he was poking at the door to be let out again while she was bone-weary and ravenous. Maybe he mistakes the wind in the sagebrush for the sound of Dad hiking back for dinner. Maybe he just prefers camping in a tent.
I, on the other hand, much prefer my cot in the cabin to the cold hard ground! The only modern convenience I’m missing at the moment is light! I can’t figure out where I put my flashlight, and we got in so late yesterday we didn’t bother stringing up the solar lights and then forgot about them. So now I’m already in bed, writing emails I can’t send instead of what I’d really like to do, which is check out these old coins I found when I was digging the garden beds today. There are three of them. They look like they could be silver, but they don’t have faces on them, just words and shapes that look sort of like birds. Crudely carved birds, I guess. I couldn’t read the lettering on them, and then, after dinner, by the time I remembered them in my pocket and was ready to see them up close with clean hands and my glasses on, it had gotten too dark. I’ll send you a picture in the morning – they remind me of the big silver dollars you and Dad used to hunt for. They might have been here since the 1850’s, when the claim was first active. Maybe they’re even worth something?
All my love to you and the girls,
Mom
.
Saturday
Sam,
It’s around noon and I’m stuck inside. We’re having a terrible dust storm. It almost makes me wish we had windows, but I secured the curtain flaps down and the velcro is doing a good job so far. The sound the wind makes whistling through the flaps is very unnerving – it’s like a person moaning. Maybe that’s why Copper was so on-edge. Maybe he could hear the air passing through this place all along.
And I’m on-edge now too, I guess. Sonya is out there with Copper, somewhere. She had her sun hat and her walking poles and said she was going down to the base of the cliff to find the entrance to the mine. I was in the garden, not paying so much attention, and she mentioned she was looking all around for her flashlight. I said she couldn’t have mine because I couldn't find it either. And she said, “Isn’t that odd?” But I had just found more of those funny coins just an inch or two under the soil. I have a whole handful of them now. They’re heavy and bright and really very beautiful. And I’d brought the coins inside and stacked them on the table before I really registered what she’d said. I looked up and there she was – well away down the trail already, walking toward the canyon path with Copper at her heels. And yes, of course she was right – it is all very odd.
It’s not just the flashlights. I had a bunch of paracord I’d used to tie up the bamboo that I packed in for the garden. I looped it up and hung it from one of the front rafters, and now it’s disappeared. Sonya asked me what I did with her beef jerky – she had a big bag of it, she said, left on the shelf by the front door since her hike yesterday. We both shrugged it off and blamed Copper, but there would have been a torn-up package to find if he’d eaten it. Neither of us admitted that we knew it wasn’t him.
And I think I may have found a bone buried back near the new garden beds. Maybe an old animal bone, maybe not. I suppose I’d rather not be certain. But I keep finding coins and the coins seem to be leading me back toward the bone, if that makes any sense. Of course it doesn’t. But there’s a bad feeling hovering around all of it, a feeling that I don’t want Sonya to know what could be there, and a feeling that Copper knows already. He avoids the garden now, and he barks at the wind. It’s odd to think our family has been camping here for so many years, but there might be more to the place than we knew, right beneath the surface.
.
Sunday
Sam,
I would say sorry for worrying you, but I see none of my messages have managed to send yet – I just see that little sending wheel that spins and spins. I should send Sonya to the top of the hill with my tablet later to see if we can get some updates from the real world. She was holed up in a cave by the base of the canyon with Copper while they waited for the windstorm to die down yesterday. I let my mind run away with itself a little, I guess. She did too, she said. She said she saw footprints in the loose dust down at the base of the canyon – strange ones, as if made by a dress shoe – squared heel and pointed toe. She didn’t know what to make of it, but they seemed to be leading toward the part of the canyon where she’d been wanting to go – a cleft in the rocks where they sloped to a low point, where there was rubble and maybe an opening. Then the wind kicked up and she ran back toward the path, and the alcove where she sheltered. I can hear the curiosity in her voice still, but there’s apprehension too.
It gets eerie in remote places like this. You come across bones or a mark in the dust and your mind makes up stories. Sonya has always been tough, but sometimes I forget that all three of you kids are grown up now. I look at her and see my little three-year-old with skinned knees and hair bows, chasing after big brothers that never wanted to slow down for her.
We had tuna salad for dinner and a little glass of wine. I can’t believe Sonya will be thirty next year. I can’t believe my only daughter lives all the way in California. It's harder accepting the big transitions when it's your youngest.
Today Sonya said she’ll stay close to the cabin and help me in the garden. Only two nights left before we head back to civilization.
There’s something big I’m hoping to have her help me clear away – an old dried up root, I told her, but I’ve suspected for a while now that it must be another bone. It adds up – the coins, the soft and hard places in the soil. I think my garden overlaps with someone’s burial place. If I’m right, I’d like to move what I can of the remains into a proper grave well back in the sagebrush, where it’s nicely marked but also out of sight.
I got an early start with my trowel, moving dirt, digging toward the rootlike object. It was long and hard, and eventually I uncovered the end of it where it rounded off, becoming unmistakably a femur. And as I excavated around it I found more: cracked and desiccated pieces of a pelvis, a smashed piece of brass – a buckle? Part of a tool? – and coins, more coins than before, not just the odd silver ones but now identifiable ones too – pennies and half dollars and some misshapen pieces of raw gold.
“Mom, what the hell?” Sonya yelled from the cabin’s back door. Her voice was unusually high and shrill. I shrugged, guessing that the extra time I’d had in proximity to the bones made the horror of their discovery easier to bear. I wasn’t horrified, but I was sorry. I hadn’t intended to disturb anyone with my silly garden project, and I also didn’t feel great about having taken coins from a burial place. I scooped up all the coins I’d displaced with this last dig and put them in my hat, standing up with it in my hands like a bowl, looking down at the partly-exposed skeleton. I realized I didn’t have the energy or time to exhume the rest of him, dig a new grave, and move him. I’d have to cover him back up right here, mark the grave, maybe move the garden to the other side of the cabin.
At the cabin’s back door, Sonya started sobbing.
“Sonya, honey, he’s been dead for a very long time,” I said.
“How long have you known that was there?”
I considered. “I found those coins, and I did wonder. I think I didn’t let myself really consider it.”
“Penny and Olivia are going to play here.”
“I know,” I sighed. “We’ll have to move him when Sam and Jimmy are here. It will be easier if we have one of the ATVs.” I swirled the coins in my hat. They were so beautiful in the afternoon light - brighter and shinier than anything fresh out of the ground had any right to be. Sonya was on the back step, hugging herself, talking about the gold claim and the two brothers who had originally owned the mine, how she'd tried to trace their families but ended up at dead ends, as if they had both disappeared.
“I don’t want to sleep here,” she said. “I want to hike out right now.”
I shrugged. There was nothing more I could accomplish in the garden, and I agreed that now even I was too upset to enjoy the afternoon. “Okay,” I said.
But the moment we stepped into the cabin, something was off. My eyes took a bit to adjust to the shadows, but there was movement – the window shades were bulging with the breeze, and the front door was clacking like someone had just exited that way. And Copper was barking crazily toward that door, but also cowering by my legs with every bark, ears tense like he was straining to locate something.
I felt it too – my back prickling with the sense of wrongness. Sonya was frozen next to me, but I knew she was thinking the same thing I was… What’s missing?
“The hatchet,” she whispered. And sure enough, the hatchet we had kept beside the wood stove for cutting up kindling was gone.
I walked further into the cabin, wanting to look unflappable for Sonya’s sake. If there was someone nearby slowly pilfering our stuff, and if that person was interested in things that could be used as weapons, we weren’t going to stick around any longer than we needed to. I noted that the stack of silver coins in the middle of the table was completely untouched. I also noted (with relief!) that my car keys were zipped inside my backpack right where I’d left them. Moving quickly, we gathered our clothes and all of the leftover food. Utensils and garden tools we would leave – we had planned to lock them up in the footlocker by the cabin’s back door, but we decided not to take the time. Sonya filled our water bottles. I got Copper’s bowl and leash ready, but he wasn't beside me anymore.
“Copper!” I called. Sonya looked at me with wide eyes. I thrust open the cabin’s front door in time to see Copper racing toward the canyon trail, barking madly as he went.
“What is he doing?” Sonya asked. Panic was rising in her voice. I tried to stay calm, but I could feel myself starting to shake. There were footprints in the dust all around the front of the cabin – even up to the front window, impressions left by pointed toes, as if someone had crept to the window and looked in. And the axe was gone from the chopping block that stood near the rain barrel.
Flashlights, rope, jerky, hatchet, axe. Was someone collecting what they needed, or depriving us of the means to survive? I yelled for Copper, again and again, but he didn’t come.
.
Monday
Sam,
I love you. Tell your brother that I love him too, that I was thinking of you both today. Someone will come to look for us, but let it be the sheriff, not you. I don’t want you or your girls to come anywhere near Camp Arnold or the mine. It’s cursed.
Sonya and I agreed it didn't make sense to go after Copper. It was early afternoon already and we'd be stretching the available daylight hiking back to the car even if we started right away. I can’t explain why, but I packed the coins, so many heavy handfuls of them filling our empty peanut butter jar. We strapped on our packs and walked away from the cabin, not looking back. But when we got out to the trail and saw Copper’s paw prints in the dust, we turned to follow them down into the canyon without a word.
Sonya was ahead of me, setting a fast pace. Maybe she thought we could make it - get Copper and still hike all the way out before dark. I made plans with every step we took deeper into the canyon, thinking maybe we could drag Copper back to the cabin for a sleepless, stressful night, then rush out when the sun rose.
I could hear her saying something, but the wind had picked up in gusts and she was several steps ahead of me. She was looking at the ground, her steps uncertain. “There are no paw prints," she said, and now that I'd caught up with her I saw that it was true. Copper’s rounded prints were nowhere to be found on the sandy, stony ground, and as we turned to look up the path the wind shot through the carved pathway, bringing a ripple of dust with it to further obscure the trail.
I yelled against the wind for him, squinting my eyes in the sun and dust, and then – "There he is!"
I spotted him several yards down the trail, just a flash of curly red coat and whipping tail as he darted onward and was hidden by the outcrop the trail hugged. There was no question, then, that we'd continue on to get him, though there were still no prints to follow, except occasionally for the strange angular ones, the pointed toe and hard-looking heel, from whoever Copper was after.
"He isn't barking at all,” Sonya said, yelling even though the wind had died down some. “If he were chasing someone he would be barking, wouldn't he?"
As we rounded the next bend in the trail I was disappointed not to see Copper. The trail of footprints had become regular and even. Whoever made them hadn't been running. Sonya pointed out cracks and crevices to our right - the sandstone alcove where she and Copper had hidden from the storm, and others.
“There's a whole network of them, like lava tubes," she commented, but I was thinking of our deceased friend up in the garden and his cache of coins, of all the dangers he would have faced trying to mine for metals in a place like this. Nothing of value was ever reported to have been found in this canyon, but maybe he did discover something and could never get knowledge of it out of this place. There's always a catch with treasure.
Finally we reached the bottom of the trail, where Copper stood looking up at us and wagging his tail, the same way he does at the door when asking to be let outside. I was furious, ready to rush toward him and grab him by the collar, but Sonya stopped me by clutching the back of my shirt.
“That’s the entrance to the mine,” she said darkly, and now I saw Copper was standing right at the opening to a shadowy shaft leading god knows where underground. And there was someone inside with our flashlights and our rope, someone calling our dog to him, luring us under.
“No, Copper,” I told him, whistling him to me. “Come, now. We’re going home.”
My stomach twisted as I heard an echo of my own whistle come from somewhere deep underground. The sound was louder and slower than the one I’d made, almost mocking. My blood ran cold. Copper’s ears perked up and he instantly sprang forward into the mine and out of sight.
Sonya and I yelled for him, crouching near the mine’s entrance. The blackness inside was nearly complete, but there was the faintest reddish glow emanating from deep within. Beside me, I could hear Sonya reasoning aloud that all she had to do was get a grip on him, get the leash on him, and then she could carry him back out to the trail and we’d all make it to the car. Meanwhile, I was having similar thoughts about Sonya.
“No,” I said, simply shaking my head, my eyes darting from the mine entrance to the trail and back. I was sure we weren’t alone, certain to my core that we were running out of time and choices. “There is someone in there, Sonya,” I whispered.
She was straining to see inside the mine, holding her phone at arm’s length with the flashlight on, but it was no use. The shaft was dark and cluttered with loose stones, steep and mostly featureless.
There was a burst of sound from within – a clatter of what sounded like metal tools, a sliding sound of shifting rocks, and a high yip and whine from Copper, as if he’d been trodden on or kicked. This was too much for Sonya, and before I could protest she had shed her pack and crouched her way into the mine shaft, calling Copper’s name and shuffling forward until the winking light from her cellphone vanished. “It opens up!” she yelled, her voice echoing up to me. “There’s all kinds of stuff – old axes and wood and burlap sacks.” Her voice grew fainter. “There’s a pit. It’s deep,” she made a disgusted sound. “There are bones at the bottom. Someone died here. I don’t see Copper. There are other shafts, branching off, just like we saw from the trail.” “Come back!” I yelled. “We’ll get help. Copper will last a few days.” When she spoke again her voice had lost all urgency. It was quieter, so the wind almost stole it.
“There’s something here. It’s beautiful.”
“Sonya, come back!” I yelled, and at last I was letting myself panic. Alone in the gusting dust, in the rising heat of the day, surrounded on all sides by the canyon’s echoing walls. Even with the blue sky stretching endlessly above, I’ve never felt so trapped.
I’m calmer now. It’s been two hours. Two hours of dead silence from within the mine. I’ve tried yelling, whistling, throwing stones, but there’s been no answer. Only stillness.
I dragged our packs closer to the trail to ensure they’ll be found. I put a note in the front pocket with our names and who to contact, but hopefully someone will find these messages – it’s too much to explain. I'm going in with only the light from my phone and one of Sonya’s hiking poles. And the coins. My pockets are so full of coins they jingle as I walk. I can't leave them behind. I wish I knew why.
Please forgive me for squandering this last chance to return home to you. I can’t leave her here.
.
Tuesday
Sam,
I shuffled and scraped my way down the mine shaft, seeing at last what Sonya had seen - paw prints and dust, old tools, a path through the rubble that gave way to a gaping pit on the left side. I looked down with my phone - there were bones at the bottom inside shrunken brown clothes, scraps of a person left by lizards and rats and whatever else might forage here. It occurred to me that this was the other brother, the brother of the man buried in my garden. I knew, somehow, that the coins in my pocket were his. He'd killed his brother over whatever treasure they'd found, then paid back his half of the claim into the earth to make up for his guilt. And maybe I had entered the bargain by unearthing that money. Perhaps I'd sold the betrayed brother back his claim, and our flashlights and rope too. Perhaps he'd bought back his life and was free to return to his mine at last. Perhaps. We find bones and tell stories. I might be making meaning where there isn’t any. I unloaded my pockets into the pit, scattering the bones with what I decided was guilty money. Take it back, I thought. So your brother can rest and leave us in peace.
As the last coins fell, their silvery clatter was answered by a distant sound, the tone of metal on dense stone, a hammer strike.
I was afraid at first, then hopeful, then resigned. The sound repeated, becoming a regular beat that echoed across the rocks whose long shadows shuddered in time with my steps. There was no question in my mind that the sound rang out for me. I needed to follow the sound deeper into the mine. I was sure it would lead me to Sonya and Copper, to whatever evil thing was keeping them underground. I walked deeper, half-blind in the dark. Tunnels opened up before me, a labyrinth of twists and turns. I didn't see whatever Sonya had called beautiful, and soon there were no signs of mining - no tools or scraps or marked stones. I was focused on the sound, the repeated clanging that grew louder and louder. It dimly occurred to me that I was ascending, my calves complaining as I hiked for what felt like hours. The cavern walls around me lightened, glittering dimly in the light my phone cast. Sandstone. I touched a wall and felt the smooth warmth of it, then rounded a tight corner and felt my heart freeze. There was daylight ahead, the warm glow of early evening. And the sound of metal striking stone stopped.
I walked out into the light, crestfallen and furious. I screamed Sonya's name back into the cave I'd come from. I was back at the top of the canyon, just across the trail from the sagebrush meadow where our cabin stands. I was near enough to see the cabin, the stump in front and the woodpile. The axe was catching the light where it stuck up from the stump, fixed back in place as if taunting me.
I approached the cabin, cursing my decision to leave our packs down in the canyon. My phone was nearly dead. I wasn’t afraid anymore. I had to know what else had returned. Maybe Sonya? Copper? The sun was getting low and the solar lights began to blink on. The hatchet was back by the woodstove, the rope and jerky back in their places. Our flashlights were sitting neatly on the table, as if they'd always been there.
I took both flashlights with me back down the canyon trail. Sonya’s footprints were in the dust still, and mine. I couldn't make out any of the angular footprints, and part of me wondered if there ever had been any. Had the flashlights and the rope and the hatchet been in the cabin all along? Had I truly found coins in the shallow dirt of my garden? A feverish hope rose in me that I would find Sonya and Copper waiting for me in the canyon, ready to lead me home by the hand, bewildered at my ramblings. Remember how Dad was, at the end, when he couldn’t remember any of our faces? Except for Sonya. He never forgot his little girl.
Our packs sat where I'd left them. I plugged my phone into my power bank and stupidly checked the tablet for a signal again. When there was nothing left to check I squinted through my flashlight beam toward the dreaded mine opening.
I had to go back in. Sonya was still in there.
Again I ducked into the mine shaft, grateful for the brighter light cast by the flashlights. The emptiness of the mine struck me. It was easier to see the walls of the entrance now, the small piles of tailings and the crags around the pit. This time, my light caught a glimmer I had missed before - a shining vein of dark gold that looked almost like a bleeding wound in the wall, starting above the pit and then leading down into it, an unbroken line of precious metal. It was beautiful, and I let my flashlight beam follow the river of gold down the wall and into the pit, understanding how such wealth might turn brother against brother, driving them to ruin.
The beam of light stopped at the bottom of the pit, pooling there for a long time before I understood what I was seeing. I couldn't see the bones and shrunken brown rags that should be there. Instead I saw Sonya, body broken, head dashed against the stony wall, a dark lake of blood pooling around her head. Copper was with her, his body halfway hidden under hers, utterly still. The coins I threw shimmered facelessly up at me, catching the light. I noted that they lay on top of Sonya's body. One rested neatly on her bloodied hairline, glimmering like a jewel. There were no hammer sounds now to call me away.
The night is cold and unspeakably still as I write this. The mine was owed a debt, and it has been paid. That's the story I tell myself. But I don't understand it, so how can I expect you to understand? Don't come for us, Sam. It's over.

I’m a little confused in my first play through and want to see if anyone can give me some advice.
I’ve completed the Gauntlet of Shar challenges but judging from other discussions here my play through seems like it was a little out of order. One of the first things that happened with me was meeting and bargaining with the rats. They let me poke around a treasure room but I can’t for the life of me remember where it is. After that, I undertook all the challenges.
After the challenges and the library, I killed Yurgir and remembered to collect the gem near him. I’ve also just met Balthazar and he wants me to clear out a place, but I can’t figure out where. After meeting Balthazar, I went back to the pedestal and realized I needed a fourth gem and have been driving myself up a wall trying to figure out where this thing could be. When I interact with the first pedestal, Shadowheart says we have all the gems needed to progress.
Since she’s in the game and must know more than me, I checked through every character’s inventory and the camp one to see if the gem might be there by mistake. Nothing. I’ve even backtracked to each challenge’s location and can’t find the damn thing.
I think I might have messed up my play through by meeting the rats first because I even went down to Shar’s feet and didn’t meet up with them or a full bodied Lythindor again. Do they even give you a gem though? Or do I need to go ahead and kill Balthazar or clear out the place that he wants me to take care of to get the gem from him? If either of those is true, why is Shadowheart lying to me when I just want her to like me and give me a kiss?
EDIT: Thanks everyone. I am now aware of knock and that Balthazar and the rats have no gems to speak of.
I’ll likely keep trying to find the thing in packs or at trial locations because this is no longer just about opening a door. This is about accomplishing something, being able to look myself in the mirror and saying “you’re worth it.”
More likely than not though, I’ll just knock.
Also, just in case you read some of my jokes as sincere in some of the comments: don’t worry, I’m just having fun.
EDIT 2: DAMN THING WAS IN ONE OF MY BACKPACKS

“There’s no good way to say it, so I’ll just say it: You’re fired. Again,” Lep Trinkle smiled as he said it. Corwell Lichten sighed and smiled back, “How many times is this? The fourth? Fifth? I can’t keep up.”
“If you count the six-day affair as a separate claim, and the contracts do, then it’s actually your seventh,” Lep ran his finger over the stack of documents in front of him, “You are currently the Count’s favorite short-term fix-it Merc, and also the easiest to dismiss. Youth grants you no favors there, I’m afraid.”
It was true. Count von Hoffthaler was a known skinflint, even if he paid rather above market rates for his mercenary help. There was enough known about his practices that no one would work for less. In return, the Count would word the contracts to make it easy to cut them short, often before hostilities were ended. Of course, that gave him license to wax grandiose about his victories without including the mercenaries who made them possible. They were never invited to victory celebrations, having been dismissed well beforehand.
Corwell wasn’t too bothered, though. He had known this in taking the job. The Count was fractious, argumentative, petty, and capricious in addition to being cheap. It did make for steady work for mercenaries wiling to put up with the inanity of border skirmishes and minor battles for perceived slights and old grudges. Fortunately, because Count von Hoffthaler couldn’t get many actual retainers and nobility to side with him, his wars were small affairs, mostly relegated to hired muscle. Hired muscle has a habit of not escalating things beyond a reasonable fight. They want to be hired again, not have their family paid for a death gratuity.
Seven short contracts over the course of two years was respectable work, and Corwell’s accounts reflected his skills as a hired mercenary. He didn’t have an official rank here in Gotebourg, as he wasn’t part of a standing military force. However, his contracts had begun at the Sub-Altern level, and he was now able to negotiate for Senior Lieutenant and even Junior Captain positions. Two years’ experience was good- working for who he had been most recently employed by was better. The Count’s reputation meant that officer-level mercenaries who got multiple contracts with him could fit in well virtually anywhere.
Corwell figured two years was enough, though. He had experience, which was good. He had money, that was good. He even had a decent reputation as a young leader. That was even better. Maestro Harling had told him that he would make Corwell a leader, and the Maestro had worked hard at accomplishing that. Not that Corwell graduated from the Salon feeling himself a leader. He just felt himself able to see what needed to be done when it was time to do it. Maestro Harling said that was fine for now, but that Corwell needed to see what needed to be done well before it was time to do it. Two years had revealed to Corwell that Maestro Harling could never have taught him all the knowledge he needed sufficiently in the strictures of a learning environment. Only experience could offer a better learning tool. It was a hard tool. Corwell had lost a friend and added two puckered scars in a stupid border skirmish that had added about two large orchards’ worth of pear income to Count von Hoffthaler’s holdings.
It was time to leave Gotebourg, with its endlessly feuding nobility. Gotebourg was far enough from Hortian that he hadn’t met too many Hortian mercenaries, and blessedly few on the opposing side. The one he had met on the other side had given him the two scars he carried, and put his friend on a memorial plaque somewhere. That enemy’s name was Birdwell, and he was a senior non-commissioned officer. His bonded weapon was the halberd, and he had been as eager to fight against a fellow Hortian as to keep his men following the orders of the Margrave von Unterschwab. That was the way of mercenary life. Hortian tried to keep their mercenaries from fighting against each other when possible. But the right official bribed by the right powerful person could tip the scales in favor of direct conflict. And honor to the contract meant that you fought who the contract said to fight. Unless they were from the same town or village’s Salon, you fought. No employer wanted to have a mercenary who thought and fought the same way as a Salon mate might. Generally some quiet words to an employer were enough to explain the situation well enough to avoid the problem. But Hortian was large enough to have enough remote towns and villages that Hortian mercenaries had often never met.
Birdwell had been a fierce warrior, and managed to kill several of Corwell’s force in response to what should have been a light raid. His eagerness to fight above lead, though, was what led him and his ambushers to retreat from the field, ultimately losing the overall fight. Combat had hard lessons. It had given Corwell his immediate re-hire though, as Count von Hoffthaler had recognized Corwell’s tactical superiority.
Etter’s Coomb seemed at once such a provincial by-water, and the center of the world. Corwell had better understood his father’s eagerness to be home after a contract, aside from just being alive and wanting to reconnect with family. The world moved a lot faster outside Etter’s Coomb, and it would be good to slow down and breathe mountain air again.
Lep Trinkle was Count von Hoffthaler’s aide de camp, and in short, ran the Count’s martial forces. He did the hiring and firing, insofar as he let the mercenaries know when their services were no longer convenient for the Count. He had often delayed the firing long enough to assure the Count’s spendthrift ways did not bite too deeply into tactical advantage. Lep was no fool. He wanted no part of nobility in Gotebourg for himself, but the privileges of being attached to nobility were undeniable. He was also savvy enough to have a final contract document ready for Corwell. He was not surprised that Corwell had plans to return home and be off the contract market for an extended period.
Corwell was on his way the next day, by private auto-carriage to the train station in County Hoffthaler. Even junior officers who had been dismissed deserved a fitting send off, Lep had seen to that. Corwell had purchased a couple of horses while in country, and had managed to sell them for a fair price. His wish to be be home had outweighed his like of the horses. The ride would be weeks longer, and he was eager to be home on his first big period of not having his contract on rotation for hire. He’d been home on leave to be sure, but now he was going to spend a little real time enjoying his profits. And the mountain air. He kept coming back to that. He knew he’d have to adjust to the thinness of his home’s air again. He hated that feeling of being weak-kneed and spinny-headed for a week till his blood thickened up properly.
The next few days were a blur of trains, and once, a horse-drawn carriage between stations where a section of track was out over a train trestle. The carriage was a bit of a novelty- at home it was walk, ride a horse if you had a bit of money, a mule and cart, or maybe a tractor pulling a hay wain. Carriages were for flat lands. But overall the miles and countries passed by. County Hoffthaler gave way quickly to the rest of Gotebourg by that first afternoon, as the Count’s writ was still not much larger after two years’ feuding. All the holdings of Gotebourg shifted slightly, but seemingly never dramatically as the weak Council of Gotebourg limited the brawling, but couldn’t stop the nobility from feuding completely. To do that, they’d need to finally appoint a monarch. But that would mean giving up their own power, and of course the ascension to primacy of one of the endlessly squabbling nobles. That fractious lot was all to happy to keep their peers (and subordinates, and superiors) too tied down to amass the needed power of a monarch.
Fortunately, it meant war in Gotebourg was never total, and the trains, mostly, ran on time. Or at least trains and merchants’ shipments went unmolested by the feuding locals. Trade suffered when commerce was delayed, and trade was money. Money was power. Corwell remembered being ordered to stop an attack mid-battle to let half a dozen twenty-mule teams hauling loads of gypsum pass through the fight unmolested. The other side had waited just as patiently for them to pass. What a strange country. He was out of it in two days’ time, and into Beauchand.
Eastward through Beauchand, and the smaller Talland. The next train took him into Rilane, widely considered to be the regional power among nations. A large nation, it took three days to get to the northbound train line, and another two days to reach the border. Corwell could easily have elected to take an airship in one of the regional capitals that the train passed through. He didn’t particularly enjoy flying, despite his affinity for mountain air. And the train gave him time to simply relax and read while it rocked him to sleep. A sleeper car was his concession to luxury, and quite enough in his mind.
Northward into Ruthenia, Uncton, and finally Hortian. Bored border officials at train stations checked his mercenary documents and waved him on without a second glance until he got to his home nation. Hortian custom was to welcome home their famous mercenaries with a small ceremony. Generally held every three hours at the border checkpoints, any returning Hortians home from contracts would assemble around a memorial obelisk for the rite. An official would ring the bell, then give thanks to their return, as well as lead a small prayer for any fellow soldiers of fortune who might have returned to them, but did not live to do so. Sometimes returning Hortians had family who lived near to the border, and were joined by loved ones. Most simply endured the ritual and made small talk while waiting for the steam locomotives to be refueled, watered, and take on or unload the cars each stop required.
One more train awaited Corwell now. One train to get to the base of the mountain pass that led to Etter’s Coomb. He found himself far more energetic now. He had been happy to lose himself in routine on the rails, but this last train ride for half a day had him unable to sit much. He walked about the carriages frequently, looking at familiar points pass by. He had hired passage up the mountain pass via a tractor-pulled cart, mostly because though he didn’t mind the walk, he had enough bags to make the trip murder on his back. He bounced around the cart, realizing he felt giddy as a child on the first trip away from home. He had done this trip before, but never as a true returning successful mercenary. He wasn’t on leave, he was home. Home until he decided to set out again, and that was enough of a difference for his state of mind.
A week later, Corwell was over the initial giddy rush of being home and seeing family and friends. He had spent two or three days in a blur, just visiting and seeing people. His mother was the only reason he remembered to eat. He had been so busy he had often forgotten that food was generally a necessity. Fortunately, his mother was used to how busy his father had been on his returns when he contracted out more regularly, and had leftovers available in the icebox when he returned.
He had been talking to a couple of his cousins, about going out to the mountains on a camping trip. They had a friend who knew a lake that was teeming with fat fish. In Corwell's experience, the fishing whenever he got to go anywhere was always better last week. "Should've been here last week, they were really jumping on to shore then!" However, if he wanted to scarper off to do some fun stuff, now was the time.
If he waited too long, his mom would find things for him to do. Corwell had seen it happen with his much older brother. Corgin had never felt unwelcome in their home, but after a few contracts, his mother had had a list set up for things for him to see to when he came home. Corwell had been eight when his brother came home from his first contract, crossbow hefted over his shoulder, looking rakish in a fancy new tabard with that wide warrior's belt. For his next few interludes, Corgin had very little time to go and enjoy his growing wealth when he was home. Ma kept him and Da busy as she could, as she figured two men in the house meant she could get some "real work done, now". Corgin hadn't complained, but he also got himself set up one valley over in Timberfell with a nice room and a horse and buggy before he'd been home a third time. He still drove over a couple of times a month from Timberfell to visit, and his visits always turned out to be a night over after staying up with Da fixing something. Fortunately, his wife was a peach, and enjoyed Ma's company.
Well, Corwell was not exactly ready to get off on his own, or be put to the yoke, yet. And he could sell the trip as him "supervising" Farrel and Jornyn. He was two years older than Farrel and three older than Jornyn. They were pretty fun guys, really, and Jornyn had a wicked sense of humor. Their friend, Dallen, was ok. A little full of himself, but it was probably worth putting up with him to get a chance to have a mini adventure that didn't involve a puffed-up Count and fighting. Fat lake fish sounded like the perfect foes, even if they turned out to be closemouthed and finicky.
So it was that he found himself lakeside on a sunny day in late spring, his father's fly-fishing rod in his hand. Corwell wasn't particularly adept at fly fishing like his Da. One of Cordenn Lichten's few passions besides his wife and his grosse messer was fishing- and fly fishing was his idea of ultimate serenity. But he had a fly rod that he had been willing to let Corwell pack out on the camping trip. Little sections of bamboo pulled apart to fit in a larger bamboo tube, to keep the fine tip from breaking off. It wasn't his Da's favorite rod- that one had been special ordered from a foreign maker Da had done business with on a contract. It was, however, the rod he could pack up the smallest.
Farrel and Jornyn had made this trip sound like a backpacking adventure. Corwell looked over at the campsite by the lake. Not so much a backpacking adventure. They had a mule picketed out over across from the tent for the day. It seems Dallen had the use of it through some work he had done in town, and the cousins and Dallen had figured they could bring a lot more creature comforts in a packsaddle versus just backpacks. The creature comforts included a very decent wall tent that slept the four comfortably, and a shocking amount of moonshine.
Corwell shook his head and set up his angling gear. The three younger campers were still in the tent, and would be for some time if the snores were any indication. None of them had graduated with the traditional warrior's belt, yet. Corwell remembered a few of his antics during the infrequent breaks he got when he was at the salon. The spring holidays were a good chance to get up to shenanigans, and camping was a great excuse to get out from under watchful eyes to perpetrate them.
It wasn't that he was a teetotaler, Corwell had done his share of overindulging from time to time. Truth be told, the moonshine wasn't that good. He'd mixed it with honey and lemon juice to get it down. He had enjoyed the freedom to enjoy the warmth that mountain liquor brought to his middle, he just hadn't wanted to feel terrible the next day, and the quality didn't change his mind any. Besides, now he really was looking after the cousins and their friend.
Casting out, Corwell let the stress leave. That was one of the things they taught you at the Salon, learning the craft of weapons and war. You had to be able to walk away from the fighting and leave the horror behind. Even fighting that didn't end in killing would stress a body out years later if one was not prepared to let one's mind release the strain. He said another little prayer for his friend, Millorn, lost in the fighting those first few weeks in Hoffthaler. Remembering those lost was part of the healing. You had to accept that they were gone, but also accept that they would never be gone in your own mind and spirit.
A tug in his hand pulled Corwell out of his thoughts. Those fat lake fish weren't just a story- a bronze lenok had inhaled his fly with some gusto, and was running towards the center of the lake with it. He hadn't really done any of the things he was supposed to do, according to his Da. He'd just tied something worthwhile looking on, and whipped it around until it settled on the water. Matching a hatch was something he was sure he was supposed to do. He wasn't sure what that was. What he was sure of was that he was having trouble turning the head of the fish to get it coming back to shore.
It was the battle with the fish that even let Corwell see the flash of movement on the other side of the small lake. He'd let his guard down fully, which was sometimes hard to do when he returned from a contract. It was good for his mind to allow himself the repose, and so he hadn't been paying much attention to the woods and meadows around the lake. There wasn't much noise to go with the movement, just an arm and leg pumping furiously as a body came into and out of view through the leaves and trunks of spring growth. He was looking at where the fish was headed when he caught the movement in his field of vision.
Corwell hauled on the fish a little harder, trying to keep his mind on fresh lenok fillets if he was successful, but also wondering who was tearing ass through the woods here. It was not a well-frequented spot, though evidence of some old camp fire rings was present. As far as he knew, when they arrived the previous morning, they were the first ones here for the season. None of the fire rings had recent use.
He tried to hurry without hurrying, but that never worked out well. He felt the line surge harder for one second at the wrong moment in playing the fish, and the heartbreaking sense of ultimate slack on the line. The fish was gone. Must have been big. But the disappointment did not last long, because again movement caught his eye. More arms and legs were moving on the other side of the lake- multiple people in the same direction as the first person was moving.
"Get her!"
It was quiet, but he heard it clearly. Sound travels well over still water.
He took the time to reel in the line and set the rod up against a tree as he dashed back to the tent. His mind noted that his fly was gone, and he wondered if he had another. On another level his mind was wondering if he had time to wake his cousins up fully for help. Neither of the cousins or their friend had earned the warrior's belt, but they were certainly far enough along in their studies to be useful in a physical altercation if it came down to it. He hoped it did not.
Corwell's bonded weapon, the war fan, was stashed in in belt as it always was. Hortians did not casually leave their bonded weapon aside, even for recreation- it was part of their culture. Of course, you couldn't swim very well hauling around a war sword in one hand, but one made the choice to stay in sight of the weapon when possible. No one felt really comfortable leaving their weapon unsecured without someone watching over it, just in case.
No time for further consideration, Corwell reached the tent and flung open the front flaps. The white canvas wasn't too dark inside, though the light was naturally muted. The bright square of light from the front shone on faces slack from a night's excesses.
"Get up, you drunk idiots, there's trouble!" Corwell used his best command voice. A voice like his could carry well over the din of a battle, though he was sure it meant the people on the other side of the lake could hear him clearly. Fine. Let them know people were aware of their actions. There was no time for stealth. Farrel and Jornyn both raised sleepy heads and blinked. Dallen snored and rolled over.
"Get him up! Get moving, and hurry- it's an emergency!" Not waiting on an answer, Corwell rushed away. He heard inquiring voices, but voices meant they were at least stirring.
He moved along at a quick trot, as the campsite was not exactly cropped close and without tripping hazards. The lack of use was its charm, but it made for poor sprinting. He angled northward to get to the far eastern side, taking the side around that the runners had headed towards. He didn't call back for his reinforcements, but he figured they would have to be blind not to be able to follow his track through the grasses along the lake. He hoped the light didn't hurt their heads too much, but so be it. It was time to act.
As he made his way towards the direction he had seen the movement go, he was able to pick up speed. The woods thickened, and the grass thinned. Regular prescribed burning kept the undergrowth from choking out the floor of the woods. The track of running feet through last year's fallen leaves was plain, and new growth was not so thick yet as to hide much. It seemed the runners were headed in the direction of a small path ahead.
By the time he reached the path, he heard another cry from ahead, and so made his choice of direction accordingly. He headed north away from the lake along the path. A few hundred yards on, he could see the figures of four people surrounding a ramshackle shed that had been left to rust and molder. Corwell seemed to recall that this area had been used by fur trappers at times. The popularity of it as a recreation area pushed the die hard trappers further into the mountains, and their old footprint was being forgotten.
Forgotten, but still used, if the people ahead were any indication. They had fanned out to get around the small building, moving constantly, their voices drifting up to Corwell.
"Yes, she's in there..."
"I know!... dangerous..."
"...more people..."
"Don't get... burn up...."
He couldn't make out much of what they said, but he never did like the idea of multiple people ganging up on someone. He'd had enough of that in the hard days at the Salon when Bronwor had friends to back up his bullying of Corwell. His mind made up, he moved quickly down the path, fan coming to his hand automatically.
He didn't see swords or spears in the hands of the men surrounding the shed. They avoided just in front of the door that was pulled shut, and moved quickly past the two dark windows that showed broken shutters on either side. Their dress was decidedly foreign, not the common tabards and breeches of Hortian everyday wear. They wore dark robes, the bottoms cut full and pleated to allow a lot of motion. Obviously, they could run just fine. As Corwell got closer, he noticed that each one had something in his hand. A gas pistol.
That changed things a bit. You could not run up on a man armed with an effective projectile weapon without danger- run up on four and you were asking to be perforated. The pistols were fairly ingenious. They did not require explosives or flammables, making them more resistant to the simple effects an Evoker could wield. A cylinder sat in the handle, containing high pressure gas. The weapon carried a number of small round bullets that could be re-armed by raising the pistol and pulling a small lever. The cylinders were good for about twenty shots before they lost appreciable power, and the cylinder could be exchanged for another in relatively short order.
They were costly weapons, but well respected by anyone who had ever faced them. However, the compressed gas cylinders were subject to an Evoker's wrath if the user was not careful. A mere spark would not do the trick to set the surrounding area ablaze like would happen with some explosive powders. Heat the cylinder enough, though, and the explosion would tear your hand and arm clean off. Generally, the ones who used weapons such as these were interested in effectiveness regardless of cost, and had the means to protect the weapons magically. A good bow could get off shots faster and father, and a crossbow could hit with more power and range. But the training needed was akin to that of a crossbow, and the pistol was faster. Corwell saw the benefits, even if he did not particularly find their use needful.
He slowed to a walk. He hoped his younger companions would get to him quickly. Corwell would like to bargain from a position of more equality. Farrell carried a crossbow, though Jornyn's bonded weapon was a battle axe. Dallen's weapon was the tomahawk. Not quite a full-sized battle axe, and deadly in close quarters, Dallen carried three that Corwell knew about. He could throw them with pinpoint accuracy at surprising distances. That meant Corwell had two missiles to four. He had seen Jornyn throw the battle axe a few times when fooling around with Dallen at the target stump. Jornyn was a fair hand at throwing that heavy axe of his, but the distance was never far, and he did not carry a back-up. So, a crossbow shot and a thrown tomahawk to four pistol shots. Assuming they could get close enough, that left two shots to four, and then closing to three melee weapons before the pistols could chamber another round. Farrell wasn't carrying a back-up weapon, just his bonded weapon. This was supposed to have been a fun trip.
Corwell heard footsteps behind him. Bless those boys, they had moved fast despite their rude awakening. All three had weapons in hand as they sprinted up to Corwell, panting and clearly wanting explanation.
Dallen looked at Corwell and opened his mouth to protest. He vomited instead. Jornyn looked green, then copied his friend. Nothing like a good sprint to convince your body to engage in open rebellion. Farrell grimaced, and then nodded down at the shed, "So that's the emergency?"
Corwell nodded, "Yeah. They were chasing some woman. I'm pretty sure she's holed up in the trapper shed, there. I don't know who these guys are, but I do hate an uneven fight."
The younger men glowered. Protecting those were who not warriors was drilled into them. That was the purpose of being bonded to your weapon, to fight for those who were not. Corwell didn't feel particularly sorry for the men down below, but he pitied them, too.
Farrel and Dallen spread out to either side of the path, and Jornyn and Corwell took the middle, as they approached in a line. It was certain they had been seen, and Corwell would rather approach as if there could be parley rather than if a fight was inevitable. Put the ones with missile weapons closer to cover, and keep the ones with melee capability with an open path to the fight.
"Ahoy, there! What's the meaning of all this?" Corwell called out when they were within fifty paces of the nearest robed figure. The men had been looking at the oncoming figures for some time.
Corwell had his folded fan in his hand, and desperately hoped at this distance he wouldn't be casually shot dead. His bet that seeing a crossbow leveled at them might keep the men from attacking outright seemed to be paying off. No one wanted to be the first to get a bolt in the throat.
By this time, all four men had maneuvered to where they could see Corwell's group. They still stayed out of the line of the shed's windows, and kept a distance from it- no one was using the walls for cover. "Be gone!" shouted the one closest to Corwell, "This is none of your concern! It is not safe for you here."
"I rather think a bunch of armed men chasing a lone woman is my concern," Corwell countered. He didn't shout, but kept his voice raised to carry. He was sure the woman inside could hear that help had arrived.
"He wears the belt, "said a second man to the west of the shed, "but the others do not. They are not that dangerous."
Farrell snorted as his crossbow never wavered, pointed directly at that man's center of mass.
"Fool," said the third man behind the shed, "We are in Hortian. They are old enough to be on their own- they are already dangerous."
The one closest to Corwell did not take his eyes off of Corwell, but addressed the men behind him, "They are dangerous enough, but less than our target in the shed. They do not realize the danger they are in."
"You still have not answered my question," Corwell pointed out to the man who was obviously their leader.
He was not tall, or overly broad. He was rather younger, as were all of the indigo robed men. A man you would find on any street dressed fashionably and well set up in his life. But the eyes were not those of any young man about town. The eyes were older, and at this distance Corwell could see they were never still. The man was taking in everything.

I have a festivized civic duty bazaar bargain and when i look at backpack.tf it just says no sales found/item not found.

This is a first impression review. Disclaimer: I bought this quilt with my own money. The views expressed in this review are my own and I did not receive any incentives whatsoever to make this review.
If you can stomach my non existent editing skills you can watch my video review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pWSh_ViJLE
Neve Gear seem to be hardly known and need to be talked about more IMO. They offer open and closed footbox quilts, hoodless sleeping bags and an ultralight backpack. Their prices are very competitive while giving you all the high end details you could wish for.
The Feathertail quilt has a closed footbox. It comes in 0°C, -6°C and -12°C versions in either 850fp duck down or 950fp goose down. Regular length fits up to 6ft, the long fits up to 6ft 5in. It comes in wide. The shell is 10d nylon (no ripstop). It has a differential cut, a draft collar, strategically uneven down distribution and a unique pad attachment system that is highly effective at preventing drafts, obliterating the need for an edge tension control system. Even though the Feathertail is not a custom quilt you have the option of adding up to 100g of overfill. Included is a storage bag with washing instructions printed upon it, a compression bag and a ripstop repair patch.
Their Waratah open footbox quilt is available in five different sizes and fits people from 5ft2 to 6ft10. It comes in regular und wide widths.
I chose the 0°C LW Feathertail in 950fp with 100g of overfill added. The quilt is 147cm wide and filled with 505g of down. In this configuration the quilt weighs 730g. According to manufacturer specs it should have been 685g, but I believe this is still a good weight considering the size and the amount of down it is filled with. The pad straps weigh another 47g, so the trail weight is 777g. The base price of the quilt was only 295 EUR. Shipping to the EU was 7 EUR (shipping in Australia is free) and customs duties and taxes were only 18 EUR. Altogether I paid 346 EUR. A comparable quilt with similar specs would clock in at about 600 EUR or more for a customer based in the EU if you factor in shipping, customs and taxes.
Where is the catch? I couldn't find one. The workmanship is outstanding, on par with the Warbonnet quilt I had. The pad attachment system is unique and seems to work really well at preventing drafts because it pulls the quilt under the body and keeps it there.
My conclusion is that if you are based in Australia or the EU buying this quilt is a no brainer. If you are in the US and okay with made in Australia, even with shipping and customs this is probably still a real bargain compared to other manufacturers.

Timestamp
What's up, you sexy GAFSers,
This is part of my slow start in selling most of the parts/optics/accessories I've accumulated over the past 6 months before my wife kills me and you see all of this in an estate sale. I've tried my best to find good deals and bargain hunt, so I'm just trying to pass those along and recoup most of the money.
Today I have an assortment of things to sell:
Salty m&p sport - this was from grab bag upper LE trade in upper sale. Comes with ERS rear sight, bcg, and ch. $240 shipped
Primary Arms Rotary knob slx red dot sight in FDE - excellent condition, glass is gtg. $80 shipped
3 NIP armalite ar10B mags, 7.62/.308 - $75 shipped
Vg6 epsilon 5.56 - $40 shipped
556 mag bundle: 3 hex mag carbon fiber 30 rounders and 1 okay industries surplus 30 rounder - $40 shipped
Camelbak snoblast backpack/ hydration pack - $60 shipped
Paypal FF or Zelle are my preferred payment methods. No notes at all, please. Feel free to request additional pics or ask any questions. Cheers!
Edit: I forgot to add I'm open to trade offers. Mainly looking for a5h2 buffer and tube for my ar10, EFAB in 762, dlc 308 bcg, enhanced type 308 bcg, or perhaps other optics. Shoot me an offer with other stuff as well, worst I can say is no thanks.

Realizing I have ten boxes of shoes in my room prompted me to unload some stuff… Prices include CONUS shipping from MI. PayPal F&F, Venmo, and Zelle ok. Add 3% for G&S. Non-smoking home.
Verification: https://imgur.com/a/w4QAArO. Thanks for looking!
Hoka Men’s Speedgoat 5, Blue/Red, 9D, 19.6oz, $130 New. Bought as replacement pair for existing SG 5s before switching to Altra
https://imgur.com/a/HJae7gi
Altra Men’s Olympus 4, Red/Black, 9D, 22.2oz, $90 Worn ~30mi. White on insole is anti-odor powder. Liked Vibram grip but stuck with LPs for lower stack height
https://imgur.com/a/h6kpJZx
Altra Men’s Lone Peak 7, Purple/Orange, 9D, 21.2oz, $90 New. Stocked up before switching to Topo
https://imgur.com/a/4kXIy9x
Altra Men’s Lone Peak 7, Green/Orange, 9D, 21.2oz, $90 New. Same as above
https://imgur.com/a/ZiSWrwz
SOLD Altra Men’s Superior 5, Black/Red, 9D, 19.6oz, $90 New. Intended to try but I have too many shoes already
https://imgur.com/a/DCpUeWJ
SOLD Altra Men’s Outroad, Black/Gray, 9.5D, 19.0oz, $70 New. Bought wrong size
https://imgur.com/a/lnP31t6
Merrell Men’s Moab 2 GTX, Beluga, 9D, 30.8oz, $40 Worn ~150mi. Minimal tread wear. Switched to non-GTX trail runners when I started backpacking
https://imgur.com/a/8ftKqsr
Zpacks Mirage Merino Sun Hoodie, Gray, S, 7.8oz, $65 Bargain bin buy since mislabeled as M instead of S. Worn ~150mi. Pilling and small hole near armpit (didn’t notice til taking pics). Too long in torso for me at 5’7
https://imgur.com/a/zNXVlVG
Ridge Merino Solstice Sun Hoodie, Orange, S, 7.7oz, $50 Worn ~800mi. Some discolored spots from use. Small hole on hood. Minor fraying near right thumbhole. Served me well during hunting season but not my color
https://imgur.com/a/dIiHgY8
Smartwool Merino 250 Neck Gaiter, Black, 2.1oz, $15 Worn ~100mi. Toasty but doesn’t fit my big noggin well
https://imgur.com/a/6LIsCl1
WhitePaws Double Velour Fleece Mittens, Red, L, 1.8oz, $20 Worn on a few runs. Love flip top, warmth, and weight but too large
https://imgur.com/a/AMO9ofo
REI Men’s Swiftland 7” Running Shorts, Blue, S, 3.5oz, $15 Worn once, too small. Liner removed
https://imgur.com/a/27OG04i
ASICS Men’s 7” Running Shorts, Orange, S, 4.3oz, $15 New, tags removed
https://imgur.com/a/7aTZUmo

Journey: 3 weeks, door-to-door, with about 10 days in each country. April 2-23, 2024.
Me: 54M from Boulder, Colorado, USA, experienced world traveler but first proper solo trip. I heard that Uzbekistan is beautiful, safe, and a worthwhile destination a couple of years ago while on The Adventurists' Rickshaw Run in Sri Lanka. That lodged in my brain, and when I discovered Turkish Airlines offered the best Star Alliance routing to Tashkent from Denver, the pairing with Turkey seemed ideal.
Here is my first ever trip report. Sorry if it's too long.
I spent the first 5 nights in Istanbul in the Karaköy neighborhood, about a 2-minute walk from the Galata bridge. Ideal location, lousy hotel (noisy, hot, and kinda shabby).
On my first full day I joined a "Taste of Two Continents" tour with Yummy Istanbul. We ate two breakfasts on the European side and two lunches on the Asian side in Kadiköy. Our top-notch guide, Leyla, offered a perfect introduction to some sites, some mosques, the Egyptian Bazaar, how to take the ferry and the fascinating neighborhood of Kadiköy. Lots of history, politics, geography, tradition, and fantastic food all baked into these 6 hours (no pun intended). Highly recommended and an excellent way to get oriented to what to eat, variations on kebab, and other culinary tidbits.
I hit the 500-year-old Hurrem Sultan Hammam(Turkish bath) on Day 2. I had never been scrubbed down like that. It hurt like crazy, but well worth it. From there, I wandered toward the Grand Bazaar. On the way, I was cornered twice by aggressive salesmen," trying to get me to buy rugs. It was my second day with a small backpack, and I had no plans to purchase anything. Their "Turkish hospitality" sales style is insistent, to say the least. I basically had to walk out (not easy as an American). I found my way to the legendary Dönerci Şahin Usta — delicious and the best döner sandwich I had in Istanbul (though there can be long lines). I spent the evening eating, drinking, and wandering the steep and bustling streets around the Galata Tower.
Day 3 was a tour of some standard sites: the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. We met at 9am and waited in an already long line for the Hagia Sofia. Beautiful, but I dislike this type of close contact with thousands of other looky-loos at tourist sites — it overwhelms the beauty at hand. The Blue Mosque proved more chill. And then the story of the Obelisk outside the Blue Mosque is extraordinary. After a nap to chip away at my jetlag, I headed back across the Bosphorus to Kadiköy for a rockin' Saturday night. I bought some incredible banknotes from a street vendor (such as old Iraqi dinars with Saddam Hussain, Syrian pounds, and old Iranian rials with the Shaw. Neighboring countries to Turkey, but 6000 miles from my home). And banknotes are an easy souvenir that fits in a fully stuffed backpack.
With no reserved activity for Day 4, I walked up toward Ortaköy. I stopped in at the Dolmabahçe Palace but found myself not in the mood for looking at random fancy things with hundreds of other tourists. Just past the palace is the phenomenal Museum of Paintings (included with my ticket). I got lost amongst the old maps of the Bosphorus, paintings of epic battles, and portraits of famous sultans. Highly recommended, and the first moment, I thought, "I dig this solo traveling thing. No one to check in with or hurry me up or slow me down." I strolled towards the charmingly named "July 15 Martyrs' Bridge." I grabbed a lamb intestine sandwich and a Coke and jumped aboard a 1-hour Bosphorus cruise. While a cliché tourist activity in Istanbul, and these boats abound in the Bosphorus, it is beautiful, timeless, and enthralling. I tried to take the bus back to my hotel with my IstanbulCard, but could not figure out which one to take (Google Maps making it more confusing), so I grabbed a "taksi."
Up early on Day 5 and was third in line for the sublime Basilica Cistern (highly recommended). I walked back along the Bosphorus waterfront to my hotel to catch a taxi for my flight to Cappadocia. I arrived in Göreme where I stayed in one of the myriad cave hotels (search them on the internet) and wandered into town to meet up with a South African couple for dinner and drinks.
After breakfast on Day 6, I walked uphill from the hotel (with one of the many town dogs following me) up a canyon through tunnels, past old houses built in the rocks, and just budding trees. The trail topped out at a chicken farm with a few turkeys to finally give me the appropriate "Welcome to Turkey" I deserved. I continued up to the town of Uçhisar for some Turkish tea on a spectacular balcony overlooking Cappadocia. Now fully caffeinated, I sauntered back down to Göreme for lunch. For a change of pace, I tried an Indian restaurant called Dehli Darbar. Upon my first bite, I realized I longed for more flavor and vegetables. This place was delicious and authentic, and I ate there three more times.
I booked the Green Tour for Day 7 upon the recommendation of a friend. Maybe I had the wrong guide, group, or route, but it was terrible from the get-go. After two 15-minute stops for photos at roadside trinket stands, we then stopped at a jewelry store for an hour. At this point, I just walked off the tour. While the better sites lay ahead (the underground city at Derinkuyu), I could not deal another minute. As I walked into Uçhisar, I enjoyed a delicious local wine tasting, climbed the Uçhisar castle, bought some souvenir 0 Euro notes (I love those things!), and ate a delicious lunch on the divine patio of the Museum Hotel (with tortoises and peacocks wandering around me). From there, I bushwhacked a different route back to Göreme, down a beautiful canyon, through another tunnel, and arrived at the hotel with thunderheads cracking, and rain came in droves 10 minutes later. After the storm, I signed up for a balloon ride (which Cappadocia is genuinely famous for) and feasted on palek paneer and naan.
Up at 5am on Day 8 for the balloon ride with Turquaz Balloons. Holt shit. I have traveled a lot and been to many unique places, and this is a true bucket list activity. It started with a light breakfast and a 20-minute van ride to the balloon. I splurged for a 20-person balloon (most have 28 people). 150+ balloons are flying all at once, and it is a sight to behold. We flew into the clouds, grazed rooftops, and came within speaking distance to people viewing from the ground. Upon landing our basket directly into the trailer (!!!), the van instantly appeared with cake, champagne, ceramic medals, and diplomas (?). A truly amaze-balls hour of my life. Upon a friend's recommendation, I walked into town to Galerie Ikman to say hello to the owner Bilal and was sucked into the moment (kismet?) and bought myself a gorgeous silk rug (shipped for free to Istanbul, where I grabbed it on my way home). While the store is Instagram-ready, it is truly perfect for Instagram. From there, I took a shuttle to the airport and flew back to Istanbul for the night, staying near the airport.
Traveling around Uzbekistan requires more advanced planning (April and May are peak seasons, and trains fill up quickly). I started and ended in the capital, Tashkent, moving along the Silk Road from west (Khiva) to east (back to Taskkent). Either direction is fine, and while there are some excellent stops further out on either end (Nukus on the west and the Fergano Valley to the east), these four stops seemed doable on my timetable. I took a short flight to Khiva, then rode the trains east from Khiva to Bukhara (slow), Bukhara to Samarkand (fast), and Samarkand to Tashkent (fast). I changed one booking the day before departure, so it is worth looking for last-minute cancellations if need be.
Up early again for Day 9, flying from Istanbul to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan (about 4.5 hours). I booked a hotel near the gigantic Chorsu Bazaar which was an eye-opening way to realize I was "not in Kansas anymore." Raw beef abounds in the main building, with maybe a third of the vendors selling a variety of gigantic cuts along with large slabs of beef fat. The main building is designed in a wheel-like fashion with a pickle section, a dairy section, and dried fruit, nuts, and spices upstairs. I found a nearby "food court" and had my first p'lov, the Uzbekistan national dish (a greasy yet tasty rice dish with meat, carrots, raisins, and lots of fat). From there I found the hall of horrors — a very stinky area of cow parts for sale. A lot of cow heads, a handful of cow hearts, inflated cow intestines, quite a few hooves, and a kid digging out the eyeballs (he had a large pile). Very real, very gritty, and very different than the Whole Foods meat counter in Boulder, Colorado.
Another early rise on Day 10 for my Uzbekistan Airways flight from Tashkent to Urgench (Khiva) and a 45-minute cab ride to my hotel. Being 830am, my room was not ready, and I strolled the streets of the old town. The entire inner city is a UNESCO World Heritage site and museum. With one ticket, you can wander in and out of mosques, madrasas, and museums, seeing exhibits and magnificent tiled courtyards. After settling in my hotel room, with a balcony overlooking a rooftop chicken coop, I continued my meandering. Dinner was the local specialty of green noodles (fresh dill-flavored).
I had set up a tour of the Korhzem fortresses near Khva for Day 11. My driver picked me up at 9am for the 2-hour drive out into the desert to visit three of the many 2000-year-old fortresses. I immediately realized my driver was not a "guide," just a driver. He spoke broken English and knew far more about the local Chevrolet models than these ancient sites (FYI: most cars here are Chevy, a handful of old Soviet Ladas, and quite a few brand-new BYDs). Walking around the fortress walls and contemplating the immense Uzbek history is humbling, and I wished I had a guide to impart more information. I spent the evening photographing the Khiva sites against a spectacular sunset and night sky. I also met a wonderful group of Uzbekistan high school seniors eager to practice their English. The people here are delightful, friendly, and chatty.
Moving on from Khiva on Day 12, I hopped on a Soviet-era slow train to Bukhara — seven hours of hot, flat, gray desert. The dining car actually had desert dust flying around, but a cold Sarbast beer still tasted pretty good (you have to remember to ask for it to be cold). At heart, I am a foodie and found the Uzbek cuisine uninspiring. I usually build my travel days around finding or planning interesting meals — easy to do in Spain, London, or New York City. While I found Istanbul's food leaned monochromatic (spiced lamb and beef abound), I built days around the city's culinary destinations. Without that focus, some days felt directionless.
After my fortress excursion, I endeavored to find a non-private tour with other people for Day 13. I ended up with a French couple with a second French-speaking guide alongside my own guide. Our tour was mainly in English, but their guide would interrupt with a few words in French, like "chapeau!" or 'tapis!" It was awkward from the get-go, but on top of that the English-speaking guide was terrible, offering fascinating cultural notes like, "The walls of this building are 20m high." The tour concluded at The Ark of Bukhara, an extraordinary structure from the 5th century. The Ark is is one of the top sites of Bukhara, yet my guide offered no context of what it is and why it is so unique in the world. I tried to nap off the bad taste in my mouth from the tour and later went out for sunset photos of the Bukhara Registan.
After seeing most of the sites in Bukhara, I realized that there was not much left for Day 14. Travel blogs said, "at least three days for Bukhara." Maybe it is traveling solo, but I found one day there plenty. I made it to the Central Bazaar, with the mind-twisting displays of meat, lots of onions and potatoes, and their gorgeous selection of pickles (which never seem to make it on the restaurant menus). I love food markets, especially ones that seem unsanitary relative to our American eyes. I wandered to a few other sites and found an antique dealer. I spent a solid house perusing their humongous collection of old Soviet pins. They had a collection of old USSR passports with photos, stamps, and handwritten notes. I found these poignant, imbued with elements of change, death, and sadness. These well-worn, long-carried, and essential documents are now just ephemera that tourists peruse and bargain over. What will happen to my old passports? I found a restaurant for dinner that served relatively decent (and cold) Uzbek riesling.
Day 15 — another day in Bukhara. I spent the morning writing at a cafe and discovered an enthralling culinary corner of Uzbekistan. I ordered a teapot of Sea Buckthorn and Orange tea, a slightly sweetened delicious concoction of spices and oranges in a large French press. I tried all three teas at this shop (called "Far East" and "Silk Road," each delicious and each with a different flavor profile). I plan to make these at home. I ate lunch at the #1 p'lov spot in town creatively named "The Plov." It tasted like every other p'lov, which that name evokes a combination of plow and shovel (appropriately named). I did order a side of "horse meat" (I know, I know), but that was one of the more tasty things I had in Uzbekistan — rich, nuanced, and savory. The train from Bukhara to Samarkand is a serious upgrade — high speed, first-class seats, way comfy. I met a lovely couple from Cádiz, Spain, and was able to practice my Spanish for a good while. Samarkand is a world away from Bukhara — bustling, clean, and well-developed. I ate at a Caucasian restaurant, enjoying a delicious bottle of Georgian wine and new culinary flavors.
For Day 16, I found a $20 tour through Tripadvisor. An amazing day with a fantastic guide, Elior, and an older well-traveled couple from Canada. We started at the Amir Temur Mausoleum, diving into the extraordinary history of Timur (Tamerlane), and then walked over to the Registan. The Registan is hands-down one of the world's finest sites. Impressively gigantic and exquisitely detailed — simply stunning. In one madrasa classroom was a musician demonstrating a few variations of banjo-like instruments. A highlight of the tour, and I got to play a couple of them and showed him a video of me playing banjo. The tour finished by walking through the local (and huge) bazaar). After another delicious Indian dinner, I returned to the Registan for their evening music and light show. It was not quite like Phish at the Sphere in Las Vegas (which was happening concurrently), but likely cheaper tickets to get to Uzbekistan than inside that venue (Ha!). ​​ Day 17 was another day of wandering the streets of Samarkand, making my way to the Afrosiyob Settlement, an archeological site from 2500 years ago. Dinner at Labi G'orwith an over-the-top decor, parakeets blasting a soundtrack, and giant overstuffed leather sofas as the seating was also delicious (tomato salad, meat salad, kebab, and their famous local bread). I took a taxi home as that night was the first giant rainstorm of my entire trip.
Travel day on Day 18, taking the high-speed train from Samarkand to Tashkent. The classic Soviet-era Hotel Uzbekistan is only a 40-minute walk from the train station, and I met a wonderful Uzbek man whom I chatted with the entire walk. I hopped on a 2-hour bus tour of the city (the only one I saw in Uzbekistan). A good tour and lots of history of sites I'd never have caught on this trip. I found a beer bar and drank a tasty pilsner of unknown origin (the name was in Cyrillic). Then one last Indian meal before heading back to the hotel, where I realized the entire front of the hotel was a giant lit-up billboard. This hotel offered a perfect metaphor for the forward-looking Tashkent and the striking difference and lasting impact of the Soviet era.
It was another travel day on Day 19. I left my hotel at 7am for my flight to Istanbul. There were eight (!!!) passport and security checks to get to my gate in Tashkent. After dropping off my stuff at the boutique Haze Karaköy Hotel, I ran out to pick up lunch, grab the rug I purchased in Göreme, and buy some last-minute gifts at the Egyptian Bazaar (visit Stall #23). Dinner was in the trendy and relatively posh neighborhood of Teşvikiye, giving a broader and deeper view of this fantastic city. Lastly, on Day 20, I flew home to Denver via London Heathrow to start working off my 11-hour jet lag.
Visas No visa is needed to get into Turkey with an American passport, but it is needed for Uzbekistan. It is easy enough to obtain an e-visa on a government website, which came to my email in about five days. The border patrol agent in Tashkent told me it was free at 55, so I said I'd return next year.
Gear: I splurged on a beautiful Boundary Arris pack, which is meticulously designed yet not overly technical and comfortable. It also fits under the seat in front of me on a plane (never necessary on this trip). I brought a small Osprey Daylite Sling, which proved to be an indispensable daily carry. It fits my Kindle, a medium water bottle, sunglasses, sunscreen, and maybe my journal and passport. While I brought my Macbook, there was never a need to bring a laptop around town. When moving from city to city, with a water bottle in the Boundary backpack pocket, the sling was light enough to carry as a "front pack" around my neck (though I could fit it inside if need be). In terms of clothing, I relentlessly culled articles to fit it all into one bag (two pairs of pants, four pairs of socks, four tees, one flannel, one fleece, one sweater, one puffy jacket, one raincoat, one pair of shorts, one bathing suit). Given the shoulder season weather, I used the warmer layers earlier in the trip that sat unused for the latter half (mainly my puffy jacket). No one wore shorts on the streets in both countries (except a few tourists), and I could have left those at home. Turkey and Uzbekistan use the Euro-style plug, and I brought this handy-dandy charger. I find noise-canceling headphones expensive and bulky, and they tend to hurt my ears after a couple of hours. I use these cheapos from Sony, and I don't fret over them and can replace them on a whim (and they are WAY better than the freebies on the plane). My shoe choices are essential for my size 14 feet, so if something is not working, I am SOL when traveling. I brought a pair of Oboz hiking shoes and had a pair of Birkenstocks in my pack.
I did laundry through the hotel about every four days, and I purchased next to nothing on the road except some souvenir banknotes, a few Soviet pins, and some beautiful Turkish coasters as gifts. The silk carpet came with a canvas bag to check, and I bought more things at the tail end of the trip, like saffron, pomegranate tea, and Turkish Delight to bring home to Colorado.
For my phone data, I have T-Mobile from the USA, which offers free data and texting in most other countries and $0.20/minute to talk (but who talks on the phone anymore?). The data could have been faster for scrolling but solid enough for Google Maps, and I appreciated not having that 5G service, which helped me not look at my phone all the time.
What I'd do differently: Regarding travel, I have been a diehard DIY-er for decades. I never considered other options on this trip, even though my research came across dozens of tour operators for both Turkey and Uzbekistan. While the time commitment for planning the Uzbekistan leg was substantial (though not reasonable), I have second-guessed my aversion to tour-based travel as a solo traveler. Most of my day tours in Uzbekistan were flops, and it proved challenging to meet other solo travelers (as most were likely on tours). All this said, I still would want to avoid being on a tour bus in Turkey. As of today, here are my thoughts on some future trips: Namibia: full tour. Caucuses: full tour. India: partial tour. Japan: no tour. But check back in a year, and I may have changed my tune.
Another thing I found as a solo traveler in Uzbekistan was that Khiva and Bukhara only required a day and a half to see. In retrospect, I would add the Fergano Valley for more mountains and hiking to the trip, a Yurt camping excursion, or the Aral Sea (which looks dry and depressing).
Regarding hotels, I'd stay at The Hazy Karaköy in Istanbul, the Amulte Hotel in Bukhara, and the Arka Boutique Hotel in Samarkand.
I wish I bought "The Great Game" instead of "The Silk Road" as a research book before coming. I listen to nonfiction and read fiction, and "The Great Game" was far more engaging, with the opening scene in Bukhara. I did not use guidebooks, only Google Maps, various blogs, Reddit, or a dozen YouTube videos.
Why Uzbekistan?
Of all the 'Stans, Uzbekistan is the best first trip to Central Asia. As an American, Afghanistan is not possible, and Pakistan seems quite sketchy. Turkmenistan is a dictatorship (and I believe we are allowed only a five days transit visa), Kazakhstan is humongous (10x bigger than Italy, or the size of all of western Europe), Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan both sounds excellent, but not considered as safe by the US State Department and don't have the same level of tourist infrastructure (which I wanted on this trip). And Uzbekistan's history spans millennia (evidence of Neanderthals has been found there), and the sites are world-class without being near the crowds like Rome, Paris, or Istanbul.
Final Verdict: I will leave it to a few famous quotes to inspire you.
"Once a year, go someplace you've never been before." —Dalai Lama
"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." — Eleanor Roosevelt
"Remind yourself that you don't have to do what everyone else is doing." — Banksy

“Daddy! I lost a tooth.”
​
He lisped a bit as he said it, and as I held my hand out I saw that his hand had a tooth in it. It was one of the front ones, and I congratulated him on losing it so cleanly. I wondered if he had pulled it out himself, but I put that out of my mind. Brandon didn’t even pull his own splinters out, and I really couldn’t see him yanking out his own teeth. He was six, six and one month as he liked to say, and this was the first tooth he had lost. He was late in that respect, many of his friends had already started losing baby teeth, but he was giddy as he brought this one to me.
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“Now the tooth fairy will come and take it away!” he said, skipping off to continue playing.
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Ah yes, I had forgotten that part.
​
Brandon had become obsessed with the Tooth Fairy after his friend Nina had lost her tooth. He thought of her as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio, and he was very excited that she would come through his window and leave money for his teeth. He had asked what she did with all those teeth, where she got all the money, and a thousand other things. I was a pretty creative person, and I had come up with all kinds of stories about what she did with them, where she got the money, how she came in without making a sound, and on and on and on.
​
I was kind of glad that he had finally lost a tooth because I was starting to run out of material and thought if he experienced it he might lose interest in it.
We put it under his pillow that night and I assured him that it would be gone in the morning and there would be money there when he got up.
​
Then, of course, I fell asleep waiting for my wife to get home and woke up to find her sleeping beside me and the sun beginning to peek over the horizon.
I went quickly, but quietly, and thanked my lucky stars that Brandon was a sound sleeper. He hadn’t woken up yet, and I took the dollar I was going to put under there out of my pocket and prepared to make the swap. To my surprise, however, the tooth was already gone. No one had left money, but the tooth had disappeared. I looked around, thinking it had slipped out, but it was just gone. I left the dollar anyway, not wanting him to be disappointed, and went back to my room to get a little more shut-eye before the alarm went off.
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We never made it to the alarm, because Brandon came in waving the dollar and saying the Tooth Fairy had come.
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“Look what the tooth fairy left me. He said it was all for me.”
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I told him that was awesome but internally I raised an eyebrow. He? The tooth fairy had always been a woman any other time he’d talked about her. Maybe, I thought, Brandon had just had a dream or something last night. He put the money in his piggy bank and I figured we could maybe put this behind us.
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Two days later, as I put him to bed, I put my hand beneath his pillow and felt something strange.
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I took my hand out and found another tooth.
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“What’s this?” I ask him.
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“Oh, I lost another tooth,” Brandon said.
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No excitement, no hope that the tooth fairy would come. Just a matter-of-fact tone. I guess that was what I wanted, his obsession with the tooth fairy had ended when he had finally lost a tooth. He’d gone from being absolutely excited to absolutely unphased, and that stopped me for a moment.
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“Why didn’t you tell me you had another loose tooth, buddy?”
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“I, uh, don’t know. It just kind of happened.”
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I put the tooth back under his pillow, telling him to make sure to say something next time, and then I kissed him good night and put him to bed.
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When I went to put money under his pillow a little later, though, the tooth wasn’t there. Instead, there was a coin. I took a look at it, thinking it was a half dollar, but realizing I was wrong almost at once. At first, I thought it was one of those weird chocolate coins you sometimes get for Christmas. Turning it, I realized it was just extremely grubby. It was heavy, like it was made out of brass or copper, and the surface looked dirty like it had been at the bottom of a well for quite some time.
​
I started to take it with me, something in me wanting to keep it away from my son, but I put it back instead. It wasn’t mine, after all, and by the look of it, it was probably something that he treasured. It had been back under his pillow for less than a few seconds before his hand went searching for it. His fingers took hold of it almost greedily as he clutched it, and I decided to take the dollar back with me.
​
Brandon changed a bit after that night, but it's only in retrospect that I see it.
​
He became very secretive, not my little buddy like he used to be. Brandon didn’t want to play video games in the living room with me anymore. He didn’t want to read stories at bedtime anymore. He spent a lot of time in his room, and he just seemed to be closing off. His mother laughed at me when I told her I was feeling a little hurt by it.
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“He’s just being a kid,” she said, “Kids go through phases sometimes. Don’t take it so personally. In a couple of months, he’ll probably be back to his usual self again.”
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I hoped he would, but it was hard to ignore the physical changes that were going on as well.
​
Not only was Brandon quieter, but it seemed like he had grown. He hadn’t gained a foot in a single week, but sometimes it seemed his fingers were abnormally long, his arms were strangely jointed, and his face was oddly stretched. He would look at me sometimes, look at me like he was thinking about doing something that he knew would make me angry. I didn’t like it, but he never did it right out in the open. Like I said, Brandon never came to sit with me or play video games, but I would sometimes catch him peeking at me from the hallway, or from under the table in the kitchen.
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It was creepy, but I figured it was just little kid behavior.
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A month after Brandon lost his first tooth, I found another one in his backpack.
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Well, not just one. I found five hidden in the front pocket of his backpack after he left it on the kitchen table when he went to the bathroom.
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He had become pretty protective of the backpack, putting it in his room or keeping it close to him at all times, and I started getting suspicious of what might be in there. I didn't think it was drugs or anything, he was six, but I thought it might be something weird or dangerous. What if he had a snake or something in there? So when he suddenly ran off to go to the bathroom, I knew this was my chance to have a look. I needed to sign his folder for school anyway, so I took out the folder and looked over the day's report before taking a peek in the pockets. The teeth were just sitting there, bumping together when I poked at them, but they didn’t really look like human teeth. These looked more like animal teeth, and they were too strange to have come out of my son's mouth. They might’ve been from a cat or a dog, I suppose, maybe a
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“What are you doing?”
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I zipped the backpack and turned around, looking like I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t.
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“Nothing, just signing your folder.”
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Brandon looked at me with a great deal of distrust, taking the backpack and going to his room without putting his back to me.
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I told his mother about the teeth when she came home from work, but she brushed it off again, saying that little kids often collected strange things.
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“My brothers collected animal skeletons they found out in the woods,” she said dismissively and she got ready for bed, “Thank goodness it’s just teeth and not a whole skull.”
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I let it go, but it was hard not to see what was going on. Brandon started looking like he wasn’t sleeping well. He had huge bags under his eyes, and he was fidgety anytime he was made to sit still, like at dinner or for homework. He would get short and agitated, muttering to himself in a way I couldn’t understand. I listened carefully once when we were doing math homework, and it sounded like he was talking in a different language. He looked up when he saw me noticing, squinting at me with that look of distrust, and it broke my heart to see him like that. Brandon had always been my little buddy, and this sudden change in him was painful to watch.
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Two weeks later, I got a call from the school.
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They needed to speak to me about something important. Brandon had been in a fight, a fight where he had knocked more than a few of the kids' teeth out. I came down right away, afraid that Brandon was hurt, but when I saw him sitting in the principal's office he looked none the worse for wear. He had a bruise on his cheek, and his hands looked like he beat them against the wall, but he didn’t seem injured or in distress at all. Quite the contrary, Brandon looked happier than I had ever seen him.
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I took a seat next to him in the office, waiting to see what they had thought was so important.
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“We called you in not because Brandon has been fighting, but because of other rumors going around about him in class.”
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“Rumors?” I asked.
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“Yes, sir. The student he fought with said Brandon has been making strange deals with other students.”
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Shook my head, not quite understanding, “What kind of deals?”
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“They say he has been buying people's teeth.”
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I shuddered, thinking about the teeth in the bag that I saw not long ago. I looked down at Brandon, questioning him with my eyes as to whether or not this was true. He looked back at me without hesitation, pretty much letting me know that it was.
​
“He’s been trading his lunch for them. He’s been trading other things for them, too, like toys and other small things. He has allegedly traded over twenty students for their teeth across three grades. Today, the student in question had taken the trade but refused to give him any teeth. Your son responded by beating the teeth out of his mouth.”
​
I looked back at Brandon, asking what he was thinking? He didn’t bother to answer, just clinched his fist in his lap and looked at the floor. I think that was when it really hit me how much he had changed. The bags under his eyes were dark and deep, and his fingers were long enough that I couldn’t see how anyone didn’t notice. Each finger seemed twice as long as it should be, and as he clinched, I could see a fourth knuckle on each of them.
​
“The reason we called you in, sir, is to get those teeth back.”
​
I turned and looked at the principal, “What do you mean?”
​
He looked a little green as he wiped his forehead with a napkin, “We believe your son has the missing teeth, but he won’t tell us where they are and he won’t give them back to us. We can’t seem to find them, and the mother is hopeful that the dentist can put them back in if they’re not too badly damaged. If nothing else, they want them back so they can take them to the dentist and make sure the teeth are baby teeth and not permanent. Brandon hasn’t said a word about where he put them, and we are deeply troubled by this behavior.”
​
I looked at Brandon and asked him where the teeth were?
​
He shook his head, not saying a word.
​
I asked him again, and when he shook his head this time, I heard something.
​
Something nearly indistinguishable, but altogether unsettling.
​
Something was rattling in his mouth.
​
“We can sit here until you decide to give us those teeth, but you’re not leaving until we get them back. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but,”
​
The idea that we wouldn’t be leaving seemed to decide him. He bent slowly over the principal desk, making eye contact with the older man the whole time as he opened his mouth. Three teeth fell out as he pushed his tongue out, and none of them appeared to be his. The teeth clattered onto the desk like old dice, and more than one of them had the root hanging from them. As he sat back up I had the sneaking suspicion that he was holding out.
​
The principal, however, seemed more than okay with what he had gotten back. He told us to go, saying that Brandon was suspended for two weeks, and I collected up my son as we headed for the door. The principal managed not to vomit before we got out of his office, but it was a near thing.
​
We talked the entire way home.
​
Well, I talked, and Brandon just sat there and said nothing.
​
I told him I didn’t know what all this was about, but that he needed to stop. This wasn’t him, this wasn’t like him, and he needed to tell me what was going on so that I could help. I was his dad, I wanted to help him, but I couldn’t help him if he didn’t talk to me. The whole time, he just sat there and stared at me. Most kids who are being chastised look out the window or look at their feet, but he stared directly at me in brazen defiance. His fingers kept flexing, and I saw him put a hand to his pocket more than once. I wanted to tell him to turn them out, to give me the tooth from that kid that he had kept, but something in me didn’t dare. I was loath to admit it, but I was a little bit afraid of my son at that moment. He looked nothing like the boy that I had known for almost seven years. My grandma used to tell stories about babies taken by fairies, and the changlings that they left behind. This reminded me of those stories. The kid in front of me was so fundamentally different from the one I knew that it was almost like I was talking to a different person.
​
As we pulled up in the yard, I told him he was grounded. No tablet, no TV, no dessert. Brandon didn’t seem to care, he just walked inside and went to his room. His tablet was still on the charger, and his TV remote had been left on the door to his room. I didn’t know what he was doing in there, but it clearly wasn’t playing. He was way too quiet, and when his mother called to tell me she was working a double, I almost cried. I didn’t want to be here alone with him more than I had to be, and that made me feel even worse.
​
He didn’t come out for dinner, and when I went to bring him his plate a little while later, I heard muffled voices as he spoke to someone.
​
“I tried to get the teeth, but they caught me.”
​
I didn’t know who he was talking to, kind of thought he might be talking to himself, but when a gruff voice responded I felt my stomach drop.
​
“You’ll just have to do better next time.”
​
The voice was unlike anything I had ever heard. It was deep and watery, like something from the bottom of a well, and it spoke in a way that made its mouth sound strangely full. It was devoid of any kind of kindness or charity, the sounds you sometimes hear when people speak to children. It was an authoritarian invoice, the teacher, and they were not pleased with my son.
​
“I’m grounded, they suspended me from school. I’m not going to be able to get you any teeth for at least two weeks.”
​
“Your father has teeth,” it said matter-of-factly, “Your mother has teeth too.”
​
When he answered, he didn’t sound afraid.
​
When he answered, it was with cold assuredness.
​
“They won’t just give them to me. They don’t understand what I’m doing.”
​
What was he doing? That’s what I wanted to know. I gripped the doorknob, hoping they wouldn’t hear me, and that was when the voice said something that made my blood run cold.
​
“Then do not ask for them. Take them, like you did from the boy today.”
​
I opened the door in one fluid motion, and my son looked up guilty as I walked into his room
​
“Who are you talking to?" I asked.
​
“No one,” he said much too quickly.
​
“I heard someone,” I said, “I heard someone in here talking to you, and I wanted to know who it was, and where they went.”
​
That was a lie. I didn’t think I wanted to know who they were. What I wanted was for them to never come back again. The person had sounded like some kind of demonic fairy from a kid's story, and I was afraid of what I would see if he did come back.
​
“It’s nothing,” Brandon said much too quickly again, “I was doing voices.”
​
I talked to him for a little while longer, but I got nothing. He wouldn’t talk to me, he wouldn’t tell me anything, and eventually I just left.
​
I should’ve left it at that, I should have just left it alone, but I had to try one more time.
​
It was late, about ten thirty which was pretty late for us, and I decided to try a peace offering. I felt pretty certain he was still awake, I had heard something moving around in there, and so I cut some of the pie I had made to go with dinner and walked to his room. I was going to offer him the pie and see if maybe we could talk. I just wanted to know what it was that had made him change so much. Most of all, I just wanted my son back. It killed me to have him act like this, but as the door came open, I got more answers than I had bargained for.
​
It was standing over his bed with its arm going under his pillow, and in the darkness of his room, I realized it had to be what he'd been talking to. The pie fell to the ground, but I had a death grip on the plate, and I realized I had sprained my thumb once I was in any state to feel it. I didn’t speak, I could barely breathe and as the thing turned to look at me I realized my fairy theory might not be too far off. It was grubby looking, like something that’s been living in a ditch. Its features were completely covered in something dark that had the texture of earth, except for the two large lamp-like eyes that protrude from its face like bubble lights. It was tall, something I realized as it took its full height. It had been crouching before, putting something under my son’s pillow, and it had to stoop so as not to bang its head on the ceiling, which is about nine feet from the floor. From its back, four insect like wings protruded. They weren't large enough to carry it, but they were large enough to be noticeable. Its hands and arms, the fingers multi-jointed, were far from delicate looking as it wiggled them ceaselessly.
​
I expected it to charge me, I expected it to attack me, but instead, it raised one huge finger to its face and made a shush sound.
​
“Shhhh, you’ll wake the baby,” it whispered, and its mouth sounded like it was trying to swallow something.
​
Then it smiled, and I saw not a double but a triple row of teeth inside its mouth. There’s no order to them, molars next to canines next to bicuspid next to what appear to be fangs and shark teeth. Its mouth is such a mishmash of teeth that it’s impossible not to feel a little woozy when you look at it. It pulled its lips down, somehow containing all those teeth, and before my very eyes, it vanished.
​
My son was pretty upset when I grabbed him up and carried him out of the house.
I put him in the car, and we waited till his mother got off work before taking him to a nearby motel. I told her what I had seen, as best as I could, and I think she believes there might be something going on now. My son is furious, saying he needs to get back home so that he can do his job, but he won’t say what that is.
​
Honestly, I think he’s been collecting teeth for whatever that thing was.
When I went back to get us some clothes and check the house, I looked under his pillow and found another of those strange coins. There’s a box under his bed, and inside it’s equal parts teeth and coins. There are around twenty of them, and they’re sitting next to teeth of every shape and every size. Most of them are animal teeth, but some of them are definitely human teeth. I’ve taken the entire box with me, but the phone call I got from my wife before I left the house was what really worried me.
​
She called to tell me that our son had locked himself in the bathroom, and she was afraid he was hurting himself.
​
“There’s a weird squelching sound, followed by him yelling and crying.”
​
He had locked himself in the bathroom, but I went and got the manager to unlock it for us.
​
What we found there will stay with me for a very long time.
​
We’re at the hospital now, my wife is in the ER room with him while I sit in the waiting room and wait for updates. The protocol states only one parent can go in at a time, and my son doesn’t want me to go in there. He can’t speak very well, but he made that very clear to my wife. I gave him space, not wanting to exacerbate his condition any more than I had to. I’ve got the box on my lap as I sit out here, and I’m not really sure what to do with it.
​
Inside are the eight teeth he managed to pull out of his own head before we got him restrained.
​
Whatever this creature is, it must get its due, and my son was apparently intent on giving it that due.
​
We'll probably end up having to take him to a mental facility, but I know he isn’t crazy.
​
I saw that thing, too, and I know it will find him no matter where we take him.
​
So be very careful when you tell your kids about the tooth fairy.
​
What comes to collect their teeth might be something far worse than even you could imagine.

“Daddy! I lost a tooth.”
He lisped a bit as he said it, and as I held my hand out I saw that his hand had a tooth in it. It was one of the front ones, and I congratulated him on losing it so cleanly. I wondered if he had pulled it out himself, but I put that out of my mind. Brandon didn’t even pull his own splinters out, and I really couldn’t see him yanking out his own teeth. He was six, six and one month as he liked to say, and this was the first tooth he had lost. He was late in that respect, many of his friends had already started losing baby teeth, but he was giddy as he brought this one to me.
“Now the tooth fairy will come and take it away!” he said, skipping off to continue playing.
Ah yes, I had forgotten that part.
Brandon had become obsessed with the Tooth Fairy after his friend Nina had lost her tooth. He thought of her as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio, and he was very excited that she would come through his window and leave money for his teeth. He had asked what she did with all those teeth, where she got all the money, and a thousand other things. I was a pretty creative person, and I had come up with all kinds of stories about what she did with them, where she got the money, how she came in without making a sound, and on and on and on.
I was kind of glad that he had finally lost a tooth because I was starting to run out of material and thought if he experienced it he might lose interest in it.
We put it under his pillow that night and I assured him that it would be gone in the morning and there would be money there when he got up.
Then, of course, I fell asleep waiting for my wife to get home and woke up to find her sleeping beside me and the sun beginning to peek over the horizon.
I went quickly, but quietly, and thanked my lucky stars that Brandon was a sound sleeper. He hadn’t woken up yet, and I took the dollar I was going to put under there out of my pocket and prepared to make the swap. To my surprise, however, the tooth was already gone. No one had left money, but the tooth had disappeared. I looked around, thinking it had slipped out, but it was just gone. I left the dollar anyway, not wanting him to be disappointed, and went back to my room to get a little more shut-eye before the alarm went off.
We never made it to the alarm, because Brandon came in waving the dollar and saying the Tooth Fairy had come.
“Look what the tooth fairy left me. He said it was all for me.”
I told him that was awesome but internally I raised an eyebrow. He? The tooth fairy had always been a woman any other time he’d talked about her. Maybe, I thought, Brandon had just had a dream or something last night. He put the money in his piggy bank and I figured we could maybe put this behind us.
Two days later, as I put him to bed, I put my hand beneath his pillow and felt something strange.
I took my hand out and found another tooth.
“What’s this?” I ask him.
“Oh, I lost another tooth,” Brandon said.
No excitement, no hope that the tooth fairy would come. Just a matter-of-fact tone. I guess that was what I wanted, his obsession with the tooth fairy had ended when he had finally lost a tooth. He’d gone from being absolutely excited to absolutely unphased, and that stopped me for a moment.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had another loose tooth, buddy?”
“I, uh, don’t know. It just kind of happened.”
I put the tooth back under his pillow, telling him to make sure to say something next time, and then I kissed him good night and put him to bed.
When I went to put money under his pillow a little later, though, the tooth wasn’t there. Instead, there was a coin. I took a look at it, thinking it was a half dollar, but realizing I was wrong almost at once. At first, I thought it was one of those weird chocolate coins you sometimes get for Christmas. Turning it, I realized it was just extremely grubby. It was heavy, like it was made out of brass or copper, and the surface looked dirty like it had been at the bottom of a well for quite some time.
I started to take it with me, something in me wanting to keep it away from my son, but I put it back instead. It wasn’t mine, after all, and by the look of it, it was probably something that he treasured. It had been back under his pillow for less than a few seconds before his hand went searching for it. His fingers took hold of it almost greedily as he clutched it, and I decided to take the dollar back with me.
Brandon changed a bit after that night, but it's only in retrospect that I see it.
He became very secretive, not my little buddy like he used to be. Brandon didn’t want to play video games in the living room with me anymore. He didn’t want to read stories at bedtime anymore. He spent a lot of time in his room, and he just seemed to be closing off. His mother laughed at me when I told her I was feeling a little hurt by it.
“He’s just being a kid,” she said, “Kids go through phases sometimes. Don’t take it so personally. In a couple of months, he’ll probably be back to his usual self again.”
I hoped he would, but it was hard to ignore the physical changes that were going on as well.
Not only was Brandon quieter, but it seemed like he had grown. He hadn’t gained a foot in a single week, but sometimes it seemed his fingers were abnormally long, his arms were strangely jointed, and his face was oddly stretched. He would look at me sometimes, look at me like he was thinking about doing something that he knew would make me angry. I didn’t like it, but he never did it right out in the open. Like I said, Brandon never came to sit with me or play video games, but I would sometimes catch him peeking at me from the hallway, or from under the table in the kitchen.
It was creepy, but I figured it was just little kid behavior.
A month after Brandon lost his first tooth, I found another one in his backpack.
Well, not just one. I found five hidden in the front pocket of his backpack after he left it on the kitchen table when he went to the bathroom.
He had become pretty protective of the backpack, putting it in his room or keeping it close to him at all times, and I started getting suspicious of what might be in there. I didn't think it was drugs or anything, he was six, but I thought it might be something weird or dangerous. What if he had a snake or something in there? So when he suddenly ran off to go to the bathroom, I knew this was my chance to have a look. I needed to sign his folder for school anyway, so I took out the folder and looked over the day's report before taking a peek in the pockets. The teeth were just sitting there, bumping together when I poked at them, but they didn’t really look like human teeth. These looked more like animal teeth, and they were too strange to have come out of my son's mouth. They might’ve been from a cat or a dog, I suppose, maybe a
“What are you doing?”
I zipped the backpack and turned around, looking like I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t.
“Nothing, just signing your folder.”
Brandon looked at me with a great deal of distrust, taking the backpack and going to his room without putting his back to me.
I told his mother about the teeth when she came home from work, but she brushed it off again, saying that little kids often collected strange things.
“My brothers collected animal skeletons they found out in the woods,” she said dismissively and she got ready for bed, “Thank goodness it’s just teeth and not a whole skull.”
I let it go, but it was hard not to see what was going on. Brandon started looking like he wasn’t sleeping well. He had huge bags under his eyes, and he was fidgety anytime he was made to sit still, like at dinner or for homework. He would get short and agitated, muttering to himself in a way I couldn’t understand. I listened carefully once when we were doing math homework, and it sounded like he was talking in a different language. He looked up when he saw me noticing, squinting at me with that look of distrust, and it broke my heart to see him like that. Brandon had always been my little buddy, and this sudden change in him was painful to watch.
Two weeks later, I got a call from the school.
They needed to speak to me about something important. Brandon had been in a fight, a fight where he had knocked more than a few of the kids' teeth out. I came down right away, afraid that Brandon was hurt, but when I saw him sitting in the principal's office he looked none the worse for wear. He had a bruise on his cheek, and his hands looked like he beat them against the wall, but he didn’t seem injured or in distress at all. Quite the contrary, Brandon looked happier than I had ever seen him.
I took a seat next to him in the office, waiting to see what they had thought was so important.
“We called you in not because Brandon has been fighting, but because of other rumors going around about him in class.”
“Rumors?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. The student he fought with said Brandon has been making strange deals with other students.”
Shook my head, not quite understanding, “What kind of deals?”
“They say he has been buying people's teeth.”
I shuddered, thinking about the teeth in the bag that I saw not long ago. I looked down at Brandon, questioning him with my eyes as to whether or not this was true. He looked back at me without hesitation, pretty much letting me know that it was.
“He’s been trading his lunch for them. He’s been trading other things for them, too, like toys and other small things. He has allegedly traded over twenty students for their teeth across three grades. Today, the student in question had taken the trade but refused to give him any teeth. Your son responded by beating the teeth out of his mouth.”
I looked back at Brandon, asking what he was thinking? He didn’t bother to answer, just clinched his fist in his lap and looked at the floor. I think that was when it really hit me how much he had changed. The bags under his eyes were dark and deep, and his fingers were long enough that I couldn’t see how anyone didn’t notice. Each finger seemed twice as long as it should be, and as he clinched, I could see a fourth knuckle on each of them.
“The reason we called you in, sir, is to get those teeth back.”
I turned and looked at the principal, “What do you mean?”
He looked a little green as he wiped his forehead with a napkin, “We believe your son has the missing teeth, but he won’t tell us where they are and he won’t give them back to us. We can’t seem to find them, and the mother is hopeful that the dentist can put them back in if they’re not too badly damaged. If nothing else, they want them back so they can take them to the dentist and make sure the teeth are baby teeth and not permanent. Brandon hasn’t said a word about where he put them, and we are deeply troubled by this behavior.”
I looked at Brandon and asked him where the teeth were?
He shook his head, not saying a word.
I asked him again, and when he shook his head this time, I heard something.
Something nearly indistinguishable, but altogether unsettling.
Something was rattling in his mouth.
“We can sit here until you decide to give us those teeth, but you’re not leaving until we get them back. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but,”
The idea that we wouldn’t be leaving seemed to decide him. He bent slowly over the principal desk, making eye contact with the older man the whole time as he opened his mouth. Three teeth fell out as he pushed his tongue out, and none of them appeared to be his. The teeth clattered onto the desk like old dice, and more than one of them had the root hanging from them. As he sat back up I had the sneaking suspicion that he was holding out.
The principal, however, seemed more than okay with what he had gotten back. He told us to go, saying that Brandon was suspended for two weeks, and I collected up my son as we headed for the door. The principal managed not to vomit before we got out of his office, but it was a near thing.
We talked the entire way home.
Well, I talked, and Brandon just sat there and said nothing.
I told him I didn’t know what all this was about, but that he needed to stop. This wasn’t him, this wasn’t like him, and he needed to tell me what was going on so that I could help. I was his dad, I wanted to help him, but I couldn’t help him if he didn’t talk to me. The whole time, he just sat there and stared at me. Most kids who are being chastised look out the window or look at their feet, but he stared directly at me in brazen defiance. His fingers kept flexing, and I saw him put a hand to his pocket more than once. I wanted to tell him to turn them out, to give me the tooth from that kid that he had kept, but something in me didn’t dare. I was loath to admit it, but I was a little bit afraid of my son at that moment. He looked nothing like the boy that I had known for almost seven years. My grandma used to tell stories about babies taken by fairies, and the changlings that they left behind. This reminded me of those stories. The kid in front of me was so fundamentally different from the one I knew that it was almost like I was talking to a different person.
As we pulled up in the yard, I told him he was grounded. No tablet, no TV, no dessert. Brandon didn’t seem to care, he just walked inside and went to his room. His tablet was still on the charger, and his TV remote had been left on the door to his room. I didn’t know what he was doing in there, but it clearly wasn’t playing. He was way too quiet, and when his mother called to tell me she was working a double, I almost cried. I didn’t want to be here alone with him more than I had to be, and that made me feel even worse.
He didn’t come out for dinner, and when I went to bring him his plate a little while later, I heard muffled voices as he spoke to someone.
“I tried to get the teeth, but they caught me.”
I didn’t know who he was talking to, kind of thought he might be talking to himself, but when a gruff voice responded I felt my stomach drop.
“You’ll just have to do better next time.”
The voice was unlike anything I had ever heard. It was deep and watery, like something from the bottom of a well, and it spoke in a way that made its mouth sound strangely full. It was devoid of any kind of kindness or charity, the sounds you sometimes hear when people speak to children. It was an authoritarian invoice, the teacher, and they were not pleased with my son.
“I’m grounded, they suspended me from school. I’m not going to be able to get you any teeth for at least two weeks.”
“Your father has teeth,” it said matter-of-factly, “Your mother has teeth too.”
When he answered, he didn’t sound afraid.
When he answered, it was with cold assuredness.
“They won’t just give them to me. They don’t understand what I’m doing.”
What was he doing? That’s what I wanted to know. I gripped the doorknob, hoping they wouldn’t hear me, and that was when the voice said something that made my blood run cold.
“Then do not ask for them. Take them, like you did from the boy today.”
I opened the door in one fluid motion, and my son looked up guilty as I walked into his room
“Who are you talking to?" I asked.
“No one,” he said much too quickly.
“I heard someone,” I said, “I heard someone in here talking to you, and I wanted to know who it was, and where they went.”
That was a lie. I didn’t think I wanted to know who they were. What I wanted was for them to never come back again. The person had sounded like some kind of demonic fairy from a kid's story, and I was afraid of what I would see if he did come back.
“It’s nothing,” Brandon said much too quickly again, “I was doing voices.”
I talked to him for a little while longer, but I got nothing. He wouldn’t talk to me, he wouldn’t tell me anything, and eventually I just left.
I should’ve left it at that, I should have just left it alone, but I had to try one more time.
It was late, about ten thirty which was pretty late for us, and I decided to try a peace offering. I felt pretty certain he was still awake, I had heard something moving around in there, and so I cut some of the pie I had made to go with dinner and walked to his room. I was going to offer him the pie and see if maybe we could talk. I just wanted to know what it was that had made him change so much. Most of all, I just wanted my son back. It killed me to have him act like this, but as the door came open, I got more answers than I had bargained for.
It was standing over his bed with its arm going under his pillow, and in the darkness of his room, I realized it had to be what he'd been talking to. The pie fell to the ground, but I had a death grip on the plate, and I realized I had sprained my thumb once I was in any state to feel it. I didn’t speak, I could barely breathe and as the thing turned to look at me I realized my fairy theory might not be too far off. It was grubby looking, like something that’s been living in a ditch. Its features were completely covered in something dark that had the texture of earth, except for the two large lamp-like eyes that protrude from its face like bubble lights. It was tall, something I realized as it took its full height. It had been crouching before, putting something under my son’s pillow, and it had to stoop so as not to bang its head on the ceiling, which is about nine feet from the floor. From its back, four insect like wings protruded. They weren't large enough to carry it, but they were large enough to be noticeable. Its hands and arms, the fingers multi-jointed, were far from delicate looking as it wiggled them ceaselessly.
I expected it to charge me, I expected it to attack me, but instead, it raised one huge finger to its face and made a shush sound.
“Shhhh, you’ll wake the baby,” it whispered, and its mouth sounded like it was trying to swallow something.
Then it smiled, and I saw not a double but a triple row of teeth inside its mouth. There’s no order to them, molars next to canines next to bicuspid next to what appear to be fangs and shark teeth. Its mouth is such a mishmash of teeth that it’s impossible not to feel a little woozy when you look at it. It pulled its lips down, somehow containing all those teeth, and before my very eyes, it vanished.
My son was pretty upset when I grabbed him up and carried him out of the house.
I put him in the car, and we waited till his mother got off work before taking him to a nearby motel. I told her what I had seen, as best as I could, and I think she believes there might be something going on now. My son is furious, saying he needs to get back home so that he can do his job, but he won’t say what that is.
Honestly, I think he’s been collecting teeth for whatever that thing was.
When I went back to get us some clothes and check the house, I looked under his pillow and found another of those strange coins. There’s a box under his bed, and inside it’s equal parts teeth and coins. There are around twenty of them, and they’re sitting next to teeth of every shape and every size. Most of them are animal teeth, but some of them are definitely human teeth. I’ve taken the entire box with me, but the phone call I got from my wife before I left the house was what really worried me.
She called to tell me that our son had locked himself in the bathroom, and she was afraid he was hurting himself.
“There’s a weird squelching sound, followed by him yelling and crying.”
He had locked himself in the bathroom, but I went and got the manager to unlock it for us.
What we found there will stay with me for a very long time.
We’re at the hospital now, my wife is in the ER room with him while I sit in the waiting room and wait for updates. The protocol states only one parent can go in at a time, and my son doesn’t want me to go in there. He can’t speak very well, but he made that very clear to my wife. I gave him space, not wanting to exacerbate his condition any more than I had to. I’ve got the box on my lap as I sit out here, and I’m not really sure what to do with it.
Inside are the eight teeth he managed to pull out of his own head before we got him restrained.
Whatever this creature is, it must get its due, and my son was apparently intent on giving it that due.
We'll probably end up having to take him to a mental facility, but I know he isn’t crazy.
I saw that thing, too, and I know it will find him no matter where we take him.
So be very careful when you tell your kids about the tooth fairy.
What comes to collect their teeth might be something far worse than even you could imagine.

“Daddy! I lost a tooth.”
​
He lisped a bit as he said it, and as I held my hand out I saw that his hand had a tooth in it. It was one of the front ones, and I congratulated him on losing it so cleanly. I wondered if he had pulled it out himself, but I put that out of my mind. Brandon didn’t even pull his own splinters out, and I really couldn’t see him yanking out his own teeth. He was six, six and one month as he liked to say, and this was the first tooth he had lost. He was late in that respect, many of his friends had already started losing baby teeth, but he was giddy as he brought this one to me.
​
“Now the tooth fairy will come and take it away!” he said, skipping off to continue playing.
​
Ah yes, I had forgotten that part.
​
Brandon had become obsessed with the Tooth Fairy after his friend Nina had lost her tooth. He thought of her as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio, and he was very excited that she would come through his window and leave money for his teeth. He had asked what she did with all those teeth, where she got all the money, and a thousand other things. I was a pretty creative person, and I had come up with all kinds of stories about what she did with them, where she got the money, how she came in without making a sound, and on and on and on.
​
I was kind of glad that he had finally lost a tooth because I was starting to run out of material and thought if he experienced it he might lose interest in it.
We put it under his pillow that night and I assured him that it would be gone in the morning and there would be money there when he got up.
​
Then, of course, I fell asleep waiting for my wife to get home and woke up to find her sleeping beside me and the sun beginning to peek over the horizon.
I went quickly, but quietly, and thanked my lucky stars that Brandon was a sound sleeper. He hadn’t woken up yet, and I took the dollar I was going to put under there out of my pocket and prepared to make the swap. To my surprise, however, the tooth was already gone. No one had left money, but the tooth had disappeared. I looked around, thinking it had slipped out, but it was just gone. I left the dollar anyway, not wanting him to be disappointed, and went back to my room to get a little more shut-eye before the alarm went off.
​
We never made it to the alarm, because Brandon came in waving the dollar and saying the Tooth Fairy had come.
​
“Look what the tooth fairy left me. He said it was all for me.”
​
I told him that was awesome but internally I raised an eyebrow. He? The tooth fairy had always been a woman any other time he’d talked about her. Maybe, I thought, Brandon had just had a dream or something last night. He put the money in his piggy bank and I figured we could maybe put this behind us.
​
Two days later, as I put him to bed, I put my hand beneath his pillow and felt something strange.
​
I took my hand out and found another tooth.
​
“What’s this?” I ask him.
​
“Oh, I lost another tooth,” Brandon said.
​
No excitement, no hope that the tooth fairy would come. Just a matter-of-fact tone. I guess that was what I wanted, his obsession with the tooth fairy had ended when he had finally lost a tooth. He’d gone from being absolutely excited to absolutely unphased, and that stopped me for a moment.
​
“Why didn’t you tell me you had another loose tooth, buddy?”
​
“I, uh, don’t know. It just kind of happened.”
​
I put the tooth back under his pillow, telling him to make sure to say something next time, and then I kissed him good night and put him to bed.
​
When I went to put money under his pillow a little later, though, the tooth wasn’t there. Instead, there was a coin. I took a look at it, thinking it was a half dollar, but realizing I was wrong almost at once. At first, I thought it was one of those weird chocolate coins you sometimes get for Christmas. Turning it, I realized it was just extremely grubby. It was heavy, like it was made out of brass or copper, and the surface looked dirty like it had been at the bottom of a well for quite some time.
​
I started to take it with me, something in me wanting to keep it away from my son, but I put it back instead. It wasn’t mine, after all, and by the look of it, it was probably something that he treasured. It had been back under his pillow for less than a few seconds before his hand went searching for it. His fingers took hold of it almost greedily as he clutched it, and I decided to take the dollar back with me.
​
Brandon changed a bit after that night, but it's only in retrospect that I see it.
​
He became very secretive, not my little buddy like he used to be. Brandon didn’t want to play video games in the living room with me anymore. He didn’t want to read stories at bedtime anymore. He spent a lot of time in his room, and he just seemed to be closing off. His mother laughed at me when I told her I was feeling a little hurt by it.
​
“He’s just being a kid,” she said, “Kids go through phases sometimes. Don’t take it so personally. In a couple of months, he’ll probably be back to his usual self again.”
​
I hoped he would, but it was hard to ignore the physical changes that were going on as well.
​
Not only was Brandon quieter, but it seemed like he had grown. He hadn’t gained a foot in a single week, but sometimes it seemed his fingers were abnormally long, his arms were strangely jointed, and his face was oddly stretched. He would look at me sometimes, look at me like he was thinking about doing something that he knew would make me angry. I didn’t like it, but he never did it right out in the open. Like I said, Brandon never came to sit with me or play video games, but I would sometimes catch him peeking at me from the hallway, or from under the table in the kitchen.
​
It was creepy, but I figured it was just little kid behavior.
​
A month after Brandon lost his first tooth, I found another one in his backpack.
​
Well, not just one. I found five hidden in the front pocket of his backpack after he left it on the kitchen table when he went to the bathroom.
​
He had become pretty protective of the backpack, putting it in his room or keeping it close to him at all times, and I started getting suspicious of what might be in there. I didn't think it was drugs or anything, he was six, but I thought it might be something weird or dangerous. What if he had a snake or something in there? So when he suddenly ran off to go to the bathroom, I knew this was my chance to have a look. I needed to sign his folder for school anyway, so I took out the folder and looked over the day's report before taking a peek in the pockets. The teeth were just sitting there, bumping together when I poked at them, but they didn’t really look like human teeth. These looked more like animal teeth, and they were too strange to have come out of my son's mouth. They might’ve been from a cat or a dog, I suppose, maybe a
​
“What are you doing?”
​
I zipped the backpack and turned around, looking like I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t.
​
“Nothing, just signing your folder.”
​
Brandon looked at me with a great deal of distrust, taking the backpack and going to his room without putting his back to me.
​
I told his mother about the teeth when she came home from work, but she brushed it off again, saying that little kids often collected strange things.
​
“My brothers collected animal skeletons they found out in the woods,” she said dismissively and she got ready for bed, “Thank goodness it’s just teeth and not a whole skull.”
​
I let it go, but it was hard not to see what was going on. Brandon started looking like he wasn’t sleeping well. He had huge bags under his eyes, and he was fidgety anytime he was made to sit still, like at dinner or for homework. He would get short and agitated, muttering to himself in a way I couldn’t understand. I listened carefully once when we were doing math homework, and it sounded like he was talking in a different language. He looked up when he saw me noticing, squinting at me with that look of distrust, and it broke my heart to see him like that. Brandon had always been my little buddy, and this sudden change in him was painful to watch.
​
Two weeks later, I got a call from the school.
​
They needed to speak to me about something important. Brandon had been in a fight, a fight where he had knocked more than a few of the kids' teeth out. I came down right away, afraid that Brandon was hurt, but when I saw him sitting in the principal's office he looked none the worse for wear. He had a bruise on his cheek, and his hands looked like he beat them against the wall, but he didn’t seem injured or in distress at all. Quite the contrary, Brandon looked happier than I had ever seen him.
​
I took a seat next to him in the office, waiting to see what they had thought was so important.
​
“We called you in not because Brandon has been fighting, but because of other rumors going around about him in class.”
​
“Rumors?” I asked.
​
“Yes, sir. The student he fought with said Brandon has been making strange deals with other students.”
​
Shook my head, not quite understanding, “What kind of deals?”
​
“They say he has been buying people's teeth.”
​
I shuddered, thinking about the teeth in the bag that I saw not long ago. I looked down at Brandon, questioning him with my eyes as to whether or not this was true. He looked back at me without hesitation, pretty much letting me know that it was.
​
“He’s been trading his lunch for them. He’s been trading other things for them, too, like toys and other small things. He has allegedly traded over twenty students for their teeth across three grades. Today, the student in question had taken the trade but refused to give him any teeth. Your son responded by beating the teeth out of his mouth.”
​
I looked back at Brandon, asking what he was thinking? He didn’t bother to answer, just clinched his fist in his lap and looked at the floor. I think that was when it really hit me how much he had changed. The bags under his eyes were dark and deep, and his fingers were long enough that I couldn’t see how anyone didn’t notice. Each finger seemed twice as long as it should be, and as he clinched, I could see a fourth knuckle on each of them.
​
“The reason we called you in, sir, is to get those teeth back.”
​
I turned and looked at the principal, “What do you mean?”
​
He looked a little green as he wiped his forehead with a napkin, “We believe your son has the missing teeth, but he won’t tell us where they are and he won’t give them back to us. We can’t seem to find them, and the mother is hopeful that the dentist can put them back in if they’re not too badly damaged. If nothing else, they want them back so they can take them to the dentist and make sure the teeth are baby teeth and not permanent. Brandon hasn’t said a word about where he put them, and we are deeply troubled by this behavior.”
​
I looked at Brandon and asked him where the teeth were?
​
He shook his head, not saying a word.
​
I asked him again, and when he shook his head this time, I heard something.
​
Something nearly indistinguishable, but altogether unsettling.
​
Something was rattling in his mouth.
​
“We can sit here until you decide to give us those teeth, but you’re not leaving until we get them back. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but,”
​
The idea that we wouldn’t be leaving seemed to decide him. He bent slowly over the principal desk, making eye contact with the older man the whole time as he opened his mouth. Three teeth fell out as he pushed his tongue out, and none of them appeared to be his. The teeth clattered onto the desk like old dice, and more than one of them had the root hanging from them. As he sat back up I had the sneaking suspicion that he was holding out.
​
The principal, however, seemed more than okay with what he had gotten back. He told us to go, saying that Brandon was suspended for two weeks, and I collected up my son as we headed for the door. The principal managed not to vomit before we got out of his office, but it was a near thing.
​
We talked the entire way home.
​
Well, I talked, and Brandon just sat there and said nothing.
​
I told him I didn’t know what all this was about, but that he needed to stop. This wasn’t him, this wasn’t like him, and he needed to tell me what was going on so that I could help. I was his dad, I wanted to help him, but I couldn’t help him if he didn’t talk to me. The whole time, he just sat there and stared at me. Most kids who are being chastised look out the window or look at their feet, but he stared directly at me in brazen defiance. His fingers kept flexing, and I saw him put a hand to his pocket more than once. I wanted to tell him to turn them out, to give me the tooth from that kid that he had kept, but something in me didn’t dare. I was loath to admit it, but I was a little bit afraid of my son at that moment. He looked nothing like the boy that I had known for almost seven years. My grandma used to tell stories about babies taken by fairies, and the changlings that they left behind. This reminded me of those stories. The kid in front of me was so fundamentally different from the one I knew that it was almost like I was talking to a different person.
​
As we pulled up in the yard, I told him he was grounded. No tablet, no TV, no dessert. Brandon didn’t seem to care, he just walked inside and went to his room. His tablet was still on the charger, and his TV remote had been left on the door to his room. I didn’t know what he was doing in there, but it clearly wasn’t playing. He was way too quiet, and when his mother called to tell me she was working a double, I almost cried. I didn’t want to be here alone with him more than I had to be, and that made me feel even worse.
​
He didn’t come out for dinner, and when I went to bring him his plate a little while later, I heard muffled voices as he spoke to someone.
​
“I tried to get the teeth, but they caught me.”
​
I didn’t know who he was talking to, kind of thought he might be talking to himself, but when a gruff voice responded I felt my stomach drop.
​
“You’ll just have to do better next time.”
​
The voice was unlike anything I had ever heard. It was deep and watery, like something from the bottom of a well, and it spoke in a way that made its mouth sound strangely full. It was devoid of any kind of kindness or charity, the sounds you sometimes hear when people speak to children. It was an authoritarian invoice, the teacher, and they were not pleased with my son.
​
“I’m grounded, they suspended me from school. I’m not going to be able to get you any teeth for at least two weeks.”
​
“Your father has teeth,” it said matter-of-factly, “Your mother has teeth too.”
​
When he answered, he didn’t sound afraid.
​
When he answered, it was with cold assuredness.
​
“They won’t just give them to me. They don’t understand what I’m doing.”
​
What was he doing? That’s what I wanted to know. I gripped the doorknob, hoping they wouldn’t hear me, and that was when the voice said something that made my blood run cold.
​
“Then do not ask for them. Take them, like you did from the boy today.”
​
I opened the door in one fluid motion, and my son looked up guilty as I walked into his room
​
“Who are you talking to?" I asked.
​
“No one,” he said much too quickly.
​
“I heard someone,” I said, “I heard someone in here talking to you, and I wanted to know who it was, and where they went.”
​
That was a lie. I didn’t think I wanted to know who they were. What I wanted was for them to never come back again. The person had sounded like some kind of demonic fairy from a kid's story, and I was afraid of what I would see if he did come back.
​
“It’s nothing,” Brandon said much too quickly again, “I was doing voices.”
​
I talked to him for a little while longer, but I got nothing. He wouldn’t talk to me, he wouldn’t tell me anything, and eventually I just left.
​
I should’ve left it at that, I should have just left it alone, but I had to try one more time.
​
It was late, about ten thirty which was pretty late for us, and I decided to try a peace offering. I felt pretty certain he was still awake, I had heard something moving around in there, and so I cut some of the pie I had made to go with dinner and walked to his room. I was going to offer him the pie and see if maybe we could talk. I just wanted to know what it was that had made him change so much. Most of all, I just wanted my son back. It killed me to have him act like this, but as the door came open, I got more answers than I had bargained for.
​
It was standing over his bed with its arm going under his pillow, and in the darkness of his room, I realized it had to be what he'd been talking to. The pie fell to the ground, but I had a death grip on the plate, and I realized I had sprained my thumb once I was in any state to feel it. I didn’t speak, I could barely breathe and as the thing turned to look at me I realized my fairy theory might not be too far off. It was grubby looking, like something that’s been living in a ditch. Its features were completely covered in something dark that had the texture of earth, except for the two large lamp-like eyes that protrude from its face like bubble lights. It was tall, something I realized as it took its full height. It had been crouching before, putting something under my son’s pillow, and it had to stoop so as not to bang its head on the ceiling, which is about nine feet from the floor. From its back, four insect like wings protruded. They weren't large enough to carry it, but they were large enough to be noticeable. Its hands and arms, the fingers multi-jointed, were far from delicate looking as it wiggled them ceaselessly.
​
I expected it to charge me, I expected it to attack me, but instead, it raised one huge finger to its face and made a shush sound.
​
“Shhhh, you’ll wake the baby,” it whispered, and its mouth sounded like it was trying to swallow something.
​
Then it smiled, and I saw not a double but a triple row of teeth inside its mouth. There’s no order to them, molars next to canines next to bicuspid next to what appear to be fangs and shark teeth. Its mouth is such a mishmash of teeth that it’s impossible not to feel a little woozy when you look at it. It pulled its lips down, somehow containing all those teeth, and before my very eyes, it vanished.
​
My son was pretty upset when I grabbed him up and carried him out of the house.
I put him in the car, and we waited till his mother got off work before taking him to a nearby motel. I told her what I had seen, as best as I could, and I think she believes there might be something going on now. My son is furious, saying he needs to get back home so that he can do his job, but he won’t say what that is.
​
Honestly, I think he’s been collecting teeth for whatever that thing was.
When I went back to get us some clothes and check the house, I looked under his pillow and found another of those strange coins. There’s a box under his bed, and inside it’s equal parts teeth and coins. There are around twenty of them, and they’re sitting next to teeth of every shape and every size. Most of them are animal teeth, but some of them are definitely human teeth. I’ve taken the entire box with me, but the phone call I got from my wife before I left the house was what really worried me.
​
She called to tell me that our son had locked himself in the bathroom, and she was afraid he was hurting himself.
​
“There’s a weird squelching sound, followed by him yelling and crying.”
​
He had locked himself in the bathroom, but I went and got the manager to unlock it for us.
​
What we found there will stay with me for a very long time.
​
We’re at the hospital now, my wife is in the ER room with him while I sit in the waiting room and wait for updates. The protocol states only one parent can go in at a time, and my son doesn’t want me to go in there. He can’t speak very well, but he made that very clear to my wife. I gave him space, not wanting to exacerbate his condition any more than I had to. I’ve got the box on my lap as I sit out here, and I’m not really sure what to do with it.
​
Inside are the eight teeth he managed to pull out of his own head before we got him restrained.
​
Whatever this creature is, it must get its due, and my son was apparently intent on giving it that due.
​
We'll probably end up having to take him to a mental facility, but I know he isn’t crazy.
​
I saw that thing, too, and I know it will find him no matter where we take him.
​
So be very careful when you tell your kids about the tooth fairy.
​
What comes to collect their teeth might be something far worse than even you could imagine.

“Daddy! I lost a tooth.”
He lisped a bit as he said it, and as I held my hand out I saw that his hand had a tooth in it. It was one of the front ones, and I congratulated him on losing it so cleanly. I wondered if he had pulled it out himself, but I put that out of my mind. Brandon didn’t even pull his own splinters out, and I really couldn’t see him yanking out his own teeth. He was six, six and one month as he liked to say, and this was the first tooth he had lost. He was late in that respect, many of his friends had already started losing baby teeth, but he was giddy as he brought this one to me.
“Now the tooth fairy will come and take it away!” he said, skipping off to continue playing.
Ah yes, I had forgotten that part.
Brandon had become obsessed with the Tooth Fairy after his friend Nina had lost her tooth. He thought of her as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio, and he was very excited that she would come through his window and leave money for his teeth. He had asked what she did with all those teeth, where she got all the money, and a thousand other things. I was a pretty creative person, and I had come up with all kinds of stories about what she did with them, where she got the money, how she came in without making a sound, and on and on and on.
I was kind of glad that he had finally lost a tooth because I was starting to run out of material and thought if he experienced it he might lose interest in it.
We put it under his pillow that night and I assured him that it would be gone in the morning and there would be money there when he got up.
Then, of course, I fell asleep waiting for my wife to get home and woke up to find her sleeping beside me and the sun beginning to peek over the horizon.
I went quickly, but quietly, and thanked my lucky stars that Brandon was a sound sleeper. He hadn’t woken up yet, and I took the dollar I was going to put under there out of my pocket and prepared to make the swap. To my surprise, however, the tooth was already gone. No one had left money, but the tooth had disappeared. I looked around, thinking it had slipped out, but it was just gone. I left the dollar anyway, not wanting him to be disappointed, and went back to my room to get a little more shut-eye before the alarm went off.
We never made it to the alarm, because Brandon came in waving the dollar and saying the Tooth Fairy had come.
“Look what the tooth fairy left me. He said it was all for me.”
I told him that was awesome but internally I raised an eyebrow. He? The tooth fairy had always been a woman any other time he’d talked about her. Maybe, I thought, Brandon had just had a dream or something last night. He put the money in his piggy bank and I figured we could maybe put this behind us.
Two days later, as I put him to bed, I put my hand beneath his pillow and felt something strange.
I took my hand out and found another tooth.
“What’s this?” I ask him.
“Oh, I lost another tooth,” Brandon said.
No excitement, no hope that the tooth fairy would come. Just a matter-of-fact tone. I guess that was what I wanted, his obsession with the tooth fairy had ended when he had finally lost a tooth. He’d gone from being absolutely excited to absolutely unphased, and that stopped me for a moment.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had another loose tooth, buddy?”
“I, uh, don’t know. It just kind of happened.”
I put the tooth back under his pillow, telling him to make sure to say something next time, and then I kissed him good night and put him to bed.
When I went to put money under his pillow a little later, though, the tooth wasn’t there. Instead, there was a coin. I took a look at it, thinking it was a half dollar, but realizing I was wrong almost at once. At first, I thought it was one of those weird chocolate coins you sometimes get for Christmas. Turning it, I realized it was just extremely grubby. It was heavy, like it was made out of brass or copper, and the surface looked dirty like it had been at the bottom of a well for quite some time.
I started to take it with me, something in me wanting to keep it away from my son, but I put it back instead. It wasn’t mine, after all, and by the look of it, it was probably something that he treasured. It had been back under his pillow for less than a few seconds before his hand went searching for it. His fingers took hold of it almost greedily as he clutched it, and I decided to take the dollar back with me.
Brandon changed a bit after that night, but it's only in retrospect that I see it.
He became very secretive, not my little buddy like he used to be. Brandon didn’t want to play video games in the living room with me anymore. He didn’t want to read stories at bedtime anymore. He spent a lot of time in his room, and he just seemed to be closing off. His mother laughed at me when I told her I was feeling a little hurt by it.
“He’s just being a kid,” she said, “Kids go through phases sometimes. Don’t take it so personally. In a couple of months, he’ll probably be back to his usual self again.”
I hoped he would, but it was hard to ignore the physical changes that were going on as well.
Not only was Brandon quieter, but it seemed like he had grown. He hadn’t gained a foot in a single week, but sometimes it seemed his fingers were abnormally long, his arms were strangely jointed, and his face was oddly stretched. He would look at me sometimes, look at me like he was thinking about doing something that he knew would make me angry. I didn’t like it, but he never did it right out in the open. Like I said, Brandon never came to sit with me or play video games, but I would sometimes catch him peeking at me from the hallway, or from under the table in the kitchen.
It was creepy, but I figured it was just little kid behavior.
A month after Brandon lost his first tooth, I found another one in his backpack.
Well, not just one. I found five hidden in the front pocket of his backpack after he left it on the kitchen table when he went to the bathroom.
He had become pretty protective of the backpack, putting it in his room or keeping it close to him at all times, and I started getting suspicious of what might be in there. I didn't think it was drugs or anything, he was six, but I thought it might be something weird or dangerous. What if he had a snake or something in there? So when he suddenly ran off to go to the bathroom, I knew this was my chance to have a look. I needed to sign his folder for school anyway, so I took out the folder and looked over the day's report before taking a peek in the pockets. The teeth were just sitting there, bumping together when I poked at them, but they didn’t really look like human teeth. These looked more like animal teeth, and they were too strange to have come out of my son's mouth. They might’ve been from a cat or a dog, I suppose, maybe a
“What are you doing?”
I zipped the backpack and turned around, looking like I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t.
“Nothing, just signing your folder.”
Brandon looked at me with a great deal of distrust, taking the backpack and going to his room without putting his back to me.
I told his mother about the teeth when she came home from work, but she brushed it off again, saying that little kids often collected strange things.
“My brothers collected animal skeletons they found out in the woods,” she said dismissively and she got ready for bed, “Thank goodness it’s just teeth and not a whole skull.”
I let it go, but it was hard not to see what was going on. Brandon started looking like he wasn’t sleeping well. He had huge bags under his eyes, and he was fidgety anytime he was made to sit still, like at dinner or for homework. He would get short and agitated, muttering to himself in a way I couldn’t understand. I listened carefully once when we were doing math homework, and it sounded like he was talking in a different language. He looked up when he saw me noticing, squinting at me with that look of distrust, and it broke my heart to see him like that. Brandon had always been my little buddy, and this sudden change in him was painful to watch.
Two weeks later, I got a call from the school.
They needed to speak to me about something important. Brandon had been in a fight, a fight where he had knocked more than a few of the kids' teeth out. I came down right away, afraid that Brandon was hurt, but when I saw him sitting in the principal's office he looked none the worse for wear. He had a bruise on his cheek, and his hands looked like he beat them against the wall, but he didn’t seem injured or in distress at all. Quite the contrary, Brandon looked happier than I had ever seen him.
I took a seat next to him in the office, waiting to see what they had thought was so important.
“We called you in not because Brandon has been fighting, but because of other rumors going around about him in class.”
“Rumors?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. The student he fought with said Brandon has been making strange deals with other students.”
Shook my head, not quite understanding, “What kind of deals?”
“They say he has been buying people's teeth.”
I shuddered, thinking about the teeth in the bag that I saw not long ago. I looked down at Brandon, questioning him with my eyes as to whether or not this was true. He looked back at me without hesitation, pretty much letting me know that it was.
“He’s been trading his lunch for them. He’s been trading other things for them, too, like toys and other small things. He has allegedly traded over twenty students for their teeth across three grades. Today, the student in question had taken the trade but refused to give him any teeth. Your son responded by beating the teeth out of his mouth.”
I looked back at Brandon, asking what he was thinking? He didn’t bother to answer, just clinched his fist in his lap and looked at the floor. I think that was when it really hit me how much he had changed. The bags under his eyes were dark and deep, and his fingers were long enough that I couldn’t see how anyone didn’t notice. Each finger seemed twice as long as it should be, and as he clinched, I could see a fourth knuckle on each of them.
“The reason we called you in, sir, is to get those teeth back.”
I turned and looked at the principal, “What do you mean?”
He looked a little green as he wiped his forehead with a napkin, “We believe your son has the missing teeth, but he won’t tell us where they are and he won’t give them back to us. We can’t seem to find them, and the mother is hopeful that the dentist can put them back in if they’re not too badly damaged. If nothing else, they want them back so they can take them to the dentist and make sure the teeth are baby teeth and not permanent. Brandon hasn’t said a word about where he put them, and we are deeply troubled by this behavior.”
I looked at Brandon and asked him where the teeth were?
He shook his head, not saying a word.
I asked him again, and when he shook his head this time, I heard something.
Something nearly indistinguishable, but altogether unsettling.
Something was rattling in his mouth.
“We can sit here until you decide to give us those teeth, but you’re not leaving until we get them back. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but,”
The idea that we wouldn’t be leaving seemed to decide him. He bent slowly over the principal desk, making eye contact with the older man the whole time as he opened his mouth. Three teeth fell out as he pushed his tongue out, and none of them appeared to be his. The teeth clattered onto the desk like old dice, and more than one of them had the root hanging from them. As he sat back up I had the sneaking suspicion that he was holding out.
The principal, however, seemed more than okay with what he had gotten back. He told us to go, saying that Brandon was suspended for two weeks, and I collected up my son as we headed for the door. The principal managed not to vomit before we got out of his office, but it was a near thing.
We talked the entire way home.
Well, I talked, and Brandon just sat there and said nothing.
I told him I didn’t know what all this was about, but that he needed to stop. This wasn’t him, this wasn’t like him, and he needed to tell me what was going on so that I could help. I was his dad, I wanted to help him, but I couldn’t help him if he didn’t talk to me. The whole time, he just sat there and stared at me. Most kids who are being chastised look out the window or look at their feet, but he stared directly at me in brazen defiance. His fingers kept flexing, and I saw him put a hand to his pocket more than once. I wanted to tell him to turn them out, to give me the tooth from that kid that he had kept, but something in me didn’t dare. I was loath to admit it, but I was a little bit afraid of my son at that moment. He looked nothing like the boy that I had known for almost seven years. My grandma used to tell stories about babies taken by fairies, and the changlings that they left behind. This reminded me of those stories. The kid in front of me was so fundamentally different from the one I knew that it was almost like I was talking to a different person.
As we pulled up in the yard, I told him he was grounded. No tablet, no TV, no dessert. Brandon didn’t seem to care, he just walked inside and went to his room. His tablet was still on the charger, and his TV remote had been left on the door to his room. I didn’t know what he was doing in there, but it clearly wasn’t playing. He was way too quiet, and when his mother called to tell me she was working a double, I almost cried. I didn’t want to be here alone with him more than I had to be, and that made me feel even worse.
He didn’t come out for dinner, and when I went to bring him his plate a little while later, I heard muffled voices as he spoke to someone.
“I tried to get the teeth, but they caught me.”
I didn’t know who he was talking to, kind of thought he might be talking to himself, but when a gruff voice responded I felt my stomach drop.
“You’ll just have to do better next time.”
The voice was unlike anything I had ever heard. It was deep and watery, like something from the bottom of a well, and it spoke in a way that made its mouth sound strangely full. It was devoid of any kind of kindness or charity, the sounds you sometimes hear when people speak to children. It was an authoritarian invoice, the teacher, and they were not pleased with my son.
“I’m grounded, they suspended me from school. I’m not going to be able to get you any teeth for at least two weeks.”
“Your father has teeth,” it said matter-of-factly, “Your mother has teeth too.”
When he answered, he didn’t sound afraid.
When he answered, it was with cold assuredness.
“They won’t just give them to me. They don’t understand what I’m doing.”
What was he doing? That’s what I wanted to know. I gripped the doorknob, hoping they wouldn’t hear me, and that was when the voice said something that made my blood run cold.
“Then do not ask for them. Take them, like you did from the boy today.”
I opened the door in one fluid motion, and my son looked up guilty as I walked into his room
“Who are you talking to?" I asked.
“No one,” he said much too quickly.
“I heard someone,” I said, “I heard someone in here talking to you, and I wanted to know who it was, and where they went.”
That was a lie. I didn’t think I wanted to know who they were. What I wanted was for them to never come back again. The person had sounded like some kind of demonic fairy from a kid's story, and I was afraid of what I would see if he did come back.
“It’s nothing,” Brandon said much too quickly again, “I was doing voices.”
I talked to him for a little while longer, but I got nothing. He wouldn’t talk to me, he wouldn’t tell me anything, and eventually I just left.
I should’ve left it at that, I should have just left it alone, but I had to try one more time.
It was late, about ten thirty which was pretty late for us, and I decided to try a peace offering. I felt pretty certain he was still awake, I had heard something moving around in there, and so I cut some of the pie I had made to go with dinner and walked to his room. I was going to offer him the pie and see if maybe we could talk. I just wanted to know what it was that had made him change so much. Most of all, I just wanted my son back. It killed me to have him act like this, but as the door came open, I got more answers than I had bargained for.
It was standing over his bed with its arm going under his pillow, and in the darkness of his room, I realized it had to be what he'd been talking to. The pie fell to the ground, but I had a death grip on the plate, and I realized I had sprained my thumb once I was in any state to feel it. I didn’t speak, I could barely breathe and as the thing turned to look at me I realized my fairy theory might not be too far off. It was grubby looking, like something that’s been living in a ditch. Its features were completely covered in something dark that had the texture of earth, except for the two large lamp-like eyes that protrude from its face like bubble lights. It was tall, something I realized as it took its full height. It had been crouching before, putting something under my son’s pillow, and it had to stoop so as not to bang its head on the ceiling, which is about nine feet from the floor. From its back, four insect like wings protruded. They weren't large enough to carry it, but they were large enough to be noticeable. Its hands and arms, the fingers multi-jointed, were far from delicate looking as it wiggled them ceaselessly.
I expected it to charge me, I expected it to attack me, but instead, it raised one huge finger to its face and made a shush sound.
“Shhhh, you’ll wake the baby,” it whispered, and its mouth sounded like it was trying to swallow something.
Then it smiled, and I saw not a double but a triple row of teeth inside its mouth. There’s no order to them, molars next to canines next to bicuspid next to what appear to be fangs and shark teeth. Its mouth is such a mishmash of teeth that it’s impossible not to feel a little woozy when you look at it. It pulled its lips down, somehow containing all those teeth, and before my very eyes, it vanished.
My son was pretty upset when I grabbed him up and carried him out of the house.
I put him in the car, and we waited till his mother got off work before taking him to a nearby motel. I told her what I had seen, as best as I could, and I think she believes there might be something going on now. My son is furious, saying he needs to get back home so that he can do his job, but he won’t say what that is.
Honestly, I think he’s been collecting teeth for whatever that thing was.
When I went back to get us some clothes and check the house, I looked under his pillow and found another of those strange coins. There’s a box under his bed, and inside it’s equal parts teeth and coins. There are around twenty of them, and they’re sitting next to teeth of every shape and every size. Most of them are animal teeth, but some of them are definitely human teeth. I’ve taken the entire box with me, but the phone call I got from my wife before I left the house was what really worried me.
She called to tell me that our son had locked himself in the bathroom, and she was afraid he was hurting himself.
“There’s a weird squelching sound, followed by him yelling and crying.”
He had locked himself in the bathroom, but I went and got the manager to unlock it for us.
What we found there will stay with me for a very long time.
We’re at the hospital now, my wife is in the ER room with him while I sit in the waiting room and wait for updates. The protocol states only one parent can go in at a time, and my son doesn’t want me to go in there. He can’t speak very well, but he made that very clear to my wife. I gave him space, not wanting to exacerbate his condition any more than I had to. I’ve got the box on my lap as I sit out here, and I’m not really sure what to do with it.
Inside are the eight teeth he managed to pull out of his own head before we got him restrained.
Whatever this creature is, it must get its due, and my son was apparently intent on giving it that due.
We'll probably end up having to take him to a mental facility, but I know he isn’t crazy.
I saw that thing, too, and I know it will find him no matter where we take him.
So be very careful when you tell your kids about the tooth fairy.
What comes to collect their teeth might be something far worse than even you could imagine.

“Daddy! I lost a tooth.”
He lisped a bit as he said it, and as I held my hand out I saw that his hand had a tooth in it. It was one of the front ones, and I congratulated him on losing it so cleanly. I wondered if he had pulled it out himself, but I put that out of my mind. Brandon didn’t even pull his own splinters out, and I really couldn’t see him yanking out his own teeth. He was six, six and one month as he liked to say, and this was the first tooth he had lost. He was late in that respect, many of his friends had already started losing baby teeth, but he was giddy as he brought this one to me.
“Now the tooth fairy will come and take it away!” he said, skipping off to continue playing.
Ah yes, I had forgotten that part.
Brandon had become obsessed with the Tooth Fairy after his friend Nina had lost her tooth. He thought of her as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio, and he was very excited that she would come through his window and leave money for his teeth. He had asked what she did with all those teeth, where she got all the money, and a thousand other things. I was a pretty creative person, and I had come up with all kinds of stories about what she did with them, where she got the money, how she came in without making a sound, and on and on and on.
I was kind of glad that he had finally lost a tooth because I was starting to run out of material and thought if he experienced it he might lose interest in it.
We put it under his pillow that night and I assured him that it would be gone in the morning and there would be money there when he got up.
Then, of course, I fell asleep waiting for my wife to get home and woke up to find her sleeping beside me and the sun beginning to peek over the horizon.
I went quickly, but quietly, and thanked my lucky stars that Brandon was a sound sleeper. He hadn’t woken up yet, and I took the dollar I was going to put under there out of my pocket and prepared to make the swap. To my surprise, however, the tooth was already gone. No one had left money, but the tooth had disappeared. I looked around, thinking it had slipped out, but it was just gone. I left the dollar anyway, not wanting him to be disappointed, and went back to my room to get a little more shut-eye before the alarm went off.
We never made it to the alarm, because Brandon came in waving the dollar and saying the Tooth Fairy had come.
“Look what the tooth fairy left me. He said it was all for me.”
I told him that was awesome but internally I raised an eyebrow. He? The tooth fairy had always been a woman any other time he’d talked about her. Maybe, I thought, Brandon had just had a dream or something last night. He put the money in his piggy bank and I figured we could maybe put this behind us.
Two days later, as I put him to bed, I put my hand beneath his pillow and felt something strange.
I took my hand out and found another tooth.
“What’s this?” I ask him.
“Oh, I lost another tooth,” Brandon said.
No excitement, no hope that the tooth fairy would come. Just a matter-of-fact tone. I guess that was what I wanted, his obsession with the tooth fairy had ended when he had finally lost a tooth. He’d gone from being absolutely excited to absolutely unphased, and that stopped me for a moment.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had another loose tooth, buddy?”
“I, uh, don’t know. It just kind of happened.”
I put the tooth back under his pillow, telling him to make sure to say something next time, and then I kissed him good night and put him to bed.
When I went to put money under his pillow a little later, though, the tooth wasn’t there. Instead, there was a coin. I took a look at it, thinking it was a half dollar, but realizing I was wrong almost at once. At first, I thought it was one of those weird chocolate coins you sometimes get for Christmas. Turning it, I realized it was just extremely grubby. It was heavy, like it was made out of brass or copper, and the surface looked dirty like it had been at the bottom of a well for quite some time.
I started to take it with me, something in me wanting to keep it away from my son, but I put it back instead. It wasn’t mine, after all, and by the look of it, it was probably something that he treasured. It had been back under his pillow for less than a few seconds before his hand went searching for it. His fingers took hold of it almost greedily as he clutched it, and I decided to take the dollar back with me.
Brandon changed a bit after that night, but it's only in retrospect that I see it.
He became very secretive, not my little buddy like he used to be. Brandon didn’t want to play video games in the living room with me anymore. He didn’t want to read stories at bedtime anymore. He spent a lot of time in his room, and he just seemed to be closing off. His mother laughed at me when I told her I was feeling a little hurt by it.
“He’s just being a kid,” she said, “Kids go through phases sometimes. Don’t take it so personally. In a couple of months, he’ll probably be back to his usual self again.”
I hoped he would, but it was hard to ignore the physical changes that were going on as well.
Not only was Brandon quieter, but it seemed like he had grown. He hadn’t gained a foot in a single week, but sometimes it seemed his fingers were abnormally long, his arms were strangely jointed, and his face was oddly stretched. He would look at me sometimes, look at me like he was thinking about doing something that he knew would make me angry. I didn’t like it, but he never did it right out in the open. Like I said, Brandon never came to sit with me or play video games, but I would sometimes catch him peeking at me from the hallway, or from under the table in the kitchen.
It was creepy, but I figured it was just little kid behavior.
A month after Brandon lost his first tooth, I found another one in his backpack.
Well, not just one. I found five hidden in the front pocket of his backpack after he left it on the kitchen table when he went to the bathroom.
He had become pretty protective of the backpack, putting it in his room or keeping it close to him at all times, and I started getting suspicious of what might be in there. I didn't think it was drugs or anything, he was six, but I thought it might be something weird or dangerous. What if he had a snake or something in there? So when he suddenly ran off to go to the bathroom, I knew this was my chance to have a look. I needed to sign his folder for school anyway, so I took out the folder and looked over the day's report before taking a peek in the pockets. The teeth were just sitting there, bumping together when I poked at them, but they didn’t really look like human teeth. These looked more like animal teeth, and they were too strange to have come out of my son's mouth. They might’ve been from a cat or a dog, I suppose, maybe a
“What are you doing?”
I zipped the backpack and turned around, looking like I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t.
“Nothing, just signing your folder.”
Brandon looked at me with a great deal of distrust, taking the backpack and going to his room without putting his back to me.
I told his mother about the teeth when she came home from work, but she brushed it off again, saying that little kids often collected strange things.
“My brothers collected animal skeletons they found out in the woods,” she said dismissively and she got ready for bed, “Thank goodness it’s just teeth and not a whole skull.”
I let it go, but it was hard not to see what was going on. Brandon started looking like he wasn’t sleeping well. He had huge bags under his eyes, and he was fidgety anytime he was made to sit still, like at dinner or for homework. He would get short and agitated, muttering to himself in a way I couldn’t understand. I listened carefully once when we were doing math homework, and it sounded like he was talking in a different language. He looked up when he saw me noticing, squinting at me with that look of distrust, and it broke my heart to see him like that. Brandon had always been my little buddy, and this sudden change in him was painful to watch.
Two weeks later, I got a call from the school.
They needed to speak to me about something important. Brandon had been in a fight, a fight where he had knocked more than a few of the kids' teeth out. I came down right away, afraid that Brandon was hurt, but when I saw him sitting in the principal's office he looked none the worse for wear. He had a bruise on his cheek, and his hands looked like he beat them against the wall, but he didn’t seem injured or in distress at all. Quite the contrary, Brandon looked happier than I had ever seen him.
I took a seat next to him in the office, waiting to see what they had thought was so important.
“We called you in not because Brandon has been fighting, but because of other rumors going around about him in class.”
“Rumors?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. The student he fought with said Brandon has been making strange deals with other students.”
Shook my head, not quite understanding, “What kind of deals?”
“They say he has been buying people's teeth.”
I shuddered, thinking about the teeth in the bag that I saw not long ago. I looked down at Brandon, questioning him with my eyes as to whether or not this was true. He looked back at me without hesitation, pretty much letting me know that it was.
“He’s been trading his lunch for them. He’s been trading other things for them, too, like toys and other small things. He has allegedly traded over twenty students for their teeth across three grades. Today, the student in question had taken the trade but refused to give him any teeth. Your son responded by beating the teeth out of his mouth.”
I looked back at Brandon, asking what he was thinking? He didn’t bother to answer, just clinched his fist in his lap and looked at the floor. I think that was when it really hit me how much he had changed. The bags under his eyes were dark and deep, and his fingers were long enough that I couldn’t see how anyone didn’t notice. Each finger seemed twice as long as it should be, and as he clinched, I could see a fourth knuckle on each of them.
“The reason we called you in, sir, is to get those teeth back.”
I turned and looked at the principal, “What do you mean?”
He looked a little green as he wiped his forehead with a napkin, “We believe your son has the missing teeth, but he won’t tell us where they are and he won’t give them back to us. We can’t seem to find them, and the mother is hopeful that the dentist can put them back in if they’re not too badly damaged. If nothing else, they want them back so they can take them to the dentist and make sure the teeth are baby teeth and not permanent. Brandon hasn’t said a word about where he put them, and we are deeply troubled by this behavior.”
I looked at Brandon and asked him where the teeth were?
He shook his head, not saying a word.
I asked him again, and when he shook his head this time, I heard something.
Something nearly indistinguishable, but altogether unsettling.
Something was rattling in his mouth.
“We can sit here until you decide to give us those teeth, but you’re not leaving until we get them back. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but,”
The idea that we wouldn’t be leaving seemed to decide him. He bent slowly over the principal desk, making eye contact with the older man the whole time as he opened his mouth. Three teeth fell out as he pushed his tongue out, and none of them appeared to be his. The teeth clattered onto the desk like old dice, and more than one of them had the root hanging from them. As he sat back up I had the sneaking suspicion that he was holding out.
The principal, however, seemed more than okay with what he had gotten back. He told us to go, saying that Brandon was suspended for two weeks, and I collected up my son as we headed for the door. The principal managed not to vomit before we got out of his office, but it was a near thing.
We talked the entire way home.
Well, I talked, and Brandon just sat there and said nothing.
I told him I didn’t know what all this was about, but that he needed to stop. This wasn’t him, this wasn’t like him, and he needed to tell me what was going on so that I could help. I was his dad, I wanted to help him, but I couldn’t help him if he didn’t talk to me. The whole time, he just sat there and stared at me. Most kids who are being chastised look out the window or look at their feet, but he stared directly at me in brazen defiance. His fingers kept flexing, and I saw him put a hand to his pocket more than once. I wanted to tell him to turn them out, to give me the tooth from that kid that he had kept, but something in me didn’t dare. I was loath to admit it, but I was a little bit afraid of my son at that moment. He looked nothing like the boy that I had known for almost seven years. My grandma used to tell stories about babies taken by fairies, and the changlings that they left behind. This reminded me of those stories. The kid in front of me was so fundamentally different from the one I knew that it was almost like I was talking to a different person.
As we pulled up in the yard, I told him he was grounded. No tablet, no TV, no dessert. Brandon didn’t seem to care, he just walked inside and went to his room. His tablet was still on the charger, and his TV remote had been left on the door to his room. I didn’t know what he was doing in there, but it clearly wasn’t playing. He was way too quiet, and when his mother called to tell me she was working a double, I almost cried. I didn’t want to be here alone with him more than I had to be, and that made me feel even worse.
He didn’t come out for dinner, and when I went to bring him his plate a little while later, I heard muffled voices as he spoke to someone.
“I tried to get the teeth, but they caught me.”
I didn’t know who he was talking to, kind of thought he might be talking to himself, but when a gruff voice responded I felt my stomach drop.
“You’ll just have to do better next time.”
The voice was unlike anything I had ever heard. It was deep and watery, like something from the bottom of a well, and it spoke in a way that made its mouth sound strangely full. It was devoid of any kind of kindness or charity, the sounds you sometimes hear when people speak to children. It was an authoritarian invoice, the teacher, and they were not pleased with my son.
“I’m grounded, they suspended me from school. I’m not going to be able to get you any teeth for at least two weeks.”
“Your father has teeth,” it said matter-of-factly, “Your mother has teeth too.”
When he answered, he didn’t sound afraid.
When he answered, it was with cold assuredness.
“They won’t just give them to me. They don’t understand what I’m doing.”
What was he doing? That’s what I wanted to know. I gripped the doorknob, hoping they wouldn’t hear me, and that was when the voice said something that made my blood run cold.
“Then do not ask for them. Take them, like you did from the boy today.”
I opened the door in one fluid motion, and my son looked up guilty as I walked into his room
“Who are you talking to?" I asked.
“No one,” he said much too quickly.
“I heard someone,” I said, “I heard someone in here talking to you, and I wanted to know who it was, and where they went.”
That was a lie. I didn’t think I wanted to know who they were. What I wanted was for them to never come back again. The person had sounded like some kind of demonic fairy from a kid's story, and I was afraid of what I would see if he did come back.
“It’s nothing,” Brandon said much too quickly again, “I was doing voices.”
I talked to him for a little while longer, but I got nothing. He wouldn’t talk to me, he wouldn’t tell me anything, and eventually I just left.
I should’ve left it at that, I should have just left it alone, but I had to try one more time.
It was late, about ten thirty which was pretty late for us, and I decided to try a peace offering. I felt pretty certain he was still awake, I had heard something moving around in there, and so I cut some of the pie I had made to go with dinner and walked to his room. I was going to offer him the pie and see if maybe we could talk. I just wanted to know what it was that had made him change so much. Most of all, I just wanted my son back. It killed me to have him act like this, but as the door came open, I got more answers than I had bargained for.
It was standing over his bed with its arm going under his pillow, and in the darkness of his room, I realized it had to be what he'd been talking to. The pie fell to the ground, but I had a death grip on the plate, and I realized I had sprained my thumb once I was in any state to feel it. I didn’t speak, I could barely breathe and as the thing turned to look at me I realized my fairy theory might not be too far off. It was grubby looking, like something that’s been living in a ditch. Its features were completely covered in something dark that had the texture of earth, except for the two large lamp-like eyes that protrude from its face like bubble lights. It was tall, something I realized as it took its full height. It had been crouching before, putting something under my son’s pillow, and it had to stoop so as not to bang its head on the ceiling, which is about nine feet from the floor. From its back, four insect like wings protruded. They weren't large enough to carry it, but they were large enough to be noticeable. Its hands and arms, the fingers multi-jointed, were far from delicate looking as it wiggled them ceaselessly.
I expected it to charge me, I expected it to attack me, but instead, it raised one huge finger to its face and made a shush sound.
“Shhhh, you’ll wake the baby,” it whispered, and its mouth sounded like it was trying to swallow something.
Then it smiled, and I saw not a double but a triple row of teeth inside its mouth. There’s no order to them, molars next to canines next to bicuspid next to what appear to be fangs and shark teeth. Its mouth is such a mishmash of teeth that it’s impossible not to feel a little woozy when you look at it. It pulled its lips down, somehow containing all those teeth, and before my very eyes, it vanished.
My son was pretty upset when I grabbed him up and carried him out of the house.
I put him in the car, and we waited till his mother got off work before taking him to a nearby motel. I told her what I had seen, as best as I could, and I think she believes there might be something going on now. My son is furious, saying he needs to get back home so that he can do his job, but he won’t say what that is.
Honestly, I think he’s been collecting teeth for whatever that thing was.
When I went back to get us some clothes and check the house, I looked under his pillow and found another of those strange coins. There’s a box under his bed, and inside it’s equal parts teeth and coins. There are around twenty of them, and they’re sitting next to teeth of every shape and every size. Most of them are animal teeth, but some of them are definitely human teeth. I’ve taken the entire box with me, but the phone call I got from my wife before I left the house was what really worried me.
She called to tell me that our son had locked himself in the bathroom, and she was afraid he was hurting himself.
“There’s a weird squelching sound, followed by him yelling and crying.”
He had locked himself in the bathroom, but I went and got the manager to unlock it for us.
What we found there will stay with me for a very long time.
We’re at the hospital now, my wife is in the ER room with him while I sit in the waiting room and wait for updates. The protocol states only one parent can go in at a time, and my son doesn’t want me to go in there. He can’t speak very well, but he made that very clear to my wife. I gave him space, not wanting to exacerbate his condition any more than I had to. I’ve got the box on my lap as I sit out here, and I’m not really sure what to do with it.
Inside are the eight teeth he managed to pull out of his own head before we got him restrained.
Whatever this creature is, it must get its due, and my son was apparently intent on giving it that due.
We'll probably end up having to take him to a mental facility, but I know he isn’t crazy.
I saw that thing, too, and I know it will find him no matter where we take him.
So be very careful when you tell your kids about the tooth fairy.
What comes to collect their teeth might be something far worse than even you could imagine.