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Creepypasta: The Nail Collector

A lot of people collect things these days. In my opinion it’s a sign of society becoming increasingly focused on cold numbers over intangible things like emotion, but that’s a rant and a half for another day. Besides, I collect things too. I collect nails.

Not fingernails, that’d be gross. I mean the metal variety. Carpentry nails, woodworking and leatherworking nails, builder’s nails, and I’m particularly into the heavy nine-inch variety they use for coffins too. The other people in Alpenview think I’m a bit eccentric, but I’m perfectly harmless so they needn’t worry. They think I collect the nails because I used to be a carpenter, and I let them think that because it’s preferable to having to explain the truth.

Every day I go into town, wandering the streets and construction sites of Alpenview looking for nails. I carry a metal lunchbox with me to keep from spilling them on my worn-down shoes, and on a good day I can expect to make four or five trips back and forth from the temporary pile in my tool shed. At sundown each evening, I head back to my house. Then I move the pile inside with a wheelbarrow where I just dump it on the floor in the front hall. The nails won’t be staying there for long.

A little backstory first: I live on a hill. They say people used to dig up strange things on my hill before I built my house here. Burnt bones from some sort of animal covered in wax. Clay vessels inlaid with illustrations of people with cyclopean eyes and no mouths. Blocks of different minerals that had been fused together and the like. I don’t worry about those things. I just head down the stairs to the basement of my house, with a hammer in my hand and the lunchbox full of nails in the other. I stop at the cellar door, which by now has been reinforced repeatedly and has thousands upon thousands of nails ringing it. Some have been fused with the wood.

I don’t hold on to the nails, you see. I use every one, and I need to use every one. I’m trying to keep them from getting out of the basement.