'The Three Imposters' by Arthur Machen

    First of all you will have to pay attention to the prologue.  Do not regard as a long winded introduction to the main story.  It holds the key and introduces you to the imposters and their aliases.  You are  therefore primed to disbelieve everything they may say and enjoy the irony of their fabrications while seeking to discover why they go to such lengths to tell Dyson and Phillipps egregious rigmaroles.  That reason you will never discover  because it is opaque to the profane.  In this realm causality operates on another level not the normal billiard ball one which is a matter of transmission of gross force on the material plane. The imposters lie out of sheer jouissance in the activity.  To impose and rook the stranger is a goal in itself.  Its what they do and they are good at it.  But why do Dyson and Phillipps meet them to be the objects of their imposture? My intuition is that the gold Tiberius, that coin a lone survivor of coinage struck as the celebration of infamy is accursed and has brought destruction on its possessors down through the centuries, generally hidden from sight and fought for when it occasionally turns up. It has therefore become karmically magnetized and though the Three Imposters do not know that Dyson has the coin their will to evil draws them into his company and to Phillipps’s who also knows about the coin.  

The action of the energies evoked by the coin are an example of what Hindu ritualists call ‘apurva’. Why, they asked, do rituals which must fructify appear to act with a non-linear causality? Are there subtle seeds which act to  create a catenary of action or must we accept that this action is apurva or unprecedented, uncanny if you will?  Shankaracarya the great teacher demurs.  It is the will of God that makes everything happen.  

The evil will and the vile energies that surround the coin make me fear for the future of Dyson and Phillips or whoever chances to bring it into the light of day.  The novel is a masterpiece of irony and palindromic fabulism.

Phillipps is most certainly wrong:

"I certainly think," replied Phillipps, "that, if you pull out that coin and flourish it under people's noses as you are doing at the present moment, you will very probably find yourself in touch with the criminal, or a criminal. You will undoubtedly be robbed with violence. Otherwise, I see no reason why either of us should be troubled. No one saw you secure the coin, and no one knows you have it. I, for my part, shall sleep peacefully, and go about my business with a sense of security and a firm dependence on the natural order of things. The events of the evening, the adventure in the street, have been odd, I grant you, but I resolutely decline to have any more to do with the matter, and, if necessary, I shall consult the police. I will not be enslaved by a gold Tiberius, even though it swims into my ken in a manner which is somewhat melodramatic."