The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  Of course Andrew couldn’t just throw him out. It was too much money, after all. Rose would hand him the hedge trimmers and the vaccuum and tell him to fix the place up himself. She’d quit, and then there’d be no inn, no nothing. He pictured himself happy, ten years older, maybe, a little bit stouter, sitting at a corner table in the restaurant, a cheery fire in the grate, a pint glass of Bass Ale in his hand, things upstairs being seen to, the chef going about his business in the kitchen, the money rolling in. It was a pleasant enough dream, all in all—a comfortable dream. And it was true that it wouldn’t come to pass if he was all the time throwing the guests out.

  He sighed, tugging on his slippers. Squinting at the bookshelves, he stood up and cocked his head sideways, reading titles. There was a book gone, missing. He was certain of it. He looked closer, studying the titles, remembering how the books had been arranged. There were two books gone … three. He’d been robbed.

  FIVE

  “Now therefore. I think that, without the risk of any further serious objection occurring to you. I may state what I believe to be the truth.—that beauty has been appointed by the Deity to be one of the elements by which the human soul is continually sustained …”

  John Ruskin

  Lectures on Architecture and Painting

  “WHAT THE HELL?” he muttered, thinking at first that he must recently have been looking at the missing books and then forgotten to put them back. Or maybe he hadn’t unboxed them yet. Maybe they were in the garage. They weren’t, though, and he knew it. It was impossible; they were gone. That was the long and short of it. Someone had taken them, and it was fairly clear who that someone was. Angry, he plucked up a pen from the dresser and looked about for a bit of paper. Finding nothing, he wrenched his handkerchief out of his pocket, and, stretching it tight across the top of the dresser, he wrote down titles on it: I Go Pogo was gone, and it had been signed, too, to Morton Jonwolly from Walt Kelly. There were two Don Blandings gone—Hula Moons and Vagabond’s House—both signed, although the signatures were almost worthless. What else? Not much of value. An unsigned copy of Witherspoon’s Liverpool Jarge and a copy of Gerhardi’s Pending Heaven. That was it, at least from a hasty glance. It had been a weirdly selective thief—either a lunatic or someone who had taken the time to study things out.

  Andrew shoved the pen into his pocket. There was the spoon, still in there. He plucked it out, looked around for some place to put it, and when nothing better suggested itself he slid it onto a bookshelf, in behind Charles Dickens.

  “Rose!” he shouted, striding toward the door. Thievery in the house—that was the last straw. “Rose!”

  Rose stepped out of the den, a swatch of fabric in her hand. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s happened?”

  “Thievery, that’s what. My books, stolen.”

  “All of them?”

  “No, just selected volumes. He knew what he was after. It was your man in the hat. It had to be. I thought you said he only fingered the books in the library.”

  “Well he did,” said Rose. “At least while I was there. He might have sneaked in, I guess, while I assumed he was on the porch with Mr. Pennyman.”

  “I dare say he did. Let me interview these people from now on, will you? We’ll be robbed blind at this rate.”

  Rose turned back toward the den. “Gladly,” she said. “Interview anyone you please.”

  “And I will, too,” shouted Andrew, thinking immediately that the retort sounded weak and foolish. He wasn’t sure he knew what he meant by it. By golly he wouldn’t be robbed though, not in his own house. And by a fat man in an Oriental robe, too, and wearing a clown hat. What was the world coming to? Was it rotting away under his nose? He slammed upstairs and into Aunt Naomi’s room, ready to give hell to the cats if they asked for it. But they’d gone out the window, apparently, and Aunt Naomi was asleep in the chair. He picked up her half-empty plate and went back out, muttering his way down the stairs.

  He laid the plate on the kitchen counter and stepped outside into the backyard where he opened the lid to the trash can, thinking that he’d been hasty to throw out the bag of poison, though he had no clear idea why at that moment he wanted to keep it—who or what he wanted to poison. The thief, certainly, was long gone by now.

  He realized suddenly that he was striding around aimlessly, as if frantic to keep the world from collapsing on his head but not knowing what to prop up first. He had to do something, though. He was apparently living in a world full of rats, and they were growing more bold by the day. The trash can was empty. The poison was gone. Surprised, he checked the other can. The ‘possum was gone, too. Rat control must have come around for the ‘possum, found the pitched-out poison and taken it, too. Well to hell with them.

  He slumped back inside. It was just nine o’clock, and all in all the most hellish night he’d spent in months. Rose would be going up to bed within the half hour, and wouldn’t speak to him first. She was miffed. But by golly, her inviting criminals in to have a go at his books—that was no damn good. He walked into the library and sat down, realizing at once that he couldn’t sit. He needed a walk, that’s what. A walk in the fog. He loved the smell of fog on concrete with the smell of the ocean just beyond. It was like an elixir.

  He started for the front door, realizing as he reached for the doorknob that he couldn’t just walk out. Rose would think he’d left in anger and there’d be no way later to insist that he’d just gone out to clear his head. He turned around and poked into the den, where she sat sewing up a slipcase for the cushion on the library window seat.

  “Thought I’d step out for a bit,” Andrew said, grinning at her.

  “That would be nice.”

  “Just for a walk. I’ve got to think this out.”

  “What a good idea.”

  “That damned robed man …”

  Rose shook her head and frowned. Then she held up the business she was sewing and turned it right-side-out, inspecting the seam at the corner. She didn’t say anything more.

  After a moment Andrew ducked away and out the front door, into the misty evening. He felt more doomful than ever. It seemed as if there were forces that conspired against him. He remembered suddenly Aunt Naomi’s two thousand dollars, and it seemed that perhaps some few things had gone right that day after all.

  But then, as if all the ghastly business this evening had seen its opportunity and leaped in to pollute things utterly, the money in his wallet was suddenly loathsome to him. What did it mean but that he was dependent on old Aunt Naomi? Here was Rose, sewing away in the den, doing something, for goodness sake. And what was he?—a man who lounged around and hoodwinked money out of an old cockeyed woman whom he pretended to despise but didn’t. He was the despicable one. He was mean and base; there were no two ways about it. Rose had seen through him at last. He would be a lucky man if she ever spoke to him again. She hadn’t stolen his books either. She put up with them, in fact. They cluttered up every room in the house. Rose didn’t say a word about them. She dusted them. She shelved them happily when he left them lying around. It wasn’t her fault if men from secret societies sneaked in and pinched them.

  And what about this “society” business? What about the funny hat and the robe? There was a good deal too much of that sort of thing in the wind recently: Pickett with his talk about blowfish; Pennyman lounging about in the dark with the air of a man possessed of secret knowledge; Aunt Naomi with her spoon and her sudden fear of silver quarters; and now this Atlantean, or whatever he was, snatching books. He seemed to know what he was after, too, as if he’d been in the house before, perhaps, and had snooped things out.

  The fog hovered heavy and wet. There wasn’t a breath of a sea breeze. He walked down the alley, past the back of Señor Corky’s, and then left on Main Street, past Walt’s and the Potholder and a half-dozen darkened stores and out onto the old pier, scuffing along. What did it mean? Was Pickett right? Was something going on? Something secret and vast? Did a scattering of
ancient men control the turnings of the world, and if so, what were they doing in Seal Beach? The idea struck him suddenly as being very funny. He nearly laughed out loud; only the night was so dark and foggy and silent that laughter wouldn’t have worked. It would have made things horrible.

  But the thought of it—a few old men like master puppeteers, working the rest of them, making them caper and dance and bow and scrape, as if humanity were a sort of enormous farce and in the sad position of never being able to see the joke because they were the joke. Somehow it seemed reasonable enough, especially on such a night as this.

  Well, so be it. What did he care? Someone had to run the show. It might as well be these wandering Caretakers. Andrew couldn’t begin to run an inn. It was a damned good thing that the business of running the world hadn’t been left to him. Rose might make a go of it. All in all, though, it made little difference who was pulling the strings, as long as they left him alone, as long as they didn’t yank the wrong string and bring the whole thing down in a heap. But they weren’t entirely letting him alone, were they?

  He found himself at the end of the pier, by Len’s Bait House, staring off into the mist. He could just see the gray Pacific below, the ground swell humping through oily and smooth, almost the same color as the fog. The scarred iron railing, beaded with mist, lay cold beneath his hands and the air smelled of fish. Along the side of the bait house, water drip-dripped into a vast sink where fishermen, on more hospitable evenings, cleaned their catch.

  All at once the shifting ocean seemed to him to symbolize all the mysteries in the universe. He recalled reading, as a boy, an account of the netting of a marine coelacanth by fishermen off the coast of eastern Africa. There had been a drawing of a black fish with an odd arrangement of fins and great scales the size of thumbnails and a mouthful of teeth. Science had been surprised. Such a fish was extinct. It had been relegated to the job of being a fossil. Now here was one in a net, which meant that there were more in the depths of the ocean, swimming through the dark waters among—what? Who could say?

  The surprising thing was that anyone had been surprised. The fishermen, certainly, weren’t surprised. They’d spent their lives on the ocean, bobbing along in small boats, peering over the side into seas of sargasso weed, tangled in the topmost branches of kelp forests, watching the sun sink and the night drift in and the green-tinged moon rising out of the water like a transmarine Venus and hearing the quiet splash of restless things disturbing the surface of the dark waters and then disappearing again into the depths.

  They must have wondered a thousand times at the shadows that shifted beneath the evening swell, beneath their puny tacked-together boat. Nothing that came from the sea would really have surprised them. Something in them would have nodded and said, “At last. Here it is. It’s come.” That’s how Andrew felt—as if nothing at all would surprise him: aliens landing in saucers, pigs bringing around a spoon early in the morning, the discovery that the Wandering Jew was at work tinkering with the earth as if it were a clockwork mechanism. He had read in a book of myths the story of a wizard who had gone out fishing on the Mediterranean Sea, trolling with a magical coin. The wizard had caught an enormous fish—the Leviathan itself—and just as the beast had swallowed the coin, a great, shadowy counterpoint fish had descended out of the shadows of the heavens and swallowed the moon. Coins, coins, coins. And now this telephone call from the man Pfennig. It was maddening, but it would put itself right in time. Everything put itself right in time. Either that or it didn’t.

  Andrew shivered. He’d forgotten to put on his jacket. He was wearing his bedroom slippers and it felt to him suddenly as if the loose, slip-on shoes were full of fog, as if he were tramping down the pier wearing a pair of ghostly fishbowls. Rose would have gone up to bed by now. She’d be asleep. He dreaded having to wake her up to set things straight. He wouldn’t let the night slip by without it, though. There’d be no weighty silence at breakfast.

  He turned around to set a course for home, nearly pitching over onto his face at the sight of Pennyman, holding his stick in one hand and with his reeking pipe in his mouth, not fifteen feet distant, all alone on the pier. He wore his white coat and he bent over the railing as if to catch a glimpse of the sea. It looked to Andrew as if he held a spool of fishing line and was dangling it over the side, thinking to hook a flounder, perhaps, and then pull it in with his hands. Lamplight shone off whatever it was that was tied onto the end of the line—a fishing lure, maybe a bass spoon; it was too dim and foggy for Andrew to see it clearly. There sounded the plunk of it hitting the water and it seemed that at that instant the pier shook, as if a monumental wave had broken across the pilings. It was coincidence, of course, as if the universe were playing along with Pennyman, abetting him in his posing and pretense.

  Andrew decided that he wouldn’t even ask about Pennyman’s fishing. He would ignore Pennyman and all of his affairs. He was one down every time he showed an interest in the man. Without looking up, Pennyman said, “Out for a stroll, are you?” and he tugged a couple of times on his line.

  “That’s right.” Andrew’s heart flailed like a machine stamping out nails. He set out at once toward Main Street. He could see the comfortable glow of streetlamps disappearing down toward the highway, and the headlights of a car that motored toward the mouth of the pier then swung off down the alley.

  “Looking for something?” asked Pennyman as Andrew strode past.

  “No, just walking. Getting a little air.”

  “Something in the air tonight, isn’t there?”

  “Fog,” said Andrew, nodding and clumping away, wishing he weren’t abroad in his bedroom slippers. He thought suddenly of what the fog must have done to his hair, but he chased the thought off, noticing that it hadn’t, somehow, ruined Pennyman’s hair, and wondering why that was. There was something in the air tonight; just as Pennyman had said. And it wasn’t just fog and darkness, either. It had been drifting in for a week or more, and it would no doubt keep on drifting in until its features coalesced out of the gray and it made itself known.

  The moon peeked through the parting mist just as Andrew stepped off the pier and out onto the sand, as if it were having a quick glance at what sort of man it was who was out fishing after mysteries. A wave broke softly along the shore, glowing with an eerie phosphorescence in the light of the moon, which looked uncommonly pale and distant and lonesome up there, winking and bobbing in the briefly starry heavens like the reflection of a dream. Then, in the slip of an instant, the fog billowed through again, swallowing the moon utterly. Andrew set out for home, scuffing along the deserted beach. He could just see the dim figure of Pennyman slouched over the railing at the end of the pier. In the now moonless night the waves no longer glowed, but out in the water, beneath the rolling swell, there gleamed a whitish light, as if a company of water goblins were gathering mussels from the pier pilings by the guttering light of an undersea candle, or as if some glowing, deep-water monster had drifted up out of a submarine grotto, attracted by Pennyman’s lure.

  The house was dark—everyone asleep. Pennyman, of course, was out fooling away the night on the pier, up to whatever it was he was up to. As Andrew stood outside, leaning against the curb tree looking at the house, he wondered exactly what it was he’d say to Rose. He decided to have a drink first—a glass of beer, maybe. He still was on the edge of feeling foul. The walk hadn’t entirely done the trick. His books were gone; Pennyman had made a fool of him; and worst, he’d made a fool of himself, whining at Rose about nonsense.

  He half-wished he smoked a pipe; it would be just the thing—outdoors on a night like this. It would be a comfort. But he numbered smoking among the vices he’d been spared, and he put the thought aside. There was a rustling off in the bushes—no doubt one of Naomi’s cats, out fouling the flowerbeds. Damn them. He’d have to hit Farm Supply for some of those anti-cat stakes. If he couldn’t bring himself to trap the creatures, then the least he could do was make it clear to them who ran the show�
��put them in their place.

  But it wasn’t a cat. It appeared just then, a ‘possum, sniffing along behind its foolish pointy nose. It was a big one, out marauding. It wandered along to the crawlspace under the house, where it hooked its paw behind the wood-framed screen that covered the space and tore the screen loose, frame and all, ducking away into the darkness. Andrew went across and examined the frame and screen. It had never been fixed properly to the house, just tilted in, sort of holding itself up—as barriers went, it was apparently no match for a determined ’possum.

  In the soft dirt around the space were a dozen of the creature’s footprints, plain as day. Maybe Pickett was right; maybe he would show them to Rose. That would cement things. All suspicion would be swept away. He tilted the little door back into its hiatus and then stood up, debating with himself. He was a fan of ’possums. He liked the idea that there were wild creatures out and about in the neighborhood, living in the urban sprawl of Southern California as if the coastal chaparral and grasslands hadn’t been swept away a hundred years earlier.

  He remembered the first time he’d seen the flock of wild parrots fly past overhead. It had been in the autumn, some years back. There was something mystical about the green, raucous flock of tropical birds cutting across the gray skies above Long Beach, winging down to roost in the broken-out windows of an abandoned building. Parrots and ’possums—they were a sort of weird counterpoint to the deadening, soulless technology of the modern age.