The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  He was struck suddenly with inspiration, and grinning, he bent over the paper, shifting the pencil to his left hand in order to make a general mess of the note. “MOKE DAT YIGARETTE,” he wrote, in a laborious, back-slanted hand, all the letters cockeyed and barely resembling each other. It was perfect. It meant nothing at all, but it seemed to imply something—smoke, perhaps, maybe poison smoke, maybe what? Ziggurats, mystical pyramids—certainly nothing that Pennyman could be sure of.

  Andrew had debated cutting letters out of a magazine and gluing them on, but that was cheap, certainly, and would deflate the whole thing accordingly. He traced over the letters, darkening them, and dotted the i with a happy face. That would kill him. Andrew nearly laughed out loud. What would Pennyman make of it? Nothing. There was nothing on earth that he could make of it, and therein lay the beauty of it.

  It would purely and simply flatten him out, like drinking undiluted grain alcohol by mistake. He’d think it was written by a foreigner at first, but then it would seem less and less likely to him that a foreigner would choose to utter such a phrase at all, and less likely yet that he would so weirdly misspell it. After the first few moments of numbed confusion that would surely follow Pennyman’s opening it up and reading it, then rereading it and turning it over, a fog of genuine bewilderment would rise in his mind. There would follow a moment of fear and wild alarm. Here, he would say to himself, is something I don’t at all understand. And the idea of it would paralyze him.

  Pickett would be proud of Andrew, although Pickett would be shy of sending it. In truth Pickett had a little too much fear of these Caretakers, whoever they were, and would balk at the idea of taking them on. He was the man to study them. It was up to Andrew to step out of the shadows and confront them. He misfolded the letter, crammed it into its tiny envelope, and sealed it with Scotch tape. All in all it was an impressive package. He decided to drive to the Naples post office to mail it, just to throw Pennyman off the scent. And on the way back he’d stop by the telephone company and order up a phone for Pennyman’s room and an extension for the attic observatory. Andrew would graciously offer to pay the charges, except for long-distance calls, of course. Pennyman needn’t know about the extension.

  He considered for a moment whether he ought to push things just a little bit: not a bloody horse’s head in Pennyman’s bed or anything like that—but a lizard in his shoe, perhaps, or some fairly horrible substance like honey or cornstarch or sulphur dissolved in his hair oil, or maybe a gag from the joke shop—rubber excrement, say,—on the toe of his shoe. Andrew started to write out a list, a battle plan, but then he thought better of it and tore the list apart, stuffing it into his coat pocket. He’d keep no records. And for the moment at least he’d abandon the idea of those sorts of gags. They were the sort of thing that would give a man away, and they weren’t half the ploy that the note was. The note was a corker.

  It was just two in the afternoon. The fog had burned off entirely, but there was still just the hint of moisture in the air. He’d break out the paint and brushes in an hour, when it was drier. How long could it take to get a good section of wall painted? A couple of hours? He’d have a really solid go at it later, after he’d mailed the letter and hit the phone company.

  Writing the note had cheered him considerably. He was finally doing something, for heaven’s sake, and was no longer just the passive observer idling away his time in a chair and getting his toe trod on by people with destinations. He went out the door whistling, driving slowly past the house on his way toward the boulevard in order to assess this business of painting it, and calculating as he drove just how much a man like him might accomplish once he rolled up his sleeves and pitched in.

  He hadn’t driven for more than eight minutes—up the Coast Highway and across the bridge onto Second Street—when he saw Pennyman tapping along the sidewalk. He looked poorly, somehow, as if he were showing his age. In fact, with the afternoon sunlight shining on him he looked almost like a walking mummy, and his hair was slick with oil, as if it had taken half a gallon or so to make it cooperate. The sight of him in that state almost made Andrew whistle a tune.

  He stepped on the brake and started to turn off onto one of the little streets leading up to the Marine Stadium, but then he swerved back onto Second Street again and angled in toward the curb. It wouldn’t do to lose Pennyman. There were a thousand streets for him to disappear into. It was better to park the car and follow on foot. He locked the doors and jumped out, fed dimes and nickels to the parking meter, and loped along up the sidewalk in order to catch up. Pennyman was walking briskly and determinedly.

  Andrew waited for a break in the traffic, keeping well away down the block and lingering now and then in the storefront shadows so as to appear leisurely. Pennyman rounded a corner and disappeared, heading toward the isthmus and Alamitos Beach, and Andrew jogged across the street in pursuit, slowing down as he came to the corner and half-expecting Pennyman to be waiting there for him, just out of sight. He found himself in front of Moneywort’s Tropical Fish, run now by Moneywort’s nephew, a man referred to only as “Adams” who’d worked there for years, making Moneywort’s life miserable while Moneywort was still alive. He was a nasty sort altogether, and the place had declined and lost much of its magic since Moneywort’s death.

  Andrew put his hands in his pockets and slouched along. He’d have a quick look around the corner, and if Pennyman were there, anticipating him, he’d pretend that he was simply heading for Moneywort’s, to buy feeder goldfish for the Surinam toad—which wouldn’t, in fact, be a bad idea. The toad would be happy with some goldfish, and there was something cheerful and solid about the notion of a happy toad. He’d buy dried shrimps for Aunt Naomi’s cats, too, just to cement the impression that he was a friend to cats. Well … He admitted it to himself. He seemed almost to be a friend to cats. It was a half dozen of them all at once in the attic that gave him the pip.

  Here was the corner. He stepped past it, down off the curb and heading across toward the Texaco station, where he would conspicuously get a drink of water at the fountain. He’d wait until he was almost there to glance down the street, and make it look as if there was nothing anxious about him, as if the last thing in the world he was doing was following someone. But he couldn’t wait. Halfway across the street he turned his head to the side and pretended to scratch his neck. The long block stretching away toward Naples Lane was empty; there wasn’t a soul on it except for a woman in hair curlers who was watering her lawn.

  Andrew continued straight on across, cutting over to the gas station drinking fountain, which was clogged with chewing gum. He turned away in disgust after having pretended to drink. Either Pennyman had slipped into one of the houses farther along the block or else he’d gone into Moneywort’s, through the back door. Of course he had.

  Andrew would have to make up his mind quickly. He couldn’t appear to be hanging about. The die was cast. He pushed into the tropical fish shop, reaching up immediately to shush the bell that would jingle to announce his arrival, and prepared to be pleasantly surprised to see Pennyman there. But there was no sign of Pennyman. The outer room of the shop was empty.

  Feeling like a private investigator out of a forties movie, he eased the door shut behind him and let go of the bell. There was silence except for the hum of aquaria. The shop was almost dim, lit only by a couple of incandescent lamps near the counter and by countless twenty-five-watt bulbs in aquarium reflectors, the light of which was darkened, somehow, by the shadowy water in the tanks, and cast a shifting, murky glow over the dank concrete floor. There was the sound of bubbling airstones and the pleasantly musty smell of waterweeds and wet sand and fish.

  The shop comprised a half-dozen small rooms with corridors leading back and forth. Pennyman could be in any one of them, waiting for him. Andrew cocked his head and listened. There was the faint sound of murmuring in the back of the shop, and then the sound of low, unpleasant laughter.

  He tiptoed past the counter and in
among the aquaria, watched by a thousand hovering fish that blinked out of grottoes built of waterfall rock and weighted driftwood and kelp-like stands of elodea and foxtail and Amazon swordplant. The murmuring grew louder and then fell away. There sounded a brief clattering and splashing and then silence again. Andrew peered past a narrow doorway into another room of aquaria. Beyond that was a broad storeroom with a door that fronted the alley down which Pennyman must have come. If he were in the shop at all. He mightn’t be, of course. Andrew slid into a shadow, peered back over his shoulder, and then crouched down onto his knees, peeking around the jamb. There was Pennyman all right, just as he’d guessed, but alone in the storeroom. He stood with his back to Andrew.

  One wall of the storeroom was simply an enormous aquarium—easily a thousand gallons, probably more like two thousand. It stretched from halfway up the wall to the ceiling, encased in hammered steel along the perimeter and braced every four feet or so. It must have opened into the attic, so that it would seem from the floor of the attic to be a sort of rectangular pool. A dozen stupendous carp, scaly and golden in the glow of hidden, overhead bulbs, clustered in the corner of the tank. The water was agitated and water plants were torn loose and floating.

  Suddenly a broad net plunged into the water of the aquarium, and directly after that a head appeared along with the hand and arm holding the net. It was the head of Adams, Moneywort’s worthless nephew, who was trying to dip out a fish. He was shirtless and wore a skin-diving mask and snorkel, and his dark hair swirled in the moving water as he looked out through the thick glass at Pennyman, who gestured impatiently toward the tank. The man swung the net ponderously at a big carp that had strayed away from the crowd huddling on the bottom. The net crept along through the water, though, and the carp easily eluded it, but made the mistake of fleeing into a back corner. The net wavered in toward it, and the carp nosed frantically against either wall of the tank, befuddled by having too many options. It burst away in a wild rush, swirling up sediment from the bottom, straight into the net, which Adams hauled up and out of the water.

  There were noises in the attic: drippings and splashings, a curse and the sound of compressed air being blown into a plastic bag. Then Adams appeared on the little tilted stair-ladder that angled into the attic crawlspace, struggling to carry a long, lidded Styrofoam box. Pennyman stepped across to grab the end of it, and Andrew pulled back out of sight. It wouldn’t do to be seen crouching in the doorway. Then he stood up slowly and straightened his coat, expecting the two men to wander out toward the front of the shop now, and find him. Just then the bell over the front door began to jangle.

  Andrew hunched over to peer into a tank full of marine tropicals. Reflected in the glass of the tank he could see two doors—the door to the storeroom and a kitty-corner door leading out to the corridor that connected to another room full of aquaria and also led out to the rest of the shop. He pretended to study the fish in the tank in front of him. Adams appeared and disappeared past the second doorway, going out to see who it was that had come in. He hadn’t seen Andrew. Then there was the sound of the back door shutting; that would be Pennyman, going out the same way he’d come in.

  Andrew thought hard and fast. Pennyman was gone—or so it seemed—and that was good. Should he follow? It would be easy enough to slip out the same door. Adams wouldn’t see him that way—wouldn’t wonder how Andrew had got in without dinging the front door bell. But somehow Andrew didn’t want to leave, or rather, he didn’t much want to follow Pennyman any longer. There was something mortally dangerous about the man and in the power he seemed to have over people. Today especially. In the watery light of the storeroom he had looked like Mr. Death, like the personification of evil and decay. Andrew would wait for Pickett. Pickett was due home soon enough. Why press it?

  But where was Pennyman going with the carp? Certainly not back to the inn. Andrew wouldn’t stand for that, for Pennyman setting up aquaria. Was he going to eat it? Bring it to Rose as a gift? It was probably a taste he’d acquired in the Orient. Heaven knew what kinds of tastes he hadn’t acquired in the Orient. Adams slipped past the door again and into the storeroom.

  The sudden appearance of Adams had been startling, but in a moment Andrew realized he was safe; he still hadn’t been seen. There would be no chance of sliding out the back door, though. He waited. There was nothing to panic about. He was a customer now, and nothing else. He still wanted those feeder fish and the shrimps for the cats. In a bit, when he was sure it was a good idea, he’d step quietly back out to the front of the shop and tug on the bell a couple of times, pretending that he had just that moment come in.

  He focused on the fish gliding around in the aquarium before him: fat clown fish lazying back and forth through the poisonous tentacles of blue anemones. Somehow it seemed to signify to Andrew; it seemed as if it ought to be a metaphor or something, and he thought idly about how the most disconnected things developed secret connections when you saw them in the right sort of light—moonlight, maybe, or the suffused light of an aquarium. He wondered what it might mean—the clown fish and the anemones—and he listened to the momentary silence and then to Adams in the back room whispering, “Mr. Pennyman?” Adams waited, as if he were listening, too, and then he said it again, like a conspirator, very low and urgently. Mr. Pennyman, of course, didn’t answer.

  There was a hand on Andrew’s shoulder suddenly, and Andrew nearly shrieked. He couldn’t, though: There was a hand over his mouth, too. He stiffened, wondering whether to slam his assailant in the rib cage with his elbow or to pretend to be a surprised customer—which he was, really. The hand on his shoulder had a ring on it that Andrew recognized—a round signet sort of ring that looked like an old doubloon, or some other vaguely familiar old coin.

  He turned his head slowly, and the hand released his shoulder. There was Uncle Arthur, standing behind him, the hand with the ring on it just touching his lips. The old man shook his head and took his other hand away from Andrew’s mouth. Andrew relaxed. He’d been holding his breath, and he let it out now in a long whoosh. He started to speak, but Uncle Arthur cut him off with a gesture, then shook his head again and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder toward the front door. Andrew nodded and set out alone, muffling the bell again and squinting at the bright sunlight when he opened the door.

  It wasn’t until he was outside and walking back up Second Street toward his car that he began to wonder why in the world Uncle Arthur was messing around in Moneywort’s shop. He and Moneywort had been friends, but now Moneywort was dead, and Arthur had little interest in tropical fish—no real reason for visiting the shop. Andrew would have plenty of mysteries to lay at Pickett’s feet, although he wouldn’t, alas, have any shrimps to lay at the feet of the cats.

  So what was Uncle Arthur doing there? That’s what Andrew wondered as he motored away up Second Street toward the post office. Coincidence wouldn’t answer. Over the past week Andrew had come to disbelieve in coincidence. There were only two answers that were any good: Uncle Arthur had come ‘round to Moneywort’s shop for the same reason Pennyman had—to buy an enormous carp—or else Arthur himself had been following Pennyman, a development that wouldn’t much surprise Pickett.

  Pennyman had got home before him. He was going in through the front door when Andrew pulled in along the curb. And he wasn’t carrying the Styrofoam box, either. Andrew sat in the Metropolitan again, thinking. It was nearly four o’clock, and once again Andrew had managed to do nothing at all that day but avoid Rose. He’d gone out after seashells that morning but had collected mysteries instead, each of which was pretty enough, in its way.

  But one wanted the mysteries to add up somehow. What Andrew had was a jumble of them, like shells rattling in a bag, and he had the growing suspicion that one day soon he’d reach into the bag to draw one out and he’d be pinched by it. He had to get them sorted, to see which of them contained hidden crabs, which of them stank of dead things, which of them he could hear the distant murmur of the ocean in
. He turned on the car radio and then turned it off again. There was no excuse on earth for wasting the rest of the day. He reminded himself of what had happened yesterday, a day that had started out so promising and then declined into despair. The two A.M. Cheerios powwow around the kitchen table had fetched it all back together just a bit, had saved him. Now here he was idling away his time, losing the little tract of ground he’d got back with Rose and Naomi.

  It was time to haul out the paint. He had painter’s coveralls in the garage. It wouldn’t take him six minutes to pull them on and get started. He had the sudden urge to announce his intentions to Rose, but he squashed it. Let her stumble upon him at work. He’d be whistling away, paintbrush in hand, cap pulled down over his eyes. He’d hang his paint scraper in the loop in the coveralls and shove a rag into his back pocket, next to his putty knife. People would drive by on the street, and, mistaking him for a professional painter, they’d stop and ask him for an estimate, appreciating his work, happy that these old houses were being sparkled up. He was working late in the afternoon, wasn’t he? Well, he’d say, nightfall was the only clock he paid any attention to—nightfall and sunrise, the two great motivators of mankind. He was a philosopher-painter. Which one of the Greeks had talked about that sort of thing? Plato, maybe.

  He picked up his coffee cup, which had lain there on the floor of the car since that morning. There was a little dribble of coffee in it, dried on the inside in a sticky line. He wished suddenly that the cup were full, but he couldn’t risk going in to brew up a fresh one. He couldn’t risk going after a beer, either. He’d have to paint dry, which was a pity, really, painting being such a boring job. Having something to drink—whatever it might be—was an end in itself, a pastime. Hose water would have to do. He sat up abruptly, realizing that another ten minutes had passed. He’d been daydreaming again.