The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  Mrs. Gummidge sprang out of the shadows just then, with a shriek that stood Andrew’s hair on end. He’d almost forgotten her, so intent was he on foiling Pennyman. She flew at Pennyman’s back when he shot at the car, and maybe because his guard was down, there was no barrier to stop her as Andrew had been stopped.

  The shriek gave her away, though, and the old man turned as he fired, sweeping his arm around savagely, roaring through his wide-open mouth, his eyes lit with hatred and with the joy of knocking her down. She slammed back against the pier railing, which caught her in the small of her back, and in an instant Pennyman’s hand was at her throat, smashing up into her chin with adrenaline-charged strength, cutting off her scream as her head snapped back with an audible breaking of bone, and she flew backward over the railing, falling headlong into the sea, all of it done in a moment.

  Aunt Naomi pushed through the bait house door, swinging her cane at Pennyman’s head as he turned back toward them, howling pointlessly, as if he knew that the killing of Mrs. Gummidge called for some expression of emotion—laughing or yipping or hooting—but was no longer human enough to puzzle out what sort. His eyes flew open and he snarled into Aunt Naomi’s face.

  Andrew saw her cane shudder to a slow stop a foot from the old man, as if Pennyman were walled-in again by magic, protected by the accumulated coins. He snatched the tip of the cane out of the air, and before Andrew could react, could clamber up and leap, Pennyman jerked Aunt Naomi toward him, grabbing her wrist and twisting her around, pointing the pistol at her head.

  Everyone stood as if frozen. The electronic car stopped fifteen feet away. Andrew was stymied. Heroics would accomplish nothing at all. He couldn’t get near Pennyman, not while Pennyman held the coins, not while he threatened Aunt Naomi. The pier shuddered, nearly throwing the lot of them onto their faces. The ocean had grown weirdly calm, and the shuddering now could have nothing to do with storm surf. There was no surf; it had fallen strangely flat, as if it were waiting. Pennyman laughed again hoarsely, like fingernails on a chalkboard.

  “Take it,” Rose said, holding out the spoon.

  “Yes,” said Pickett. Blood seeped through the fabric of his jacket in a growing patch. “He still doesn’t have them all. There’s one in the fish. He can’t get that one. The fish doesn’t care about his gun.”

  Pennyman nodded sagely, as if in response to the conclusions of an intelligent four-year-old. “Put it in my pocket,” he said to Rose.

  “Don’t go near him!” Andrew shouted.

  Pennyman shrugged, tipped the gun up, and shot through Aunt Naomi’s hair. Rose screamed at the crack of the pistol, staggering against the doorway. Aunt Naomi flinched and bent forward, unhurt. Pennyman laughed. “I want it now,” he said.

  Rose stepped forward to give it to him. He couldn’t take it, though, not with one hand on Aunt Naomi and the other on the pistol. She would have to put it into his pocket, as he’d said. Andrew waited, poised, ready to leap. If Rose wasn’t repelled by invisible walls, then he wouldn’t be either. He’d knock the old man down, kick him to bits. If he touched Rose …

  But Pennyman jerked Aunt Naomi around, covering Andrew with the pistol, waving it back and forth between him and Rose. In an instant the spoon was in his pocket, and when Rose grabbed Aunt Naomi’s shoulders and pulled the old lady away from him, Pennyman let her go.

  His eyes were rolled half up into his head, so that crescents of bloodshot white shone under each iris. His teeth chattered and his breath came in gasps. He seemed to be twisted from within, as if he’d swallowed a handful of ten-penny nails, and his hand shook as he clutched at his silver box, laying it on the pier and pulling it open. Twenty-eight silver coins lay within, glowing an almost sickly green in the lamplight. There was a ghastly, rotten smell on the wind, as if Pennyman were a ripe cheese or was riddled with dead, gangrenous flesh. The pier shuddered again, the creature in the sea, perhaps, growing impatient.

  The spoon wouldn’t fit in the box. It was too long. The lid closed against the handle. The surface of Pennyman’s face moved as if it were a swarm of insects, betraying a dozen emotions in a moment, and he sniffled and drooled over the box, kneeling on it finally to warp the lid down around the spoon handle. There was the snap of the lid catching, and Pennyman stood up, holding it, backing toward the very corner of the pier, staggering as the pilings shook, his mouth working, but nothing but babble croaking out of his throat.

  He climbed onto the railing. The great fish lolled on the surface of the sea—an immensely long undulating whale, looking like something out of an illustration of a Paleozoic ocean.

  It came to Andrew abruptly that the great fish was Pennyman’s destiny. Pickett was wrong. Pennyman didn’t need the pistol any longer. He was merely going to leap into the gaping mouth of the fish, into the belly of the fish where lay the last of the coins. Pennyman was a modern-day Jonah. But he was a corrupted Jonah. And when the fish spit him up finally onto a Southern California beach, it wouldn’t be the grace of God that brought him forth. Nor would Pennyman any longer be a man. He would be something else entirely.

  There sounded the beeping of a tinny little electric horn, and Andrew threw himself out of the way as Uncle Arthur’s red car surged past. It angled arrow-straight toward where Pennyman was perched on the corner of the pier railing, squatting like a wind-bedraggled sea bird, clutching the box, the pistol, and—in the crook of his elbow—the iron lamppost. He stood up boldly, flinging the pistol into the sea just as Uncle Arthur’s car smashed feebly into the post. Andrew lunged forward, grabbing futilely for Pennyman’s foot, over the tiny hood of the stalled car.

  Pennyman swung around the iron pipe of the lamppost, waving the box of coins in his free hand, a wild, damn-all look in his eyes, intoxicated with coin-magic. He flailed at the railing, at the post, scrabbling to steady himself, waiting for the moment to deliver himself into the mouth of the fish.

  The pier shuddered again, a vast, heaving, concrete-snapping quake that threw Andrew backward and into the railing. He grabbed for a hand hold, his legs slewing around and through, between the parallel rails. His head banged hard against an iron post as he latched onto the wooden curb along the very edge of the pier and hung on, nearly sobbing with the effort of stopping his fall and looking down at the roiling water, seeing Pickett out of the corner of his eye, hunkering along toward him as the pier tossed and groaned.

  Andrew shook his head, and pain lanced across the back of his skull where he’d hit the post. He sagged with the weight of fatigue and defeat and pain. He hadn’t slept for two days. What could anyone expect of him? He was powerless to help himself, let alone the world. He could do nothing but hang on, and steel himself for the sliding rush, the smash of cold ocean water.

  Blood from his lacerated scalp dribbled down past his shirt collar, and somehow the wild rush of the world around him paled and he focused on that little tickling dribble. It would be simplest just to hold on and wait, to be acted upon instead of acting.

  Pickett hadn’t made it to him. He couldn’t help. He hugged the railing ten feet farther down, his left arm bloody. Rose huddled with Aunt Naomi against the wall of the bait house, and Andrew could hear Rose shouting at him, hollering unnecessarily for them both to hang on.

  Then Aunt Naomi lurched forward across the pier toward Andrew. She shouted something, but he couldn’t make it out. She stopped, nearly pitching forward, then steadied herself for a moment and flung her cane. It bounced, clacked down, and skittered toward Andrew, and he let go of the precious rail to grab it, shaking his head hard, letting the shot of pain wake him up—call him back to the world.

  Andrew twisted his face into the wind as the pier heaved again. He hauled himself to his feet, the cane in his right hand. He could see Uncle Arthur slumped behind the wheel of his car, the electric motor still humming. Pennyman balanced on the top railing for a long, gasping moment. A hundred sea birds swarmed around him, snatching at his clothing, pecking at his eyes. He batted at them, slamming away
with the box. There was one last shuddering quake, and Pennyman was thrown backward, off balance, clutching the coins to his chest as the entire corner of the pier—deck, lamp post, sink, railing, and all—began to crack loose from the rest of the pier with a groaning of twisting metal and a snapping of wood and bolts.

  Andrew lunged, shouting, and swung the cane like a baseball bat, with both hands, slamming the hooked end across Pennyman’s knuckles. There was a shriek and a clang—the sound of Pennyman screaming and of his coin box banging against the cold iron of the lamppost that fell now as if in slow motion into the sea.

  Andrew whipped the cane back to hit him again, just as the badly latched box sprang open and the coins sailed out in an arc, into the ocean, across the pier. For an instant Pennyman had a look of horrified, uncomprehending defeat in his eyes, and then he went down end over end, scrabbling after the flying coins like a man in a cartoon as the corner of the pier collapsed piecemeal into the sea. Andrew dived back toward the railing to save himself, throwing away Aunt Naomi’s cane, tearing out the knees of his trousers on the rough deck of the pier and hugging the splintered wooden curb.

  He held on and watched Pennyman fall, watched his cloven hooves shiver and metamorphose into the feet of an old, old man, his magic gone, the coins no longer his. Pennyman turned his face to the sky, betraying the yellow, sunken-eyed features of a mummy, of a man long dead but half-preserved by potions. And then he splashed into the sea like a something built of sticks and twine.

  The red electronic car geysered in after him, carrying Uncle Arthur inside its little cab. And just as Andrew thought of letting loose, of sliding in after it all, of trying to drag poor Uncle Arthur out of there, the dark bulk of the whale gave one last heaving lash and it opened its mouth like the door of Aladdin’s cave, swallowing them up, Pennyman and Arthur both, and the car into the bargain.

  The great fish humped around and slipped away, into the shadowed depths, and was gone.

  The surface of the sea boiled with fish, but almost immediately it was still, and the dawn light illuminated the depths enough for Andrew to see that the fish were diving toward the bottom, darting after the coins that shimmered and disappeared into deep water.

  The sky suddenly, was full of birds—sea gulls and pelicans, parrots and crows and curlews—dropping down and pecking at the scattered coins on the pier, flying off with the coins in their beaks. Andrew heaved himself through the twisted railing, rolling over onto his back on the deck of the ruined pier. Something gouged him in the shoulder blade. He sat up and looked. It was the spoon.

  He picked it up, and on an impulse, cocked his arm to throw it into the sea, into the newly rolling swell and the ribbon of sunlight that had just then blazed up across the blue-green water. Let the fish have it, he thought. Let them swim it away to some other continent, out of his life entirely. But then he stopped himself.

  The light of the rising sun shone on the back of something running toward them down the center of the pier, running with an odd, short-legged, rolling gait. It was The One Pig, and no mistaking it, its hour come ’round at last. It trotted indifferently past a company of sleepy fishermen just arriving with the dawn, and followed the course of the Uncle Arthur’s lost car, straight through the hovering birds, past Aunt Naomi and Rose, past the open-mouthed Pickett, trotting to within a foot of where Andrew sat holding the spoon in his outstretched hand.

  Neat as clockwork the pig plucked it up, turned immediately around, and trotted off again. Andrew watched it grow smaller and smaller and smaller, disappearing up Main Street, bound for heaven alone knew where.

  Epilogue

  BEAMS PICKETT FELT a little like Tom Sawyer, as if his wound were a badge, a trophy. He’d only been winged. He liked the sound of the word—“winged.” It seemed to conjure up the notion of it having been very close, his ducking away and foiling the concentrated efforts of a world-class murderer.

  Georgia had announced that the inn was almost clean of mystical emanations. There was a residue, maybe in the dust under the house, like the lingering smell of aromatic cedar in a sweater just out of the chest. Ocean winds would sweep it away.

  The little car he rode in jolted as it went off the curb, straight out into traffic, weaving crazily around a stalled truck and under the nose of a startled pedestrian. Pickett held on, one hand on the dashboard and another on the edge of the cardboard carton wedged behind his seat—an Exer-Genie. Apparently they were marvelous things for toning stomach muscles. Heaven knew he could use some of that. The thirty-five bucks had been well spent. Georgia had him on a new regime—diets, stylish clothes, twenty-dollar haircuts. She was going to civilize him, bring him up to date. Rose had been threatening the same ever since Andrew had made a clean sweep of things and admitted to the credit card outrage. She seemed to be softening, though. Georgia, on the other hand, had taken Pickett on as a sort of challenge.

  “New battery, then?”

  Uncle Arthur nodded, looping the car around an insanely wide turn and onto Main. “Corroded all to hell. Bumper all strung with kelp. They patented a machine for processing kelp. Did you know that? I sold them off the coast of Maine.”

  “No, did they? Where were you these three days, anyway?”

  “Out. Constitutional and all. Holiday. Ever been to Scottsdale?”

  Pickett shook his head. “No, is that where you’ve been? Arizona? We thought you were drowned.”

  “Not me.”

  “You weren’t in Scottsdale?”

  “I wasn’t drowned. What happened to your mustache?”

  “My girlfriend made me shave it off.”

  “She’s a good woman. Keen eye.”

  “So you were in Scottsdale?”

  “Once. Hell of a place. I sold rain gutters. Losing proposition in Scottsdale, you’d think. A man would go broke.” Uncle Arthur grinned at Pickett and widened his eyes, possibly to imply that he hadn’t gone broke.

  Pickett was satisfied. He knew where Uncle Arthur had been. You could smell it in the upholstery. That the car still ran after being dumped in the ocean and swallowed by a fish was a testament to something—although whether to something mechanical or something spiritual he couldn’t quite figure. Maybe both.

  Pickett had tried to make it clear to Rose and Andrew. He himself had anticipated Arthur’s return. Pickett had driven out to Leisure World on a hunch that morning. He had knocked on Arthur’s door, and when it opened, there the old man had stood, in reading glasses and a suitcoat. He had got Pickett’s name wrong and then taken him out to the garage and sold him the Exer-Genie. Just like that. Now they were on their way to the Potholder, together.

  Pickett grinned and slapped his knee. The real corker was that Andrew and Rose still thought the old man was dead. In almost exactly a minute and a half—less, even, if Uncle Arthur ran another red light—Pickett and he would lurch up to the door of the Potholder, maybe take out a parking meter or slam into the curb, maybe park on the sidewalk. Andrew and Rose, sitting at the window table, would doubletake, spill their coffee. Andrew would choke and stagger out of his chair, toppling it over. They would rush outside, wild with wonder and joy, appearing to be lunatics, and Uncle Arthur, very calmly and deliberately, as if there were nothing else in the world to interest them, would talk about selling rain gutters in the desert, the red electronic car smelling of whales and kelp and the sea, like a tiny, deep-water submarine, a tangle of waterweeds still trailing from the smashed front bumper.

  They couldn’t fish off the pier because of what the storm supposedly had done to it. It was cordoned off again, and from where they sat they could see the sparks of a cutting torch where three men worked on a scaffold above the ocean. Rose and Andrew, of course, knew that it hadn’t been the storm at all, that it had been a giant fish that had knocked the end of the pier to bits, but there was no profit in saying so. The less said the better.

  So they fished off the rock jetty just to the south, Andrew and Rose did, drinking coffee out of a thermos. The fish
weren’t biting so far, but it didn’t matter to either one of them. The sunrise had been worth getting up for. And fishing there together like that, with all the turmoil and villainy behind them, was like a holiday. In a little under an hour they were meeting Pickett at the Potholder for bacon and eggs. There was summer in the air, and the morning was warm and fine.

  “So it was you,” said Andrew. “You were onto the whole business all along.”

  Rose shrugged, flipping her plastic lure twenty yards out into the water. She reeled it in slowly. “It belonged to me, too, just as it belonged to Aunt Naomi when her husband died, or when Mrs. Gummidge murdered him, I guess. That’s something I didn’t know. I should have though.” She sat silently, thinking. “Poor Uncle Arthur,” she said at last.

  “I wish, well …” He let the thought go and pressed on to more cheerful subjects. “So you were feeding the ‘possum under the house, weren’t you? Admit it. And the brick on the toad tank—you left that off on purpose. I’m astonished. I wouldn’t have thought it. Not for a minute. I bet you’re a closet Weetabix eater, too. Sometimes … Sometimes I don’t figure you very well. Sometimes I wish …” His cheerful train of thought had sidetracked again.

  “Sometimes you should quit figuring. The house looks great, by the way—the paint that is. Did I tell you that?”

  “Yeah,” said Andrew. “You did. But you can tell me a couple more times if you want. God I hate painting.”

  “Want some help?”

  Andrew started to say no. Then he caught himself. Actually he wanted help very badly. “Sure,” he said. “Mounds bar?” He held one out to her.

  Rose looked skeptical. “A Mounds bar? This early in the morning? Where did you get that?”

  “I keep a few in the tackle box, actually. There’s nothing like them when you’re fishing.”