“What? You'd actually demand money from a woman on her way to a screaming and plummeting death? Oh you cheese, you cheese!”
Those town-and-country men, Charles Penstock and Ed Rivet, had gone to visit Little Otto Pankration at a loose hour. They knocked at the door of Little Otto's Den, and the door was opened. They were startled, though, that it was opened by Mr. Pankration himself. But were not Mr. Pankration and Little Otto Pankration the same person? Probably they were. Nevertheless, the two town-and-country men were startled.
“Oh Mr. Pankration,” Ed Rivet said, “we were really looking for Little Otto.” And then he felt very foolish.
“Oh go away,” Pankration growled. “Vagabonds, out-of-season killers of game, dynamiters of fish, spooks of whatever sort, be gone from here. You are only rags and splinters of men who are dead and gone. In any case, I am locking up the storeroom now.”
“Mr. Pankration,” Ed asked, “what is that thing that looks like an electric furnace, and isn't?”
“It is an electric furnace,” Mr. Pankration said. He pushed the two town-and-country men out of the doorway, came out the door himself, and closed and locked it behind him. Then he walked around the corner to his main establishment. And Charles Penstock and Ed Rivet stood uncertainly in the road.
Then the door of Little Otto's Den unlocked and opened again, and Little Otto looked out and hissed for them to come in. Still feeling a little foolish, they entered.
“It should be foggy in the next hours,” Charles Penstock said. “Let's go to Silly Ghost Cove on Keystone Lake and jug for bullhead catfish.”
“I can't go, not anymore, not anywhere,” Little Otto said. “He won't let me out of the complex at all.”
“Who is he?” Ed Rivet asked. “Isn't he really just yourself? How will he keep you from going out? Will he hide your shoes, like the Ozark farmer did to his wife?”
“Not my shoes, my feet,” Little Otto said. “He hid my feet.”
The other two saw that it was true. Little Otto hadn't any feet. He wouldn't be able to go with them.
“He says that you are spooks,” Little Otto said. “He says that your primaries are dead men, and that makes you dirty.”
“That's true,” Ed Rivet admitted. “You knew that. Ah we're sorry about your feet.”
Charles Penstock and Ed Rivet went away from there to Silly Ghost Cove on Keystone Lake to jug for bullhead catfish. It was a favorite spot of theirs.
The pundit Barry McNary gave this account the next morning on his program, “The Morning Sun”:
A night of horror rampages on into the glare-eyed dawn. The plummeting, screaming death of the beloved Evangeline Aster was horror enough for any night. But there have been flesh-crawling (yes, and pseudoflesh-crawling) developments since then. And now we are all in stunned and sordid amazement.
Evangeline Aster, that sparkler of the picture tube, that comic with class, had been in unusually high spirits only ten minutes before the tragedy. She had laughed as she told it: “Kids, am I ever going to pull one! I will stand them all on their ears. This stroke is going to put your favorite sparkler into the Big Time. And it will all be good, clean fun. What is more good, clean fun than an absolute horror stroke?”
Then, at nine forty-seven last night, Evangeline climbed the parapet gingerly (she was afraid of heights) and seemed to be talking to someone there, though she was alone. Then she seemed to stumble (it was almost as if she were pushed by invisible hands), and she fell to her screaming death from the veranda of the forty-ninth-floor Penthouse Club.
She was utterly smashed in the street below. But many observers, including myself, will swear that her scream was repeated in the high air again and again for several minutes after her horrifying death.
Naturally, considering the close friendship of Miss Aster with the people of this station and her frequent appearances here, her violent death of only thirteen minutes before was the main topic on our ten-o'clock news last night. But it was at ten twenty-seven, almost at the end of the news program, that something almost more shocking than Evangeline's death took place.
Evangeline walked into our studio and onto camera, alive and sparkling. Or it seemed as if she did. Something walked into the studio, possibly alive in a gaudy way, and sparkling in a funky manner. And, at first, it looked like Evangeline. I myself had no doubt that it was herself — not for ten seconds or so.
“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” she said. “Oh isn't there any way to update that line? Surely a lot of fuss has been made about an imposter. It is not I who have died, as all of you can see. Here I am, more sparkling and radiant than ever!”
But then something went out of the apparition. It became not Evangeline Aster, but a horrible and revolting caricature of her. What was it? What was it? It was alive. It walked and it talked. And then it staggered and whimpered.
“She tried to push me off,” the apparition whined. “That's what scared me. I didn't think she'd do that to me.”
We closed the station down then and got the horrible situation off of camera.
But the horrible situation has been examined all through the night, from that hour to this, and soon there will be nothing of her left to examine. The horrible situation has been examined by a cosmologist, a meteorologist, a physician, and by a para-psychologist. The walking and talking apparition was, by every basic test, Evangeline Aster. And yet it wasn't Evangeline as solidly as was the dead body that was in police morgue. But the apparition even had the fingerprints of Evangeline except that, ah — change of subject.
“The weather has been good for eidolons for more than a week now,” the meteorologist said. “Rarely is the weather good for them; most of the time it is no good for them at all. We weathermen believe that they (eidolons, fragments, splinters, ghosts, they are sometimes called) are always present. But most of the time they cannot be seen or heard. And in times of very special weather they can be.” “No, it isn't alive,” the physician said. “It is apparently an echo or a mirage. It is associated with a certain amount of matter, but it's a loose and perhaps accidental association. No, there's nothing here. It's all illusion.”
“Oh it's plain enough,” the parapsychologist said. “It's a ‘clearly manifest psychic splinter,’ presently impaired by the destruction of its primary. Psychic splinters are so ordinary that they are almost the rule. They're personality fragments, no more than that. They are ‘partially manifest psychic splinters’ when they are poltergeists or other ghosts or presences. But a ‘clearly manifest psychic splinter’ like this one isn't encountered often. I'd like to study her for a long time, but there's only a couple of minutes left for it.”
“There has been something going on around town lately that is almost like a burlesque of my own work, and she's part of it,” added the great parapsychologist Dr. Otto Pankration.
“A lot of me went with her when she went,” the apparition said. “It was like turning out the light in me. She tried to throw me off the parapet. How damned inconsiderate of her anyhow! She told me one thing: ‘Keep screaming, keep screaming.’ Oh I'd forgot that she told me that. I kept it up for a while and then I stopped. I'll start again.”
“It is pseudo-organic,” the cosmologist said. “It is mostly made of glycerin and it is evaporating. Ah glycerin, like we used to put in the soap-bubble mixture. No, there's really nothing to her, gentlemen.”
“She tried to throw me off the parapet, but I threw her off instead,” the apparition said. “I thought that was kind of a joke on her. But she told me to keep screaming on my way down, and I'm on my way down now. I forgot, and I stopped screaming. But I'll start again now.”
The apparition has disappeared. It had become an absolutely horrifying caricature of Evangeline at the moment of its disappearance.
But the screaming continues, continues, continues.
“How long?” we asked.
“No telling,” the parapsychologist said. “It's become immaterial now, and there is no
way you can make an immaterial entity shut up, particularly if it is obsessed by a single idea or instruction. The Hollbecker phantom in Germany has been screaming for fifty years now, but nobody pays any attention to it anymore. It is just like any other industrial nois—”
Oh my God, that scream, that scream, that scream! Will any of us get used to it in even fifty years?
Bright Coins In Never-Ending Stream
People sometimes became exasperated with Matthew Quoin, that tedious old shuffler. Sometimes? Well, they were exasperated with him almost all the time. It isn't that people aren't patient and kind-hearted. All of them in our town are invariably so. But Matthew could sure ruffle a kind-hearted surface. “Oh, he is so slow about it!” people said of him. That wasn't true, Matthew's fingers flew lightning-like when he was involved in a transaction. It was just that so very many movements were required of him to get anything at all transacted.
And then the stories that he told about his past, a very far-distant past according to him, were worn out by repetition.
“Oh, was I ever the cock of the walk!” he would say. “I left a trail of twenty-dollar gold pieces around the world three times, and that was when twenty dollars was still worth something. I always paid everything with twenty-dollar gold pieces, and there was no way that I could ever run out of them. Ten of them, a hundred of them, a thousand of them, I could lay them out whenever they were needed. I had a cruse of oil that would never be empty, as the Bible says. I had a pocketbook that would never be without coin. I was the cock of the walk. Plague take it all, I still am! Has anybody ever seen me without money?”
No, nobody had. It was just that, of late years, it took Matthew's money so long to add up. And often people had to wait behind him for a long time while he counted it out, and they became sulky and even furious.
When people became weary of listening to Matthew's stories (and of late years he could feel their weariness for him like a hot blast) he went and talked to the pigeons. They, at least, had manners.
“The bloom is off the plum now,” he would tell those red-footed peckers, “and the roses of life have become a little ratty for me. But I will not run out of coin. I have the promise that I will not. I got that promise as part of a dubious transaction, but the promise has held up now for more years and decades than you would believe. And I will not die till I am death-weary of taking coin out of my pocketbook: I have that promise also. How would I ever be weary of drawing coins out of my pocketbook?
“This began a long time ago, you see, when the pigeons were no bigger than the jenny-wrens are now. They had just started to mint the American twenty-dollar gold piece, and I had them in full and never-ending flow. I tell you that a man can make an impression if he has enough gold pieces. Ah, the ladies who were my friends! Lola Montez, Squirrel Alice, Marie Laveau, Sarah Bernhardt, Empress Elizabeth of Austria. And the high ladies were attracted to me for myself as well as for my money. I was the golden cock of the golden walk.
“You ask what happened to those golden days?” Matthew said to the pigeons, who hadn't asked anything except maybe, “How about springing for another box of Cracker Jacks?”
“Oh, the golden days are still with me, though technically they are the copper days now. I was promised eight bright eons of ever-flowing money, and the eight of the eons could last (along with my life) as long as I wished it to last.
“And, when the first eon of flowing money slipped into the second, it didn't diminish my fortune much. It was still an unending stream of gold. Now they were five-dollar gold pieces instead of twenty-dollar gold pieces, but when there is no limit to the number of them, what difference does that make? I would take one out of my pocketbook, and immediately there would be another one in it waiting to be taken.”
“I suppose I really had the most fun when I was known as the Silver Dollar Kid,” Matthew Quoin told them. He was talking to squirrels rather than pigeons now, and it was a different day. But one day was very much like another. “I never cared overly for money. I just don't want to run out of it. And I have the promise that my pocketbook will always have one more coin in it. I liked that sound of silver dollars on a counter, and I'd ring them down as fast as one a second when I wished to make an impression. And they rang like bells. I was in my pleasant maturity then, and life was good to me. I was the guy they all noticed. They called me ‘Show Boat’ and ‘the Silver Dollar Sport.’ I always tipped a dollar for everything. That was when money was worth ten times what it is now and a dollar was really something. What, squirrels, another sack of peanuts, you say? Sure I can afford it! The girl at the kiosk will be a little impatient with me because it takes me so long to get enough coins out, but we don't care about that, do we?”
The fact was that Matthew Quoin, though he still commanded a shining and unending stream of money, had a poor and shabby look about him in these days of the eighth coin. As part of an old and dubious transaction, he had the promise that he could live as long as he wished, but that didn't prevent him from becoming quite old. He had a grubby little room. He would get up at three o'clock every Friday morning and begin to pull coins one at a time (there was no possible way except one at a time) out of his pocketbook. It was one of those small, three-section, snap-jaw pocketbooks such as men used to carry to keep their coins and bills in. It was old, but it was never-failing. Matthew would draw the coins out one at a time. He would count them into piles. He would roll them into rolls. And at eight o'clock in the morning, when his weekly rent was due, he would pay it proudly, twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents. So he would be fixed for another week. It took him from three until eight o'clock every Friday morning to do this; but he cat-napped quite a bit during that time. All oldsters cat-nap a lot.
And it didn't really take him very long (no more than five or six minutes) to draw out enough coins for one of his simple lunch-counter meals. But some people are a little bit testy at having to wait even five or six minutes behind an old man at the cashier's stand.
“I was known as the Four-Bit Man for a few years, and that was all right,” Matthew Quoin said. “Then I was known as the Two-Bit Man for a few other years, and that was all right too.” This was a different day, and Matthew was talking to a flock of grackle-birds who were committing slaughter on worms, slugs, and other crawlers in the grass of City Park. “It didn't begin to hurt till I was known as the Dime-a-Time Man,” Matthew said, “and that stuck in the throat of my pride a little bit, although it shouldn't have. I was still the cock of the grassy walk even though I didn't have as many hens as I had once. I had good lodgings, and I had plenty to eat and drink. I could buy such clothes as I needed, though it flustered me a bit to make a major purchase. We had come into the era of the hundred-dollar overcoat then, and to draw out one thousand coins, one by one, with people perhaps waiting, can be a nervous thing.
“I began to see that there was an element of humor in that dubious transaction that I had made so many years ago, and that part of the joke was on me. Oh, I had won every point of argument when we had made that deal. The pocketbook was calfskin, triple-stitched, and with German silver snap-latch. It was absolutely guaranteed never to be clear empty of coin, and it should last forever. Each coin appeared in the very bottom of the pocketbook, that's true, and the contrivance was rather deep and with a narrow mouth, so it did take several seconds to fish each dime out. But it was a good bargain that I made, and all parties still abide by it. The Dime-a-Time years weren't bad.
“Nor were the nickel years really. There is nothing wrong with nickels. Dammit, the nickel is the backbone of commerce! It was in the nickel years that I began to get rheumatism in my fingers, and that slowed me down. But it had nothing to do with the bargain, which was still a good one.”
When the penny years rolled around, Matthew Quoin was quite old. Likely he was not as old as he claimed to be, but he was the oldest and stringiest cock around. “But it's all as bright as one of my new pennies,” he said to a multitude of army caterpillars that was destroying th
e fine grass in City Park. “And this is the eighth and final eon of the overflowing money, and it will go on forever for me unless I tell it to stop. Why should I tell it to stop? The flow of money from my pocketbook is vital to me as the flow of blood through my veins. And the denomination cannot be diminished further. There is no smaller coin than the copper penny.”
It didn't go all that bright and shining with Matthew Quoin in the penny years, though. The rheumatism had bitten deeper into his hands and fingers, and now his lightning fingers were slow lightning indeed. The “time is money” saying applied to Matthew more explicitly than it had ever applied to anyone else, and there were quite a few slownesses conspiring to eat up his valuable time.
And every time that prices went up, by the same degree was he driven down. After five years in the penny eon he was driven down plenty.
“If it takes me five hours just to draw out and count the money for my week's rent, then things are coming to an intolerable stage with me,” he said. “Something is going to have to give.” Something gave.
The government decreed that, due to the general inflation of the economy and the near-worthlessness of the one-cent piece, or penny, that coin would no longer be minted. And, after a cutoff date in the near future, it would no longer be legal tender either.
“What will I do now?” Matthew Quoin asked himself.
He went to talk to the people at the Elite Metal Salvage Company, Scavenger Department.
“How much a pound will you give me for copper pennies?” he asked.
“Two cents a pound,” the man said. “There hasn't been very much copper in copper pennies for years and years.”
“There is in these,” Matthew said. “They follow the specifications of the earliest minting.” He showed several of them to the man.
“Amazing, amazing!” the man said. “They're almost pure copper. Five cents a pound.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 259
