The Last Coin Read online

  THE LAST COIN

  James P. Blaylock

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Book I

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Book II

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Book III

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  Website

  Also by James P. Blaylock

  Dedication

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  “—Nay, if you come to that, Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,—have they not had their Hobby-Horses;—their running horses, their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets, their maggots and their butterflies?—and so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,—pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?”

  Laurence Sterne

  Tristram Shandy

  BOOK I

  The Second Joke

  “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy … A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note.”

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  “An Apology for Idlers”

  Prologue

  HE SAT IN the back seat of a sherrut, a whirling dervish taxi, slamming down the road out of the Jerusalem Highlands toward the Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. The driver was a lunatic, and Pennyman bounced and rocked on the back seat of the old Mercedes-Benz as it wheeled around curves and plunged over dips. In his pocket was a leather bag of silver coins, uncomfortably hot. The day was declining behind them, and the buildings of old Jerusalem were sun-washed and pale. Ahead, the high-rises of Tel Aviv threw shadows out over the flat Mediterranean landscape. Pennyman could barely recognize it. It had been years.

  He’d been through the airport once before, when it was the Lod Airport. Before that, uncounted years earlier, he’d sailed from Haifa to Cyprus on a fishing boat, carrying another of the coins—only the third he’d ever possessed. The crew had sensed that he was fleeing from something, and when a storm had blown up in the night and nearly capsized them, the ship’s cook, a Jordanian with wide, holy eyes, had called him a Jonah, and Pennyman had come close to being pitched into the sea. They had taken the coin from him when it had begun to crackle with St. Elmo’s fire in the static-charged air. They’d flung it over the side instead, and then watched silently when a vast shadow rose from the dark sea and swallowed up the glowing coin as it tumbled into the depths.

  The years had shuffled his memory, dealing away bits and pieces of it. Time diminished a man; there was no denying it—even a man who possessed certain methods. Now the coins in his pocket made him feel almost young again, although it was a feeling that was tainted and corrupted, like the youthful flush of a well-nourished vampire.

  He looked back out the window. There appeared to be no sign of pursuit. In well under an hour he’d be in the airport, and then on a Pan American jet to Paris and New York. He would angle across to Vancouver on the way to Los Angeles in order to pay a visit to his old coin-collecting friend, Pfennig. Pfennig might have heard about the murder of Aureus by then, of course, and might have fled. He might as easily have decided to sell. Perhaps Pfennig was the sort who would come cheap, or at least who could be convinced that it was better to come cheap than dead. The world was filled with fools, it seemed, who thought they’d been called upon to be Caretakers. He himself had been called upon to be something; but it was he, and no one else, who would determine what that something was.

  He’d left the old man named Aureus dead in Jerusalem, and with any luck the man’s corpse would lie in his locked shop for days before it was found. The shades were pulled and a sign hung in the window. He was gone, it said—on holiday. No one on earth expected the store to reopen for another week. The blind beggars in the man’s employ would know that something was wrong. They sensed something, no doubt about it, behind their strangely Asiatic, sightless eyes. But they were almost certainly mad. One had followed Pennyman for half a block, and then had cocked his head, as if listening, when Pennyman had climbed into the taxi and driven off. Pennyman had made the mistake of rattling his bag full of stolen silver out the window at the man, just as a lark. At the sound of it, coins had flown out of the beggar’s cup like popcorn out of hot oil, and the man had thrown open his mouth and howled so high and shrill that his howling was silent, and the rising lamentation of baying dogs had followed the taxi out of the city to the highway. None of the beggars would have keys to the shop, though. Old Aureus wouldn’t have trusted them with a bag of shekels much less with the coins. His corpse would have ample time to ripen.

  Pennyman patted his coat pocket. His papers, as the saying went, were in order. It was too bad he had to fly out of Tel Aviv. Security at Ben-Gurion was tight and mean, and there was nothing of the bazaar atmosphere of Athens or Beirut airport. That would keep the beggars out, though, which was just as well. Tackling the metal detector would be interesting. He’d send the coins around it with the papers of requisition from the British Museum. Carrying out old Hebrew coins would have been tricky, but these thirty silver coins—of which Pennyman possessed twenty-five—had their origins farther east, much farther east, and so weren’t of local historical significance. He wouldn’t be accused of trying to smuggle out relics from the Holy Land.

  The coins were old when the Cities of the Plain had burned, and they had been scattered in the years since, to be collected, all of them together, only once in the last thousands of years. The man who had held all of them briefly in his grasp had cast the coins into the dirt and hanged himself
in remorse for the ruination his greed had fashioned.

  But he hadn’t been allowed to die. The thirty silver coins, all together, had assured his immortality, and he had wandered the earth since, for over two thousand years, seeking to redeem himself by assuring that the coins were kept forever scattered. Old Aureus, trusted as a secret Caretaker, had sought to betray him, and had sought out more and more of the coins, hoarding them. Aureus had failed, though, in the end. Jules Pennyman didn’t intend to fail.

  Some few of the coins had been used by temple priests twenty centuries ago to buy the potter’s field where wandering strangers would be buried—the first one of whom was interred with two of the coins pressing his eyelids shut. And so it was thought by the priest who had buried the man that even if twenty-eight of the coins were gathered again in a distant time, at least these two would be lost forever. But in the end he betrayed his own secret, for his own meddling with the coins had tainted him.

  When the grave in the potter’s field was robbed, though, the coins were gone, and it was said that the weight of the coins had driven them through the dead man’s head and that they’d burnt through the winding sheet and into the earth beneath it and that one day, ages hence, they would complete their travel through the earth and appear on the other side of the world to set into spinning motion the prophecy of revelation.

  The twenty-eight unburied coins had been carried off singly, and now and then two or three together. Most had been squandered, sometimes sold as curiosities. In the right hands, though, they were something more than curiosities. Benjamin Aureus, finally, had buried fourteen of them in the sand beneath the floor of his shop, and it was said that early on autumn mornings, an hour or two before sunrise, the air over the shop seemed to be agitated by flitting spirits, like an illustration of the opening of Pandora’s box.

  Jules Pennyman had long suspected that Aureus possessed some of the coins, but he hadn’t half-expected what he’d found. Powerful as Aureus was, he couldn’t have hoped to keep the coins silent. The coins had a way of finding Caretakers, and of searching out weaknesses in them. In the absence of weaknesses, the coins would create some. Aureus at first had been nothing more than a Caretaker himself, a disciple of the Wandering Jew whose penance for the sin of betrayal was the two-thousand-year task of keeping the coins apart. But Aureus had fallen to greed and to the corruption that came inevitably from the process of accumulating the coins. And now he was dead.

  Jules Pennyman wasn’t anyone’s disciple. He was a stone in the desert—linked to nothing at all, a self-contained, self-satisfied entity. And unlike Aureus, he was alive, and he possessed nearly, but not quite, twice the number of coins. His power would be incalculable. Unlike Judas Iscariot, he wasn’t a man given over to remorse …

  At the thought of Judas Iscariot he pulled a flask full of Pepto-Bismol out of his coat and drank off half the contents. He had more in his luggage.

  The taxi banged over a pothole as the driver felt around on the floor, coming up with a bottle of sweet Carmel wine. Pennyman leaned forward to complain, but the man shrugged and tilted it back, then spat the wine through the open window, cursing and throwing the bag and then the bottle out after it, muttering about vinegar. He turned and glared at Pennyman, as if the wine’s turning was his fault. And in a way it was.

  Just then it began to rain, great muddy drops that fouled the windshield. Pennyman peered up out the rear window at a nearly cloudless sky. Overhead, as if following them, was a single black cloud, and out over the desert a thousand little wind devils seemed to be whirling up, dancing in a riot of dust and dry twigs. They raced along beside the car for a way, the twigs and debris swirling into vaguely human shapes, like spirits again, peering in at the window. A dead bird plummeted from the sky, thumping onto the hood of the taxi, and then another followed, slamming against the windshield. The rain of birds lasted half a minute, and then the sky cleared abruptly and the wind devils died away. Pennyman waited. He had expected something, but he hadn’t known what.

  There was a lead box waiting at the airport, in his suitcase in a locker. He ought to have brought it along. The leather bag wasn’t enough to contain the coins. Even the weather, suddenly, was sensitive to them, as if it knew that they’d fallen into—what?—not evil hands. Evil wasn’t the word for it. Evil was a word used by the ignorant to explain powers and forces they feared. Jules Pennyman feared nothing at all, short of being stopped when he was so close to winning through.

  The rearview mirror spontaneously cracked to bits just then, showering the front seat with tiny fragments. The driver glanced sideways at Pennyman. He had a look of frightened incomprehension on his face now. The taxi swerved toward the shoulder, then back again, and then started to slow down. Pennyman had seen that look before. He pulled out his wallet, withdrew a wad of shekels, and waved it at the man. The taxi drove on. In ten minutes they’d be in Tel Aviv.

  It was true that Pennyman didn’t yet have all of the coins. There were still two in the earth, and the one that had been thrown into the sea. Pfennig, it seemed certain, possessed another one—or rather the coin possessed him. And then there was the coin in California. That one was veiled by mystery. He would have them all, though, in the very end; for the more he possessed, the more certain he became of the whereabouts of the rest, as if the coins sought each other out.

  “Skirt the city,” Pennyman said, not wanting to get caught in the downtown press of people. The road had flattened, and the air was sticky and warm. The muddy rain had given out, but the sky over the Mediterranean was black with approaching clouds.

  Something was happening to the weather. The pressure was dropping and the atmosphere seemed to be bending and warping—tensing like a coiled spring. When the taxi lurched to a halt amid honking traffic and Pennyman stepped out onto the curb, the ground shook, just a little, just enough to make the hurrying masses of people put down their luggage and stop, waiting.

  Pennyman paid the taxi driver and strode toward the airport doors—casually, nodding at an old woman with a dog, and pausing for one precious moment to hold back the milling crowd so that she could drag her bags and her dog in through the door. He didn’t want to seem to be in a hurry to get to the locker, to be a man possessed, although in truth there wasn’t a man in the world at that moment more thoroughly possessed than he was.

  He peered up at what he could see of the sky and grimaced as lightning arced across it. An immediate blast of thunder rattled the windows, followed by a wash of wind-driven rain. The air suddenly was full of the smell of ozone and sulphur, and the ground shook again, as if it were waking up.

  ONE

  “I was told that he was in his heart, a good fellow, and an enemy to no one but himself.”

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Prince Otto

  ANDREW VANBERGEN USED a pruning ladder to get to the attic window—the sort with flared legs and a single pole for support. The pole clacked against the copper rain gutter and then hung uselessly, the top rung of the ladder seesawing back and forth across it. He looked over his shoulder at the silent midnight street and wiggled the ladder, worried that it might slide down along the gutter and pitch him into the branches of the camphor tree that grew along the side of the house. But there was nothing he could do about it now; it was the only ladder he had.

  He could hear Aunt Naomi snoring through the open window. The whole street could hear it. That’s what would give him away—not any noise he’d make, not the scraping of the ladder against the gutter, but the sudden stopping of the snoring if she woke up and saw him there outside the window, peering in. Neighbors would lurch awake in their beds, wondering. Had they heard something? It would be like in an earthquake, when you’re not aware of the rumbling and the groaning and creaking until it stops.

  An hour ago he had lain in bed beside his sleeping wife in their second-story bedroom, listening to Aunt Naomi snoring through the floor. It drove him nearly crazy, the snoring and the mewling of her cats. He couldn’t slee
p because of it. He had pitched and tossed and plumped up his pillow, watching the slow luminous hands on the clock edge toward morning. He swore that if he saw the coming of twelve o’clock, he’d act. Midnight had come and gone.

  He had lain there knowing that the old woman would sleep the night through, like a baby. She’d awaken in the morning, about five, proud of herself for rising early but complaining about it anyway. She couldn’t sleep: her poor nerves, her “sciatica,” her sinuses, her this, her that. She’d demand tea with milk in it. Her bed would be covered with cats, and the air in the room would reek of mentholated vapor rub and litter boxes and old clothes. Taken altogether it would smell like—what? Words couldn’t express it. They wouldn’t express it; they’d mutiny first and become babble.

  It was the hottest April he could remember. Even at nearly one in the morning it was seventy-seven degrees and not a whisper of wind. The ocean sighed through the pier pilings half a block away, just over the rooftops. Now and then the light of headlamps would swing around the curve from Sunset Beach, and a car full of sleepy night owls would go gunning up the Pacific Coast Highway toward Belmont Shore and Long Beach. They were too far off to see him though, hidden as the house was down the little dead-end street that it shared with half a dozen other houses. Lights shone in one; the others were dark.

  Andrew climbed the ladder slowly, his faced blacked out with ash from the disused fireplace. He wore a black shirt and slacks and black burlap shoes with crepe soles. A long fiberglass pole with a loop on the end lay tilted against the ladder. On the shingled gable in front of him was an empty flour sack and a bit of rope with a loop already tied in one end. Lying there awake in bed an hour earlier, hot and tired and unable to sleep through the mewling and the snoring, he’d committed himself to the idea of tackling the cat problem that very night. Sleeplessness was maddening. There was nothing else on earth like it when it came to sheer, teeth-grinding irritation.