The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  In a fit of determination he climbed out of the car, closed the door softly, and stepped around into the backyard, hurrying into the garage. There on the bench was the sack full of smashed glass. The sight of it depressed him hugely, and he picked it up and flung it into the trash can in the corner. To hell with melting lead. He hadn’t the time to waste on it. There was no use trying to fiddle away old mistakes anyway; Rose wouldn’t be fooled. Not for a moment. All he would accomplish would be to look like an utter moron, and he couldn’t afford that sort of thing any more. He yanked on the coveralls, pried open his paint, and hurriedly stirred it with a piece of stick. In minutes he stood alongside the house, spreading out a canvas dropcloth. To hell with painting the garage, too. The house was bigger game.

  He began to dust off the house with a horsehair brush, intending to clean a good-sized area before starting to paint. It was nothing, this painting business. He studied the edge of his paintbrush. It was a good one, a Purdy four inch—sharp and clean. He dipped it into the paint, slipped the back edge of it across the metal can rim, and cut in a two-foot section of one of the clapboards, catching a drip and smoothing it out nicely. He stepped back and looked at it happily. It seemed to him to be evidence of something—that he wasn’t entirely a worthless crud, perhaps. He dipped the brush again and then stopped and listened. There were voices murmuring, one of them angry.

  He laid the paintbrush across the mouth of the can and rubbed his hands on the rag. It sounded like Rose; the angry voice did. He wouldn’t have that. He would put a quick stop to it. There was no one in the house who had the right to argue with her, except maybe himself. If it was Pennyman giving her trouble … A hot flush of anger surged through him and he stepped around toward the front door, nearly breaking into a run, his fists clenched. Then there came another voice; it was Pennyman, but he wasn’t arguing with Rose. The woman’s voice belonged to Mrs. Gummidge, and both voices were coming through the open window of Mrs. Gummidge’s ground-floor bedroom. She was the only one of them who occupied a room down below—a sort of maid’s quarters with its own bath and kitchenette. The window was open just a fraction.

  Andrew braked and then skipped backward two steps, spinning around and lunging after the paintbrush and paint. He fetched them, then tiptoed back around until he stood just beside the open window, and then very quietly and haphazardly he began to paint the siding. He hadn’t brought the horsehair brush, and there wasn’t time to waste going back after it, so he splashed the paint on over ten years worth of grime. He barely breathed, listening to the rising and falling of voices.

  “I should think I’d get more than that,” said Mrs. Gummidge tearfully.

  There was a pause, then Pennyman’s voice: “I haven’t got more. You can appreciate that. It’s a tiresome, slow process, wringing it out like that and distilling it down and decanting it and aging it. It isn’t done in a day. And the fish themselves are fearsomely rare. When Adams killed them all out of stupidity, with his cheap thermostats, it was six months before the damage could be put right. If it hadn’t been for the quick trip up to San Francisco … Well … Thank heavens for Han Koi’s man up in Chinatown. It’s only in the last month that Adams has got it all going again, and that means a month or two more before there’s a surplus.”

  “A surplus! I’m not asking for a surplus. I’m asking for a very little bit. A bit of yours is what I’m asking for. You can spare it. You’d think it was narcotics.”

  “And it works that very way,” said Pennyman in a soft and fatherly voice. “You don’t need any more than I’ve given you. I do, though. Certainly you can see that. Don’t cut any capers now. We’re days away from it. You know that. I can’t sacrifice a drop. If my powers aren’t honed and strong, then we’re done for; we might as well not have bothered.”

  There was silence for a moment as Andrew continued to slap paint on the wooden siding, paying no attention to the finer points of his work. He idly painted upwards and sideways and crossways, his head cocked, waiting for the conversation to continue. He could hear Mrs. Gummidge crying almost silently—stifling it, as if she didn’t want to be overheard by anyone chancing to pass by in the hallway. Andrew smiled. They had no earthly suspicion that the enemy stood right outside their window, got up in coveralls and a hat. He was killing two birds with one stone; that was the truth of it.

  The conversation started up again. There was the sound of glass clinking against glass and of Pennyman muttering something about cups of tea. Andrew couldn’t make it out.

  “Just a little at a time,” Mrs. Gummidge said.

  “Why don’t you give that up? This has nothing to do with personal vendettas. We’re above that.”

  “I don’t believe we are,” she said after a moment. “What about the books? Aren’t we above that, too?”

  “Damn the books. What books?”

  “Don’t think I don’t see anything. Don’t think it’s not me that does a bit of dusting and vacuuming around this house.” Her voice rose. In a moment she’d be hysterical.

  “Shh!” Pennyman hushed her up, cutting her off before she had revealed anything at all.

  Andrew was baffled. The whole conversation was baffling. Now there was another baffling silence during which he heard the back door shut. That could only be Rose, coming outside. She’d see that the garage door was open and she’d go in to have a look. Then she’d find the lid to the paint can and his jacket hanging over the bench vise, and she’d come around to the front to see if her wondering eyes had deceived her.

  There was a grunt of loathing, as if Mrs. Gummidge had swallowed a toad, and then an ungodly sort of fishy smell wafted out through the window, so putrid and overpowering that Andrew reeled back, turning his face away. There was Rose, standing on the sidewalk. He might have predicted it. He had predicted it. He smiled at her and waved his paintbrush. At least he hadn’t been crushing water glasses or experimenting with cups full of cold coffee.

  He moved away from the window before he said anything, hauling his paint can back around to where his dropcloth lay and setting it down. “Thought I’d take advantage of the sunlight and get in a bit of painting.”

  Rose nodded—not happily, it seemed to him. He stepped back and looked at the house. There were two short strips of clapboard painted very neatly on the corner where he’d started in. Then there was a sort of mess of fresh paint near Mrs. Gummidge’s window. It looked something like a psychological test. He waved his brush at it, as if in explanation, thinking hard for something to say. He’d been caught out again. But at least he’d been caught by Rose and not by Pennyman. It would have gone hard on him if Pennyman had discovered him listening at the window. And of course he would discover it, too, as soon as he saw the weirdly painted patch of siding. Pennyman wasn’t an idiot.

  “I’m amazed,” said Rose, seeming suddenly to be happy with Andrew’s antics, as if she’d taken the long view and come to the conclusion that any work was good work, any painting good painting. “What’s the point of being so wild with it, though?”

  “Bad grain in the wood. The redwood seems to be delaminating there. Probably a matter of too much afternoon sun. When that sort of thing happens you have to scrub it on, to get it in under the grain lines where the wood is coming apart. It acts as a sort of adhesive. Looks bizarre now, I’ll admit, but once the whole thing is painted …”

  Rose nodded. “Why don’t you stick to one side at a time. That way if you don’t get it all done, it won’t look quite so peculiar.”

  “Absolutely,” said Andrew. “I got carried away, I guess. I saw what the problem would be with the wood and all and decided to have a go at it. I couldn’t resist. You know how I am when it comes to tackling little problems like that.”

  Rose nodded. “Shouldn’t you clean it first? All that dirt …”

  “Bonding agent,” said Andrew, hating himself. “It’ll look good freshened up, won’t it?”

  “I’ll be pretty happy with it,” said Rose. “But why don’t yo
u clean up? You don’t have much of the afternoon left anyway.”

  Andrew picked up his paint can and moved across toward the open window again, talking loudly to alert Mrs. Gummidge and Pennyman, if they were still in the room, that he was out on the lawn. His spying was pretty much at an end. If he were smart, he’d haul out a floodlight and an extension cord and try to get the mess of paint smoothed out and cleaned up before he quit for the evening. Rose would admire his sticking to it, and Pennyman wouldn’t wander out in the morning and find anything suspicious.

  “Bring my dinner out on a plate, will you?”

  “If you want,” said Rose, heading back up the sidewalk toward the garage. “Don’t wear yourself out, though.”

  That was just like Rose, worrying about him. He dipped his brush into the paint, straightened up, and looked square into the face of Pennyman, which was regarding him out the window, grinning slyly. “Good evening,” rasped Andrew, startled.

  Pennyman nodded, giggling just a little bit, then laughing harder, then bursting into such a paroxysm of laughter that for a moment Andrew thought he’d choke. And for as long as Pennyman laughed, Andrew couldn’t step a foot nearer the house, and he began to hope very fervently that Pennyman would choke, that the laughter would simply explode him like an overfilled balloon.

  EIGHT

  “Our affections and beliefs are wiser than we; the best that is in us is better than we can understand …”

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Virginibus Puerisque

  IT WAS LATE—after midnight. Pennyman hadn’t come in all day. Andrew was sure of it. He would give the old man another hour, maybe catch an hour of sleep himself, if he could. It was high time he had a look inside Pennyman’s room, and this was as good a night as any. He punched buttons on his little battery-operated kitchen timer, setting it for sixty minutes. In order to muffle it, he shoved it under the pillow on the couch. Then he lay down and fell asleep almost at once.

  He woke up from a dream involving pigs, wondering where he was, wondering at the ringing buzz in his ear, and he groped for the alarm clock. Then he remembered. He sat up groggily, rubbing his eyes. He could barely keep them wedged open. His back was nearly murdering him, and he was stiff in the joints. He suddenly wanted very much to go back to sleep, to lie on the couch forever. But he couldn’t. He had a mission. When he stood up, though, he almost tumbled forward onto his face. An hour’s worth of sleep had just made him more beat; his mind was a sandy pudding. Then he thought about the pending adventure, and the thought woke him up. He stretched, tucked in his shirt, and stepped out into the livingroom.

  The tennis ball he’d set against the front door still sat there. Pennyman hadn’t come in. He was gone for the night—something fairly common lately. Mrs. Gummidge had mentioned having spoken to him before dinner. She had said that Pennyman had spent most of the day in his room and then had gone out to a relative’s house in Glendale, where he would doubtless spend the night. But neither Andrew nor Rose had seen Pennyman that morning, and Andrew suspected that he’d gone off early and hadn’t returned, that Mrs. Gummidge had lied. Pennyman was using Mrs. Gummidge for an alibi, it seemed. From Andrew’s point of view, a man who needed an alibi was usually guilty as a gibbon ape.

  Andrew didn’t much trust Mrs. Gummidge, not since he’d overheard them at the window. He was certain that they were up to something together, that they’d joined forces since coming to live at the inn. In one way it relieved him just a little. Mrs. Gummidge, after all … One would have thought that Pennyman could find more capable allies. Perhaps his liaison with Mrs. Gummidge was evidence that Pennyman was mostly show, mostly facade. He was the sort, certainly, who seemed to be. That was something Andrew could sniff out pretty accurately. Andrew had a good nose for falseness.

  He looked around for something else—something that would make a clatter. The fireplace tools would do. He left them hanging precariously in their wrought iron holder and tilted the whole business against the door. If Pennyman came in now, the whole house would know it. Andrew would have some explaining to do, but it would be better than Pennyman sneaking in and catching Andrew rummaging in his room.

  He creaked up the stairs, listening to the snores echoing down the stairwell from Aunt Naomi’s room in the attic, listening for sounds of restlessness from the bedroom where Rose, by now, had been asleep for three hours. He couldn’t help grinning. There was excitement in skulking around a dark house after midnight, doing battle with the forces of evil—or the forces of something.

  One of Aunt Naomi’s cats strolled down from above and stood blinking at him on the stairs. Then it jumped past him and ran down the stairs to the ground-floor landing, where it sat on its haunches and stared out toward the front door. Another cat appeared above, coming along down to rub against Andrew’s leg. It sat down outside Pennyman’s door and meowed softly. The cat below meowed as if in response. Andrew had the uncanny feeling that the cats were up to something—that they were signaling each other. He was certain somehow that they were on his side, though—that once again they were watching over him.

  He suddenly felt surefooted and keen. The thrill of it all had scoured the sleep from his head. He could picture the interior of Pennyman’s bedroom—the chair, the bureau, the bookcases, the single bed tucked into an alcove in the wall and with a curtain hung across in front of it. He’d found and bought the furniture himself. Rose had sewed the bedchamber curtain, and Andrew had installed it on a wooden rod across the front of the bed alcove. There wasn’t a square inch of the room that he wasn’t familiar with. He really didn’t need the penlight in his pocket; he could feel his way from stem to stern in the dark.

  Suddenly and without a tickle of warning, he sneezed. He squelched it with his hand, sort of moomphing it into his palm. He pinched his nose to stop an inevitable second sneeze as he froze there on the darkened stairs, listening again, his heart slamming. No one stirred. The snores continued unabated from overhead, and in the still, enclosed air of the stairwell hung just a hint of the smell of cats. It was comforting, somehow, and hadn’t the power anymore to disgust him or set him into a rage.

  He still didn’t like the idea of a house full of them, though. His resolve to deal with them had weakened a bit, but he still had a score to settle there. He had to be the master of his own house. One thing at a time, though; that was how it had to be. Pennyman first, the cats afterward. He wouldn’t make the mistake of overreaching himself. He tiptoed past the cat, bending over to pet it and feeling guilty again for plotting against it. He paused outside Pennyman’s door, listening for one last time. Then he steeled himself, shoved the door open slowly, and stepped into the dark interior of the room.

  There was the smell of books and rosewater and bay rum. An octagonal, hinged mirror sitting atop the bureau caught a glint of moonlight through the window. Arranged atop the bureau were carefully laid out toiletries: tortoiseshell combs and brushes, a mustache scissors, bottles of hair tonic and skin lotion, an emery board and another mirror—for admiring the back of his head, apparently. It was an unimpressive lot of credentials, but it was all Pennyman had to recommend himself. Mess his hair up and he was a sorry-looking scarecrow.

  Andrew abruptly considered tumbling the lot of it out the window. He could watch Pennyman’s pride crack to bits on the stones of the pathway below. Walk with the proud, he thought, and you shall be scornful. That was true enough. If there was one thing that Pennyman surely was, it was scornful. Andrew was—what?—scornful of it. He grinned again. That’s what tripped him up every time—his pride in being humble. It beat all. There was no way to lick it.

  He found himself contemplating a hairbrush, idly thinking about philosophy. He shook his head, clearing it again. There was no time for that. At any moment the fireplace tools might clatter down on the hardwood floor and Andrew’s mission would come to a bad end. What if Rose, waking up and stepping into the hallway, caught him sneaking out of Pennyman’s room? What if she got downstairs before
him and found the fireplace tools strewn across the floor? Who would appear to be the fool, the lunatic? He or Pennyman? He knew the answer to that. He also knew that Rose wasn’t the sort to lie in bed and shake when there were strange noises in the house. She was every bit as likely to pull on her bathrobe and have a look. He wondered suddenly what he was doing there at all, meddling in Pennyman’s room.

  The business of the fish tonic—that was central. Come to think of it, that was the other odor, mingling with the hair tonic and the bay rum and the general old-house smell. And there was something more, too—the faint smell of something sweet and chemical. What was it?—perfume, perhaps. A woman’s perfume.

  His eyes were adjusted to the dark, but the faint moonlight wasn’t quite enough illumination to do the trick. He pulled out the penlight and switched it on, shining it first at this, then at that. There was a plethora of drawers in the room—five in the bureau, two in the desk, six in the built-in cupboard below the bed. He wished he could look through them all, but it would be folly. What if Rose awakened and went downstairs out of kindness to him, to wake him up on the couch and urge him to come up to bed? He’d have to hurry.

  There it was, as if it had been left for him. On the little mahogany table next to the head of the bed alcove sat a half-filled bottle, open and with a glass vial lying beside it. It was odd that Pennyman would leave it open, and even odder that he’d leave it out like that, unless he were so conceited and sure of himself that he couldn’t imagine anyone slipping in like this. Andrew pulled his silver flask out of his coat pocket, twisted open the cap, tilted the fish elixir bottle over it, and drained off a quarter inch or so—no more than a half ounce, just enough to have a bit of laboratory work done on it.