The Horror Megapack

by H. P. Lovecraft

  My friend came back, sat down again, and drank in silence for several minutes, then finally said, “I suppose I’ve set myself up for this. I might as well tell you the whole story. You don’t have to believe a word of it, but you can listen. Maybe you can use some of it in a book.”

  “Jimbo, I may have called you a lot of things, but never a liar.”

  “Just listen.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  * * * *

  “Well the first thing you have to remember,” Jim began, “is that Joe Eisenberg was like one of the characters in his own cartoons. Mock-pedantry was definitely his shtick. You couldn’t tell when he was serious and when he wasn’t. He’d explain something like the Spooch Theory in the driest professorial tone, like an arcane point of real linguistics.”

  “The what theory?”

  “The idea was that spooch is an inherently funny word on the phonetic level. The double-o sound is inherently funny. The sp sort of slides you in there, and the hard ch traps you inside the word, so the oo can resonate until it reaches the humor threshold. A soft sound at the end, and you’d escape. That’s why ‘spoon’ isn’t funny; but spooch is.”

  I snickered. Jim took another sip of his drink and said, “You see? That proves it. Or that’s what Joe used to say. And he had lots more where that came from.”

  “Weird.”

  “Yeah, but creative people are allowed to be weird. The same secret committee that issues the bifocals assigns weirdness quotas, and underground comic book artists get more than most people. And Joe was fun that way. We used to call him. Spoocho Marx. The other Marx Brothers had locked him in the refriger­ator and forgotten about him, sometime back in the ’30s, so here he was. He looked the part too, like a dark-haired version of Harpo.

  “But somewhere he went too far, and the silliness turned into craziness of a less pleasant sort. I think it began about a year after he’d started working for me, one evening in December. I was still prosperous then, and lived in the suburbs, and Joe and I used to go home on the same train.

  “We had been working late over some story boards. It was the beginning of Joe’s Miracles of Saint Toad series that later got such a tremendous response in Zipperhead Funnies. He had the art wrapped in a plastic trash can liner under one arm, and we ran for the train, the wind and rain blasting in our faces. I reached the entrance first, and I could hear the train rumbling in downstairs. We would have made it, but Joe suddenly called out, ‘Jim! Help!’

  “He’d spilled the artwork, all of it, half inside the doorway; half out. Rain splattered over the floor. Late commuters rushed in, not too careful where they stepped.

  “I ran back and helped him recover it, but by then several panels had been ruined. They’d have to be redone. We missed the train, and had to wait another hour inside the station. Much of that time was spent drying the story boards with paper towels from the men’s room.

  “‘How the Hell did you drop them?’ I asked.

  “‘Oh,’ he said, digging into his coat pocket. ‘Here’s why.’ He held up a penny. ‘You know what they say, See a penny; pick it up; all the day you’ll have good luck—’

  “‘That was real dumb,’ I said. ‘Grade-A Idiota Maximus. You’re running to catch a train, in the rain, and you’re carrying art that took you days or even weeks to produce, and you risk it all for one crummy cent. Not what I would call sound financial planning, my dear fellow. Not at all.’

  “He went on for a minute drying a spot where the ink, had run badly, then he gave me his best Harpo smile and said, ‘It isn’t the money, Jimbo. It’s more luck. If I don’t have luck, I might lapse into superstition, which is really bad luck. It’s where I get my inspiration from. I’ve found that out. It works like this: I have to find at least one penny every day. That’s basic recognition from the gods.’

  “‘The gods?’

  “‘Yeah, Zeus and all that crowd. Nobody sacrifices oxen or goes to oracles anymore, so this is how they stay in touch With the few remaining faithful.’

  “‘Uh-huh…’

  “‘Like I said, you find one penny a day and that’s a sign that at least nothing disastrous will happen. Find more, or dimes or quarters, and you’re ten times blessed, or twenty-five times, and things will turn out real nice. Find a bright, shiny penny, and something new will come into your life, while an old, tarnished thing means that you’ll find something or do something which is old and familiar, but still good. It’s a form of divination, I suppose. There are lots of ramifications. I could go on for hours.’

  “He proceeded to do so. He explained away the accident with the art by the fact that he hadn’t yet picked up a penny that day, and so was sailing under a curse, so to speak. But the evening would be better. He would probably get a lot of work done, or inherit money from a long-lost uncle, or hear from his old girlfriend, or something. The penny foretold it. He had a whole system worked out, as elaborate as anything in an astrology manual, and he was absolutely serious as he explained it all, in the station while waited, then on the train all the way to his stop.

  “Any other time it might have been hilarious, but I was thinking about deadlines and distributors, and the sort of scene my then-wife Carol was going to cause when I got home late and her special Organic dinner was cold.

  “‘Christ, Joe,’ I said at last. ‘I don’t have time for this bullshit.’

  “He turned to me, a hurt look on his face. ‘It isn’t bullshit,’ he said quietly.

  “Before I could say anything, the train arrived at his stop, and he got up and left.

  “Things got rapidly weirder after that, but I didn’t care, because Joe was hot. He was turning in great stuff. Before long I gave him his own book, Saint Toad’s Cracked Chimes, and by the time the third issue was out and the returns were in on the first, I knew we had a hit. If he had discovered the secret of success by picking up pennies on the street, well, all I could say was more power to him.

  “It’s hard for me to think of any scene in what was left of his life that didn’t have a penny in it. I mean, he found them everywhere. In a dark alley, during a blackout, for God’s sake, he stopped, bent over, and said, ‘Ah, here we go!’

  “That summer we went to a comic art convention in Boston. The two of us shared the taxi from the train station to the hotel, and, sure enough, there was a penny on the floor in front of him. He held it up to the window, doing his best Harpo act, and, true to character, whipped out an oversized magnifying glass and began to scrutinize the coin minutely.

  “‘What do you expect to find on it, the secret of the ages?’ I asked.

  “‘Something like that, Jimbo.’

  “Joe was a big success with the fans. He could be a real charmer when he wanted to be. But he got a lot of odd looks, always bending over to pick up pennies. There were a lot of jokes about how badly I paid my artists, that they had to scrounge change to stay alive. And once, in the middle of a panel discussion, all the microphones went dead. Joe calmly unscrewed the top of his, shook it, and a penny dropped onto the table top. He gave the audience his trademarked grin, and there was nervous laughter, as if most people didn’t get the joke.

  “‘There’s a fortune written on it,’ he told them. ‘It says: You will find true love and get laid.’

  “That got a laugh, and, you know, the prediction came true, at least in part. There was a groupie in the audience, who used Joe’s shtick to bait him…literally. She laid out a trail of pennies, up a flight of stairs, along a corridor, and under the door of her room. The door was unlocked. And that, to make a steamy story short, is how Joe Eisenberg lost his virginity, at the age of twenty-seven. Because the gods had revealed that he would, he told me afterward.

  “‘I’m sure glad I picked up that penny,’ he said.

  “I think he used his silliness to hide social awkwardness. And somewhere along the line, all this very much ceased to be amusing.

  “He found I don’t know how many pennies during the remainder of the convent
ion, and on the train ride back. The way he pounced on them told me that the totally overdone gag was turning into a mania. It was a wonder he didn’t walk right into people. He was always scanning the floor, looking for pennies.

  “‘Awwright! Enough of this!’ I told him in my best Graham­ Chapman-as-a-British-Army-officer voice. This has got to stop. It’s getting silly.’

  “‘I only wish it were, Jimbo,’ he said softly, then turned to stare out the train window.

  * * * *

  “It was early November when he came into my office one evening late with a stack of new artwork. Things were going badly for me by then, for all Joe’s stuff sold better than anything else I had. The mid-’70s were bad times for undergrounds. Sex and obscenity had lost a good deal of their novelty, and the Moron Majority was after us. Head shops were closing, and with them went much of the distribution. Books that had sold 75,000 copies five years previously were now lucky to do 20,000. And so I was living in that dingy office above the record store on South Street. My suburban apartment, and my wife-Carol, had gone in the course of belt-tightening.

  “I was working late with some bills, and Joe knew I’d be there. He had a key and he just came in. I hardly glanced up. Just as he stepped through the door my Selectric jammed and began making a hideous rattle.

  “Somehow he was expecting it. Joe dropped his artwork on a chair and ran to my desk, leaning over my shoulder, reaching into my typewriter with the longest pair of tweezers I have ever laid eyes on, and extracted—you don’t have to guess—a shiny, new, Goddamn penny from the innards of my typewriter. As soon as he did, the machine reverted to a contented hum.

  “Out came the magnifying glass again. I knew better than to expect an explanation.

  “‘This is great!’ he said in something that was almost a tone of reverential awe. ‘The pattern is complete. I have all the answers now.’

  “Without another word, he left, not bothering to even discuss the artwork. But, as I said, I was pretty used to his, ah, eccentricities by now. So I just got up and looked at the art myself.

  “And in a minute, I’d forgotten my troubles, how weird Joe was getting, and everything. The stuff was brilliant. It was the first of that final sequence of the Saint Toad strips, in which the warty sage sets out on his pilgrimage to find the Meaning of Life in the Land of Reversible Cups. I was laughing aloud. It was a breakthrough, which put Joe on a level with the immortal R. Crumb, or even a notch above.

  “‘Wow,’ I said to myself. ‘Mister Natural, move over.”

  “It was part of a sustained burst of creativity on Joe’s part. I didn’t see him much after that. He sent his stuff in by Federal Express. There was enough there to keep Saint Toad going for several years, weird, metaphysical stuff, all full of dooms and prophecies—and some of his predictions were just uncanny, as things turned out. You know, about the World Series and Comet Kohoutek and the president’s brain.

  “There were pennies in every panel. It became a trademark, a game; to see where he had hidden them. Even in the Fantastic Voyage parody sequence, where the hero sails a tiny submarine up his own asshole, if you look very closely, there’s an Indian-head cent lodged in the pancreas.

  “It was completely impossible for me to think of Joe Eisenberg Without thinking of pennies, and vice-versa. ‘My God,’ I told myself, ‘he must have buckets of them by now.’

  “By the time the following January came around, the sales of Joe’s work were all that was keeping my operation afloat. So you can understand my alarm when I tried to call him one day and got a recorded message saying his phone had been disconnected.

  “It was a mistake, I told myself. Or maybe he had just forgotten to pay the bill. I sent him a letter, certified, so he’d have to come to the door and sign for it.

  “The letter was returned, undeliverable.

  “There was another Joe Eisenberg shtick that came to mind: mock-childish eagerness over the question, Can we panic now? Huh? Huh? Can we?

  “Yes, I thought, we can panic now.

  “I decided to pay him a visit. It was raining that evening as I walked to the train station. I couldn’t help but think of the night when the penny-mania had all begun. Joe no doubt would have called it a sign from the gods, a meaningful symmetry or something.

  “There was a discarded newspaper on the seat beside me as the train pulled out of 30th Street and headed for the suburbs. I glanced at the familiar scenes for a while, then picked up the paper. It was a back section, and there, under a snide headline, was a piece about a ‘local character,’ the Penny Man, who spent whole days wandering the streets after loose change, the bulging pockets of his old overcoat jangling. For all there was no photo and no names were mentioned, I knew it was Joe.

  “‘Oh, shit,’ I muttered to myself, crumpling the newspaper. ‘Oh shit…’

  “Joe lived on one of the few sleazy side streets in the posh Main Line town of Bryn Mawr, in an upstairs apartment over a drugstore. I went up the back stairs—wooden stairs outside the building—and tapped gently on his door. No answer. I peered through the glass. The apartment was dark. It was just my luck. Maybe he was out picking up pennies again, hoping to find the secret of the universe that way—in my state of mind, I didn’t doubt he could actually do it—or else the pennies had revealed that he should move without telling me. I was ready to believe anything.

  “Then I heard slow, shuffling footsteps, a metallic clang, and the sound of coins pouring onto the floor, followed by incoherent obscenities. But I knew that tired, almost sobbing voice.

  “He opened the door, then lunged for my feet. I jumped back, startled. He picked up a penny off the mat, looked at it, then put it in his pocket and turned to go back inside.

  “‘Not yet,’ he said to himself. ‘A little more time.’

  “He made to shut the door, as if he hadn’t noticed me at all.

  “‘Joe, aren’t you going to ask me in?’

  “‘Uh, hello, Jim,’ he said, a little disoriented.

  “I got a good look at him then, and I hardly recognized him. Now you’ll recall that there were still a lot of hippies then, and squalor hadn’t totally fallen into disfavor yet—but Joe had gone beyond acceptable limits. It was a cold, damp winter night, and there he was barefoot, wearing old jeans with both knees out, and a bathrobe held shut with safety pins. He hadn’t shaved in at least a week, and he smelled like he hadn’t bathed in twice that. And he was haggard, his face pale and sunken, his eyes bloodshot, his gaze wild and distracted. Like a crazy man’s. Like the look you see on bag people, when they sit for hours in a corner somewhere, staring into nothing.

  “How are you, Joe?’

  “‘Jimbo, I’m…I knew you would come by eventually. I suppose you deserve an explanation. Come in.’

  “I followed him silently along an unlighted corridor, stepping over boxes and piles of papers. His studio was a mess, paint chipping from the walls, trash in cardboard boxes heaped in corners, orange peels on the floor. Something moved behind the boxes. Maybe it was a cat, maybe not.

  “I wondered how he could work here. The only window looked out on a brick wall. The overhead light apparently didn’t work, so the only illumination came from a small lamp he’d clamped onto his drawing table.

  “I· waded forward, careful not to step on any artwork, and looked at the drawing on the table. It was a rough pencil sketch of the opening spread for what turned out to be the final issue of Saint Toad, the scene where they sacrifice Little Nell to Odin. I was selfishly relieved to see that, for all Joe Eisenberg might be going mad, his creative powers were not failing. His stuff would continue to sell comic books.

  “Still Joe didn’t say anything. I turned away from the table, and began to scan the bookshelves, reading titles as best I could in the gloom. You know, you can tell a lot about someone by what is on their bookshelves. Joe was full of surprises. Oh, there were lots of comics, and the hardcover reprints of the E.C. classics, but also lots of classics in the literary sense
. He had most of the Elizabethans, and even Latin and Greek writers. And there were scholarly books on religion, folklore, magic, that sort of thing. I could only make out a few titles: Franz Cumont books on Roman paganism, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the Joshi transla­tion of Al Azif, and a few more. Not what you’d expect for the average cartoonist. Of course Joe wasn’t the average cartoonist, and his strips were fantastically erudite sometimes.

  “‘Jim,’ he said at last, ‘you are probably wondering…’

  “‘You could say that.’

  “‘I’ll bet you have.’ Then he bent over and I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. All along one wall was a row of buckets, and they were indeed filled with pennies. He picked up a handful of them, and let them dribble through his fingers. ‘See a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck. Do you know what the next verse is, Jimbo?’

  “‘No, but I think you’re going to tell me.’

  “‘See a penny; leave it lay; death will claim you that same day. I learned that from the Penny Elves. That’s one of the many things they told me.’

  “‘The what kind of elves?’

  “‘Penny Elves, Jim. Like tooth fairies who have been promoted, only they’re not good enough to work for Santa Claus. I used to think it was the old gods, and that was a grand and serene and beautiful way to look at it—the Olympian powers exiled, forgotten, reduced to communicating to the few mortals who still acknowledge them by penny-divination. There’s a certain pathos in the idea. But it isn’t true. It’s all the work of these loser elves. They resent the job. They want the prestige of being in the employ of the Big Claus, but they know they haven’t made the grade. So they put us humans through the paces, just to make us look ridiculous. They bait the trap with real knowledge, real predictions, and lead us on.’

  “He said all this with such conviction, such passive, yet intense resignation that the effect was scary. I can’t put it any other way.

  “‘Is this…like the Spooch Theory, Joe?’