“Suddenly he was angry. I had never seen him angry before. He threw the remaining pennies down hard, and started shooing me toward the door.
“‘Forget it, Jimbo. You keep asking me if I can be serious. Well you can’t. That’s pretty obvious. You won’t understand. Don’t worry about your Goddamn artwork. You’ll get it on time. What you need to worry about is What are you going to do when this starts happening to you? Huh, Jimbo? What?’
“He slammed the door in my face. I stood there for a minute at the top of the stairs, stunned, and then I headed for the Bryn Mawr train station. There was nothing I could do. I had never felt so helpless in all my life. Joe had no family that I knew of, and I couldn’t very well spend $75.00 an hour—even if I had it—explaining to a shrink that I had this friend who was suffering from extraordinary delusions. What was left? Call up the police and tell them Joe was behaving irrationally? There are lots of irrational people in our society, and nobody cares a bit about them. You see them in every big city, sleeping on vents.
“So I caught the last train back into Philly and did nothing. “I was disturbed to notice that there was an unusual amount of loose change on the floor of the train car I was riding in. Nobody stooped to pick any of it up.
“Joe Eisenberg was as good as his word. He remained punctual until the end. His work came in on time, as brilliant and wonderful as ever. Somewhere in the deep recesses of his tangled mind, genius still remained; I don’t use the word lightly. Genius…
“My own behavior in the following couple of months was selfish, even shameful. That whole scene had been a cry for help from a very disturbed individual, but I tried to put him out of my mind. He was an adult, I told myself, his own responsibility. I was his publisher, not his daddy.
“Mostly I retreated into my work. When I’d started out publishing undergrounds, it was a lark, a mixture of joking and idealism, a way of showing what we called The Establishment in those days that the true spirit of freaky America had not been stifled. I never imagined that it would become a desperate, grinding business frequently interrupted by messages from the sponsor, that is to say the landlord, who swore he would turn me and mine out on the sidewalk if the rent was late one more time. Then there were the artists. I managed to pay some of them, some of the time. I felt bad about that.
“But Joe never complained. He was faithful till the end.
“The end came on the last evening of April, Walpurgisnacht. I suppose that figured. I had been out most of the day, trying to find a second-hand typewriter to replace my Selectric, which had rattled and gurgled its last. When I got back to the office-cumapartment, there was a package between the inner and outer doors, with no markings at all, save a single word scribbled on the back in magic marker: GOOD-BYE.
“I recognized Joe’s handwriting, of course. I hurried inside and slit open the package. Several pennies fell out, onto the carpet. The package contained artwork, another, the final installment of Saint Toad’s Cracked Chimes, beginning with the sacrifice scene I’d seen on his drawing table during my visit. Well fine, I thought. He’s delivering them himself now.
“Then the phone rang. It was the printer, who wasn’t going to print the next Zipperhead unless I paid him for the jobs he’d done on the previous four. As soon as I got myself out of that one, another artist called and threatened to go on strike if I didn’t pay him what I owed him.
“One thing followed another, and I didn’t manage to even think of Joe again until quite late that night. It must have been around eleven when I noticed that one of the coins on the rug was much larger than the others. I picked it up. It wasn’t an American penny, but a very old, large-sized British one, with Queen Victoria on the front.
“On the back were the words: WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS.
“I dropped it with a yelp, as if it were red hot. I was sure I was seeing things, going a bit mad myself. The coin lay on the rug at my feet, the message fading in and out: WATCH…WATCH…WATCH…
“Then the phone rang one more time. I assumed it was another creditor. It’s never too late at night when people are after you for money.
“‘Hello!’ I snarled.
“It was Joe. He sounded exhausted, his voice cracking as he spoke. I think he had been crying.
“‘Jim,’ he said. ‘You’ve been good to me, as good as anyone. I think you ought to know. It’s too late to do anything for me, but I ought to tell you the truth.’
“There was a long pause, as if he couldn’t bring himself to speak.
“‘What is it, Joe,’ I asked him gently. ‘You can tell me.’
“‘It isn’t elves. There are no such things as Penny Elves.’
I hoped that somehow Joe had snapped out of it, had become sane again. But he didn’t sound any saner. If anything, he sounded worse.
“‘It’s devils,’ he said. ‘Devils right out of Hell. A special subdivision of them. They work for Mammon, the demon of avarice, and they lead people to damnation through, well…money. I made a pact with them, Jim. I did it before I knew who they really were. It all started as a game, picking up pennies, tying them in to coincidences, pretending they were omens and prophecies. But then, somehow, I discovered that they really worked. Forbidden knowledge, Jim. That’s what it was. They told me…all sorts of things…wonderful, terrible. I made a deal. I wanted to be good, Jim. I wanted to be the best, so I made a deal, and I learned how to read the signs more closely than ever before. That’s where my inspiration came from, Saint Toad, all the rest. Made in Hell. You know what they say about me—devilishly funny.’
“‘No, Joe,’ I said. ‘This is crapola. It’s you. You’re a genius. It comes out of your head. You didn’t get it off the back of any stupid penny.’
“‘The back, Jimbo? How did you know the message is always on the back? I never told you that.’
“I looked down at the coin on the rug. There, on the back of it, was something new: JOE IS DYING.
“‘Joe!’ I said. ‘Don’t do anything! Stay where you are! I’m coming out there right now!’.
“‘I appreciate the thought, my friend, but you can’t help me. They’re coming for me tonight. They’re coming to collect on an old debt. They told me this, on the last penny I found.’
“He babbled for a while after that. I could barely make out one word in five. Then he was weeping, and reciting poetry:
‘Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo’s laurel-bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man.
Faustus is gone; regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise—’
“‘I’m coming out there,’ I said, and hung up on him.
“I ran for the train station, only to find when I got there that I had missed the last train. I was desperate. I would have to take a cab, but then I realized that I didn’t have enough money on me.
“The floor of the train station was littered with coins, which no one else seemed to notice.
A cop paced calmly, kicking hundreds of nickels and dimes this way and that.
“I didn’t look at any of them. They burned in my hands as I gathered them, but after a few minutes I had my pockets full, just like the Penny Man the newspaper writer had found so amusing.
“It was a long ride to Bryn Mawr. I didn’t even bother to ask the cabby why there was so much loose change on the floor in the back of his cab. Something scratched beneath the seat, and I thought I caught a whiff of sulfur. This same cabby was more surprised than angry when I paid my fifteen-dollar fare with a double handful of coins.
“‘You count it!’ I yelled, as I ran up the stairs to Joe’s apartment.
“There was a thunderous racket coming from the alley beneath the studio window. Coins were pouring out, rattling off the tops of trash cans like rainwater. When I got to his door, the sound from inside was like what you’d hear if every slot machine in Atlantic City hit the jackpot at once.
“Of course I was too late. He was already dead by the time I forced open the door and crawled the length of that hall, through three or four feet of loose change, which seemed to wriggle and heave beneath me, while millions of coins poured out of the darkness overhead, battering, nearly suffocating me.
“I think Joe had been trying to draw at the very end. His table was still standing, and there were a few random lines across a sheet of paper clamped there. His stool was buried. I dug· frantically.
“I found him at last, face down on the floor, half underneath the drawing table. I pulled him to the surface and clung to him, as if somehow that would do some good, but he was already dead. I just sat there for a while as the coins rained down and the whole structure of the building creaked from the weight of them. My mind blanked out. His corpse was a kind of life preserver. I hung on because I couldn’t let go. I was still holding him when the police arrived.”
* * * *
Jim Bowen stopped talking, and took another sip of his drink. My Wangadangburger had gotten cold on the plate. The waitress was staring at us.
“That’s the story,” he said. “I don’t expect you to believe it, but that’s the story.”
“Wait a Goddamn minute,” I said, almost convinced I was the victim of the most inscrutable, poker-faced put-on in history. “You can’t end it there. I mean, the police find you half-buried in something like forty million dollars worth of small change, and Joe Eisenberg is in your arms, crushed to death—you must have had quite a time explaining.”
“He wasn’t crushed. He’d choked on a single coin. Otherwise the apartment was its usual mess. All those pennies were gone.”
“Except the one he’d choked on.”
“That wasn’t a penny, Chuck. It was a solidus.”
“A what?”
“An ancient Roman coin. Gold, about the size of a nickel. The figure on it was Julian the Apostate, who was the last emperor to honor the old gods. ‘He was heavily into divination, I understand.”
“But what has that got to do with—?”
“I think the devils, or whatever they were, thought it would make a particularly fine finishing touch, that’s all. It was embedded in his esophagus. A doctor showed it to me after the autopsy.”
I didn’t know what to say next. Jim Bowen seemed so sincere about all this. That, as he’d put it, was the scary part.
I rose to leave.
“I suppose it is about that time,” Jim said.
The waitress came with our checks on a little tray. I reached for my wallet, but Jim said, “No, you listened to my story. I’ll treat you.”
He put some bills down, and the waitress took them away.
Then he picked up his napkin. There were coins under it, nickels, dimes, but mostly pennies.
He recoiled in disgust, as if the tabletop were covered with live spiders.
What are you going to do when this starts happening to you? Joe Eisenberg had supposedly asked. Jim was clearly wondering. So was I, just a little bit.
I thought he was going to faint. But instead, very gingerly, he brushed the tabletop clear.
The waitress came back, offering him a little tray.
“For God’s sake! Keep the change!”
THE HOUND, by H. P. Lovecraft
In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint, distant baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not dream—it is not, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. St. John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.
May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St. John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the Symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon of its diverting novelty and appeal. Only the sombre philosophy of the Decadents could hold us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.
I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions, or catalogue even partly the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we prepared in the great stone house where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities. It was a secret room, far, far underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the odours our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies, sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!—the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered grave.
Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, life-like bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist’s art, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the world. Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the fresh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Statues and paintings there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St. John and myself. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnamable drawings which it was rumoured Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. It is of this loot in particular that I must not speak—thank God I had the courage to destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself.
The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous, grinning secret of the earth. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St. John was always the leader, and he it was who led the way at last to that mocking, that accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.
By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? I think it was the dark rumour and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre. I can recall the scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legion
s of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant corner; the odours of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and worst of all, the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we could neither see nor definitely place. As we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this selfsame spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast.
I remembered how we delved in this ghoul’s grave with our spades, and how we thrilled at the picture of ourselves, the grave, the pale watching moon, the horrible shadows, the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the antique church, the dancing death-fires, the sickening odours, the gently moaning night-wind, and the strange, half-heard, directionless baying, of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure. Then we struck a substance harder than the damp mould, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the long undisturbed ground. It was incredibly tough and thick, but so old that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held.
Much—amazingly much—was left of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had killed it, held together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever like our own. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the sleeper’s neck. It was the oddly conventionalised figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade. The expression on its features was repellent in the extreme, savouring at once of death, bestiality, and malevolence. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St. John nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a maker’s seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.
The Horror Megapack Page 23