The Last Coin

THE LAST COIN

James P. Blaylock

www.sfgateway.com

“—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

Robert Louis Stevenson
“An Apology for Idlers”

H
E 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.