Free The Last Coin by James P. Blaylock Page B

into nothing.
    The door slammed again, and Pickett stood watching the empty porch, lost in thought. His eyes had that vacant, dangerous look that meant he was “onto something,” that he was beginning to see things clearly at last. He was lost in plots, assembling and disassembling them, thinking of blowfish and assassins and lights in the sky, thinking of Moneywort and Pennyman, thinking of Uncle Arthur steering across foggy midnight oilfields in his red, electronic car, bumping over ruts, watching, perhaps, for the telltale glow of a suddenly uncovered lantern that would reveal to him in the instant of illumination the secret tiltings of world banks, the moment-to-moment machinations of governments. He turned around stiffly and set out after his fishing pole.

THREE
     
    “See the rings pursue each other;
    All below grows black as night …”
     
    Robert Louis Stevenson
“Looking Glass River”
     
    W HATEVER WAS HAPPENING had the feeling of nightfall about it, the feeling that twenty centuries of battles and betrayals, of civilizations and the shifting of continents, were crashing to a stony close. Something was coming full circle—slouching in on a wind out of the east. It was hot and thin—a desert wind with the smell of sagebrush and riverbeds on it, yanking off roof shingles in the night and scattering sycamore leaves and blowing spindrift off the back of the cold north swell as it hammered through pier pilings and surged up onto an almost deserted spring beach.
    The wind tore fruitlessly at the newspaper in the hands of Jules Pennyman, who sat at a redwood table in the shade of the old pier and drank black coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He knew as he sat there, idly sipping his coffee and watching the sea across the top of his newspaper, that something had loosened in the world; something had awakened, and was plodding toward him, or with him, across the aimless miles. He smiled and stroked his beard, then flicked a bit of thread from the knee of his white trousers. He could hear the deep, hoarse breathing of it on the wind, like an out-of-tune, bedlam orchestra. There was just the suggestion of the first trumpet behind it all, and there would follow in the days to come a rain of hail and fire and blood, maybe literally. He rather hoped so.
    Pennyman’s coffee was terrible—probably brewed early that morning and then burnt up on a hot plate. Andrew Vanbergen made a good cup of coffee. You had to give him that much. It didn’t matter much to Pennyman anymore, though; coffee was coffee. He drank it because he had to fill his stomach; that much was still required of him. He would have liked to see the world rid of its curious little habits. If it were up to him—and it soon might be—he’d have the beaches swept clean of sand and its seashells ground into powder and mixed into cement. He’d pave everything, is what he’d do. The pattern of mussels and barnacles and starfish on the pier pilings offended him, almost as much as the sunlight did. The shouted laughter of an unseen fisherman up on the pier rasped across the back of his brain like the serrated edge of a scaling knife.
    He’d gotten back just four weeks past from his trip to the Middle East. His coins were tucked away, waiting against the day that he’d possess them all. There was still only one of the remaining five that puzzled him, and he suspected that somehow, somewhere in antiquity, something had been done to it to render it unrecognizable. He’d find it, though. Someone knew what it was and where it was, and it was only a matter of time before, one by one, he’d wring the information out of them.
    He wasn’t the only one who sensed that something was in the wind. There’d been a rash of odd stories in the newspaper over the past months—and not in the tabloids, either, but in big-city papers. A goat had climbed into a truck owned by a shadowy delivery service and had knocked the handbrake loose and steered the truck down a hill and into