The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

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,