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

—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