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

“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