The Last Coin by James P. Blaylock

a tree, jumping out the open window a moment before the truck had caught fire and burned, along with its contents. Two pigs a month back had terrorized a doughnut shop, making away across a parking lot with half a dozen glazed doughnuts and rooting through a drive-in dairy until the startled clerk had given them milk to drink. When they were rounded up at last they seemed to be playing a complicated game on the asphalt of the parking lot, snuffling the doughnuts up and down with their noses. And then there were reports in Huntington Beach of a hippopotamus that had appeared through the mist of a foggy morning and then disappeared just as thoroughly and quickly. Thirty whales had beached themselves in Mexico.
    It had all been very funny to the journalists, but it wasn’t funny to Pennyman; it reminded him a little too much of the demoniacs and the Gadarene swine. It was as if an unseen hand were stirring nature out of her long lethargy, as if there were counterplots and divine conspiracies that he didn’t entirely see or understand. There was nothing he liked less than something he didn’t understand.
    Someone would rise up to take the places of Moneywort and Aureus. And when Pennyman had his way with Pfennig, there would be a person in the world unwittingly ready to take his place, too, if any of the coins found him. The trick was recognizing them when they appeared; and they
would
appear—one of them possessing the untraceable coin. It had been thousands of years that they’d worked as one, all the Caretakers, and all the time there was someone’s shadow cast across their enterprises. There were surreptitious visits, disappearing coins, coins reappearing in the possession of apes or in the pouches of opossums after being lost for decades—all of it a sort of shadow symphony, orchestrated by—whom?
    Pennyman knew the secret identity of the man who conducted the orchestra; he knew who the overseer
really
was. And he knew that the man sought to ransom himself by keeping the coins apart. It was a two-thousand-years-old good deed. The man’s
assumed
identity was a mystery to him, though. One couldn’t simply look up “Iscariot, Judas” in the Seal Beach phone directory and come up with an address. It might be the mayor, or a television repairman, or, even more likely, the hobo that slept right now against the wall of the concrete rest room beneath the pier. He might call himself anything at all. There were certain tests that betrayed the identity of one of the Caretakers, but their master wasn’t susceptible to tests, not unless you caught him out—in the moonlight. Well, he would show his hand soon enough, whoever he was. Pennyman would force it. He’d been forcing it for close onto two hundred years now—hoarding and hiding the coins, giving up one here to gain two there, committing any sort of atrocity, buying and selling kings and presidents and piling up the silver coins one on top of another. And now the pot was almost full. Almost.
    Things were falling into disorder—a condition that suited Pennyman just fine. He sometimes, more often lately, preferred white noise to music on the radio. He sought out the hoarse, chaotic cry of nighttime terror and closed his ears to the insipid laughter of human beings pretending to be jolly. He found his flask in his coat pocket and drained off the rest of the chalky, pink antacid in it. The skin of his scalp felt as if it were crawling, and for a moment it seemed as if he were breathing dust. He could almost feel his pulse creeping along like a tired, rusted engine. With a shaking hand he fumbled after a glass vial in the pocket of his trousers. He squinted at the little dribble of elixir in the bottom of it, and he shook his head, as if dissatisfied. Then, grimacing, he drank it off, capped it and put it away.
    He poured the rest of his coffee onto the ground and nodded his head at a man who approached along the sand. He felt the elixir from the vial seeping along his