"Jack Finney - I'm Scared" - читать интересную книгу автора (Finney Jack)

intelligent man, and as I listened I was not frightened, but puzzled at what seemed to be a
connecting link, a common denominator, between this story and the odd behavior of my radio.
Since I am retired and have plenty of time, I took the trouble, the following day, of making a
two-hour train trip to Connecticut in order to verify the story firsthand. I took detailed notes, and
the story ap-pears in my files now as follows:

Case 2. Louis Trachnor, coal and wood dealer, R.F.D. 1, Danbury, Connecticut, aged fifty-four
On July 20, 1950, Mr. Trachnor told me, he walked out on the front porch of his house about six
o'clock in the morning. Running from the eaves of his house to the floor of the porch was a strea
of gray paint, still damp. "It was about the width of an eight-inch brush," Mr. Trachnor told me,
"and it looked like hell, because the house was white. I figured some kids did it in the night for a
joke, but if they did, they had to get a ladder up to the eaves and you wouldn't figure they'd go to
that much trouble. It wasn't smeared, either; it was a careful job, a nice even stripe straight down
the front of the house."
Mr. Trachnor got a ladder and cleaned off the gray paint with turpentine.
In October of that same year Mr. Trachnor painted his house. "The white hadn't held up so good
so I painted it gray. I got to the front last and finished about five one Saturday afternoon. Next
morning when I came out I saw a streak of white right down the front of the house. I figured it
was the damn kids again, because it was the same place as before. But when I looked close, I sa
it wasn't new paint; it was the old white I'd painted over. Somebody had done a nice careful job
of cleaning off the new paint in a long stripe about eight inches wide right down from the eaves!
Now who the hell would go to that trouble? I just can't figure it out."
Do you see the link between this story and mine? Sup-pose for a moment that something had
happened, on each occasion, to disturb briefly the orderly progress of time. That seemed to hav
happened in my case; for a matter of some seconds I apparently heard a radio broadcast that ha
been made years before. Suppose, then, that no one had touched Mr. Trachnor's house but
himself; that he had painted his house in October, but that through some fantastic mix-up in time
a por-tion of that paint appeared on his house the previous summer. Since he had cleaned the
paint off at that time, a broad strip of new gray paint was missing after he painted his house in th
fall.
I would be lying, however, if I said I really believed this. It was merely an intriguing speculation,
and I told both these little stories to friends, simply as curious anecdotes. I am a sociable person
see a good many people, and occasionally I heard other odd stories in response to mine.
Someone would nod and say, "Reminds me of something I heard recently—" and I would have
one more to add to my collection. A man on Long Island received a telephone call from his siste
in New York one Friday evening. She insists that she did not make this call until the following
Monday, three days later. At the Forty-fifth Street branch of the Chase National Bank, I was
shown a check deposited the day before it was written. A letter was delivered on East Sixty-eigh
Street in New York City, just seventeen minutes after it was dropped into a mailbox on the main
street of Green River, Wyoming.
And so on, and so on; my stories were now in demand at parties, and I told myself that collectin
and verifying them was a hobby. But the day I heard Julia Eisenberg's story, I knew it was no
longer that.
Case 17. Julia Eisenberg, office worker, New York City, aged thirty-one.
Miss Eisenberg lives in a small walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village. I talked to her there after
a chess-club friend who lives in her neighborhood had repeated to me a somewhat garbled
version of her story, which was told to him by the doorman of the building he lives in.
In October 1947, about eleven at night, Miss Eisen-berg left her apartment to walk to the
drugstore for toothpaste. On her way back, not far from her apart-ment, a large black-and-white
dog ran up to her and put his front paws on her chest.