Chance -- Fiction; Love -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
He stepped back and quickly snapped the camera. There was a sharp flash
of the bulb. The glare blinded him. But when he put out his hand again,
the door was open. He stepped into the living-room without having to
unlock and open it a second time.
* * * * *
He looked at the desk as he turned the film and put in a new
flash-bulb. It was as empty as he'd left it in the morning. He hung up
his coat and settled down tensely with his pipe. Presently he knocked
out the ashes. There were cigaret butts in the tray.
He quivered a little. He smoked again, carefully not looking at the
desk. It was not until he knocked out the second pipeful of ashes that
he let himself look where Jane's diary had been.
It was there again. The book was open. There was a ruler laid across it
to keep it open.
Jimmy wasn't frightened, and he wasn't hopeful. There was absolutely no
reason why this should happen to him. He was simply desperate and grim
when he went across the room. He saw yesterday's entry, and his own
hysterical message. And there was more writing beyond that.
In Jane's hand.
"_Darling, maybe I'm going crazy. But I think you wrote me as if you
were alive. Maybe I'm crazy to answer you. But please, darling, if you
are alive somewhere and somehow--_"
There was a tear-blot here. The rest was frightened, and tender, and as
desperate as Jimmy's own sensations.
He wrote, with trembling fingers, before he put the camera into
position and pressed the shutter-control for the second time.
When his eyes recovered from the flash, there was nothing on the desk.
He did not sleep at all that night, nor did he work the next day. He
went to a photographer with the film and paid an extravagant fee to
have the film developed and enlarged at once. He got back two prints,
quite distinct. Even very clear, considering everything. One looked
like a trick shot, showing a door twice, once open and once closed, in
the same photograph. The other was a picture of an open book and he
could read every word on its pages. It was inconceivable that such a
picture should have come out.
He walked around practically at random for a couple of hours, looking
at the pictures from time to time. Pictures or no pictures, the thing
was nonsense. The facts were preposterous. It must be that he only
imagined seeing these prints. But there was a quick way to find out.
He went to Haynes. Haynes was his friend and reluctantly a
lawyer--reluctantly because law practice interfered with a large number
of unlikely hobbies.
"Haynes," said Jimmy quietly, "I want you to look at a couple of
pictures and see if you see what I do. I may have gone out of my head."
* * * * *
He passed over the picture of the door. It looked to Jimmy like two
doors, nearly at right angles, in the same door-frame and hung from the
same hinges.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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