They were standing face to face near the head of the horizontal table, with only its narrow width separating them. Dr. Jackson’s teeth were clenched tightly, his face blanched, and wild thoughts flew through his brain. Dare he try to disarm the man? The hand that held the gun moved forward toward him across the dividing adjusting table.
“Turn around — you—” the man said.
Slowly Dr. Jackson pivoted on his right foot, then with lightning suddenness he jammed his left foot on the release catch at the base of the table. Zoom! With catapultic speed and a jangling crash, the table, unrestrained by the weight of a body, shot upwards, striking the extended arm with such force that the gun clattered to the floor and the man himself was hurled backward against the wall. Before he could recover, Dr. Jackson lunged for the gun and leveled it at him.
A moment later the police sergeant came charging into the room, gun drawn. The table was still vibrating from the terrific impact of the powerful springs, suddenly released.
“I was outside phoning—” the sergeant said. “What did he try to do, Doc, hold you up?”
After Doc’s breathless explanation, the sergeant said, “I think this bird is wanted in Pilotsville. A bank job was pulled there yesterday. But say, Doc, what made you think of that stunt with the table?”
Dr. Jackson smiled. “Something Meg, my wife, said yesterday. ‘You’d better have that thingamujig fixed. I’ve got a hunch it’ll hurt somebody.’ ”
The sergeant chuckled. “Know what, Doc? You’d better get some more chairs for your waiting room. Because I’ve got a hunch that tomorrow you’ll be the town hero.”
The Glass Wall
by Mitchell F. Jayne
Long have scholars wondered over where has gone the past. For some, who think in cycles, all the past is future; while for others the past is but the present become invisible.
The chill, electric silence of a November night hung over the woods and crept up to the edge of the campfire. Two men, facing each other across the flames, sat sipping hot coffee while they observed the night.
“Do you have the feeling,” asked Clayton Warner suddenly, “that you’ve been here before?” He had a young, serious face, and mild, scholarly eyes.
The other man was older, with a bearded, apple-cheeked face that caught the firelight, and an ancient, tattered great-coat that made him look grotesque in the flickering firelight.
“Yes,” he said musingly, “but that ain’t surprisin’, seein’ that I’ve deer hunted in these woods many a year.”
Far off, an owl called eerily in the quiet night, and the forest listened. In the glow of a pale moon, just beginning its climb through clawlike branches of trees on the ridge, the two men saw the woods move closer. Clayton Warner shivered a little and wrapped both hands about his cup to warm them.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Have you ever entered a room, and somehow known that whatever you saw next would be familiar to you? That for the next few minutes everything would fall into a familiar pattern you couldn’t do anything about?”
The old man grunted, and getting a coal from the fire, began to puff life into his pipe.
“Hit’s natural,” he said, with the calm satisfaction of age. “Happens to everybody now and then. My old grandma claimed it was tokens left over from another life, or some kind of spirit message from the other world.”
“What would you think,” asked Clayton carefully, “if I told you that this happens to me all the time lately?”
“Why, I’d say,” said the old man drily, “that I’d suppose that kind of thing would begin to taste of the keg after a while.”
“I just don’t understand it,” sighed Clayton. “I don’t have a runaway imagination at all. As a matter of fact, I’m afraid lots of people think I’m dull as lead, just a small town schoolteacher plugging along on the way to nowhere.”
He looked past the old man to the shimmering woods and the faint redness of the firelight on the near trees.
“And yet, ever since I came to this town, these things have been happening,” he continued, “and it’s weird. Not so much people as places. I come to a place, and I’m mortally sure I’ve been there before. I can even tell what the inside of some of those old houses on Tulliver Street look like, though I’ve never been in them.”
“How do you know you’re right then?” asked the old man mildly. His eyes twinkled in the firelight as he puffed away at the pipe.
“I’ve checked myself,” answered Clayton. “Store buildings and such. I even went in that old ramshackle mill building that’s been empty for years. I had a feeling I’d know just what it looked like inside, including that old wooden machinery, and I was right. It was as familiar as my own home town.”
He lit a cigarette and snapped the lighter shut angrily. “And then there’s this other thing I’ve told nobody about.” He paused, a bit anxiously, and peered into the shadows that flickered over the old man’s face, but his companion remained inscrutable.
Clayton knew he ought to get back to town. This was deer season, and the schools were closed, but he had papers to grade and he was already very tired. He had met this old man, a stranger to him, late that afternoon at a deer stand, where the leaves went scudding down a long hollow in the wind, and the woods were brown and open. The old man had been standing by a tree, and so well did his colorless clothing and brindle-grey beard fit into the pattern of the woods, that Clayton had not seen him until he spoke.
Neither had seen a deer, but they fell into conversation, and Clayton, who was an ardent deer hunter, was so arrested by something, perhaps the old man’s knowledge and his stories of the seasons past, that he had stayed with him and came here to the old man’s camp to share a pot of coffee. The old man too was hunting alone.
“I don’t reckon,” said his companion in the silence, “that you’d ever been to town sometime when you were just a tad and maybe didn’t know it.”
“Never,” said Clayton firmly. “I was born in Indiana, six hundred miles from here, and I was never out of the state until I went to college. My family always hated to travel.”
The owl called again, from a dark hollow, and another answered, and then another. For a moment the woods were alive with the laughing, hooting cry of owls, and then the silence descended again, like ominous frost.
Clayton wondered if he should tell the old man the whole story. Normally a quiet, systematic man, he had found his life nearly derailed by the strange manifestations his mind had forced on him. He knew no one well enough to tell these things, or perhaps he knew everyone too well to tell them. He made up his mind abruptly, with customary finality.
“I’m not a storyteller,” he said with a sigh, “but I want to tell somebody about this. It’s a kind of ghost story,” he added apologetically.
The old man hunched over his crossed legs and picked the coffeepot gingerly from the fire. He poured his cup full and blew at the rim to cool the hot tin.
“It’s a fine night for a tale, or a fox race,” he said encouragingly, “and I’m partial to both. We’ll have a drop of the horn to make it better.”
He took an old flask from his coat and passed it over. They each had a long draught from the bottle and the old man put it away with a satisfied sigh.
“You can smell the feet of the boys that plowed the corn,” he said with gusto.
The fiery moonshine coursed through Clayton’s veins like electricity, and he felt warm with it immediately. He lit a cigarette and began talking, as the old man cleaned his ancient rifle in the firelight.