"Blaylock, James P - The Other Side" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blaylock James P)

"Wait," Beth told him, waving him silent and picking up the receiver, clearly assuming that he was starting to tell her something about his old friend Anthony, who had moved to New York the previous winter. "Hello," she said, and then listened, double-taking just a little bit. She handed him the phone, her hand over the mouthpiece. "Anthony Collier," she said.

"Hey," Art said weakly. He realized that his heart was racing now, and he replied in half sentences, finally begging off to eat dinner.

"Wow," she said. "That was a weird coincidence. What were you going to tell me?"

"Nothing."

"What do you mean nothing? You started to tell me something about Anthony."

"Just his name. His name sort of flew into my head. It was weird, like the thing with the possum."

"I think feathers," Nina said, looking at the parakeets, which had started chattering when the phone rang. They had two of them, both green, in a cage suspended from the ceiling. Nina climbed onto a chair and peered into the cloth seed guard that aproned the underside of the cage. She reached into it and pulled out a loose feather, smiling and holding it up for them to see before dropping it into the shoebox.




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For the next hour Art was unable to concentrate on anything else. He tried to think out the meaning of the two incidents, possessed by the idea that they were a new category of experience, that they were evidence of Е other things. He had never been a rationalist, and had always been willing to consider things he himself had never witnessedЧghosts, flying saucers, the hollow earth, New Zealand. But never had he ever been a party to a public display of these things. The paranormal was something he had read about, something that happened to others, whose stories were related in pulp-paper magazines.
During the evening the phone rang twice more, and each time his mind supplied him with a name as he leaped up to grab it, but he was wrong both times, and he realized that he had been merely guessing. With Anthony he hadn't guessed. The information had come from outside of himself somehow, independent of his own thinking, exactly as if it had been beamed into his head.

He stopped himself. That kind of thinking sounded crazy even to him, and he wondered suddenly if this was some kind of schizophrenic episode, the precursor to a gibbering decline into nuttiness. Except, of course, that Beth had been a witness. She could misunderstand the possum, because she hadn't been there, but she'd heard him come up with Anthony's name out of the blue.

He went into the pantry and dug out a deck of cards, then returned to his chair in the living room, fanning the cards out on the coffee table. Coincidence wouldn't answer the possum question. That much was clear to him. Beth came out of Nina's room, where she had been reading the nightly story, and she stood watching him move the cards around. He could see that she was interested. This thing had gotten to her.

"Five of spades," he said out loud, flipping over a random card from the middle of the spread. It was a queen of hearts. He tried again, naming the two of clubs, then the eight of diamonds, and then a half dozen other numbers and suits, dead wrong every time. The five of spades finally appeared, meaninglessly late. Beth had already lost interest and gone into the family room to watch television. He heard the theme song from Jeopardy! start up, and he put the cards back in the pack, giving up and going in to kiss Nina goodnight.

"Read me one," Nina whispered, pulling the covers up to her chin so that she looked like Kilroy.

"You already had a story," Art told her. By her bed lay the shoe box, empty except for the parakeet feather. "This is a good collection," he said.

"It's only one. Mom says one's not a collection."

"Maybe we should go feather collecting."

"Do you know where?" she asked.

But just like that he had lost the thread of the conversation. In his mind's eye he saw the possum again, returning to haunt him, its hairless tail vanishing into the oleander. Everything had been identical in his mind and on the roadЧthe angle at which it crossed, the grove off to the left, the way the headlights picked it out of the darkness, the way the creature had been swallowed up by the shrubbery and the shadows.Е

Something struck him then, something he hadn't thought of before.

"Do I know where what?" he asked, finally reacting to Nina's question.

"Where there's feathers?"

"Sure. I know a place. We'll go looking." He tucked her in and went out, hurrying into the family room where Beth sat watching Jeopardy! He saw right away that the Double Jeopardy categories weren't up his alley. "Listen to this," he said to Beth, sitting down next to her on the couch. "The two incidents aren't the same thing."