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

"Okay," she said, her eyes on the television screen.

"With Anthony, his name came into my mind the instant the phone rang. At the same time."

"I still say it's coincidence."

"That's all right. It might be. But listen to what I'm telling you. With the possum it was different. I predicted the possum. You see the difference? I forecast it. There was a five- or six-minute lag between when I pictured it and when it appeared."

"I do see the difference. I don't know what it means, but I see what you're saying. The possum is kind of Е psychic."

"Yeah, I guess so. Actually they're both kind of psychic, aren't they? Unless you really think the phone call thing was coincidence."

"I don't know what I think. What's the Santa Maria?"

"What?" he asked, utterly baffled by this.

"The name of Columbus's ship," she said. "Explorers for six hundred."

"Oh." He watched the game show for a minute. It was winding up. "You know why it's not a coincidence? Because of the possum. That would make two weird things on the same night, which would be a double coincidence."

"The Final Jeopardy subject is British History," Alex Trebek said, looking shrewdly at the audience, and the program cut away to a commercial.

"Oliver Cromwell," Art said, the name almost leaping out of his throat. This time he was sure of it. It was like the possum and like Anthony Collier. He hadn't guessed. He hadn't had time to guess. The name had simply come to him. Beth looked at him wonderingly and he nodded his head. "That's it again," he said. "At least I think it is." Instantly he had come to doubt himself. Was this another guess, like the five of spades? Or was this the possum, crossing the road to get to the other side?

There were half a dozen commercials, interminable commercials, but finally the show was on the air again. Trebek read off the answer: "This Puritan Prime Minister of England was so hated by the populace, that after he was dead and buried his body was exhumed and Е"

Art didn't hear the rest of it. He sat with his mouth open, his mind swimming. Beth stared at him when the answer was revealed. "Now you're giving me the creeps," she said.




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On Friday evening he tried again with the cards, and again he couldn't make them work. He rolled dice, but that was a washout, too. He made a mighty effort to blank out his mind, to open himself to psychic suggestion, but it was no good. The harder he tried, the more he understood that it wouldn't speak to him, whatever it was, and he tried hard not to try as hard. When the phone rang at eight o'clock he shouted "Jimmy Carter!" but it was the Fireman's Fund selling tickets to a talent show. Beth humored him to the point of asking the caller whether his name was Jimmy Carter, but it turned out not to be, and the man hung up angry, thinking that she was making fun of him.

"I guess it's not working as good as it was," Beth said, and from her tone of voice Art could tell that her Oliver Cromwell enthusiasm had pretty much worn off.




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On Saturday morning he stopped at Rod's Liquors and bought five dollars' worth of lottery tickets, marking the little ovals as random numbers wandered unbidden into his head, rejecting numbers that seemed too insistent or that appeared there twice or that were clearly ringers, like Nina's birthday or his own age. Quickly, however, every number on the lottery ticket began to seem suspect, and he filled in the last two games by shutting his eyes and pointing.
On the way home, he stopped at the used book store where he found something promising: a book called A Field Guide to the Paranormal. He knew the clerk at the counter, a thin, owl-eyed man named Bob who had worked there forever and, in fact, lived a couple of blocks away from him and Beth.

"You're interested in the paranormal?" Bob asked him, taking his money.

"Yeah," Art confessed. "I find it kind of fascinating."