boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

The Chronokinesis of Jonathan Hull 85
“Jonathan Hull is living backwards.”
Jackson burst out with a loud “Nonsense!”
“It even explains the absence of the cuffs. They’re trousers from next year, when
we’ll be in the war and Sergeant Marcus’ prophecy will come true.”
“Then you mean that the other stiff too—?”
“Both of ’em.”
“O.K. Grant you that much, and I suppose in some cockeyed way it explains the
prints of a corpse on a murder weapon. But that kid out at Lockheed—”
“—is your second stiff. But don’t trust me: Let’s see what Hull himself has to
say.” Fergus reached for the drawer.
“Hull left a message before he bumped himself off?”
“Don’t you see? If he’s living backwards, he came into my room, sat at the
typewriter, wrote a message, and then killed himself. I just saw it being reeled off
hindsideto. So when I ‘saw’ him taking an envelope out of this drawer, he was actually,
in his own time-sequence, putting it in.”
“I’ll believe you,” said Jackson, “when I see—”
Fergus had pulled the drawer open. There lay a fat envelope, inscribed:
f o r f e rg u s o’breen
f r o m j o n at h a n h u l l.
“All right,” said the lieutenant, “so your conclusion is correct. That still doesn’t
mean your reasoning is. How can a man live backwards? You might as well ask the
universe to run in reverse entropy.”
“Maybe it does,” said Fergus. “Maybe Hull just found out how to go forwards.”
Jackson snorted. “Well, let’s see what he says.”
Fergus read: “ ‘The first indication of my strange destiny was that I could see
ghosts, or so I then interpreted the phenomena.’ ”
Jackson groaned. “Ghosts we have again! Fergus, I will not have the supernatural.
The parascientific is bad enough, but the supernatural—no! ”
“Is there necessarily any difference?” Fergus asked. “What we haven’t found the
answer to, we call supernatural. Maybe Jonathan Hull found an answer or two.
Subside, Andy, and let’s settle down to this.”
They settled.
t h e n a r r at i v e o f j o n at h a n h u l l
The first indication of my strange destiny was that I could see ghosts, or so I then
interpreted the phenomena. The first such episode occurred when I was five years old
and came in from the yard to tell the family that I had been playing with Gramps.
Since my grandfather had died the previous year in that mysterious post-war epidemic,
the family was not a little concerned as to my veracity; but no amount of
spanking shook me from my conviction.
Again in my twentieth year, I was visited in my lodgings near the Institute by my
father, who had died when I was fifteen. The two visitations were curiously similar.