It didn’t quite make sense. It didn’t fit into this morning of 18 October 1962. Nor into the twentieth century. Nor into normal human life.
He turned around, grasped the doorknob firmly, and wrenched, intending to throw it wide open in one sudden jerk. But the knob slid beneath his fingers and would not move, and the door stayed shut.
Locked, thought Crane. The lock snapped home when I slammed the door. And I haven’t got the key. Dorothy Graham has the key, but she always leaves the door open because it’s hard to get it open once it’s locked. She almost always has to call one of the janitors. Maybe there’s some of the maintenance men around. Maybe I should hunt one up and tell him -
Tell him what? Tell him I saw a metal rat run into the cabinet? Tell him I threw a pastepot at it and knocked it off the desk? That I threw a spike at it, too, and to prove it, there’s the spike sticking in the floor?
Crane shook his head.
He walked over to the spike and yanked it from the floor. He put the spike back on the copy desk and kicked the fragments of the pastepot out of sight.
At his own desk, he selected three sheets of paper and rolled them into the typewriter.
The machine started to type. All by itself without his touching it! He sat stupefied and watched its keys go up and down. It typed: Keep out of this, Joe, don’t mix into this. You might get hurt.
Joe Crane pulled the sheets of copy paper out of the machine. He balled them in his fist and threw them into a waste-basket. Then he went out to get a cup of coffee.
‘You know, Louie,’ he said to the man behind the counter, ‘a man lives alone too long and he gets to seeing things.’