Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 3 (1925-09).djvu/55

Fate Laughed Harshly at this Victim of
the Power that Lies in Suggestion

I am told that coincidence in a story is an element for which editors and readers have a dislike which approaches the sparkling. But if a story be thirty-three and a third per cent each of coincidence, imagination on the part of the principal character, and irony—what then?

Coincidence, which is another name for destiny, played its trump early in the life of Graham Fletcher—in fact before his life began. But it was many years before the stakes were dragged across the game table of life and into the lap of a sneering fate.

It all started when his father, John Fletcher, was carried home after a terrific explosion in which he had lost an arm and the sight of two perfectly good eyes. His young wife fainted with the horror of it; and only a week later Graham Fletcher was born into the world, while on the wall opposite the mother's bed a dread phantom played hide and seek with a tremendous human eye, the half of which was missing. And the years which followed bear mute witness that in that terrible hour a Gargantuan fear was transmitted to the soul of young Fletcher—a fear of blindness.

Too, the daily sight of his stricken father had its influence upon the boy as he passed through his early youth. Blindness! Indelibly there was scared on his brain the fear of it, the horror of it. It was when he was fourteen that a prophecy was made about him.

Now the fortune-teller had given ample proof that she was just as elaborate a liar as the average fortune-teller is supposed to be. She didn't try to tell his fortune in the orthodox way, however. In fact he didn't want her to tell it.

It so happened that young Graham was just as full of the Old Nick as any boy. It seemed human nature to him, then, to hurl pebbles at the horses tied behind the gypsy's wagon. He meant no real harm. But that did not prevent a jagged pebble from striking an eye of one of the horses in such manner as to cause the animal to scream fearfully, while blood spurted from the injured optic.

The wrath of the woman fell upon the boy. Hoarsely she spoke to him in broken English; "For that you pay—pay, see? You blind da hoss; one day you be blind too! Then—you die!"

No doubt she would have done more than prophesy had it not been for the crowd near at hand. But it was more than enough. She had set her mark upon the soul of young Graham Fletcher. He would not forget. And so was another coincidence born—almost an inexcusable one. . . .

The years passed by. Deeper and deeper into the being of Graham Fletcher pushed that phantom of unrest. He had gone home crying after