Time and Again by Jack Finney, Paul Hecht

that his father's grave was really the way he remembered it as a child.
    "It was — exactly." Kate handed me the little photograph. "That's the picture Ira took that summer: That's his father's gravestone. I suppose it's still there; someday I'd like to go see."
    I couldn't make out what I was looking at, staring at the glossy little snapshot on my palm. Then I recognized the shape: It was the kind of gravestone cartoonists draw, the old-fashioned straight-sided slab with the top rounded into a perfect half-circle. This one seemed to stand no more than a foot and a half or so above ground — it was much shorter than most — and was no longer perfectly upright, but canted to the left. It was sharp and clear; he'd taken this when the light was just right. There stood the stone at the head of a sparsely grassed grave, several gone-to-seed dandelions plainly visible. It was an old grave, the mound shallow, almost level again with the surrounding earth. Then I realized with a small sense of shock that the markings on the stone weren't letters; there was no inscription on the headstone, only a design, and I brought the little snap closer, tilting it toward the lighted lamp at the end of the chesterfield.
    The design was a nine-pointed star inside a circle. It was formed of what must have been ninety or a hundred or so dots. The engraver had simply tapped it out, one dot after another, the points of the star touching the circle, the design covering almost the entire surface of the tombstone right down to the ground. The photograph was good, each dot a tiny shadow-blackened pit in the flaking stone surface, the weathered round-topped shape of the tombstone sharply outlined against the much darker background of hard-packed earth and sparse grass behind it, other neighboring headstones slightly out of focus in the near distance.
    I have an idea that I sat staring at the little photograph for as much as a full minute, which is a long time. It had the fascination of absolute reality; somewhere far across the country outside a small Montana town this strange stone still stood, very likely, stained and roughened by years of heat, cold, and the alternate wetness and dryness of many seasons. I looked up at Kate finally. "This is what his wife put up at his grave?"
    Kate nodded. "It disturbed Ira all of his life." Her hand was rummaging in the folder again; then she brought out a paper, a long rectangle of robin's-egg blue. It was an envelope, and Kate said, "His father shot himself. One summer afternoon. Sitting at his desk in a little frame house. And this is what he left on his desk."
    I took the envelope. It bore a canceled three-cent green stamp bearing a profile of Washington in a design I'd never seen before, and the postmark circle read: "New York, N.Y., Main Post Office, Jan. 23, 1882, 6:00 P.M." Under this it was hand-addressed in black ink to "Andrew W. Carmody, Esq., 589 Fifth Avenue, City." The lower right corner of the envelope was slightly charred as though it had been lighted and almost immediately put out. I turned it over — the back was blank — and Kate said, "Look inside."
    There was a white sheet inside, folded in half and charred at one side as though it had been in the envelope when the envelope was lighted. In black ink above the fold, in the same neat script as the address, was written: If a discussion of Court House Carrara should prove of interest to you, please appear in City Hall Park at half past twelve on Thursday next. In blue ink below the fold, in a large half-illegible scrawl, blot-stained in four places, it said: That the sending of this should cause the Destruction by Fire of the entire World (a word seemed to be missing here at the end of the top line where the paper was burned) seems well-nigh incredible. Yet it is so, and the Fault and the Guilt (another word missing in the burned area) mine, and can never be denied or escaped. So, with this wretched souvenir of that Event before me, I now end the