Page 37

The number 37. I was seeing it everywhere, though this was nothing new. The book page, however, was new.

It happened at the beach.

I'd gone out to sun, which I did, and it was good. Then, as I started back to my truck, something odd happened: I found myself going a different way than I'd arrived. Instead of walking over the stairs and deck to the parking lot, I went alongside them, down in the sand. It struck me as illogical, since the sand was loose and difficult to walk through; but then, I'd been intuitively Compelled to go that way, and I'd long ago learned to obey my Compellings. So I went with it.

There, I found the page.

There was a lot of litter in my path, along the dune I was walking beside; yet I felt Compelled to pick up just one in particular, a small, unassuming piece of paper. I grabbed it up, and felt another Compelling, now to read the paper's black type.

As it turned out, the litter was a single, stray page from a paperback book. In the header, the page number read "37."

Could I have seen that page number on the paper, subconsciously, and been attracted to it? No; I'd been Compelled at distance from it, too far away to read the small, paperback type (plus, I didn't even have my glasses on, being out on the beach). And, what about my being Compelled to walk down there in the first place, before I even had a chance to see the rogue book page at all?

This, after seeing that number no less than two dozen times in the preceding hours, and always in ways such as this, conspicuous and in-my-face and hugely unlikely (and that was just that one day ...).

I laughed. Indeed, I laughed.