No Evidence: Death on the Edge of Reality

For most of his life, Charley Johnson has lived with a divided nature. One Charley drinks heavily, makes scenes, and creates strange art that earns him little but embarrassment. The other is practical and ambitious, building a successful career, marrying well, and becoming the kind of man society respects. Then, on a bitterly cold night during Prohibition, an impossible encounter behind a roadside signboard changes everything. Charley emerges feeling clearer, stronger, and finally free of the troublesome man he used to be.

Then the letters start arriving.

They come from Ireland in handwriting Charley knows immediately: his own. The writer describes another existence filled with poverty, art, hardship, and a woman who has remained faithfully beside him. Occasionally there is a request for money. Charley sends it and tries not to think about how another man can possess his memories, his handwriting, and perhaps something even more unsettling.

Meanwhile, Charley prospers. His career advances, his marriage remains secure, and the reckless impulses that once threatened everything are gone. Whatever occurred that winter night seems to have worked entirely in his favor.

But the final letter is different. It tells of woodcuts created through years of suffering and obsession—images intended to survive their creator and reveal something Charley desperately wants concealed. Faced with the possibility that evidence of the impossible may soon appear, Charley makes a cold, deliberate choice. Ten days later, the nightmares begin.

No Evidence is a haunting psychological story about a man confronted by a part of himself he believed he had escaped forever. Victoria Lincoln turns an impossible premise into a steadily tightening mystery where the greatest danger may be the truth Charley refuses to face.

Victoria Lincoln was an American author whose fiction appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, where No Evidence was published in 1953.