What happens
James Clarence Witherncraft, a forty-year-old artist, spends a stifling August day making a sketch he cannot explain. The drawing shows a fat, defeated man in a courtroom, holding a chisel he cannot yet remember drawing. Hoping to clear his head, he wanders the city until he reaches a monumental mason's yard, where a craftsman named Charles Atkinson looks exactly like the man in his sketch. Atkinson is carving a headstone that bears Witherncraft's name and birth date, and an inscription dated today. Suspense, the radio series, aired this story on May 31, 1945, with Ronald Coleman in the lead role. The episode is a dreamlike tale of premonition and creeping unease in the heat.
A sweltering August day in an unnamed city, moving from an artist's room to the streets and then to a stone-cutter's yard and home.
Characters: James Clarence Witherncraft, Charles Atkinson, Mrs. Atkinson
Listen for: The eerie sketch Witherncraft draws, the headstone carved with his own name and birth date, and the mason's unsettling remarks about the heat.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.