The Dark Other by Stanley G. Weinbaum (new ebook reader .txt) 📕

was unable to dismiss the matter as easily as that. There was some uncanny, elusive element in it that fascinated her. Cruel, terrible, demoniac, he might have been; he had also been kind, lovable, and gentle. Yet Dr. Carl had told her that split personalities could contain no characteristics that were not present in the original, normal character. Was cruelty, then, a part of kindness? Was cruelty merely the lack of kindness, or, cynical thought, was kindness but the lack of cruelty? Which qualities were positive in the antagonistic phases of Nicholas Devine’s individuality, and which negative? Was the gentle, lovable, but indubitably weaker character the split, and the demon of last evening his normal self? Or vice-versa? Or were both of these fragmentary entities, portions of some greater personality as yet unapparent to her?

The whole matter was a mystery; she shrugged in helpless perplexity.

“I don’t think Dr. Carl knows as much about it as he says,” she mused. “I don’t think psychiatry or any other science knows that much about the human soul. Dr. Carl doesn’t even believe in a soul; how could he know anything about it, then?” She frowned in puzzlement and gave up the attempt to solve the mystery.

The hours she had spent in her room, at her mother’s insistence, began to pall; she didn’t feel particularly ill⁠—it was more of a languor, a depressed, worn-out feeling. Her mother, of course, was out somewhere; she felt a desire for human companionship, and wondered if the Doctor might by some chance drop in. It seemed improbable; he had his regular Sunday afternoon routine of golf at the Club, and it took a real catastrophe to keep him away from that. She sighed, stretched her legs, rose from her position on the chaise lounge, and wandered toward the kitchen where Magda was doubtless to be found.

It was in the dusk of the rear hall that the first sense of her loss came over her. Heretofore her renunciation of Nicholas Devine was a rational thing, a promise given but not felt; but now it was suddenly a poignant reality. Nick was gone, she realized; he was out of her world, irrevocably sundered from her. She paused at the top of the rear flight of stairs, considering the matter.

“He’s gone! I won’t see him ever again.” The thought was appalling; she felt already a premonition of loneliness to come, of an emptiness in her world, a lack that nothing could replace.

“I shouldn’t have promised Dr. Carl,” she mused, knowing that even without that promise her course must still have been the same. “I shouldn’t have, not until I’d talked to Nick⁠—my own Nick.”

And still, she reflected forlornly, what difference did it make? She had to give him up; she couldn’t continue to see him not knowing at what instant that terrible caricature of him might appear to torment her. But he might have explained, she argued miserably, answering her own objection at once⁠—he’s said he couldn’t explain, didn’t understand. The thing was at an impasse.

She shook her shining black head despondently, and descended the dusky well of the stairs to the kitchen. Magda was there clattering among her pots and pans; Pat entered quietly and perched on the high stool by the long table. Old Magda, who had warmed her babyhood milk and measured out her formula, gave her a single glance and continued her work.

“Sorry about the accident, I was,” she said without looking up.

“Thanks,” responded the girl. “I’m all right again.”

“You don’t look it.”

“I feel all right.”

She watched the mysterious, alchemistic mixing of a pastry, and thought of the vast array of them that had come from Magda’s hands. As far back as she could remember she had perched on this stool observing the same mystic culinary rites.

Suddenly another memory rose out of the grave of forgetfulness and went gibbering across her world. She remembered the stories Magda used to tell her, frightening stories of witchcraft and the evil eye, tales out of an older region and a more credulous age.

“Magda,” she asked, “did you ever see a devil?”

“Not I, but I’ve talked with them that had.”

“Didn’t you ever see one?”

“No.” The woman slid a pan into the oven. “I saw a man once, when I was a tot, possessed by a devil.”

“You did? How did he look?”

“He screamed terrible, then he said queer things. Then he fell down and foam came out of his mouth.”

“Like a fit?”

“The Priest, he said it was a devil. He came and prayed over him, and after a while he was real quiet, and then he was all right.”

“Possessed by a devil,” said Pat thoughtfully. “What happened to him?”

“Dunno.”

“What queer things did he say?”

“Wicked things, the Priest said. I couldn’t tell! I was a tot.”

“Possessed by a devil!” Pat repeated musingly. She sat immersed in thoughts on the high stool while Magda clattered busily about. The woman paused finally, turning her face to the girl.

“What you so quiet about, Miss Pat?”

“I was just thinking.”

“You get your letter?”

“Letter? What letter? Today’s Sunday.”

“Special delivery. The girl, she put it in the hall.”

“I didn’t know anything about it. Who’d write me a special?”

She slipped off the high stool and proceeded to the front hall. The letter was there, solitary on the salver that always held the mail. She picked it up, examining the envelope in sudden startled amazement and more than a trace of illogical exultation.

For the letter, postmarked that same morning, was addressed in the irregular script of Nicholas Devine!

XIII Indecision

Pat turned the envelope dubiously in her hands, while a maze of chaotic thoughts assailed her. She felt almost a sensation of guilt as if she were in some manner violating the promise given to Dr. Horker; she felt a tinge of indignation that Nicholas Devine should dare communicate with her at all, and she felt too that queer exultation, an inexplicable pleasure, a feeling of secret triumph. She slipped the letter in the pocket of her robe and padded quietly up the