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

“Long miles above cloud-bank and blast,
And many miles above the sea,
I watch you rise majestically
Feeling your chilly light at last⁠—
Cold beauty in the way you cast
Split silver fragments on the waves,
As if this planet’s life were past,
And all men peaceful in their graves.”

Pat was silent for a moment as he paused, then she murmured a low phrase. “Oh, I love you, Nick!” she said.

“And I you, dear,” he responded. “Have we decided anything? Are we⁠—going through with it?”

“I’ve not faltered,” she said soberly. “I meant it, Nick. Without you, life would be as empty as that airless void you speak of. I’m not afraid. What’s there to be afraid of?”

“Only the transition, Pat. That and the unknown⁠—but no situation could possibly be more terrible than our present one. It couldn’t be! Oblivion, annihilation⁠—they’re preferable, aren’t they?”

“Oh, yes! Nothing I can imagine could be other than a change for the better.”

“Then let’s face it!” His voice took on a note of determination. “I’ve thought to face it a dozen times before this, and each time I’ve hesitated. The hesitation of a coward, Pat.”

“You’re no coward, dear. It was that illusion of hope; that always weakens one. No one’s strong who hasn’t given up hope.”

“Then,” he repeated, “let’s face it!”

“How, Nick?”

“My father has left us the means. There in the cabinet are a hundred deaths⁠—swift ones, lingering ones, painful, and easy! I don’t know one from the other; our choice must be blind.” He strode over to the case, sending slivers of glass from the shattered front glistening along the floor. “I’d choose an easy one, Dear, if I knew, for your sake. Euthanasia!”

He stared hesitantly at the files of mysterious drugs with their incomprehensible labels.

Suddenly the scene appeared humorous to the girl, queerly funny, in some unnatural horrible fashion. Her nerves, overstrained for hours, were on the verge of breaking; without realization of it, she had come to the border of hysteria.

“Shopping for death!” she choked, trying to suppress the wild laughter that beat in her throat. “Which one’s most suitable? Which one’s most becoming? Which one”⁠—an hysterical laughing sob shook her⁠—“will wear the longest?”

He turned, gazing at her with an illogical concern in his face.

“What’s the difference?” she cried wildly. “I don’t care⁠—painful or pleasant, it all ends in the same grave! Close your eyes and choose!”

Suddenly he was holding her in his arms again, and she was sobbing, clinging to him frantically. She was miserably unstrung; her body shook under the impact of her gasping breath. Then gradually, she quieted, and was silent against him.

“We’ve been mad!” he murmured. “It’s been an insane idea⁠—for me to inflict this on you, Pat. Do you think I could consider the destruction of your beauty, Dear? I’ve been lying to myself, stifling my judgment with poetic imagery, when all the while it was just that I’m afraid to face the thing alone!”

“No,” she murmured, burying her face against his shoulder. “I’m the coward, Nick. I’m the one that’s frightened, and I’m the one that broke down! It’s just been⁠—too much, this evening; I’m all right now.”

“But we’ll not go through with this, Pat!”

“But we will! It’s better than life without you, Dear. We’ve argued and argued, and at last forgotten the one truth, the one thing I’ll never retract: I can’t face living without you, Nick! I can’t!”

He brushed his hand wearily before his eyes. “Back at the starting point,” he muttered. “All right, Honey. So be it!”

He strode again to the cabinet. “Corrosive sublimate,” he murmured. “Cyanide of Potassium. They’re both deadly, but I think the second is rapid, and therefore less painful. Cyanide let it be!”

He extracted two small beakers from the glassware on the shelf. He filled them with water from a carafe on the table, and, while the girl watched him with fascinated eyes, he deliberately tilted a spoonful or so of white crystals into each of them. The mixture swirled a moment, then settled clear and colorless, and the crystals began to shrink as they passed swiftly into solution.

“There it is,” he announced grimly. “There’s peace, oblivion, forgetfulness, and annihilation for you, for me, and⁠—for him! Beyond all doubt, the logical course for us, isn’t it? Do we take it?”

“Please,” she said faintly. “Kiss me first, Honey. Isn’t that the proper course for lovers in this situation?” She felt a faint touch of astonishment at her own irony; the circumstances had ceased to have any reality to her, and had become merely a dramatic sequence like the happenings in a play.

He gathered her again into his arms and pressed his lips to hers. It was a long, tender, wistful kiss; when at last it ended, Pat found her eyes again filled with tears, but not this time the tears of hysteria.

“Nick!” she murmured. “Nick, darling!”

He gave her a deep, somber, but very tender smile, and reached for one of the deadly beakers, “To another meeting!” he said as his fingers closed on it.

Suddenly, amazingly, the strident ring of a doorbell sounded, the more surprising since they had all but forgotten the existence of a world about them. Interruption! It meant only the going through once more of all that they had just passed.

“Drink it!” exclaimed Pat impulsively, seizing the remaining beaker.

The glass was struck from Pat’s hand, and the water-clear contents streamed into pools and darkening blots over the table and its litter of papers. She stared unseeingly at the mess, without realizing that it was Nick who had dashed the draught from her very lips. She felt neither anger nor relief, but only a numbness, and a sense of anticlimax. Somewhere below the bell was ringing again, and a door was resounding to violent blows, but she only continued her bewildered, questioning gaze.

“I can’t let you, Pat!” he muttered, answering her unspoken query.

“But Nick⁠—why?”

“There’s somebody at the door, isn’t there? Mustn’t we find out who?”

“What difference can it