Читать книгу The Dark Other - Stanley G. Weinbaum - Страница 9

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I SUPPOSE I really ought to meet your friends, Patricia," said Mrs. Lane, peering out of the window, "but they all seem to call when I'm not at home."

"I'll have some of them call in February." said Pat. "You're not out as often in February."

"Why do you say I'm not out as often in February?" demanded her mother. "I don't see what earthly difference the month makes."

"There are fewer days in February," retorted Pat airily.

"Facetious brat!"

"So I've been told. You needn't worry, though, Mother; I'm sober, steady, and reliable, and if I weren't, Dr. Carl would see to it that my associates were,"

"Yes; Carl is a gem," observed her mother. "By the way, who's this Nicholas you're so enthusiastic about?"

"He's a boy I met."

"What's he like?"

"Well, he speaks English and wears a hat."

"Imp! Is he nice?"

"That means is his family acceptable, doesn't it? He hasn't any family."

Mrs. Lane shrugged her attractive shoulders. "You're a self-reliant sort, Patricia, and cool as iced lettuce, like your father. I don't doubt that you can manage your own affairs, and here comes Claude with the car." She gave the girl a hasty kiss. "Goodbye, and have a good time, as I'm sure I shan't with Bret Cutter in the game."

Pat watched her mother's trim, amazingly youthful figure as she entered the car. More like a companion than a parent, she mused; she liked the independence her mother's attitude permitted her.

"Better than being watched like a prize-winning puppy," she thought. "Maybe Dr. Carl as a father would have a detriment or two along with the advantages. He's a dear, and I'm mad about him, but he does lean to the nineteenth century as far as parental duties are concerned."

She saw Nick's car draw to the curb; as he emerged she waved from the window and skipped into the hall. She caught up her wrap and bounded out to meet him just ascending the steps.

"Let's go!" she greeted him. She cast an apprehensive glance at his features, but there was nothing disturbing about him. He gave her a diffident smile, the shy, gentle smile that had taken her in that first moment of meeting. This was certainly no one but her own Nick, with no trace of the unsettling personality of their last encounter.

He helped her into the car, seating himself at her side. He leaned over her, kissing her very tenderly; suddenly she was clinging to him, her face against the thrilling warmth of his cheek.

"Nick!" she murmured. "Nick! You're just safely you, aren't you? I've been imagining things that I knew couldn't be so!"

He slipped his arm caressingly about her, and the pressure of it was like the security of encircling battlements. The world was outside the circle of his arms; she was within, safe, inviolable. It was some moments before she stirred, lifting her pert face with tear-bright eyes from the obscurity of his shoulder.

"So!" she exclaimed, patting the black glow of her hair into composure. "I feel better, Nick, and I hope you didn't mind."

"Mind!" he ejaculated. "If you mean that as a joke, Honey, it's far too subtle for me."

"Well, I didn't think you'd mind," said Pat demurely, settling herself beside him. "Let's be moving, then; Dr. Carl is nearly popping his eyes out in the window there."

The car hummed into motion; she waved a derisive arm at the Doctor's window by way of indicating her knowledge of his surveillance. "Ought to teach him a lesson some time," she thought. "One of these fine evenings I'll give him a real shock."

"Where'll we go?" queried Nick, veering skilfully into the swift traffic of Sheridan Road.

"Anywhere!" she said blithely. "Who cares as long as we go together?"

"Dancing?"

"Why not? Know a good place?"

"No." He frowned in thought. "I haven't indulged much."

"The Picador?" she suggested. "The music's good, and it's not too expensive. But it's 'most across town, and besides, Saturday nights we'd be sure to run into some of the crowd."

"What of it?"

"I want to dance with you, Nick—all evening. I want to be without distractions."

"Pat, dear! I could kiss you for that."

"You will," she murmured softly.

They moved aimlessly south with the traffic, pausing momentarily at the light-controlled intersections, then whirring again to rapid motion. The girl leaned against his arm silently, contentedly; block after block dropped behind.

"Why so pensive, Honey?" he asked after an interval. "I've never known you so quiet before."

"I'm enjoying my happiness, Nick."

"Aren't you usually happy?"

"Of course, only these last two or three days, ever since our last date, I've been making myself miserable. I've been telling myself foolish things, impossible things, and it's only now that I've thrown off the blues. I'm happy, Dear!"

"I'm glad you are," he said. His voice was strangely husky, and he stared fixedly at the street rushing toward them. "I'm glad you are," he repeated, a curious tensity in his tones.

"So'm I."

"I'll never do anything to make you unhappy, Pat—never. Not—if I can help it."

"You can help it, Nick. You're the one making me happy; please keep doing it."

"I—hope to." There was a queer catch in his voice. It was almost as if he feared something.

"Selah!" said Pat conclusively. She was thinking, "Wrong of me to refer to that accident. After all it was harmless; just a natural burst of passion. Might happen to anyone."

"Where'll we go?" asked Nick as they swung into the tree-shadowed road of Lincoln Park. "We haven't decided that."

"Anywhere," said the girl dreamily. "Just drive; we'll find a place."

"You must know lots of them."

"We'll find a new place; we'll discover it for ourselves. It'll mean more, doing that, than if we just go to one of the old places where I've been with every boy that ever dated me. You don't want me dancing with a crowd of memories, do you?"

"I shouldn't mind as long as they stayed merely memories."

"Well, I should! This evening's to be ours—exclusively ours."

"As if it could ever be otherwise!"

"Indeed?" said Pat. "And how do you know what memories I might choose to carry along? Are you capable of inspecting my mental baggage?"

"We'll check it at the door. You're traveling light tonight, aren't you?"

"Pest!" she said, giving his cheek an impudent vicious pinch. "Nice, pleasurable pest!"

He made no answer. The car was idling rather slowly along Michigan Boulevard; half a block ahead glowed the green of a traffic light. Faster traffic flowed around them, passing them like water eddying about a slow floating branch.

Suddenly the car lurched forward. The amber flame of the warning light had flared out; they flashed across the intersection a split second before the metallic click of the red light, and a scant few feet before the converging lines of traffic from the side street swept in with protesting horns.

"Nick!" the girl gasped. "You'll rate yourself a traffic ticket! Why'd you cut the light like that?"

"To lose your guardian angel," he muttered in tones so low she barely understood his words.

Pat glanced back; the lights of a dozen cars showed beyond the barrier of the red signal.

"Do you mean one of those cars was following us? What on earth makes you think that, and why should it, anyway?"

The other made no answer; he swerved the car abruptly off the avenue, into one of the nondescript side street. He drove swiftly to the corner, turned south again, and turned again on some street Pat failed to identify—South Superior or Grand, she thought. They were scarcely a block from the magnificence of Michigan Avenue and its skyscrapers, its brilliant lights, and its teeming night traffic, yet here they moved down a deserted dark thoroughfare, a street lined with ramshackle wooden houses intermingled with mean little shops.

"Nick!" Pat exclaimed. "Where are we going?"

The low voice sounded. "Dancing," he said.

He brought the car to the curb; in the silence as the motor died, the faint strains of a mechanical piano sounded. He opened the car door, stepped around to the sidewalk.

"We're here," he said.

Something metallic in his tone drew Pat's eyes to his face. The eyes that returned her stare were the bloody orbs of the demon of last Wednesday night!