Chance -- Fiction; Love -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
But he kept his mind resolutely on the problem. Work, during the
day, was a godsend. Sometimes he was able to thrust aside for whole
half-hours the fact that Jane was dead. Now he grappled relievedly with
the question of his sanity or lunacy. He went to the desk where Jane
had kept her household accounts. He'd set the whole thing down on paper
and examine it methodically, checking this item against that.
* * * * *
Jane's diary lay on the desk-blotter, with a pencil between two of its
pages. He picked it up with a tug of dread. Some day he might read
it--an absurd chronicle Jane had never offered him--but not now. Not
now!
That was when he realized that it shouldn't be here. His hands jumped,
and it fell open. He saw Jane's angular writing and it hurt. He closed
it quickly, aching all over. But the printed date at the top of the
page registered on his brain even as he snapped the cover shut.
He sat still for minutes, every muscle taut.
It was a long time before he opened the book again, and by that time
he had a perfectly reasonable explanation. It must be that Jane hadn't
restricted herself to assigned spaces. When she had something extra to
write, she wrote it on past the page allotted for a given date.
Of course!
Jimmy fumbled back to the last written page, where the pencil had been,
with a tense matter-of-factness. It was, as he'd noticed, today's date.
The page was filled. The writing was fresh. It was Jane's handwriting.
"_Went to the cemetery_," said the sprawling letters. "_It was very
bad. Three months since the accident and it doesn't get any easier.
I'm developing a personal enmity to chance. It doesn't seem like an
abstraction any more. It was chance that killed Jimmy. It could have
been me instead, or neither of us. I wish--_"
Jimmy went quietly mad for a moment or two. When he came to himself he
was staring at an empty desk-blotter. There wasn't any book before him.
There wasn't any pencil between his fingers. He remembered picking up
the pencil and writing desperately under Jane's entry. "_Jane!_" he'd
written--and he could remember the look of his scrawled script under
Jane's--"_where are you? I'm not dead! I thought you were! In God's
name, where are you?_"
But certainly nothing of the sort could have happened. It was delusion.
That night was particularly bad, but curiously not as bad as some
other nights had been. Jimmy had a normal man's horror of insanity,
yet this wasn't, so to speak, normal insanity. A lunatic has always an
explanation for his delusions. Jimmy had none. He noted the fact.
Next morning he bought a small camera with a flash-bulb attachment and
carefully memorized the directions for its use. This was the thing that
would tell the story. And that night, when he got home, as usual after
dark, he had the camera ready. He unlocked the door and opened it. He
put his hand out tentatively. The door was still closed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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