find oneself standing beside
the Thing and looking down at it? It would not be a good thing to stand
and look down on--even for that which had deserted it. But having torn
oneself loose from it and its devilish aches and pains, one would not
care--one would see how little it all mattered. Anything else must be
better than this--the thing for which there was a scientific name but no
healing. He had taken all the drugs, he had obeyed all the medical
orders, and here he was after that last hell of a night--dressing
himself in a back bedroom of a cheap lodging-house to go out and buy a
pistol in this damned fog.

He laughed at the last phrase of his thought, the laugh which was a
mirthless grin.

"I am thinking of it as if I was afraid of taking cold," he said. "And
to-morrow--!"

There would be no To-morrow. To-morrows were at an end. No more
nights--no more days--no more morrows.

He finished dressing, putting on his discriminatingly chosen
shabby-genteel clothes with a care for the effect he intended them to
produce. The collar and cuffs of his shirt were frayed and yellow, and
he fastened his collar with a pin and tied his worn necktie carelessly.
His overcoat was beginning to wear a greenish shade and look threadbare,
so was his hat. When his toilet was complete he looked at himself in the
cracked and hazy glass, bending forward to scrutinize his unshaven face
under the shadow of the dingy hat.

"It is all right," he muttered. "It is not far to the pawnshop where I
saw it."

The stillness of the room as he turned to go out was uncanny. As it was
a back room, there was no street below from which could arise sounds of
passing vehicles, and the thickness of the fog muffled such sound as
might have floated from the front. He stopped half-way to the door, not
knowing why, and listened. To what--for what? The silence seemed to
spread through all the house--out into the streets--through all
London--through all the world, and he to stand in the midst of it, a man
on the way to Death--with no To-morrow.

What did it mean? It seemed to mean something. The world withdrawn--
life withdrawn--sound withdrawn--breath withdrawn. He stood and waited.
Perhaps this was one of the symptoms of the morbid thing for which there
was that name. If so he had better get away quickly and have it over,
lest he be found wandering about not knowing--not knowing. But now he
knew--the Silence. He waited--waited and tried to hea