The dead man--for there was no question about his condition, with a
bloody shrapnel wound in the side of his head--_was myself_!
Gradually the import of this penetrated my consciousness. Then I
realized that it was Louis who had called my name--that even now he was
sobbing it over and over.
The irony of it struck me at the moment of realization. I was dead--_I_
was the phantom--who had meant to kill Louis!
I looked at my hands, my uniform--I touched my body. Apparently I was
as substantial as before the shrapnel buried itself in my head. Yet,
when I had tried to grasp Louis, my hand seemed to encompass only space.
_Louis lived, and I was dead!_
The discovery for a time benumbed my feeling toward him. With
impersonal curiosity, I saw him close the eyes of the dead man--the man
who, somehow or other, had been me. I saw him search the pockets and
draw forth a letter I had written only that morning, a letter addressed
to----
With a sudden surge of dismay, I darted forward to snatch it from his
hands. He should not read that letter!
Again I was reminded of my impalpability.
But Louis did not open the envelope, although it was unsealed. He read
the superscription, kissed it, as sobs rent his frame, and thrust the
letter inside his khaki jacket.
“Dick! Buddie!” he cried brokenly. “Best pal man ever had--how can I
take this news back to her!”
My lips curled. To Louis, I was his pal, his buddie. Not a suspicion
of the hate I bore him--had borne him ever since I discovered in him a
rival for Velma Roth.
Oh, I had been clever! It was our “unselfish friendship” that endeared
us both to her. A sign of jealousy, of ill nature, and I would have
forfeited the paradise of her regard that apparently I shared with
Louis.
I had never felt secure of my place in that paradise. True, I could
always awaken a response in her, but I must put forth effort in order
to do so. He held her interest, it seemed, without trying. They were
happy with each other and in each other.
Our relations might be expressed by likening her to the water of a
placid pool, Louis to the basin that held her, me to the wind that
swept over it. By exerting myself, I could agitate the surface of her
nature into ripples of pleasurable excitement--could even lash her
emotion into a tempest. She responded to the stimulation of my mood,
yet, in my absence, settled contentedly into the peaceful comfort of
Louis’ steadfast love.
I felt vaguely then--and am certain now, with a broader perspective
toward realities--that Velma intuitively recognized Louis as her
mate, yet feared to yield herself to him because of my sway over her
emotional nature.
When the great war came, we all, I am convinced, felt that it would
absolve Velma from the task of choosing between us.
Whether the agony that spoke from the violet depths of her eyes when we
said good-by was chiefly for Louis or for me, I could not tell. I doubt
if she could have done so. But in my mind was the determination that
only one of us should return, and--Louis would not be that one.
Did I feel no repugnance at thought of murdering the man who stood in
my way? Very little. I was a savage at heart--a savage in whom desire
outweighed anything that might stand in the way of gaining its object.
From my point of view, I would have been a fool to pass the opportunity.
Why I should have so hated him--a mere obstacle in my path--I do not
know. It may have been due to a prescience of the intangible barrier
his blood would always raise between Velma and me--or to a slumbering
sense of remorse.
But, speculation aside, here I was, in a state of being that the world
calls death, while Louis lived--was free to return home--to claim
Velma--to flaunt his possession of all that I held precious.
It was maddening! Must I stand idly by, helpless to prevent this?
_III._
I have wondered, since, how I could remain so long in touch with the
objective world--why I did not at once, or very soon, find myself shut
off from earthly sights and sounds as those in physical form are shut
off from the things beyond.
The matter seems to have been determined by my will. Like weights of
lead, envy of Louis and passionate longing for Velma held my feet to
the sphere of dense matter.
Vengeful, despairing, I watched beside Louis. When at last he turned
away from my body and, with tears streaming from his eyes, began to
drag a useless leg toward the trenches we had left, I realized why he
had not gone on with the others to the crest of the hill. He, too, was
a victim of Boche gunnery.
I walked beside the stretcher-bearers when they had picked him up and
were conveying him toward the base hospital. Throughout the weeks that
followed I hovered near his cot, watching the doctors as they bound up
the lacerated tendons in his thigh, and missing no detail of his battle
with the fever.
Over his shoulder I read the first letter he wrote home to Velma, in
which he gave a belated account of my death, dwelling upon the glory of
my sacrifice.
“_I have often thought that you two were meant for each other_” [he
wrote] “_and that if it had not been for fear of hurting me, you would
have been his wife long ago. He was the best buddie a man ever had. If
only I could have been the one to die!_”
Had I known it, I could have followed this letter across seas--could,
in fact, have passed it and, by an exercise of the will, have been
at Velma’s side in the twinkling of an eye. But my ignorance of the
laws of the new plane was total. All my thoughts were centered upon a
problem of entirely different character.
Never was hold upon earthly treasure more reluctantly relinquished
than was my hope of possessing Velma. Surely, death could not
erect so absolute a barrier. There must be a way--some loophole of
communication--some chance for a disembodied man to contend with his
corporeal rival for a woman’s love.
Slowly, very slowly, dawned the light of a plan. So feeble was the
glimmer that it would scarcely have comforted one in less desperate
straits, but to me it appeared to offer a possible hope. I set about
methodically, with infinite patience, evolving it into something
tangible, even though I had but the most indefinite idea of what the
outcome might be.
The first suggestion came when Louis had so far recovered that but
little trace of the fever remained. One afternoon, as he lay sleeping,
the mail-distributor handed a letter to the nurse who happened to be
standing beside his cot. She glanced at it, then tucked it under his
pillow.
The letter was from Velma, and I was hungry for the contents. I did not
then know that I could have read it easily, sealed though it was. In a
frenzy of impatience, I exclaimed:
“Wake up, confound it, and read your letter!”
With a start, he opened his eyes. He looked around with a bewildered
expression.
“Under your pillow!” I fumed. “Look under your pillow!”
In a dazed manner, he put his hand under the pillow and drew forth the
letter.
A few hours later, I heard him commenting on the experience to the
nurse.
“Something seemed to wake me up,” he said, “and I had a peculiar
impulse to feel under the pillow. It was just as if I knew I would find
the letter there.”
The circumstances seemed as remarkable to me as it did to him. It might
be coincidence, but I determined to make a further test.
A series of experiments convinced me that I could, to a very slight
degree, impress my thoughts and will upon Louis, especially when he
was tired or on the borderland of sleep. Occasionally I was able to
control the direction of his thoughts as he wrote home to Velma.
On one occasion, he was describing for her a funny little French woman
who visited the hospital with a basket that always was filled with
cigarettes and candy.
“_Last time_” [he wrote], “_she brought with her a boy whom she
called...._”
He paused, with pencil upraised, trying to recall the name.
A moment later, he looked down at the page and stared with
astonishment. The words, “_She called him Maurice_,” had been added
below the unfinished line.
“I must be going daffy,” he muttered. “I’d swear I didn’t write that.”
Behind him, I stood rubbing my hands in triumph. It was my first
successful effort to guide the pencil while his thoughts strayed
elsewhere.
Another time, he wrote to Velma:
“_I’ve a strange feeling, lately, that dear old Dick is near.
Sometimes, as I wake up, I seem to remember vaguely having seen him in
my dreams. It’s as if his features were just fading from view._”
He paused here so long that I made another attempt to take advantage of
his abstraction.
By an effort of the will that it is difficult to explain, I guided his
hand into the formation of the words:
“_With a jugful of kisses for Winkie, as ever her...._”
Just then, Louis looked down.
“Good God!” he exclaimed, as if he had seen a ghost.
_IV._
“Winkie” was a pet name I had given Velma when we were children
together.
Louis always maintained there was no sense in it, and refused to adopt
it, though I frequently called her by the name in later years. And
of his own volition, Louis would never have mentioned anything so
convivial as a jugful of kisses.
So, through the weary months before he was invalided home, I worked.
When he left France at the debarkation point, he still walked on
crutches, but with the promise of regaining the unassisted use of
his leg before very long. Throughout the voyage, I hovered near him,
sharing his impatience, his longing for the one we both held dearest.
Over the exquisite pain of the reunion--at which I was present, yet
_not_ present--I shall pass briefly. More beautiful than ever, more
appealing with her vivid, deep coloring, Velma in the flesh was a
vision that stirred my longing into an intense flame.
Louis limped painfully down the gangplank. When they met, she rested
her head silently on his shoulder for a moment, then--her eyes brimming
with tears--assisted him, with the tender solicitude of a mother, to
the machine she had in waiting.
Two months later they were married. I felt the pain of this less deeply
than I would have done had it not been essential to my designs.
Whatever vague hope I may have had, however, of vicariously enjoying
the delights of love were disappointed. I could not have explained
why--I only knew that something barred me from intruding upon
the sacred intimacies of their life, as if a defensive wall were
interposed. It was baffling, but a very present fact, against which I
found it useless to rebel. I have since learned--but no matter. * * *
This had no bearing on my purpose, which hinged upon the ability I was
acquiring of influencing Louis’ thoughts and actions--of taking partial
control of his faculties.
The occupation into which he drifted, restricted in choice as he was by
the stiffened leg, helped me materially. Often, after an interminable
shift at the bank, he would plod home at night with brain so weary and
benumbed that it was a simple matter to impress my will upon him. Each
successful attempt, too, made the next one easier.
The inevitable consequence was that in time Velma should notice his
aberrations and betray concern.
“Why did you say to me, when you came in last night, ‘There’s a blue
Billy-goat on the stairs--I wish they’d drive him out’?” she demanded
one morning.
He looked down shamefacedly at the tablecloth.
“I don’t know what made me say it. I seemed to _want_ to say it, and
that was the only way to get it off my mind. I thought you’d take it
as a joke.” He shifted his shoulders, as if trying to dislodge an
unpleasant burden.
“And was that what made you wear a necktie to bed?” she asked,
ironically.
He nodded an affirmative. “I knew it was idiotic--but the idea kept
running in my mind. It seemed as if the only way I could go to sleep
was to give in to it. I don’t have these freaks unless I’m very tired.”
She said nothing more at the time, but that evening she broached
the subject of his looking for an opening in some less sedentary
occupation--a subject to which she thereafter constantly recurred.
Then came a development that surprised and excited me with its
possibilities.
Exhausted, drained to the last drop of his nerve-force, Louis was
returning late one night from the bank, following the usual month-end
overtime grind. As he walked from the car-line, I hovered over him,
subduing his personality, forcing it under control, with the effort
of will I had gradually learned to direct upon him. The process can
only be explained in a crude way: It was as if I contended with him,
sometimes successfully, for possession of the steering-wheel of the
human car that he drove.
Velma was waiting when we arrived. As Louis’ feet sounded on the
threshold of their apartment, she opened the door, caught his hands,
and drew him inside.
At the action, I felt inexplicably thrilled. It was as if some
marvelous change had come over me. And then, as I met her gaze, I knew
what that change was.
I held her hands in real flesh-and-blood contact. I was looking at her
with Louis’ sight!
_V._
The shock of it cost me what I had gained. Shaken from my poise, I felt
the personality I had subdued regain its sway.
The next moment, Louis was staring at Velma in bewilderment. Her eyes
were filled with alarm.
“You--you _frightened_ me!” she gasped, withdrawing her hands, which I
had all but crushed. “Louis, dear--don’t _ever_ look at me again like
that!”
I can imagine the devouring intensity of gaze that had blazed forth
from the features in that brief moment when they were mine.
From this time, my plans quickly took form. Two modes of action
presented themselves. The first and more alluring, however, I was
forced to abandon. It was none other than the wild dream of acquiring
exclusive possession of Louis’ body--of forcing him down, out, and into
the secondary place I had occupied.
Despite the progress I had made, this proved inexpressibly difficult.
For one thing, there seemed an affinity between Louis’ body and his
personality, which forced me out when he was moderately rested. This
bond I might have weakened, but there were other factors.
One was the growing conviction on his part that something was radically
wrong. With a faculty I had discovered of putting myself _en rapport_
with him and reading his thoughts, I knew that at times he feared that
he was going insane.
I once had the experience of accompanying him to an alienist and there,
like the proverbial fly on the wall, overhearing learned scientific
names applied to my efforts. The alienist spoke of “dual personality,”
“amnesia,” and “the subconscious mind,” while I laughed in my (shall I
say?) ghostly sleeve.
But he advised Louis to seek a complete rest and, if possible, to go
into the country to build up physically--which was what I desired most
to prevent.
I could not play the Mr. Hyde to his Dr. Jekyll if Louis maintained his
normal virility.
Velma’s fears, too, I knew were growing more acute. As insistently as
she could, without betraying too openly her alarm, she pressed him to
give up the bank position and seek work in the open air--work that
would prove less devitalizing to a person of his peculiar temperament.
One of the results of debility from overwork is, apparently, that it
deprives the victim of his initiative--makes him fearful of giving up
his hold upon the meager means of sustenance that he has, lest he shall
be unable to grasp another. Louis was in debt, earning scarcely enough
for their living expenses, too proud to let Velma help as she longed to
do, his game leg putting him at a disadvantage in the industrial field.
In fact, he was in just the predicament I desired, but I knew that in
time her wishes would prevail.
The circumstances, however, that deprived me of all hope of completely
usurping his place was this: I could not, for any length of time,
face the gaze of Velma’s eyes. The personified truth, the purity that
dwelt in them, seemed to dissolve my power, to beat me back into the
secondary relationship I had come to occupy toward Louis.
He was sometimes tempted to tell her: “You give me my one grip on
sanity.”
I have witnessed his panic at the thought of losing her, at the thought
that some day she might give him up in disgust at his aberrations, and
abandon him to the formless “thing” that haunted him.
Curious--to be of the world and yet not of it--to enjoy a perspective
that reveals the hidden side of effects, which seem so mysterious from
the material side of the veil. But I would gladly have given all the
advantages of my disembodied state for one hour of flesh-and-blood
companionship with Velma.
My alternative plan was this:
If I could not enter her world, what was to prevent me from _bringing
Velma into mine_?
_VI._
Daring? To be sure.
Unversed as I was in the laws that govern this mystery of passing from
the physical into another state of existence, I could only hope that
the plan would work. It might--and that was enough for me. I took a
gambler’s chance. By risking all, I might gain all--might gain--
The thought of what I might gain transported me to a heaven of pain and
ecstasy.
Velma and I--in a world apart--a world of our own--free from the sordid
trammels that mar the perfection of the rosiest earth-existence. Velma
and I--together through all eternity!
This much reason I had for hoping! I observed that other persons passed
through the change called death, and that some entered a state of
being in which I was conscious of them and they of me. Uninteresting
creatures they were, almost wholly preoccupied with their former
earth-interests; but they were as much in the world as I had been in
the world of Velma and Louis before that fragment of shrapnel ruled me
out of the game.
A few, it was true, on passing from their physical habitations,
seemed to emerge into a sphere to which I could not follow. This
troubled me. Velma might do likewise. Yet I refused to admit the
probability--refused to consider the possible failure of my plan. The
very intensity of my longing would draw her to me.
The gulf that separated us was spanned by the grave. Once Velma had
crossed to my side of the abyss, there would be no going back to Louis.
Yet I was cunning. She must not come to me with overpowering regrets
that would cause her to hover about Louis as I now hovered about her.
If I could inspire her with horror and loathing for him--ah! if I only
could!
As a preliminary step, I must induce Louis to buy the instrument with
which my purpose was to be accomplished. This was not easy, for on
nights when he left the bank during shopping hours he was sufficiently
vigorous to resist my will. I could work only through suggestion.
In a pawnshop window that he passed daily I had noticed a revolver
prominently displayed. My whole effort was concentrated upon bringing
this to his attention.
The second night, he glanced at the revolver, but did not stop. Three
nights later, drawn by a fascination for which he could not have
accounted, he paused and looked at it for several minutes, fighting an
urge that seemed to command: “_Step in and buy! Buy! Buy!_”
When, a few evenings later, he arrived home with the revolver and a box
of cartridges that the pawnbroker had included in the sale, he put them
hastily out of sight in a drawer of his desk.
He said nothing about his purchase, but the next day Velma came across
the weapon and questioned him regarding it.
Visibly confused, he replied: “Oh, I thought we might need something of
the sort. Saw it in a window, and the notion of having it sort of took
hold of me. There’s been a lot of housebreaking lately, and it’s just
as well to be prepared.”
And now with impatience I waited for the opportunity to stage my
_dénouement_.
It came, naturally, at the end of the month, when Louis, after a
prolonged day’s work, returned home, soon after midnight, his brain
benumbed with poring over interminable columns of figures. When his
feet ascended the stairs to his apartment it was not his faculties that
directed them, but mine--cunning, alert, aflame with deadly purpose.
Never was more weird preliminary to a murder--the entering, in guise of
a dear, familiar form, of a fiend incarnate, intent upon destroying the
flower of the home.
I speak of a fiend incarnate, even though I was that fiend, for I did
not enter Louis’s body in full expression of my faculties. Taking up
physical life, my recollection of existence as a spirit entity was
always shadowy. I carried through the dominating impulses that had
actuated me on entering the body, but scarcely more.
And the impulse I had carried through that night was the impulse to
kill.
_VII._
With utmost caution, I entered the bedroom.
My control of Louis’s body was complete. I felt, for perhaps the first
time, so corporeally secure that the vague dread of being driven out
did not oppress me.
The room was dark, but the soft, regular breathing of Velma, asleep,
reached my ears. It was like the invitation that rises in the scent of
old wine which the lips are about to quaff--quickening my eagerness and
setting my brain on fire.
I did not think of love. I lusted--but my lust was to destroy that
beautiful body--to _kill_!
However, I was cunning--_cunning_. With caution, I felt my way toward
the desk and secured the revolver, filling its chambers with leaden
emissaries of death.
When all was in readiness, I switched on the light.
She wakened almost instantly. As the radiance flooded the room,
a startled cry rose to her lips. It froze, unuttered, as--half
rising--she met my gaze.
Her beauty--the raven blackness of her hair falling over her bare
shoulders and full, heaving bosom, fanned the flame of my gory passion
into fury. In an ecstasy of triumph, I stood drinking in the picture.
While I temporized with the lust to kill--prolonging the exquisite
sensation--she was battling for self-control.
“_Louis!_” The name was gasped through bloodless lips.
Involuntarily, I shrank, reeling a little under her gaze. A dormant
something seemed to rise in feeble protest at what I sought to do. The
leveled revolver wavered in my hand.
But the note of panic in her voice revived my purpose. I
laughed--mockingly.
“Louis!” her tone was sharp, but edged with terror. “Louis--_put down
that pistol_! You don’t know what you are doing.”
She struggled to her feet and now stood before me. God! how
beautiful--how tempting that bare white bosom!
“_Put down that pistol!_” she ordered hysterically.
She was frantic with fear. And her fear was like the blast of a forge
upon the white heat of my passion.
I mocked her. A shrill, maniacal laugh burst from my throat. She had
said I didn’t know what I was doing! Oh, yes, I did.
“I’m going to kill you!--_kill you!_” I shrieked, and laughed again.
She swayed forward like a wraith, as I fired. Or perhaps that was the
trick played by my eyes as darkness overwhelmed me.
_VIII._
A few fragmentary pictures stand out in my recollection like
clear-etched cameos on the scroll of the past.
One is of Louis, standing dazedly--slightly swaying as with
vertigo--looking down at the smoking revolver in his hand. On the floor
before him a crumpled figure in ebony and white and vivid crimson.
Then a confusion of frightened men and women in oddly assorted
nondescript attire--uniformed officers bursting into the room and
taking the revolver from Louis’s unresisting hand--clumsy efforts at
lifting the white-robed body to the bed--a crimson stain spreading over
the sheet--a doctor, attired in collarless shirt and wearing slippers,
bending over her * * *
Finally, after a lapse of hours, a hushed atmosphere--efficient
nurses--the beginning of delirium.
And one other picture--of Louis, cringing behind the bars of his cell,
denied the privilege of visiting his wife’s bedside--crushed, dreading
the hourly announcement of her death--filled with unspeakable horror of
himself.
Velma still lived. The bullet had pierced her left lung and life
hung by a tenuous thread. Hovering near I watched with dispassionate
interest the battle for life. For the time I seemed emotionally spent.
I had made a supreme effort--events would now take their inevitable
course and show whether I had accomplished my purpose. I felt neither
anxious nor overjoyed, neither regretful nor triumphant--merely
impersonally curious.
A fever set in lessening Velma’s slender chances of recovery. In her
delirium, her thoughts seemed always of Louis. Sometimes she breathed
his name pleadingly, tenderly, then cried out in terror at some
fleeting rehearsal of the scene in which he stood before her, the
glitter of insanity in his eyes, the leveled revolver in his hand.
Again she pleaded with him to give up his work at the bank; and at
other times she seemed to think of him as over on the battlefields of
Europe.
Only once did she apparently think of me--when she whispered the name
by which I had called her, “_Winkie!_” and added, “_Dick!_” But, save
for this exception, it was always “Louis! Louis!”
Her constant reiteration of his name finally dispelled the apathy of my
spirit.
_Louis!_ All the vengeful fury toward him I had experienced when my
soul went hurtling into the region of the disembodied returned with
thwarted intensity.
When Velma’s fever subsided, when the long fight for recovery began and
she fluttered from the borderland back into the realm of the physical,
when I knew I had failed--balked of my prey, I had at least this
satisfaction:
Never again would these two--the man I hated and the woman for whom I
hungered--never again would they be to each other as they had been in
the past. The perfection of their love had been irretrievably marred.
Never would she meet his gaze without an inward shrinking. Always on
his part--on both their parts--there would be an undercurrent of fear
that the incident might recur--a grizzly menace, poisoning each moment
of their lives together.