Page:The Dead Man's Tale.pdf/6

 The inevitable consequence was that in time Velma should notice his aberrations and betray concern.

"Why did you savy 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 clown shamefacedly at the tablecloth.

"1 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 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 carline, 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. 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 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 eves 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 action presented theselves. The first and more alluring, however, I was forced to abandon. It was none other than the wild dream of 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—