Page:The Dead Man's Tale.pdf/8

 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 denouement

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 —running, 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, myy 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 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 even 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—he was battling for self-control.

"Louis!" The name was gasped through bloodless lips.

Involuntarily, I shrunk, 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.