Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 3 (1923-03).djvu/55

 There's a Psychic Riddle in

HE doctors say that I have only a short time to live. They are right. My heart is so bad that I have to lie propped up in bed because I cannot breathe lying down. A few weeks at most is the longest I can last. My legs are waterlogged and my lungs are beginning to fill up. Digitalis helps me very little now, and when that fails—good night.

This is written in an asylum for the criminal insane. Society has adjudged me a criminal and the doctors say that I am insane. The former I am, but the latter I certainly am not. For my crime, although I have never considered what I did a crime, I am paying the penalty—and I am paying it without whimpering, but I do object to being classed as a lunatic.

I would not care so much—I would take it as part of my punishment—if it did not prevent me from trying to right a grievous wrong. For whatever I say, or whatever I write, is discounted because of the supposed aberrancy of my mind. But since I know my end is very near I am writing this despite whether it will be read as the vaporing of a disordered intellect or not. Under the circumstances it is all I can do, and if I did not do it I would be more miserable than I am for the little time that remains to me.

This is written to clear the name of a dead man. Robert Q. Emory did not kill Dr. Kendall. I killed him. I am aware that it will be at once objected to that as this is written Robert Q. Emory is not dead and that I am Robert Q. Emory. In part, this is true. The body of Robert Q. Emory still lives, in a very dilapidated state, but his soul has departed from it for some time—about eighteen months, to be exact. My soul, my intelligence, my identity, has inhabited the body of Robert Q. Emory since immediately before the killing of Dr. Kendall, and it was my personal ego that motivated his body to commit the murder. I obsessed his body and used it as an instrument to avenge myself upon my enemy. Therefore I can say with absolute truth that he is innocent and that I am guilty.

I am Archibald Swayne, and in the body of Robert Q. Emory I killed Dr. Kendall. That is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is not necessary here to go into the details whereby I learned that Kendall was my enemy. It is enough to say that I unmasked him as a trickster and a liar when he set up the wall I could not climb, and shattered my fondest hopes and broke me. He did it for no reason. Because he did it for no reason I destroyed him.

Now, you will say, the slate is clean, the balance even, but it is not. I hate him now more than I believe I hated him then, and I welcome death and am glad that it is near, because so much the sooner will I come to grips with him again. In the realm of shadows I will strike him as I have struck him here, and in the worlds beyond, if he flees that far, I will follow him.

S a psychologist I was, and am, not unknown. My monographs on "The Will" and "The Fundamentals of Character" are accepted as authoritative. I have also some reputation as a mathematician, or rather that branch of it which is included in the domain of metaphysics, transcendental mathematics, which was developed by the mystics of antiquity and more recently by Zollner, Hinton, and Einstein.

Into the mysteries of hyperspace I have penetrated farther than any man now living. I am one of the few who can say that physically I have been in the fourth dimension. It was while in this plane that I learned that J. Ensley Kendall had betrayed me. I read his thoughts as if they were an open book. When I returned to three dimensional space I went to him and accused him of his treachery and upbraided him. He listened. It even seemed to me that he listened patiently.

When I was through, and I know that I spoke loudly and excitedly, he simply said, "Is that all?"

I could have throttled him then and there. I felt hot and cold. My legs gave under me and I trembled. I tried to speak, but could not. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "You're not feeling well, old man. You'd better go home and go to bed." I don't know why I did it, but without another word I left him.

After that the persecution began. Wherever I went I was followed. Once, when a particularly uncouth individual was following me, I turned and asked him what he wanted. He answered, "You're talkin' through your hat. Beat it, or I'll hand yer one."

It made me brood, and brooding is not good; too much of it rots the soul and turns the milk of human kindness into gall.

I began to be persecuted in another and still more devilish way. Voices spoke to me. They whispered in ears while I was lecturing to my class. They jeered me when I walked the streets. When I sat alone they sometimes fairly yelled at me. They kept me awake at nights so that I became haggard for want of sleep. They called me fool and coward and many another names too vile to write.

I am well aware that in certain forms of insanity, especially dementia praecox and paranoia, hallucinations of sound are not uncommon. But I was not insane. The processes of my mind worked as smoothly as ever. If I were superstitious I would probably have attributed them to disembodied spirits, but this I knew to be absurd.

Finally I solved the problem. It was so absurdly simple that I was actually ashamed of my stupidity in not having done so before. The voices that tormented me, that were driving me almost to the verge of insanity were nothing more than the voice of J. Ensley Kendall speaking to me from fourth dimensional space. He had evidently filched the secret from me; although I have never been able to determine how he did it. Probably he gained surreptitious access to my notes and apparatus.