Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 04.djvu/64

448 large, scrawling hand. I read the first six accounts, then stared at Carse in amazement. His six crimes and Drukker's first six were so identical they might have been conscious reproductions. In all cases the victims were the same sex, the same age, and were in the same general walk of life. I then turned to account Number Seven and after reading a few wretched lines I gasped with horror: it was a seven-year-old girl!

Carse was on his feet, his jaw grim and determined. He stared fiercely at me, waiting my response.

"Carse," I muttered dazedly, "it—it——"

"You can't back out," he cried as he stepped toward me. "There will be no seven, I tell you. It's ended on six. I swear it to you!"

"No," I said, "I cannot permit such a risk. Did you read account Number Seven? He not only cut off the head, but he dismembered——"

"You can't back out!" he screamed as he shook my arm. "You can't, you can't!"

"But Carse, this is a girl—a mere child. Don't you realize it would be unpardonable even for you? No, I can never take such a risk. I must turn you over to the police."

Carse slapped me viciously, then stumbled back against the table. His face was a mask of suffused blood, his eyes wild with desperation.

"Damn you!" he cried savagely. "You are no friend; you're a cheat, a betrayer!"

Suddenly his groping fingers touched the butcher knife and he drew himself taut. His fingers wound around the hilt like slowly moving worms. For a moment there was scarcely a breath between us; then he lifted his arm and brought the knife slowly out before him. I watched, horror-stricken, unable to lift my feet from the floor. A numbing paralysis of fright seemed to come over me.

"Carse, Carse!" I muttered.

He didn't hear me; his body was tensed for the deadly spring that would bring him down upon my throat. I saw a ripple of galvanizing energy race through his hands; then I managed an outcry. At the same instant he was in the air.

is no need for me to relate the events which followed; for the newspapers had assiduously described the capture and arrest of Carse, and his subsequent history, brief as it was, has become public property. To my dying day I shall carry the five-inch scar along my cheek where his knife descended upon me, and I can never cease to be thankful for that one outburst of absolute fear which tore from my lips and attracted a passing policeman; otherwise I might have been Number Seven in the grim line of epitaphs that marked the close of this fantastic case. Only by bludgeoning Carse with his stick could the officer overcome him, and it was necessary to keep him in a straitjacket until the hour of his execution.

It is a curious fact that the psychiatrists who examined Carse, several of them his former pupils, could not find him unbalanced enough to be irresponsible for his crimes. Those long and tiring vigils in the mental clinic will haunt me for life; there was no end to their searching and probing of his subconscious mind, no end to the tests and questions, the examinations and analyses which ended hopelessly against him. But even if they had found him insane, violently and homicidally insane, they would not have dared report such a finding to the court. Society demanded a death in return for a death, and Jason Carse was nailed to his coffin at the first moment of his arrest. Had he been spared the gallows by the W. T.—4