Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 1, March 1923: The unique magazine

“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.

I had not schemed and contrived--and dared--in vain.

This was the thought I hugged when Louis was released from jail, upon her refusal to prosecute. It caused me sardonic amusement when, in their first embrace, the tears of despair rained down their cheeks. It recurred when they began their pitiful attempt to build anew on the shattered foundation of love.

And then--creepingly, slyly, like a bird of ill omen casting the shadow of its silent wings over the landscape--came retribution.

Many times, in retrospect, I lived over that brief hour of my return to physical expression--my hour of realization. Wraithlike, arose a vision of Velma--Velma as she had stood before me that night, staring at me with horror. I saw the horror deepen--deepen to abject despair.