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.