The Homicidal Diary Part 3

"Ca.r.s.e, Ca.r.s.e!" 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.

There is no need for me to relate the events which followed; for the newspapers had a.s.siduously described the capture and arrest of Ca.r.s.e, 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 pa.s.sing 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 Ca.r.s.e 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 Ca.r.s.e, 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 a.n.a.lyses 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 Ca.r.s.e was nailed to his coffin at the first moment of his arrest. Had he been spared the gallows by the court, he would not have been spared the gallows by the mobs that milled about the detention prison; for continually throughout the trial was the grim reminder that society represented by mobs has not yet forgotten the use of lynch law.

Ca.r.s.e's death put a definite end to the head-hunting crimes in this city, and for the first time in over six weeks the metropolitan area has been able to breathe freely. I have lost a faithful and sincere friend; but I lost him, not on the gallows, but three months ago when he first discovered the diary of Emil Drukker.

It is the diary, not my mourning, which has prompted me to pen this account of my knowledge of the head-hunting crimes. During the trial, as you may remember, I sought to introduce the diary as major evidence in support of Ca.r.s.e's somnambulistic manias, but it was waived out of court with ridicule and contempt.

One must admit that Ca.r.s.e's story as he told it to me, and as I later reiterated it to the court, was fantastic and highly improbable. But there are certain irrefutable arguments in support of Ca.r.s.e's story which shed a terrible light, not alone upon the case, but on all criminal cases of similar nature. For one thing, a hypnotic examination by competent state alienists was completely unsuccessful in the attempt to bring forth his subconscious knowledge of any of the six murders. Secondly, Ca.r.s.e was unable, despite his most intense and willing efforts, to reconstruct even the smallest part of any one of the crimes. His only acquaintance with his own alleged activities was brought to him in _dreams_.

A further significant fact, which the court ignored as irrelevant, was the ghastly ident.i.ty of Ca.r.s.e's supposed crimes and those confessed by Emil Drukker. It is impossible that this duality of murders could be brought about by mere coincidence, for the similarity of detail was carried too far. This fact alone presupposes the statement that there was a horrible and unnatural bondage between Emil Drukker and Jason Ca.r.s.e--the bondage of the diary!

One night of each week for six weeks Jason Ca.r.s.e was compelled by some unknown power to dream about a murder confessed and described in Drukker's diary. On each of these nights, while Ca.r.s.e watched it in a dream, an identical murder was committed somewhere in the city and the man whom he recognized as the murderer was Emil Drukker. It was as if Ca.r.s.e's dreams, projected into reality by the sheer vividness of the diary, had resurrected Emil Drukker from his grave and set him free to re-enact his former crimes!

I am mad, you will say; but I speak of demonism and not law. How else can you explain the duality of these murders? How else can you explain Ca.r.s.e's ignorance of the crimes? How else can you explain those brutal dreams, the fruit of whose reality Ca.r.s.e found each morning on the floor beside his bed? Nor is it enough to stop alone with this question. How many men besides Jason Ca.r.s.e have spent sleepless nights over the diary of Emil Drukker?

The newspapers will answer that question each time they are opened; in Paris the police discover a headless body lying along the wharves, and the murderer is still unknown; in Berlin a college professor kills himself upon the discovery of a human head lying near his bed with his own hunting-knife stuck to the hilt into its brain; in Stockholm the police discover the bodies of two women lying in an empty house--their heads have not yet been found; and in Cleveland, one of our greatest cities, is reported the discovery of the tenth headless corpse in a series of murders that has gripped the city in terror. What kind of person commits such crimes? And why do the missing heads turn up years later in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a house owned by a mild-appearing and docile old man?

Jason Ca.r.s.e was not the first man to pay with his life for crimes such as these, nor is he the last. It is well to beware of sickish-smelling trunks that are left in deserted houses, and I caution the reader against stepping on misshapen bundles of clothing which he may find half hidden in a clump of bushes.

For the diary of Emil Drukker is missing from the drawer where I left it, and I have been told that a strange, Germanic-looking man was seen prowling about the house just before its disappearance.