CHAPTER IV
As I stuffed things into my big battered Gladstone I found myself changing.
A cryptic statement, that, and one which requires explanation; yet how can I say just what it was like, this metamorphosis? At first I was the same creature that had crouched behind the false stalagmite and slain the guard, then had leaped from the second-story window to flee into the night. This was a—I was about to say a wholly physical being. That isn't true. There was brainwork of a sort behind its actions, but an alien brainwork. Could you understand the thoughts of an ape? Could you describe them if you did?
At any rate, I slid away from this physical being, imperceptibly, until Bill Cuff the prosaic pulpster seemed in the ascendant. Touching familiar things: my typewriter, sport shirts, cigarette lighter, a stack of manuscript—appeared to bring me back to what had all my life been normality.
Yet this creates the portrait of a sort of Jekyll-Hyde personality, an extreme example of schizophrenia. I would not have you believe this for a moment. I was not two souls warring in a single body, nor a lunatic of any sort.
No. I was not two people. I was a sleeper who had awakened in a manner not explained, not understood, but acceptable at once as quite natural. I found myself in a body which I had already been occupying for twenty-eight years and two months and seven days. There was no other personality in this body with me. The body was mine. The mind therein, fully developed along its own lines, was my mind.
The body and mind were mine, but the I—the older I—which had wakened was of somewhat different stuff. It had taken the body and mind (perhaps while I slept on the marble bench, perhaps during the brief argument with the guard), merging with them and dominating them. Yet the dual brain, the single body with new proclivities, were one, were all Bill Cuff. They differed but they were one.
I have said that before this night I had never even struck anyone. Yet there had always been the possibility that I might; might strike and slay, go berserk as I had now done. I had written many tales of brutal violence. Without my knowledge, there had been the seeds of savagery within me. They had flowered.
I looked in the mirror. I saw a well-set-up young fellow, a little broader than average for my six feet, heavy-boned, not much excess fat. My face was broad too, with high cheekbones and a small mustache and wide gray eyes, under an unruly thatch of thick black hair. I had a rather unintellectual look for a writer; it had always annoyed me. But I didn't look brutal. I had a sort of mild-mannered air, like a wider Jimmy Stewart.
In all that night I never questioned anything for more than a second or two until I came to pack my belongings. Then the lifelong habits and prejudices came back to make me ask myself for an accounting. No remorse, nor fear, nor any such weak emotions; simply curiosity at the changes.
What is it, I asked myself; reincarnation?
That would explain many things, including the paradox of two individuals in one—who were not two, had never been two, yet were different.
Postulate a gorilla, reborn in a man. His racial memories come to life after a certain period of time. He is still a man, has the reasoning ability of a man, is thoroughly Homo sapiens in everything, except that suddenly he can swing through the trees and can think in a manner strange to man—a furtive, sly, cunning, beastly way, if you like, but a way that will help to preserve him even in the stone jungles of man.
As I said this to myself, I caught at one phrase therein. Swing through the trees.
It was obvious that my physical powers had undergone a terrific change. I did not remember my hands ever being so powerful before. Never, certainly, had my reflexes been so flawless. Why, take but one instance: my leap from the second floor of the museum. That leap yesterday would more than likely have cost me two fractured ankles.
Superstitiously I looked in the mirror again and felt my muscles. Had they grown overnight, bulging out into the great biceps of whatever primitive entity had emerged within me? So far as I could tell, they were just my old muscles—not bad for a writer, because I swam a lot and did calisthenics regularly, but surely no marvels as muscles go. The change appeared to be in my use of them. Instinctively I could employ them in the most effective way. What could that be but a racial memory acting beneath the surface of the skin?
Other implausible explanations of the business occurred to me as I packed. I discarded them. Nothing seemed to fit except the abrupt return of a personality from eons ago, some great brute out of my lineage. That chimed with the curious recollection I had had in the cave, and with the accent I had several times put upon the word man to describe my enemies. A gorilla? I laughed to myself. An intriguing thought, indeed! I did not for a minute believe it. But what?