“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.
There 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 449 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.
Carse’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 Carse’s somnambulistic manias, but it was waived out of court with ridicule and contempt.
One must admit that Carse’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 Carse’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, Carse 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 identity of Carse’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 Carse—the bondage of the diary!
One night of each week for six weeks Jason Carse was compelled by some unknown power to dream about a murder confessed and described in Drukker’s diary. On each of these nights, while Carse 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 Carse’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!