"I didn't do it. I mean, I did the acts, but I was possessed. That's all. Others have done worse, under the same circumstances, and been let off. Just as Fisher was acquitted for murdering the Learnards, as Draper got off after what he did to the Cline boy. As Jack Souther over there was let off after he murdered my own wife. They should be. They couldn't help themselves. Whatever this thing is that takes control, I know it can't be fought. My God, you can't even try to fight it!"
He was not getting through. The faces had not changed. The forewoman of the jury was now searching systematically through her pocketbook, taking each item out and examining it, putting it back and taking out another. But between times she looked at him and at least her expression wasn't hostile. He said, addressing her:
"That's all there is to it. It wasn't me running my body. It was someone else. I swear it before all of you, and before God."
The prosecutor did not bother to question him.
Chandler went back to his seat and sat down and watched the next twenty minutes go by in the wink of an eye, rapid, rapid, they were in a hurry to shoot him. He could hardly believe that Judge Ellithorp could speak so fast, the jurymen rise and file out at a gallop, zip, whisk, and they were back again. Too fast! he cried silently, time had gone into high gear; but he knew that it was only his imagination. The twenty minutes had been a full twelve hundred seconds. And then time, as if to make amends, came to a stop, abrupt, brakes-on. The judge asked the jury for their verdict and it was an eternity before the forewoman arose.
She was beginning to look rather disheveled. Beaming at Chandler—surely the woman was rather odd, it couldn't be just his imagination—she fumbled in her pocketbook for the slip of paper with the verdict. But she wore an expression of suppressed laughter.
"I knew I had it," she cried triumphantly and waved the slip above her head. "Now, let's see." She held it before her eyes and squinted. "Oh, yes. Judge, we the jury, and so forth and so on—"
She paused to wink at Judge Ellithorp. An uncertain worried murmur welled up in the auditorium. "All that junk, Judge," she explained, "anyway, we unanimously—but unanimously, love!—find this son of a bitch innocent. Why," she giggled, "we think he ought to get a medal, you know? I tell you what you do, love, you go right over and give him a big wet kiss and say you're sorry." She kept on talking, but no one heard. The murmur became a mass scream.
"Stop, stop her!" bawled the judge, dropping his glasses. "Bailiff!"
The scream became a word, in many voices chorused: Possessed! And beyond doubt the woman was. The men around her hurled themselves away, as from leprosy among them, and then washed back like a lynch mob. She was giggling as they fell on her. "Got a cigarette? No cigarettes in this lousy bag—oh." She screamed as they touched her, went limp and screamed again.