JASON, SON OF JASON
By J. U. Gíesy
CHAPTER I
THE GATEWAY OF LIFE
It was midnight when the night superintendent called and told me No. 27 had died. I rose. The thing was no surprise. I had known it was going to happen. No. 27 had told me so himself. None the less, I went to his room. Routine in the mental hospital had nothing to do with that strange secret held in common between myself and the man—that strange state of affairs which had enabled him to predicate his own death so accurately.
And yet as I mounted the stairs to the room where his body now lay as a worn-out husk I had none of the feeling which so customarily assails the average mortal in such an hour. To me it was not as though he had died. To my mind in those moments it was no more than the casting aside by the activating spirit of that instrument which for its own ends it had used. The body then was a husk indeed—an emaciated, worn-out thing which, because of our mutual secret, I knew had been kept alive by the sheer force of the spiritual tenant, now removed.
I stood looking down upon it, with very much the same sensations one might have in viewing the tool once plied by the hand of a friend. It was nothing more than that really. Jason Croft had used it while he had need of its manipulation, and when his need was accomplished he had simply laid it down.
Jason Croft. Dead? I felt an impulse to smile in most improper fashion. Not at all. The man was not only not dead, but I knew—as positively as I knew I was presently going to leave the room where his dead shell lay on a hospital bed and return to my own quarters—exactly where he had gone.
The statement sounds a bit as though I were better qualified as an inmate than the superintendent of an institution for the care of the insane. And I don't suppose it will help any for me to add that I had seen Jason Croft die before—or that he had informed me on the former occasion, though in less specific fashion, of his approaching end.