He said nothing about his purchase, but the next day Velma came across the weapon and questioned him regarding it.
Visibly confused, he replied: “Oh, I thought we might need something of the sort. Saw it in a window, and the notion of having it sort of took hold of me. There’s been a lot of housebreaking lately, and it’s just as well to be prepared.”
And now with impatience I waited for the opportunity to stage my dénouement.
It came, naturally, at the end of the month, when Louis, after a prolonged day’s work, returned home, soon after midnight, his brain benumbed with poring over interminable columns of figures. When his feet ascended the stairs to his apartment it was not his faculties that directed them, but mine—cunning, alert, aflame with deadly purpose.
Never was more weird preliminary to a murder—the entering, in guise of a dear, familiar form, of a fiend incarnate, intent upon destroying the flower of the home.
I speak of a fiend incarnate, even though I was that fiend, for I did not enter Louis’s body in full expression of my faculties. Taking up physical life, my recollection of existence as a spirit entity was always shadowy. I carried through the dominating impulses that had actuated me on entering the body, but scarcely more.
And the impulse I had carried through that night was the impulse to kill.
VII.
WITH utmost caution, I entered the bedroom.
My control of Louis’s body was complete. I felt, for perhaps the first time, so corporeally secure that the vague dread of being driven out did not oppress me.