Drukker.”

“Where did you get it?”

He cast a swift glance about the room, then suddenly his eyes fell upon the butcher knife. I saw him tense, saw his lips twitch under the lash of a horrible temptation.

“Carse, tell me about it!” I yelled, to distract him. “Where did you get the book?”

He pulled his eyes away from the knife and let them burn into my face. For a moment, undecided, he was silent; then his brows straightened and he leaned forward in his chair.

“Do you remember my Graz thesis? It was based upon the life of Emil Drukker in an effort to explain what impulse drove him to cut off human heads. It was a good thesis, one of the best on the subject, and it brought a lot of response from criminologists all over the world. About six months after it was published I received a letter from a man who was once Emil Drukker’s personal servant. He was living in Cologne right close to the old Drukker castle, and he wanted to see me. He told me that he knew the Drukker crimes from the first to the last—sixteen of them.

“So I went, of course, and met this man, who was small and old, with an obsession for Emil Drukker. He talked for a long time, and then he handed me the diary and said it explained more vividly than I could ever imagine the impulse which prompted Drukker’s recurrent human decapitations. He told me that Drukker had written each entry while the memory of the crime was still fresh in his mind. It was a terrible book to read, he warned, and unless I had the intellectual strength of a mental Hercules I would never forgive myself for having opened it.

“Naturally I was too excited to heed his warning, and on that same night I took the book away with me. I promised to return it to him when I had finished, but he wouldn’t accept this plan. Instead he said that he would come and get the book when I was through. It was a mysterious business and should have told me 445 to expect no good to come of it. I asked him how he would know when I had finished with the book, and I shall never forget that evil smile and disdainful shrug of his response.

“‘I shall know well enough when I read the newspapers,’ he told me. ‘This time it will be six or seven—in about four months from now.’

“Do you understand what he meant by those words? He knew what would happen! And yet he let me carry that book away with me! In the name of God, what kind of a man is he?”

“Why didn’t you destroy the book?” I demanded of him.

“I couldn’t! It was too fascinating, too powerful to destroy. I read that book with the reverence of an ecclesiastic until I knew every word between the covers, and the whole ghastly parade of Drukker’s sixteen murders passed before my eyes like figures on a stage. Ten weeks ago I began to have nightmares that reconstructed the crimes of Drukker, going chronologically from Number One to Number Sixteen, then beginning all over again.

“When I returned to America seven weeks ago I still had the book with me, and the contents were so deeply engraved on my brain that I could think of nothing else. Day and night I thought about it, until at length I found myself actually imagining how I would go about emulating his crimes. Then I began to get the horrible impulse to fondle a butcher knife—Drukker used a butcher knife, you know!—and more than once I was struck with the scarcely resistible urge to cut off someone’s head. It didn’t matter whose head—but just a head!”

“Easy, Carse!” I cried with a wary glance at the kitchen table. “Tell me the rest, but don’t excite yourself. What happened then?”

He slid back in a sort of stupor, shook his head several times, then passed his hand across his eyes in a gesture of despair.

“You ought to know damned well what happened if you were listening at your door last night. Six weeks ago I went to bed and dreamed horribly. I had just finished reading the first confession in the diary—some strange impulse made me read that confession and no other—and in my sleep I saw a human head staring at me. It was a cruel, Teutonic head, and I knew that it was Emil Drukker’s head hanging in a gallows rope. Then he smiled at me; a horrible, vivid, real smile, and the head vanished. From then on, for how long I cannot say, I sat as a spectator and watched the complete action of Drukker’s Number One.

“I saw Drukker leave his house and walk down a dark street with no other illumination than a few scattered electric lights. I tried to imagine how they were electric lights, for they had only gas in his day, but nevertheless they were modern lights, and the street looked like the street in front of my own house. He walked about ten blocks; then he saw a woman standing on a street corner. There wasn’t another soul in sight. He crept closer to her, then drew out his butcher knife and hid it in the folds of his coat—a coat which looked strangely like my own wind-breaker. He first tried to talk with the woman, but she was not interested; so he pulled out the knife and brought it sweeping down across her throat. The blood spurted like a fountain and overran Drukker’s hand, but he only laughed and pushed the woman to the ground, then knelt over her and began a horrible sawing movement with his knife. When he had finished, he drew a towel from his pocket and wrapped the head tightly to prevent the blood from trailing him home. He came 446 back the same way and entered the house, and at the foot of the stairs he unwrapped the towel and held the thing only by its hair as he climbed the steps. The last thing I saw or heard was the blood dripping on each step as he ascended to the upper hall.”

“My God!” I whispered in horror.

“But that’s not the worst,” Carse cried as he grabbed my arm. “When I awakened the next morning it was late and the shrieks of the newsboys stabbed into my ears. They were yelling about a cruel, brutal murder which had been committed sometime during the night. I swung my feet off the bed to arise, when my eyes fell upon the diary which rested on my night-table. It was open to the confession of Number One as if I had been reading it in my sleep. There was a strange and terrifying dread in my soul as my feet struck the floor. I felt something wet and sticky touch my toes; then I looked down. It was a woman’s head staring up at me.

“The room was smeared with blood from one end to the other, and there was a gore-caked knife resting beside the head, and a crimson towel lay across my bedpost. But there wasn’t a drop of blood on my hands!

“I couldn’t even attempt to explain it. I only knew that a woman had been murdered and that her severed head was in my bedroom. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t force myself into the belief that I was the murderer, and I stood stunned with the weird horror of knowing that Emil Drukker’s Number One had been re-enacted and that I had played his own role. Where could I turn? Whom could I ask for advice? If I was mad they would commit me to an asylum; if I was not mad they would hang me.

“I carried the head to the cellar and buried it; then I cleaned up the blood and burned the towel. In my wardrobe I found a suit of clothes smeared with fresh blood. I found my shoes and hat splattered with it, and then I found my discarded gloves stained a violent crimson, with each finger stiffened as the blood had coagulated about it. No wonder there wasn’t any blood on my hands!

“I went over the house from top to bottom and eradicated every stain that might be evidence against me; then I sat down with the diary in one hand and the morning newspaper in the other. I compared the two crimes. They were identical, even to the burying of the heads. Emil Drukker had done exactly the same as I had done: he carried the head in a towel, he left it in his room overnight,