Then too I never know exactly how Mary is going to react to things I tell her. Sometimes things that don’t strike me as the least funny touch her odd sense of humor. She might even laugh.
Thursday night: I bought a gun today. I’m not exactly sure why. I seemed to be impelled to do it by some force outside of myself. Perhaps by the power of God’s will.
Mary had a chemistry lab, and she thought I was spending the afternoon at the college library, as I usually do on Thursdays until she gets out of lab. I didn’t lie to her. When I picked her up to take her home, I simply didn’t mention I hadn’t gone near the library that afternoon.
I didn’t buy the gun locally. I drove thirty miles to another town and got it in a pawn shop. I signed the name Howard Turpin because that’s about as unlike mine as I could dream up, and gave the man a fake address. The gun cost me twenty dollars and it’s a .32 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver. It’s only five-shot instead of six, which struck me as odd. I was under the impression all revolvers were six-shooters.
The gun fascinates me because it’s such an ingenious mechanical contrivance. It’s what they call a hammerless resolver, and it breaks open by releasing a catch and bending the barrel downward. As the rear of the cylinder comes in view, a small pronged gadget thrusts backward from the center of the cylinder, ejecting all five shells at once. Then, when the gun is fully open, the gadget automatically snaps back into place so the cylinder may be reloaded. I’m not very mechanically inclined and I haven’t been able to figure out what makes the gadget work. I’d like to know, but the internal mechanism can’t be gotten at without taking the whole gun apart, and I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to get it back together again properly.
Before I returned to town I bought a box of fifty .32 caliber shells in a hardware store. The clerk didn’t even ask my name.
Saturday night: I fired my gun for the first time today. I drove out to the old stone quarry and shot twenty rounds at a tin can. I only hit it once, but I came quite close with all of the last five rounds. I think maybe I should have gotten a gun with a hammer, so I could cock it before firing. This one requires so much trigger pressure, it’s hard to hold the gun steady while squeezing.
It has a wonderful kick. Not hard, but definite. A loaded gun in your hand gives you an indefinable sense of power. I felt more exhilarated than I have in months when the stock jolted back against my palm each time I squeezed the trigger.
Mary was a little cross when she learned I’d gone for an afternoon ride without her.
“I thought you were studying,” she complained.
“I just felt like a little air,” I said.
I didn’t tell her I had been target practicing.
Sunday night: In church today, sitting between Mary and Mother, the voices came to me right in the middle of communion. I pretended to be praying so that Mary and Mother wouldn’t realize I was intently listening to something they couldn’t hear.
The voices have given me my complete mission finally. I know now what God wants me to do.
I am to kill sinners.
It gave me a warm sense of confidence to sit there in church and feel the pressure of my revolver under my belt and beneath my shirt.
Monday night: I watched you again earlier tonight through your front window while you saw a comedy program on television. Your laughter sounded clean and sinless to me, but I couldn’t penetrate your thoughts. I’m not yet sure about you, but I don’t think you’re a sinner because I can’t believe an evil person could laugh like that.
I’m learning to read minds, though, and before long I should be able to read yours.
I find already I can sometimes divine Mary’s secret thoughts.
Tuesday night: Tonight I walked the streets for hours, impelled by the same strange force which made me buy a gun. I didn’t feel like watching those I’ve watched in the past, because I’m gradually becoming convinced I won’t catch anyone sinning by peering through windows of people’s houses. It’s away from home that people perform their sins.
So I walked and I tried to penetrate the minds of those I saw on the streets.
At two A.M. I had my first opportunity to serve the Lord, and I failed. But even as I failed I knew I was forgiven, for the voices came to me soothingly rather than in anger. Maybe I was made to fail on purpose, as some kind of test.
I knew the instant I passed the couple in the parked car that I’d found the first sinner I was appointed to kill. He had a girl in his arms and was kissing her in such a sickeningly passionate manner, the sight nearly made me ill.
Sins of the flesh are the evilest of all sins.
Neither paid any attention to me as I walked quietly by, being too preoccupied with each other. A few yards beyond I faded into the deep shadow of a large elm and simply waited.
After a time the couple got out of the car and went up the steps to a porch. It was too dark to see what either looked like, but I got an impression they were both young. Perhaps college students like myself.
Their figures merged on the porch, then separated and I heard a soft goodnight from the girl and a deeper-toned reply from the man. Then her front door opened and closed, and the man came briskly down the steps.
The gun was in my hand, steadied against the bole of the elm, and a great feeling of elation built within me. As he reached the sidewalk only ten feet from where I stood, I began to squeeze the trigger.
But something happened to distract me. The night was overcast, but just for a moment the clouds shifted enough to let bright moonlight shaft downward. And as the unexpected light struck the face of the man I was on the verge of killing, I recognized him.
He was George Haber, who sits in front of me in my class on criminal jurisprudence.
Of course the mere fact that I knew the man shouldn’t have changed my purpose. A sinner’s a sinner, regardless of name, and George Haber should have died. But recognizing him startled me enough to make me relax pressure on the trigger, and then it was too late. Haber was in his car, the motor was running and he was pulling away from the curb.
I wasn’t confident enough of my marksmanship to risk a shot at such a rapidly moving target.
But the voices assured me there would be future opportunity to kill George Haber.
Wednesday night: I’ve now managed to develop my mind-reading ability to the point where I know what Mary is thinking about almost constantly. The experience is a revelation.
I’ve always thought of Mary as a clean, fresh girl incapable of anything evil. But when she talks of our future marriage and how happy we’ll be, I’m shocked to discover part of her thoughts are on the wedding night. She actually looks forward with a kind of frightened but pleasurable anticipation to being in bed with me.
Thoughts of sex have never occupied my mind. I suppose subconsciously I knew men and women engaged in carnal acts after marriage, but it never actually occurred to me Mary and I would do such things after marriage. Not that I don’t know the facts of life. I simply hadn’t ever thought beyond the marriage ceremony.
I know it sounds ridiculous for a grown man to say such a thing, I now realize when I try to analyze my relationship with Mary, but I literally haven’t ever had a single sexual thought about her. I think my picture of married life must have been a vague notion that things would go on much as they had, with me taking Mary for rides, going to an occasional movie or dance, and occasionally indulging in a chaste kiss which was no more than a brief pressure of lips against lips.