I noted a dirty sign. “Robey Street,” it read. I noted a number. I was in the 2300 block.
“2318 Robey Street."
The address written on the slip of paper in my uncle's dresser.
It was a ramshackle cottage, but neater than its neighbors. I turned off back of the house, where the muddy alley was and the dim shapes of packing cases.
It was at this time I began to realize I wasn't dreaming.
There was a light in the back of the house. The door opened and a little girl stepped out, carrying a small tin pail with a cover on it. She wore a short dress and her legs were thin and her hair was straight and smoky yellow. She turned back for a moment in the doorway and I heard a coarse female voice say, “Now mind you, get over there fast. Your Pa likes to have his food hot. And don't stop on the way and don't let nobody see you.” I could hear again.
The little girl nodded meekly and started toward the dark alley. Then I saw the other figure, the one crouching in the shadows at a spot that she must pass. At first I saw only a dark form. Then I came nearer. I saw the face.
It was my own face.
I hope to heaven no one ever sees me as I looked then. The indolent mouth twisted up into something between a grin and a snarl. Nostrils twitching. The nondescript eyes bulging from their sockets so that the white showed all around the pupils. More animal than human.
The little girl was coming nearer. Waves of blackness seemed to oppose me, driving me back, but with one last despairing effort I threw myself at the distorted face I recognized as my own. There was one supreme moment of pain and terror, and then I realized I was looking down at the little girl and she was looking up at me. She was saying, “My, but you scared me. I didn't know who you were at first."
I was in my own body and I knew I wasn't dreaming. Ill-fitting clothes cramped my waist and shoulders, pulled at my wrists. I looked down at the lead-weighted night stick I held in my hand. I reached up and felt for the stiff visored cap on my head, then downward, where in the dim light I could see that I was wearing the dark blue uniform of a policeman.
I do not know what my reaction would have been, if I hadn't realized that the little girl was still staring up at me, puzzled, half-smiling, but frightened. I forced my lips to smile. I said, “It's all right, little girl. I'm sorry I scared you. Where does your pa work? I'll see that you get there safely and I'll bring you home again."
And I did that.
Mercifully, my emotions were exhausted, paralyzed, for the next few hours. By questioning the little girl cautiously, I found out the way to the section of the city in which my uncle's rooming house was situated. Afterwards I managed to return there undetected and strip off those hateful clothes, hang them in the closet from which I had taken them.
Next morning I went to the police. I told them nothing of my dreams, my uncanny experience. I only said that the queer assortment of objects in the bottom dresser drawer, in conjunction with the things mentioned in the clippings had awakened certain ghastly suspicions in my mind. They were unwilling to believe, and obviously skeptical, but consented to a routine investigation, which had startling and conclusive results. Most of the objects in the bottom drawer, the silver-headed cane and the rest, were identified as having been in the personal possession of the victims of the “Phantom Slayer,” and as having disappeared at the time of the murders. For example, the cane and briefcase had been carried by an old man found dead under a viaduct near the river; the toy horse had belonged to a boy murdered in an empty lot; the tortoise-shell comb was similar to one missing from the battered head of a woman whose dead body was found in a residential district; the green ribbon had come from another battered head. A close examination of my uncle's assignments and beats completed the damning evidence by showing that in almost every case he had been patrolling or stationed near the scene of the murder.
For many reasons this horrible discovery was not made public in its entirety. There had been at least eight murders, all told. They had begun while my uncle was still on the force, and continued after his retirement.
But apparently he had always worn his uniform to lull his victim's suspicions. The collection of newspaper clippings was attributed to his vanity. The incriminating objects he had kept by him were explained as “symbols” of his crimes—ghastly mementoes. “Fetishes” one man called them.
There is no need to describe the degree to which my nerves were shaken by this confirmation of my dreams and my fearful sleep-walking experience. Most of all I was terrified by the notion that some murderous taint in the blood of our family had been communicated to me as well as my uncle. I was only slightly relieved when the passing weeks brought no further horrors.
A considerable time afterwards I related the whole matter, in strict confidence, to a doctor whom I trust. He did not question my sanity, as I feared he might. He took my story at face value. But he attributed it to the workings of my unconscious mind. He said that, during my perusal of the clippings, my unconscious mind had realized that my uncle was a murderer, but that my conscious mind had refused to accept the idea. This resulted in a kind of mental turmoil, magnified by my distraught and highly suggestible state. The “will to murder” in my own mind was wakened without my knowing it. The slip of paper with the address written on it somehow focused that force. In my sleep I had got up, dressed myself in my uncle's uniform and walked to the address. While I was sleep-walking my mind imagined it was on all sorts of wild journeys through space and into the past.
The doctor has told me of some very remarkable actions performed by other sleep-walkers. And, as he says, I have no way of proving my uncle was really planning to commit that last murder.
I hope his explanation is correct.
LIE STILL, SNOW WHITE
I tiptoed into Vivian's bedroom and softly closed the door behind me. She was lying outside the covers, wrapped in a white silk kimono. She had a little sleeping mask on—a narrow black oval without eye holes, but it had sequin eyes stitched on it with black velvet pupils staring at the ceiling.
Her legs were stretched out straight and close together, her arms were at her side, her head was thrown back on a little silk pillow, emphasizing her cameo-perfect profile and the long swan-line of her throat.
The moon was chilly and the blue lights were all on, making the white coverlet and the kimono and Vivian's flesh one pale blue marble. It would only have taken a sleeping wolfhound at her feet, his back against their soles, to have perfected the illusion of a medieval tomb statue.
“Lie still, my darling,” I called gently on a sudden impulse. “I'll be with you in a moment. Don't say a word. You're so beautiful just as you are."
I am a man of very odd impulses. But following all faint cues from the unknown is the only way I know of wresting a little beauty from life. And beauty is everything.
I have a great instinct for beauty. I can see subtle possibilities for it where the average intelligent person beholds a blank. For instance, I don't think I'd have gotten the inspiration for this midnight rendezvous if it hadn't been for Vivian's strange penchant for blue-tinted electric light bulbs—a penchant which she told me annoyed her female friends quite a bit. Vivian has always been most imaginative, but sly with it.