It was midnight when the night superintendent called and told me No. 27had died. I rose. The thing was no surprise. I had known it was goingto happen. No. 27 had told me so himself. None the less, I went tohis room. Routine in the mental hospital had nothing to do with thatstrange secret held in common between myself and the man—that strangestate of affairs which had enabled him to predicate his own death soaccurately.
And yet as I mounted the stairs to the room where his body now lay asa worn-out husk I had none of the feeling which so customarily assailsthe average mortal in such an hour. To me it was not as though he haddied. To my mind in those moments it was no more than the casting asideby the activating spirit of that instrument which for its own ends ithad used. The body then was a husk indeed—an emaciated, worn-out thingwhich, because of our mutual secret, I knew had been kept alive by thesheer force of the spiritual tenant, now removed.
I stood looking down upon it, with very much the same sensations onemight have in viewing the tool once plied by the hand of a friend. Itwas nothing more than that really. Jason Croft had used it while he hadneed of its manipulation, and when his need was accomplished he hadsimply 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 positivelyas I knew I was presently going to leave the room where his dead shelllay on a hospital bed and return to my own quarters—exactly where hehad gone.
The statement sounds a bit as though I were better qualified as aninmate than the superintendent of an institution for the care of theinsane. And I don't suppose it will help any for me to add that I hadseen Jason Croft die before—or that he had informed me on the formeroccasion, though in less specific fashion, of his approaching end.
That was after he had told me a most remarkable tale, which, inspite of its almost incredible nature, I found myself stronglyinclined to believe. It had concerned Croft's adventures on anotherplanet—Palos—one of the spheres in the universe of the Dog StarSirius, to which he had traveled first by astral projection, but onwhich he had found means to establish an actual existence in the flesh.
"Unbelievable—can a man be dead and yet live again?" you will say.Well, yes, but—Croft's earth body died just as he had told me itwould, and was buried, and time passed, and this patient No. 27 wascommitted to the institution of which I was the head; and when I wentto examine and inspect him, he asked me to dismiss the attendants, andthen he spoke to me in the voice of Jason Croft.
More than that, he took up the story of his adventures where he hadleft off in the previous instance, admitted freely that he had reversedthe experiment by which he had gained material existence on Palos, and,driven by the necessity of gaining knowledge for use in his new estate,had deliberately returned to earth. Unbelievable, you will say again.And again I answer:
"Yes—but wait."
Croft was a physician, even as am I. He was a scientific man. Inaddition he was a student of the occult—the science of the mind, thespirit, and its control of the physical forces of life.
He was an earth-born man. The home in which I first met him containedthe greatest private collection of works on the subject I have everseen. In dying he left them to me—I have them all about me. They aremine. According to his statements and his notations on margins, he hadgone so far in his investigations that he could project the astralconsciousness anywhere at will. And wh