Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 3 (1926-09).djvu/55

there was an English word, but we couldn't make out the drift of it. And the agony of her struggles—and her dumb—she was not our child———"

He broke down and hid his face in his hands. Meanwhile the morphine had begun to take effect; the girl struggled no longer, bat sat watching us, apathetical and hopeless. The vicious stamp had gone from the face, leaving the brutish, melancholy Slav.

"Yes, you can picture the father's suffering," said the doctor. "The murderer awakes—he wants to come back. He is lonely and cold; he sees a home, family life, things which awaken a dumb longing within his stunted soul. And so this little girl's body is made the scene of this tremendous drama. It is this struggle of the disembodied to express themselves in terms of the flesh that is the cause of almost all our mental diseases."

Dr. Brodsky wheeled over toward the child suddenly. From his pocket he took a burnished mirror of bronze, hardly larger than a quarter-dollar. "Look at this!" he commanded.

The child turned her eyes upon it silently.

"Look!" Brodsky repeated, and with his finger he gave the mirror a twist that set it spinning upon a tiny wire which produced a rapid, circulatory movement. It spun like a thread of light. The child's eyes became immovable. Dr. Brodsky leaned forward and placed a finger upon each eyelid, closing them. The girl sat bolt upright, but perfectly motionless. I had seen this procedure often in the mental ward; it was the hynotic sleep that Brodsky had induced.

I knew that he had put the dominant personality to sleep in order to call up whatever lay beneath that external stratum of consciousness.

"You are asleep," said Brodsky, softly. "You will sleep more deeply. Now you are gone. You are quite gone. Now speak. Open your eyes. You—Radovitch!"

As a ripple passes over the face of a still pool, changing its entire aspect, so the light came back to the expressionless features. Once again it was Radovitch; but all the cunning, the hate, the vileness had been purged away. It was the soul of Radovitch, stripped of the emotions, the passions that had defiled it.

"Who art thou?" asked Brodsky, gently, using the familiar Russian termination.

The eyes opened wider in fear; the lips trembled.

"Thou art with friends," said the doctor, compassionately. "Have no fear. So—thou art Radovitch?"

"Yes, I am Radovitch," said the lips, mechanically.

"Why didst thou come here?" continued the doctor.

"Ah, don't drive me away," pleaded the man's voice from the child's body. "It is all dark outside. There is nobody—nobody. It is all dark and cold. Here it is warm. And she was my friend."

"What did they do to thee, to bring thee to this extremity?" asked Brodsky, while the jailer and I, awed into silence, could only sit, staring and listening. "What did they do to thee?"

"I do not know."

"Dost thou not know that thou art dead?"

A spasm of terror convulsed the lips and the cheek muscles. "Dead?" cried the voice. "No; for then I should be in hell."

"You are in all the hell that you are likely to get, my friend," muttered the doctor. "What dost thou remember?"

"I remember—I remember—they told me I was to die," the voice muttered, ramblingly. "They bound my arms tightly so that they pained me, and they placed me in a strange