s 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 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