Earl Peirce

“ There are six human heads buried in your cellar. There must be no more.”
“No more?” he laughed shrilly and threw up both his hands to indicate the count of ten. “No more, you say? There will be ten more before it stops. Ten more! That’s what the book says!”
“You want ten?” I demanded incredulously, struck numb by his callousness. “You want ten more to add to those six? Carse, Carse! They are not cabbages you are counting; they are human heads. Do you think I am a fiend to let this continue? No; it must end—it must end on the gallows.”
“He died on the gallows!” ”

“ Six crimes in six weeks! And I can only thank merciful God that it will end with only one more. Perhaps it is ended now. That German servant who loaned me the diary said it would be only six or seven."
"Do you think the police will believe all of this?" I demanded. "What you have told me has no sane explanation. It—it's demonism!"
Carse smiled pitiably. "There are more things in heaven and earth," he began; then he heaved his shoulders as if flinging off an attempt at levity. "The human mind is a strange organ, and no man can explain its mysteries. ”

“ Men and women moved furtively, airport officials and police examined every strange face with cold and scrutinizing suspicion, and even my taxi-driver, a small mousy man, kept his fear-laden dark eyes continually reverting to the mirror as he whirled me through the slight evening traffic. I was surprized, therefore, in view of this mutual distrust, to find that Jason Carse, a veteran criminalist, had discharged all of his servants and was living alone in his grim house behind a barricaded door. ”

“ Try to make sense, Carse. I am your friend; trust me.”
“I am talking of Emil Drukker—the man who taught me how to do these things. He is responsible for them, not I. He is the one to hang for them. Dig him out of his grave and hang him again!”
444 I pushed him gently into a chair, for his collapse seemed imminent. Spittle was running from his mouth, and his retching continued in spasms that shook him to his teeth.
“I am your friend,” I told him again. “I want to help you, but you must get control of yourself. Why do you say you are not responsible? What drove you to commit these crimes?” ”

“ I must turn you over to the police."
Carse slapped me viciously, then stumbled back against the table. His face was a mask of suffused blood, his eyes wild with desperation.
"Damn you!" he cried savagely. "You are no friend; you're a cheat, a betrayer!"
Suddenly his groping fingers touched the butcher knife and he drew himself taut. His fingers wound around the hilt like slowly moving worms. For a moment there was scarcely a breath between us; then he lifted his arm and brought the knife slowly out before him. I watched, horror-stricken, unable to lift my feet from the floor. ”

“ How many men besides Jason Carse have spent sleepless nights over the diary of Emil Drukker?
The newspapers will answer that question each time they are opened; in Paris the police discover a headless body lying along the wharves, and the murderer is still unknown; in Berlin a college professor kills himself upon the discovery of a human head lying near his bed with his own hunting-knife stuck to the hilt into its brain; in Stockholm the police discover the bodies of two women lying in an empty house—their heads have not yet been found ”

“ I thought myself to be in the presence of a tremendous evil.
In the morning Carse was up early, and moved back and forth in the corridor with strange industry. He was crying, for his sobs came disturbingly to my ears, and once I heard him descend into the cellar and there was a faint digging sound as he performed some outlandish task. Then I heard him in the hallway and on the stairs. ”

“ The horrible truth had been dawning upon me for hours, and when I came face to face with him in the kitchen at the head of the cellar stairs I looked squarely into his eyes with the full realization that Jason Carse was the Head-hunter. ”

“ Carse’s death put a definite end to the head-hunting crimes in this city, and for the first time in over six weeks the metropolitan area has been able to breathe freely. I have lost a faithful and sincere friend; but I lost him, not on the gallows, but three months ago when he first discovered the diary of Emil Drukker. ”

“ I left for the city by plane on the evening of the discovery of the fifth victim, and during the trans-country flight I read Carse's own statement in the Metropolitan Gazette citing the crime as an atavistic expression of animalism. The fact that two of the five victims had been men, according to Carse's theory, belied the popular suspicion that the criminal was a homicidal sadist. Carse expressed the belief that the murderer was in the grip of some inherent savagery, and that the ghastly murders would continue until he wore himself out by the sheer expenditure of energy. ”

“ I am in the power of that book. I am the puppet of a horror that has outlived all natural deaths.”
A feeling of relief passed over me as I saw him settle into a state of rational observation. I hoped it would last, for not three yards away from him, lying on top of the kitchen table, was a seven-inch butcher knife. My only hope was to preserve his state by permitting him to tell his story, and in that way to persuade him to accept the inevitable consequences of his crimes. I drew up a chair beside his own, yet kept myself alert to ward off any lunge he might make for the knife. ”

“ The reader may recall the international effects of the infamous "Ripper" crimes which terrified London a few decades ago and he will understand how rapidly the Head-hunter's fame spread through crime-conscious America. Both murders were made particularly mysterious because of the disappearance of the victims' heads. I knew the damaging influence which these doings would produce upon Carse, for he had always been interested in decapitations, and his thesis at the University of Graz had been based upon the mad career of Emil Drukker, the Head-hunter of Cologne. ”

“ The room was smeared with blood from one end to the other, and there was a gore-caked knife resting beside the head, and a crimson towel lay across my bedpost. But there wasn’t a drop of blood on my hands!
“I couldn’t even attempt to explain it. I only knew that a woman had been murdered and that her severed head was in my bedroom. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t force myself into the belief that I was the murderer, and I stood stunned with the weird horror of knowing that Emil Drukker’s Number One had been re-enacted and that I had played his own role. Where could I turn? ”

“ An ugly smirk went across his face and he cast a glance at the cellar door.
“You always were too smart for your own good,” he said softly. “Knowledge can be dangerous.”
“How did you think you could get away with it?” I screamed, only too well aware of his implication. “My God, Carse! Six human heads!” ”

“ He swallowed a mass of incoherent words in an effort to master himself; then his hand pressed over mine.
“You are right; I must get control of myself,” he said. “I have done some horrible things which can never be forgiven, but I swear to you that I have not done them intentionally. ”

“ Jason Carse was not the first man to pay with his life for crimes such as these, nor is he the last. It is well to beware of sickish-smelling trunks that are left in deserted houses, and I caution the reader against stepping on misshapen bundles of clothing which he may rind half hidden in a clump of bushes.
For the diary of Emil Drukker is missing from the drawer where I left it, and I have been told that a strange, Germanic-looking man was seen prowling about the house just before its disappearance. ”

“ One is naturally prejudiced against Carse, for even I myself, his lifelong acquaintance, was struck with repugnance when I first realized the nature of his activities, but his death on the gallows should foreclose biased reflection and permit the student to regard his case in a purely empirical light. ”

“ Society demanded a death in return for a death, and Jason Carse was nailed to his coffin at the first moment of his arrest. Had he been spared the gallows by the court, he would not have been spared the gallows by the mobs that milled about the detention prison ”

“ A further significant fact, which the court ignored as irrelevant, was the ghastly identity of Carse’s supposed crimes and those confessed by Emil Drukker. It is impossible that this duality of murders could be brought about by mere coincidence, for the similarity of detail was carried too far. This fact alone presupposes the statement that there was a horrible and unnatural bondage between Emil Drukker and Jason Carse—the bondage of the diary! ”

“ It is a curious fact that the psychiatrists who examined Carse, several of them his former pupils, could not find him unbalanced enough to be irresponsible for his crimes. Those long and tiring vigils in the mental clinic will haunt me for life ”

“ The Homicidal Diary By EARL PEIRCE, JR.
What strange compulsion drove an ordinarily gentle and cultured man, on one
night of each week, to roam the city streets and
commit a ghastly crime?
I am writing this account of my friend Jason Carse in the interests of both justice and psychiatry, and perhaps of demonology as well. There is no greater proof of what I relate than the sequence of murders which so recently shocked this city, the newspaper items regarding the crimes, and especially the official report of the alienists who examined Carse during his trial. ”

“ He worked late at night on the murder cases, referring constantly to autopsy protocols and police memoranda, and more than once I saw him reading his Bible. On several occasions he visited the county morgue and examined the remains of the Head-hunter's victims, and following each such visit he lapsed into a state of mental and physical agitation that exhausted him within a few hours. ”

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