CHAPTER IX.

One thing of great value I learned in the long, pain-weary hours of

waking—namely, the mastery of the body by the mind. I learned to suffer

passively, as, undoubtedly, all men have learned who have passed

through the post-graduate courses of strait-jacketing. Oh, it is no

easy trick to keep the brain in such serene repose that it is quite

oblivious to the throbbing, exquisite complaint of some tortured nerve.

And it was this very mastery of the flesh by the spirit which I so

acquired that enabled me easily to practise the secret Ed Morrell told

to me.

“Think it is curtains?” Ed Morrell rapped to me one night.

I had just been released from one hundred hours, and I was weaker than

I had ever been before. So weak was I that though my whole body was one

mass of bruise and misery, nevertheless I scarcely was aware that I had

a body.

“It looks like curtains,” I rapped back. “They will get me if they keep

it up much longer.”

“Don’t let them,” he advised. “There is a way. I learned it myself,

down in the dungeons, when Massie and I got ours good and plenty. I

pulled through. But Massie croaked. If I hadn’t learned the trick, I’d

have croaked along with him. You’ve got to be pretty weak first, before

you try it. If you try it when you are strong, you make a failure of

it, and then that queers you for ever after. I made the mistake of

telling Jake the trick when he was strong. Of course, he could not pull

it off, and in the times since when he did need it, it was too late,

for his first failure had queered it. He won’t even believe it now. He

thinks I am kidding him. Ain’t that right, Jake?”

And from cell thirteen Jake rapped back, “Don’t swallow it, Darrell.

It’s a sure fairy story.”

“Go on and tell me,” I rapped to Morrell.

“That is why I waited for you to get real weak,” he continued. “Now you

need it, and I am going to tell you. It’s up to you. If you have got

the will you can do it. I’ve done it three times, and I know.”

“Well, what is it?” I rapped eagerly.

“The trick is to die in the jacket, to will yourself to die. I know you

don’t get me yet, but wait. You know how you get numb in the jacket—how

your arm or your leg goes to sleep. Now you can’t help that, but you

can take it for the idea and improve on it. Don’t wait for your legs or

anything to go to sleep. You lie on your back as comfortable as you can

get, and you begin to use your will.

“And this is the idea you must think to yourself, and that you must

believe all the time you’re thinking it. If you don’t believe, then

there’s nothing to it. The thing you must think and believe is that

your body is one thing and your spirit is another thing. You are you,

and your body is something else that don’t amount to shucks. Your body

don’t count. You’re the boss. You don’t need any body. And thinking and

believing all this you proceed to prove it by using your will. You make

your body die.

“You begin with the toes, one at a time. You make your toes die. You

will them to die. And if you’ve got the belief and the will your toes

will die. That is the big job—to start the dying. Once you’ve got the

first toe dead, the rest is easy, for you don’t have to do any more

believing. You know. Then you put all your will into making the rest of

the body die. I tell you, Darrell, I know. I’ve done it three times.

“Once you get the dying started, it goes right along. And the funny

thing is that you are all there all the time. Because your toes are

dead don’t make you in the least bit dead. By-and-by your legs are dead

to the knees, and then to the thighs, and you are just the same as you

always were. It is your body that is dropping out of the game a chunk

at a time. And you are just you, the same you were before you began.”

“And then what happens?” I queried.

“Well, when your body is all dead, and you are all there yet, you just

skin out and leave your body. And when you leave your body you leave

the cell. Stone walls and iron doors are to hold bodies in. They can’t

hold the spirit in. You see, you have proved it. You are spirit outside

of your body. You can look at your body from outside of it. I tell you

I know because I have done it three times—looked at my body lying there

with me outside of it.”

“Ha! ha! ha!” Jake Oppenheimer rapped his laughter thirteen cells away.

“You see, that’s Jake’s trouble,” Morrell went on. “He can’t believe.

That one time he tried it he was too strong and failed. And now he

thinks I am kidding.”

“When you die you are dead, and dead men stay dead,” Oppenheimer

retorted.

“I tell you I’ve been dead three times,” Morrell argued.

“And lived to tell us about it,” Oppenheimer jeered.

“But don’t forget one thing, Darrell,” Morrell rapped to me. “The thing

is ticklish. You have a feeling all the time that you are taking

liberties. I can’t explain it, but I always had a feeling if I was away

when they came and let my body out of the jacket that I couldn’t get

back into my body again. I mean that my body would be dead for keeps.

And I didn’t want it to be dead. I didn’t want to give Captain Jamie

and the rest that satisfaction. But I tell you, Darrell, if you can

turn the trick you can laugh at the Warden. Once you make your body die

that way it don’t matter whether they keep you in the jacket a month on

end. You don’t suffer none, and your body don’t suffer. You know there

are cases of people who have slept a whole year at a time. That’s the

way it will be with your body. It just stays there in the jacket, not

hurting or anything, just waiting for you to come back.

“You try it. I am giving you the straight steer.”

“And if he don’t come back?” Oppenheimer, asked.

“Then the laugh will be on him, I guess, Jake,” Morrell answered.

“Unless, maybe, it will be on us for sticking round this old dump when

we could get away that easy.”

And here the conversation ended, for Pie-Face Jones, waking crustily

from stolen slumber, threatened Morrell and Oppenheimer with a report

next morning that would mean the jacket for them. Me he did not

threaten, for he knew I was doomed for the jacket anyway.

I lay long there in the silence, forgetting the misery of my body while

I considered this proposition Morrell had advanced. Already, as I have

explained, by mechanical self-hypnosis I had sought to penetrate back

through time to my previous selves. That I had partly succeeded I knew;

but all that I had experienced was a fluttering of apparitions that

merged erratically and were without continuity.

But Morrell’s method was so patently the reverse of my method of

self-hypnosis that I was fascinated. By my method, my consciousness

went first of all. By his method, consciousness persisted last of all,

and, when the body was quite gone, passed into stages so sublimated

that it left the body, left the prison of San Quentin, and journeyed

afar, and was still consciousness.

It was worth a trial, anyway, I concluded. And, despite the sceptical

attitude of the scientist that was mine, I believed. I had no doubt I

could do what Morrell said he had done three times. Perhaps this faith

that so easily possessed me was due to my extreme debility. Perhaps I

was not strong enough to be sceptical. This was the hypothesis already

suggested by Morrell. It was a conclusion of pure empiricism, and I,

too, as you shall see, demonstrated it empirically.