Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination - Edogawa Rampo [45]
Before I knew it, my long-awaited victim had arrived just in front of the shrubbery in which I was concealed, and I realized with a start that my time had come. With amazing agility, I suddenly sprang out and wound the rope which I had prepared around my brother's neck—and then I slowly proceeded to strangle him.
Desperately he struggled, twisting and squirming, and frequently he tried to look back to see who his assailant was. I in turn tried with all my might to keep him from doing so. But his discolored face, as though it was being worked by a very strong spring, slowly turned back toward me, inch by inch. Finally, his red, swollen face—it was just the same as mine—turned back and came into range, and from the corners of his mad, staring eyes, he beheld my face. As soon as he recognized me, he shuddered, as if from shock. Never will I be able to forget his face at that moment. It was a death mask, a horrible countenance which cried out for vengeance!
Soon, however, he ceased to struggle. Then he turned limp and fell to the ground. By this time I was exhausted, and after I dropped him, I rubbed my hands vigorously because they were rigid and paralyzed from the strain. Then, my knees still knocking together, I rolled his dead body like a log to the well opening and pushed it in headfirst. Next, I picked up a board and used it to scoop enough of the loose dirt into the well to cover the corpse.
Had there been a witness to the scene, he would certainly have thought it nothing but a bad nightmare. Just imagine! —he would have seen one man strangling another wearing the same clothes, possessing the same figure and even the same face.
Well, thus it was that I committed the great crime of killing my own brother. It was the same story as that of Cain and his brother Abel, only in our case the brothers looked exactly alike, for did we not share identical bodies?
Does it surprise you that any one could perpetrate such a cold-blooded crime? I do not wonder. But as for me, the very reason for my wanting to kill him was that we were two persons in one. And how I hated my other half! I wonder whether you've ever had such a feeling of uncontrollable hatred, far more severe than that which you could feel against any person not closely related to you. And in my particular case it was still more so because we were twins and I was insane with jealousy.
To continue with my story, after I covered the body with enough earth, I still lingered on, absorbed in contemplation. After about half an hour I suddenly noticed with alarm that the gardeners were coming, led by a maid, and I again concealed myself. Immediately the devil in me again whispered that this was the cue for my second entrance on the stage for a brutally deceptive play—a performance starring a maniac!
Impersonating my brother, I calmly came out of hiding and turned my face toward them a little nervously.
"Well, well," I said as naturally as possible, "so you've come early. I've helped you with your work a little, ha-ha. I hope you can fill up the well by nightfall. Well, you'd better get started!"
With these words, I slowly walked away with the familiar gait of my dead brother and went into the house.
After that everything went like clockwork. I kept to the study all that day, my nose buried in my brother's diary and account books, for although I had studied everything else before announcing that I was going to Korea, I had been unable to get at these two items. In the evening I sat at the dining table with my "wife"—the woman who had been my brother's wife and who now was mine—chatting pleasantly in the same way my brother had done, conscious that she was utterly unaware of the