Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination - Edogawa Rampo [50]
You might have inferred that I am now repentant for all the ghastly crimes I have committed. Well, that is definitely not the case. To tell the truth, I am not penitent at all. Far from it, for the fact of the matter is I have no conscience! So, instead of being racked with remorse, as apparently would any normal person, I simply became tired even of the bloody stimulus of murder. Again seeking some new diversion, I next took up the vice of opium-smoking. Gradually I became addicted to the drug, and today I can no longer do without a pipe at regular intervals.
So far, gentlemen, I have merely outlined the circumstances of my past—the murder of nearly a hundred people, all as yet undetected. I know, however, that the Supreme Judge who will pass sentence upon me for all my crimes is already demanding that I enter the portals of eternity, to roast in hellfire.
Now I shall relate the various events that made up my premeditated festival of crime. I do not doubt even for a moment that, when you have heard all the gruesome details, you will consider me a worthy member of your mystic society!
It all began about three years ago. In those days, as I have already told you, I was tired of every normal pastime and idled away my time with nothing whatever to do. In the spring of the year—as it was still very cold, it must have been about the end of February or the beginning of March—I had a strange experience one evening, the very incident that led me to take nearly one hundred lives.
I had been out late somewhere and, if I remember correctly, was a little tipsy. The time was about one in the morning. As I walked at a leisurely pace toward home, I suddenly came upon a man who seemed to be in a state of great confusion. I was startled when we almost collided, but he seemed to be even more frightened, for he stopped in his tracks, trembling. After a moment he peered into my face in the dim light of a street lamp and, to my great surprise, suddenly spoke.
"Does any doctor live hereabouts?" he asked.
"Yes," I immediately replied and asked what had happened.
The man hastily explained that he was a chauffeur and that he had accidentally run down and injured an old man who appeared to be a vagrant, some distance down the road. When he pointed out where the accident had occurred, I realized that it was in the very neighborhood of my house.
"Go to the left for a couple of blocks," I directed, "and you will find a house with a red lamp on the left-hand side. That's the office of Dr. Matsui. You'd better go there."
A few moments later I saw the chauffeur carrying the badly injured man to the house I had indicated. For some reason I kept watching until their dim figures vanished into the darkness. As I thought it inadvisable to interfere in such an affair, I returned to my bachelor quarters and promptly sank into the bed which had been prepared by my old housekeeper. Soon the alcohol in my system had me deep in sleep.
If, with the coming of sleep, I had forgotten all about that accident, it would have been the end of the affair. When I woke up the next morning, however, I remembered every detail of the previous night's episode. I began to wonder if the man who had been run down had succumbed to his injuries or had survived. Then suddenly something came to my mind with a jolt. Due to some strange quirk of the mind, or possibly because of the wine I had drunk, I had made a serious error in the directions I had given the chauffeur.
I was amazed. However drunk I might have been, I had surely not been out of my mind. Then why had I instructed the driver of the car to carry the unconscious