I laughed, a little nervously. "Tell me your story, if you like," I
said, "and let me decide just how black you are. But I haven't a great
deal of apprehension. We're all of us poor miserable sinners, as far as
that's concerned. I could tell you things about myself----"

Banaotovich was not listening to me at all. He had fallen suddenly into
a fit of black brooding. After a minute or two, he looked up and asked
sharply:

"Do you remember Wolansky?" Wolansky was the Greek professor who had threatened to vote against
Banaotovich when he was finishing his course at the Gymnasium. "Of course," said I. "And I remember well how he abused you that last
year. If there ever was a cantankerous old scoundrel, Wolansky was just
that identical individual!" "Maybe," he said absently; then after another pause:

"Do you remember that Wolansky died suddenly, just a little while before
the end of the school year?" I nodded. "I imagine that was a great piece of good luck for you," I
said. "Yes," said Banaotovich. "If he had lived, I should never have had my
diploma. As it was, I finished with honors. If Wolansky hadn't died when
he did, I'd have been ruined. Don't forget that--ruined!" I was puzzled at his insistence. "Yes, you would have been seriously
handicapped," I agreed. "Ruined is the word, perhaps." Banaotovich's face was purple with wine and some strange kind of
suffering. "Do you remember another thing?" he said thickly. "Do you
remember an old Hindoo who had a dark little hole away back of the shops
and the beer depot and the livery stables between the Old Market and the
river?" "The old fellow that had love charms and told fortunes and helped people
to health and wealth and happiness?" I said in a tone of slightly forced
cheerfulness. It was hard to be cheerful with those somber eyes boring
into you. "Yes, I remember him, all right. I wanted to go and see him
once, when I was about fifteen or sixteen, but Father told me that
meddling with the black art had sent more people to hell than it had
helped. And Father was so terribly earnest about it that he frightened
me. I never went. As a matter of fact it was only a passing fancy, and I
soon forgot all about him." "That Hindoo," said my old school-fellow thoughtfully, "knew things
about the secret forces in the universe that made him almost a god. And
he taught me things that the wisest philosopher in the world doesn't
suspect. Still, your father may have been right. I think it very likely
that what he taught me may send me to hell!" I shivered. I looked up nervously to make sure that the way was clear to
the door. I began to suspect that my friend Banaotovich, though he was
certainly not a criminal, might be a dangerous lunatic. My _vis-à-vis_ rubbed absently at a protuberance on his left side. I had
noticed it when he first came across the room to speak to me. A
deformity--I was sure it had not been there when he was a boy--or
perhaps a tumor or some such thing as that. "I kept very quiet about what the Hindoo taught me, because I knew most
people felt about such things much as you say your father did. And I
wanted to get on in the world. But I had an idea the Hindoo could help
me get on. Perhaps he _has_----"

And he stared gloomily at space. "Perhaps he has. And perhaps he hasn't." He brooded. Then he took up the thread of his story. "Wolansky nearly drove me to suicide. I read and studied and crammed,
day and night. I tried everything I could think of to overcome the man's
antagonism. I crawled in the dust before him like a whipped cur! Nothing
did any good. And when I saw he hated me and was determined to smash me,
I began to hate _him_, too. I came to hate him worse than I hated the
devils in hell. There was a time when I had to hold myself back with all
my strength to keep from sticking a knife into him or braining him with
a chair. But the Hindoo and I made some experiments with telepathy, and
I discovered that there are other ways of killing a man besides stabbing
him or giving him poison. "I learned how to make a man in front of me on the street turn around
and look at me. I learned how to make _you_ dream about me and come and
tell me the dream the next morning," (when he said that, I jumped, for I
remembered having done exactly that thing!). "I learned how to bring out
a bruise on Wolansky's face although he lived on the other side of town;
so that he went around asking people how he could have bumped his
forehead without knowing it. And at last I went to bed one night, set my
mind on Wolansky, and said over and over to myself a thousand times:
Die, you dog! You've _got_ to die! I _order_ you to die! "I said it over till I fell into a sort of trance. It wasn't sleep, I
tell you. You can't sleep when you are in a state like that. And in my
trance, I could feel another arm grow out of my side here and grow
longer and longer, and grow out through the window although the window
was closed, and grow out across the street and down the street and right
through the walls and across the river. "I had never known where Wolansky lived. But that night I knew. I had
never known the street or the house number. I had never been there in my
life. But I can tell you just exactly how his bedroom looked. The
wash-stand between the two windows, the work-table against the west
wall, the wardrobe, the old divan against the north wall. In a corner
the blue-gray tiled stove with some of the tile chipped off. And against
the south wall--the bed he lay in. I can tell you the color of the
blanket he pulled up over his face. It was a dirty brownish red. "But my hand seemed to go through the blanket and grip Wolansky by the
throat. First he sighed and turned his head to one side and tried to
wriggle free. Then he raised his arms and tried to get hold of something
that wasn't there. His sighs turned into groans, and the groans changed
to a death rattle. He threw his arms and legs wildly around in the air,
his body bent up like a bow. But my hand held his head down against the
pillow. At last he quit struggling and dropped down limp on the bed. Then the arm came crawling back in to my body, and I came out of the
trance--and went to sleep--or perhaps I fainted. "The next morning the director came into our classroom and told us
Wolansky had died in the night of some sort of attack. You remember
that, I am sure----"

When Banaotovich began to tell me this story, he had looked away from
me, and his eyes never met mine during the telling. He had begun with a
painful effort, but as he went on he grew more and more excited and more
and more inflamed with hatred of the malicious old Greek teacher, till
it almost seemed as if he had forgotten me and was living the astounding
experience through for himself alone. When he was through, his ecstasy
of indignation left him and he sat dejected and apprehensive, studying
me pitifully out of the corners of his deep gray eyes.