Jason, Son of Jason

It was midnight when the night superintendent called and told me No. 27

had died. I rose. The thing was no surprise. I had known it was going to

happen. No. 27 had told me so himself. Nonetheless, I went to his room.

Routine in the mental hospital had nothing to do with that strange secret

held in common between myself and the man--that strange state of affairs

which had enabled him to predict his own death so accurately.

And yet as I mounted the stairs to the room where his body now lay as a

worn-out husk I had none of the feeling which so customarily assails the

average mortal in such an hour. To me it was not as though he had died.

The body was a husk indeed--an emaciated, worn-out thing which, because

of our mutual secret, I knew had been kept alive by the sheer force of

the spiritual tenant, now removed.

I stood looking down upon it, with very much the same sensations one

might have in viewing the tool once plied by the hand of a friend. It was

nothing more than that really. Jason Croft had used it while he had need

of its manipulation, and when his need was accomplished he had simply

laid it down.

Croft was a physician, even as am I. He was a scientific man. In addition

he was a student of the occult--the science of the mind, the spirit, and

its control of the physical forces of life.

He was an Earth-born man. The home in which I first met him contained the

greatest private collection of works on the subject I have ever seen. In

dying he left them to me--I have them all about me.

Many men have mastered the astral control on the Earthly plane. Croft had

carried it to an ultimate degree. He shook off the envelope of the Earth

atmosphere, led thereto, as he frankly confessed in our conversations, by

the attraction of a feminine spirit, though he did not know it at the

time, and recognized it only when he first viewed Naia--Princess of

Tamarizia--on Palos, planet of a distant star.