Sinking back into my chair, I propped my elbows on the tabletop and buried my face in my hands. At length—having regained a measure of control over my turbulent emotions—I looked up at Crockett and said: “I can well appreciate the disconcerting effects of my extraordinary confession, Colonel Crockett. Be assured, however, that your own sense of dismay—no matter how intense, unmitigated, or proƒound—cannot possibly exceed my own.”

My lips feeling dry to the point of desiccation, I took a moment to moisten them with the tip of my tongue before inquiring: “Are you familiar with the term doppelgänger, Colonel?”

“I don’t reckon I am.”

“It is a German word, meaning, in effect, a walking—or living—double.”

“I don’t take much stock in German notions,” came the frontiersman’s reply. “Nor them of any other furriners, neither.”

“Be that as it may,” I said, “the term in question refers to a phenomenon whose reality, however seemingly ƒantastic, is acknowledged by societies throughout the world. Indeed, I have recently been perusing a most fascinating volume which treats of the subject as it pertains to the beliefs of the native inhabitants of Melanesia.”

“I ain’t entirely following your line of thinking, Poe.”

I paused to consider how best to approach the subject so as to render it accessible to the frontiersman’s comprehension. “You will grant,” I said at last, “that there are two distinct conditions of mental existence. On the one hand are those faculties belonging to the realm of lucid reason. On the other are those features that partake of the purely irrational. This latter class comprises all those impulses, urges, desires, and phantasies that civilization decries as violent, immoral, and even insane. It must not be supposed, however, that—as abhorrent as they appear to our more refined and enlightened conceptions—these dark and lawless characteristics are peculiar only to those who lead lives of active criminality. On the contrary, a resolute and impartial process of self-scrutiny unmistakably reveals that they exist as a living, if deeply hidden, portion of every human being, residing in the nethermost recesses of even the most loving and law-abiding soul.”

“Drat it all, Poe,” interjected Crockett at this juncture. “I’m damned if I got the smallest notion of what you’re saying.”

Regarding the frontiersman with a firm—an unƒinching—gaze, I drew a deep breath and declared: “I am speaking, Colonel Crockett, of the ancient and ubiquitous belief that each of us possesses an evil alter ego: a dark, daemonic spirit that, under certain exceptional conditions, may spring to life and enact—entirely without the complicity of our conscious minds—our most secret dreams and wishes!”