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III - THE FOOL

I am certain that you understand the dilemma I was in. Not only had I acquired a book of such exquisite rarity that its mere existence was widely considered hypothetical - an illusionary work thought up by dreamers and fantasts, and yet it rested in my very study. Of it's authenticity there could be no doubt, for I had read it and had experienced a glimpse of its potential myself. Yet its contents were deeply disturbing: reading and repeating the mystical mantras, written by a mad kisanti a millennium ago, had awoken a dormant power within me.

R'kasha sat at his beloved piano, absentmindedly fingering a single key. He was visibly shaken by the brief event that had transpired only moments ago, and I wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and poured him a copious drink of absinthe, laced with opium from my private stock to calm the shaken feline.

To me, the experience of leaving my body and possessing that of R'kasha had been accompanied by a profound feeling of exaltation and I had revelled in my newfound potential and skill sets. But to my dearest friend, the terror had been as equally stark as the ecstasy that I had felt.

"Torn!", he said quietly. "I was torn from my body. Like a chicken from its shell or an eye from its orbit"

"-and I was lost. My soul was without a home and if I had not loved you so, I wouldn't have known where to go" he now cried.

The secrets within the _Possessicon Viventium_had unlocked an innate power in me: the ability to possess and control the body of another being, even that of a different species, and I was curious, nay obsessing with testing the limits of its application.

R'kasha was adamant about returning the Possessicon to its glass-cage at the earliest opportunity, and I knew that my time for savouring the book was limited. Maybe that is why I administered a minute dosage of opium along with the absinthe; I needed R'kasha to rest long enough to allow me to finish the read, and I watched him with some impatience, until he nodded into a peaceful slumber. Then, ravenous for insight I devoured the contents of the rare book, but sadly, most of the writing in the latter half was incoherent and made little sense, for the author was clearly in the firm embrace of madness.

Much to my dismay, R'kasha awoke only three hours later, still in a stupor from the dram yet highly agitated. I quietly put down the book and pretended to occupy myself with stoking the fireplace as to not upset him. No plea or reason could change his resolve and he went straight for the book and hid it in the depths of his cloak, before disappearing into the night with nary a word.

I did not wish to cause my dear friend any further grief, and thus I decided to continue my experimentation in secrecy. The next morning I made a purchase of several species of farm animals from the Portobello farm, including one pig, one goat and assorted poultry. I led the animals to a secluded place south of the farm and tethered them to a stout poplar. Here I sad down and began to chant the mantras from the Possessicon.

The awkwardness of sitting in public, mumbling mantras to a goat was of some distraction to my efforts, and it took me a while to rekindle the sensation that I had felt two nights ago.

After many failed attempts I finally felt my mind loosening its grasp, and I connected with the goat. The first sense to suggest that a change had taken place, was that of my sight. My field of vision collapsed in height while expanding in breath, and there were qualities to the vision that were new and foreign to me -an added dimension to every object that expanded on it's description. I now believe that I experienced colour vision for the first time on that day, but my brain did not know the names of these colours, nor did the goat for it's mind was lacklustre and primitive.

Moving around was unproblematic; I could draw freely upon the motor skills of the goat, and I kicked and jumped, much to the confusion of the other animals. Only the tail I could not control tough I could feel it wagging.

My own body remained dormant. I watched it sitting upright the way I had left, eyes half closed and staring into infinity. I wondered whether the soul of the goat had taken refuge in my own shell, which did raise some concern, but there was no movement in my body and I decided that it was currently vacant.

After a while I became aware of a dull ache in my mind that manifested itself as a sharp throbbing between my physical goat's eyes. Yet, I was unable to distinguish whether the pain was in the goat or in my own mind. The sensation grew increasingly uncomfortable and I decided to return to my own body. I thus chanted the mantra and this time it was easy for me to steer my soul back to the beacon of my sedentary body. I blinked twice, and once again I saw the world around me with my own eyes.

I rose to examine the goat, which had remained calm during the transfer, and I was disturbed to discover that the spirit of the goat had not returned. The creature was as lifeless and vacant as my own body had been. The goat showed a pulse and a steady heartbeat and it breathed slowly as if asleep, yet it seemed devoid of life, as if its soul had been carved out to leave the husk entirely hollow.

The headache I felt while possessing the goat had evaporated, but I was exhausted -much more than the previous night, and I decided not to experiment any further on the pig and the poultry, so I set them free and watched them walk calmly in the one direction that led back to the farm. Simple creatures like these had minds too poorly developed to be of any use save that of moving around. If I were to investigate my powers, It was necessary to test them on a creature of greater complexity.

I brought the paralysed goat with me, for if left to its own devices it would surely expire within days or be eaten by predators. I hailed a hansom cab to the university and left the goat in a nearby shed. Every morning I returned to check on its condition, and I watched how it grew thinner and began to show prominent signs of exhaustion with each passing day. I found it dead on the fourth morning, presumably from heart failure brought on by dehydration.

I visited the ZOO in search of a more suitable specimen. The oldest and largest of its kind, the London ZOO gave me ample choice of creatures, and I was free to probe the strength of the large predatory felines, the flight of the avians or the brute force of the elephants but yet I faltered and possessed none, for I knew that with every possession I also left behind a dying animal.

I was torn between scientific curiosity and ethical conduct, for I had little desire to leave any creature in a state of suffering for days, but I also knew that much crueler experimentation had already taken place, while the London ZOO was closed to the public and served only as a collection for scientific study -no more than twenty years ago.

My random ambulations eventually led me to the house that held the primates. From the minute gibbon to the mighty gorilla, the primates all showed clear similarities in appearance and behaviour, and I speculated whether Darwin could be correct in thinking that humans and apes were in fact related, rather than separately created through divine providence. If so, possessing one of the primates before me would grant me a unique opportunity to probe into the human mind.

I decided that the knowledge gained this way, clearly outweighed the sacrifice of a single creature, and I spent several hours seeking out the one specimen to possess. I evaluated their foraging patterns, signs of intelligence and their behaviour, and almost had my mind set on a lively, female chimpanzee when one of the curators arrived with a baboon in chains. When enquired about the restraints, the curator replied in that lovely east-end cockney, that

Ee's too aggressive to keep. I'm off to 'ave 'im put down.

Chaste_Tyche_, rest your rudder and behold the waves you create in the flow of fortune, for such luck is rare and I hastily produced a five pound note to convince the curator into giving me the beast, before the ripple broke. I spun some fanciful tale about taking the baboon off his hands for university studies, but I could have read him the daily fishing reports for all it mattered, for his sole attention was on the fiver and he scarcely heard as much as a single word. A few additional schillings secured the transportation of the beast to the university, and soon I found myself the owner of a temperamental baboon in a cage.

Back at the institute, I pulled a comfortable chair next to the cage, and began to focus my mind on the creature. This time I was free from external disturbances, and I connected with the baboon within minutes of chanting. My soul separated from my body like an etheral snakelike creature and floated gently through the air towards the caged animal.

Only, this time I faced resistance; the baboon's spirit was unwilling to leave and there was a brief struggle between our wills, yet the animal's determination was short-lived and the moment his thoughts returned to foraging the cage for bananas, I quickly pounced and fully possessed the animal. A terrible wail of rage and horror formed inside my mind as I expelled the baboon's spirit, and we both knew that it was destined to roam the aether endlessly.

I saw through the baboons eyes how I was trapped inside the cage. The fear so deeply rooted in the primitive brain took over and I shared in its desperation and rage. The empathy I felt with the animal triggered something within me: the fearsome badger-rage that we are taught how to keep under control as kitts, but now I felt it awaken deep inside me and intertwine with that of the baboon, and I lost all control.

I screamed ever so fiercely and shattered every object within reach with the mighty strength of the primate. I held on to the bars with hands and flexible feet and slammed my body against them with a force that I did not think possible for a creature so modest of stature. The bars began to twist and deform under the impact, and I am certain that I would have utterly destroyed the cage and every object in the laboratory, had I not been interrupted by a late working student. With a frightened scream, he stormed through the laboratory only to find my lifeless body still sitting in the chair. The disturbance broke my rage, and I made a hasty exit from the baboon and returned to my own body, and in that instant the baboon froze in mid-leap and crashed lifeless to the floor.

"Brain hemorrhage," I told the terrified student. "Baboons are especially prone to it." I offered him a one pound note and watched him regain his composure within seconds. It never ceases to impress me how much of an impact money can have on the human mind, and I could not help admiring the simple joy that the student expressed at the sight of the note. This was a student; one of the brighter specimens of the humankind, yet so easy to please through the administration of a simple reward. Bananas or money -both were easy means to reward and drive primates, and I was strengthened in my conviction that Darwin was entirely correct.

My experiment had been a success; I had possessed the body of a primate but I felt a brief pang of remorse, for I knew that I had certainly doomed the creature. I took comfort in the recent experiments carried out by Edison and Brown on the lethal effects of alternating electrical currents. These have claimed the lives of hundreds of dogs and horses within the past few months, and I knew then that no scientist; mustelid, feline or human would deem my experiment on the singular primate, unethical.

Would it then be considered unethical or atrocious to repeat the same experiment on a lower member of the human race? I pondered. Doing so, naturally carried a risk of leaving the human specimen hollow and helpless, a condition from where there seemed no return until dehydration released the body from its paralysis, four days later. But surely science had demanded greater sacrifices than this.

The soul of R'kasha had returned safely once I left his body, with a fright as the sole consequence - and nothing that couldn't be cured by a drink or two. Why the difference between him and the other test individuals I could not fathom. Perhaps the kisanti mind was simply stronger than that of the hapless baboon and found its way home with ease. The question remained; was the human mind as highly developed as that of mustelids and kisanti, or would a human test subject be reduced to an empty and withering husk, like the goat and baboon before him.

I nodded farewell to the young student, but by letting him go, I also knew that I only postponed the inevitable:

_ _

I would need to possess a human in the name of science, if I were to probe the boundaries of this power.