A cryptic statement, that, and one which requires explanation; yet how can I say just what it was like, this metamorphosis? At first I was the same creature that had crouched behind the false stalagmite and slain the guard, then had leaped from the second-story window to flee into the night. This was a--I was about to say a wholly physical being. That isn't true. There was brainwork of a sort behind its actions, but an alien brainwork. Could you understand the thoughts of an ape? Could you describe them if you did? At any rate, I slid away from this physical being, imperceptibly, until Bill Cuff the prosaic pulpster seemed in the ascendant. Touching familiar things: my typewriter, sport shirts, cigarette lighter, a stack of manuscript--appeared to bring me back to what had all my life been normality. Yet this creates the portrait of a sort of Jekyll-Hyde personality, an extreme example of schizophrenia. I would not have you believe this for a moment. I was not two souls warring in a single body, nor a lunatic of any sort. No. I was not two people. I was a sleeper who had awakened in a manner not explained, not understood, but acceptable at once as quite natural. I found myself in a body which I had already been occupying for twenty-eight years and two months and seven days. There was no other personality in this body with me. The body was mine. The mind therein, fully developed along its own lines, was my mind. The body and mind were mine, but the _I_--the older _I_--which had wakened was of somewhat different stuff. It had taken the body and mind (perhaps while I slept on the marble bench, perhaps during the brief argument with the guard), merging with them and dominating them. Yet the dual brain, the single body with new proclivities, were one, were all Bill Cuff. They differed but they were one. I have said that before this night I had never even struck anyone. Yet there had always been the possibility that I might; might strike and slay, go berserk as I had now done. I had written many tales of brutal violence. Without my knowledge, there had been the seeds of savagery within me. They had flowered. I looked in the mirror. I saw a well-set-up young fellow, a little broader than average for my six feet, heavy-boned, not much excess fat. My face was broad too, with high cheekbones and a small mustache and wide gray eyes, under an unruly thatch of thick black hair. I had a rather unintellectual look for a writer; it had always annoyed me. But I didn't look brutal. I had a sort of mild-mannered air, like a wider Jimmy Stewart. * * * * * In all that night I never questioned anything for more than a second or two until I came to pack my belongings. Then the lifelong habits and prejudices came back to make me ask myself for an accounting. No remorse, nor fear, nor any such weak emotions; simply curiosity at the changes. What is it, I asked myself; reincarnation?