Manhunt. Volume 2, Number 10, December, 1954

“Of course,” I said. “Why?”

“You’re getting dark circles under your eyes. Sure you aren’t studying too hard? Maybe you need glasses.”

“I’m quite all right,” I told her.

“I’m sure you’re studying too hard,” she decided, examining my face worriedly. “It’s not natural for a twenty-year-old boy to spend so much time alone in his room. You ought to take Mary out some evening.”

I didn’t tell her I spent much less time alone in my room than she thought. I didn’t tell her that almost every night when she thought I was asleep I was prowling the dark streets, watching those whom God’s angels have ordered me to watch. My mother is a religious person, but she hasn’t any more imagination than most practical people. She can believe in the saints receiving direct communication from God, but I know she wouldn’t be able to believe her own son is an emissary of the Lord. Like too many people, her religious belief stops when miracles strike too close to home. I know if I told her about the voices, she not only wouldn’t believe me, she might even do something silly like insisting I go see a psychiatrist.

Suppose Saul’s mother had sent him to a psychiatrist?

Instead of attempting to explain, I just said mildly, “Final exams are in two more weeks, Mother. I’ll get out more when I’ve finished cramming.”

Mary fussed at me a little too when I picked her up on the way to school. As she slid into the front seat beside me, she studied my face critically before even saying hello.

Then she said, “What’s the matter with you lately, hon? You don’t look well. And you haven’t even so much as called me for over a week.”

“Called you?” I said. “I see you every day.”

“On the way to school and on the way home,” she conceded. “Fine romance. Ever occur to you a girl might like a little night life?”

“Two weeks before finals? Be sensible, Mary.”

“I know you’re studying hard,” she admitted. “So am I for that matter. But it wouldn’t kill you to take five minutes off every night to make a phone call.”

“I get so involved in law books, I don’t think of it,” I said. “Maybe I am studying too hard. But you can’t win a law degree without study. We’ll go out on the town the night finals are over.”

Then she demanded to know if I had stopped loving her. Of course I said no, but in thinking about it later, I wondered if our plans to marry shouldn’t change now that I have a new mission. Is there any room for marriage in a life devoted to service to the Lord? Much as I love Mary, I can’t see that there is.

I haven’t mentioned the voices to Mary for the same reason I didn’t tell Mother. She’s a sweet girl, but I know with complete certainty she wouldn’t believe any more than Mother would that I’ve actually been chosen as a servant of God.

Then too I never know exactly how Mary is going to react to things I tell her. Sometimes things that don’t strike me as the least funny touch her odd sense of humor. She might even laugh.

Thursday night: I bought a gun today. I’m not exactly sure why. I seemed to be impelled to do it by some force outside of myself. Perhaps by the power of God’s will.

Mary had a chemistry lab, and she thought I was spending the afternoon at the college library, as I usually do on Thursdays until she gets out of lab. I didn’t lie to her. When I picked her up to take her home, I simply didn’t mention I hadn’t gone near the library that afternoon.

I didn’t buy the gun locally. I drove thirty miles to another town and got it in a pawn shop. I signed the name Howard Turpin because that’s about as unlike mine as I could dream up, and gave the man a fake address. The gun cost me twenty dollars and it’s a .32 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver. It’s only five-shot instead of six, which struck me as odd. I was under the impression all revolvers were six-shooters.

The gun fascinates me because it’s such an ingenious mechanical contrivance. It’s what they call a hammerless resolver, and it breaks open by releasing a catch and bending the barrel downward. As the rear of the cylinder comes in view, a small pronged gadget thrusts backward from the center of the cylinder, ejecting all five shells at once. Then, when the gun is fully open, the gadget automatically snaps back into place so the cylinder may be reloaded. I’m not very mechanically inclined and I haven’t been able to figure out what makes the gadget work. I’d like to know, but the internal mechanism can’t be gotten at without taking the whole gun apart, and I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to get it back together again properly.

Before I returned to town I bought a box of fifty .32 caliber shells in a hardware store. The clerk didn’t even ask my name.