The Last of Mrs. Satan

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In his cell, when they’d first picked him up, he’d babbled enough to cause them to look at one another and later to call in the state psychiatrist. Now, looking back, he was able to remember the bumbling little doctor with a sort of amused pity. The little man with all the degrees had been so sure of his science. He had the answer: Mind was but the intangible corollary of the function of nervous tissue. The human soul? The smug little doctor had scoffed at the possibility of its existence. The vaporings of the superstitious, he called such talk.

Charlie Cotter wondered in that amused, detached way he had developed what the little doctor’s reaction would be when one day he sank into the black maw of death to discover that he’d made a mistake, that, after all, the mere function of nervous tissue was not the total answer...

He had found Charlie sane. Charlie had wanted desperately to be found sane. He knew he was sane and could have told them so, but when the little doctor spoke, it was the degrees speaking. No one could question the degrees. Charlie’s first babblings? The degrees had a ready answer for that: hysteria and psychic shock, natural reactions to the violence which Charlie had perpetrated.

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