Silly, isn’t it?  But remember, my reader, whom I hope to have travel far with me through time and space—­remember, please, my reader, that I have thought much on these matters, that through bloody nights and sweats of dark that lasted years-long, I have been alone with my many selves to consult and contemplate my many selves.  I have gone through the hells of all existences to bring you news which you will share with me in a casual comfortable hour over my printed page.

So, to return, I say, during the ages of three and four and five, I was not yet I. I was merely becoming as I took form in the mould of my body, and all the mighty, indestructible past wrought in the mixture of me to determine what the form of that becoming would be.  It was not my voice that cried out in the night in fear of things known, which I, forsooth, did not and could not know.  The same with my childish angers, my loves, and my laughters.  Other voices screamed through my voice, the voices of men and women aforetime, of all shadowy hosts of progenitors.  And the snarl of my anger was blended with the snarls of beasts more ancient than the mountains, and the vocal madness of my child hysteria, with all the red of its wrath, was chorded with the insensate, stupid cries of beasts pre-Adamic and progeologic in time.

And there the secret is out.  The red wrath!  It has undone me in this, my present life.  Because of it, a few short weeks hence, I shall be led from this cell to a high place with unstable flooring, graced above by a well-stretched rope; and there they will hang me by the neck until I am dead.  The red wrath always has undone me in all my lives; for the red wrath is my disastrous catastrophic heritage from the time of the slimy things ere the world was prime.

* * * * *

It is time that I introduce myself.  I am neither fool nor lunatic.  I want you to know that, in order that you will believe the things I shall tell you.  I am Darrell Standing.  Some few of you who read this will know me immediately.  But to the majority, who are bound to be strangers, let me exposit myself.  Eight years ago I was Professor of Agronomics in the College of Agriculture of the University of California.  Eight years ago the sleepy little university town of Berkeley was shocked by the murder of Professor Haskell in one of the laboratories of the Mining Building.  Darrell Standing was the murderer.

I am Darrell Standing.  I was caught red-handed.  Now the right and the wrong of this affair with Professor Haskell I shall not discuss.  It was purely a private matter.  The point is, that in a surge of anger, obsessed by that catastrophic red wrath that has cursed me down the ages, I killed my fellow professor.  The court records show that I did; and, for once, I agree with the court records.