BEFORE THE CORONER'S JURY STATEMENT OF THOMAS BARRON
My name is Thomas Barron. For nine years I have been a partner in the brokerage firm of Slade & Barron. I never suspected Michael Slade was abnormal. He was a strong character, and I always thought him rather a superior individual.
I saw him a dozen times after the car accident that precipitated events, mostly in connection with my purchase of his share of the business. He gave me no inkling of anything wrong, and I have no idea what actually happened.
The crash was over, the car neatly -turned on its top. Slade sprawled dizzily on his back, conscious that he had lost his glasses. Something warm trickled from his forehead into his left eye. -
He wiped it away, and saw with a start that it was blood. He mustered a smile for his wife, who was sitting up. He said:
"Well, we survived. I don't know what happened. The steering gear broke, I think."
He stopped. Miriam was close enough for his near-sighted eyes, even without glasses, to see that she was gazing at him in mixed horror and alarm.
"Michael, your forehead-the soft spot! It's torn, bleeding, and-Michael, it's an eye."
Slade felt blank. Almost automatically, he bent towards the rearview mirror, tilting it upwards to catch his head. The skin was torn raggedly starting about an inch from the hairline, and coming down about two inches.
A third eye was plainly visible.
The eyelid of it was closed by a surplus of sticky matter, but abruptly he grew aware that it was pulsing with a vague perception of light.
It began to hurt.
***
LOCAL MAN HAS THREE EYES
A car accident, which tore a layer of skin from the forehead of Michael Slade yesterday, revealed that the young business executive has three eyes. Mr. Slade, when interviewed in the hospital, where he was taken by a passing motorist, seemed in good spirits, but could offer no reason for his possession of a third eye. "I always had that soft spot in my forehead," he said. "The eye itself seems to be a thoroughly useless appendage. I can't imagine Nature's purpose."
He admitted that it was very likely that he would have the skin grafted into place again. "People," he said, "go to sideshows to see freaks. Otherwise they don't like to look at them."
The discovery of a three-eyed man in this small city caused a buzz of interest in local scientific circles. At Technical High, Mr. Arthur Trainor, biology teacher, suggested that it was either a mutation, or else that a third eye was once common to human beings, and this is a retrogression. He felt, however, that the latter possibility was controverted by the fact that two eyes were normal throughout the entire animal world. There was, of course, the gland known as the pineal eye.
Dr. Joseph Mclver, eye specialist, thought that it would be an interesting experiment to bring all three eyes back to perfect vision. He agreed that this would be difficult, since Mr. Slade's third eye has a bare perception of light, and also because the famous eye training systems now in existence have a hard enough time getting two imperfect eyes back to focus together and work perfectly.
"Nevertheless," Dr. Mclver concluded, "the human brain is a strange and wonderful machine. When it is relaxed, everything balances. But when it is tensed for any reason, eye, ear, stomach and other organic troubles begin."
Mrs. Slade, whom our reporter tried to interview, could not be reached.
BEFORE THE CORONER'S JURY STATEMENT OF MRS. M. SLADE
My name is Miriam Leona Crenshaw. I am the former Mrs. Michael Slade. I divorced Mr. Slade and have legal right to use my maiden name. I met Michael Slade about six years ago, and had no suspicion that he was anything but a normal individual.
I saw my husband only twice after the car accident that revealed his abnormality. The first time it was to plead with him to change his mind about keeping all his three eyes visible. But he had been profoundly influenced by a comment in the press by a local eye specialist concerning the possibility that he might recover the vision of his three eyes. And he felt that publicity had then been so widespread that any attempt at deception was useless.
This determination was the sole reason for our separation, and it was to sign the separation papers that I saw him the second time.
I know nothing special of subsequent events. I did not even look at the body. Its crushed condition having been described to me, I refused to view it.
Slade sat palming and glancing at the Snellen charts, waiting for the eye specialist.
The sun was shining down on the chart, but he himself was in shadow, and comfortably ensconced in an easy-chair. Relaxation, that was the secret.
Only, after nearly three months of doing it on his own from books, his progress had been comparatively tiny.
Footsteps crunched on the walk. Slade looked up at the eye specialist curiously. Dr. Mclver was a tall gray-haired man of fifty-five or so; that much was visible to Slade without glasses.
The doctor said: "Your man told me I would find you here."
He did not wait for a reply, but stood at ease, looking across the lawn at the three charts, respectively five, ten and twenty feet from the chair in which Slade sat.
"Well," he said, "I see you're familiar with the principles of eye training. I wish a billion more people would realize how satisfactory it is to have a light of ten thousand candlepower shining from the sky into their back yards. I think," he confided, "before I die I shall become a sun worshiper!"
Slade found himself warming to the man. He had been a little doubtful, when he had phoned Dr. Mclver, about inviting even a specialist into his problem. But his doubts began to fade.
He explained his trouble. After nearly three months his third eye could see the ten-foot line at one foot, but with each additional foot that he drew back from the chart, its vision became worse out of all proportion to the extra distance. At three feet he could barely see the two hundred foot chart.
"In other words," Dr. Mclver said, "it's largely mental now. Your mind is suppressing images with which it is familiar, and you can be almost certain that it is suppressing them because it has been in the habit of doing so."
He turned, and began to unpack his bag. "Let's see," he said confidently, "if we can't persuade it to give in."
Slade could literally feel himself relaxing before the glowing positivities of this man. This was what he needed. For long now, tensions must have been building up inside him. Unconsciously he must be resenting his slow progress.
"A few questions first," said Dr. Mclver, straightening with a retinoscope in his hand: "Have you been reading fine print every day? Can you 'swing' the letters? Have you accustomed your eyes to direct sunlight? O.K.! Let's begin with the right eye without palming."
Slade was able to read at twenty feet the line that should have been visible at fifty. He was aware of Mclver standing eight feet away studying his eye through the retinoscope. The eye specialist nodded finally.
"Vision of right eye 20/50. Astigmatism of two diopters." He added; "Do you practice looking at dominoes?"
Slade nodded. Up to a point he had made considerable progress with the muscle imbalance that caused the astigmatism which affected all three of his eyes.
"Left eye next," said Dr. Mclver. And a little later: "Vision 20/70, astigmatism of 3 diopters."
"Center eye, vision 3/200, astigmatism of 11 diopters. Now palm."
Palming produced long flashes of 20/20 vision in his right and left eyes, and a bare instant of 5/70 vision in his center eye.
"I think," said Dr. Mclver, "we shall start by trying for a better illusion of black. What you see may seem black to your imagination, but you're fooling yourself. Afterwards, we'll do some whipping and shifting, and bounce a few tennis balls."
He fumbled in his bag, and came up with a roll of black materials. Slade recognized a black fur piece, black wool, black cotton, a square of black cardboard, black silk, a piece of black metal, a hand-engraved ebony ornament, and a variety of familiar black items including a plastic fountain pen, a bow tie, and a small book with a black cover.
"Look them over," Mclver said. "The mind cannot remember any shade of black more than a few seconds. Palm, and switch your imagination from one to the other of these items."
After half an hour, Slade had improved noticeably the vision of each eye. He could see the large C with his third eye at twenty feet, and the R and B below it were recognizable blurs. But perfect vision was still a long, long way off.
"Again, palm," said Dr. Mclver. This time he went on talking softly as Slade closed his eyes. "Black is black is black. There is no black but black. Black, pure, unadulterated black is black black."
It was nonsense with a pattern of reason in it. Slade found himself smiling, as he visualized the black in the various articles that Mclver had placed on his lap. Black, he thought, black, wherefore art thou, black?
As simply as that it came. Black as black as the black of a moonless, starless night, black as printer's ink, black as all the black that the mind of man ever conceived. The black.
He opened his center eye, and saw the ten line on the twenty-foot chart. He blinked, but it was still there as bright and black as the print itself. Startled, he opened the other two eyes. And still there was no blurring. With 20/10 vision in all three of his eyes he looked around his back yard.
He saw!
At first, the fence and the other residences and the charts and all the shrubbery remained as a part of the scene. It was like looking at two pictures, with one super-imposed upon the other, like two images coming through two different sets of eyes. But images of different scenes.
The familiar one-his own back yard, and the hill to the right and the rooftops of his neighbors that made up his horizon-had the effect of blurring the other, stranger scene.
Gradually, however, its outlines pushed through. To his left, where the houses fell away into a large shallow depression, was an enormous expanse of marsh, thick with brilliant growth. To his right, where the hill had always hidden his view, were scores of caves with fires burning at their openings.
The smoke from the fires rose up in curling tongues of black and gray, and intensified the blur that already half hid the Morton and Gladwander mansions, which dominated the hill. They kept fading, fading. And now, Slade saw that the hill with the caves was somewhat higher and steeper than the hill with the houses. There was a wide ledge that ran along in front of the caves. And it was on this ledge that he suddenly noticed something else.
Human beings! They moved around, now bending over pots that hung above the fires, now adding wood to the fires, or disappearing into the caves, and then emerging again. There were not many, and most of them had long hair characteristic of woman, or else they were small and childlike. Their primitive clothes-clearly visible even at this distance-made the reality of them unnatural.
Slade sat there. He had a remote impulse to get up, but it was too soon yet for reaction or even understanding. At last memory came that this was happening as a result of improvement in his vision; and the lightning thought followed: What in the name of sanity had happened?
It was too vague as yet, that tugging amazement, and besides there was still the scene of the cave dwellers becoming clearer and clearer to his vision. The houses and his own yard were just shimmering images, like fading mirages, like things dimly seen through an all-enveloping haze.
For the first time Slade realized that his eyes had been straining to hold those two scenes, but that the strain was lessening, as the second one took stronger and stronger hold of his attention.
The paralysis left him. Quite automatically, he stood up.
He noted, with enormous and developing interest, that, where the marsh ended, a rolling meadow began, spotted here and there with bright splashes of gigantic flowering shrubs, and in the distance trees that looked amazingly tall.
Everything was as clear and bright as a summer sun could make it. A warm, glowing wilderness, almost untouched by man, spread before him. It was like a fairy land, and he stared and stared.
At last, with wondering delight, he turned to look at the other horizon-and the girl must have started the same instant around the tree that was there.
She was tall and very straight. She must have been intending to swim in the stream that babbled into the marsh a few yards away because, except for a rather ornamental silvery belt around her waist, she had no clothes on.
She had three eyes, and all three of them appraised Slade with amazement but without a shade of embarrassment. There was something else in her manner that was not so prepossessing, even a little repellent. It was the dominating look of a woman accustomed to think only of herself. He had time to realize that she was older than she looked.
The woman's eyes were narrowing. She spoke in a violin-toned contralto, meaningless words, but offensively sharp in tone.
She began to fade. The trees, the great marsh, the hill, partly visible to his left now, faded perceptibly. A house showed through her body and all around, the earth as he had known it for years took swift form.
Suddenly, there was the yard, and himself standing beside his chair. There was Dr. Mclver, his back to Slade, peering around the corner of the house. The eye specialist turned, and his face lighted as he saw Slade.
"Where did you go?" he asked. "I turn my back, and you're off without a word."
Slade made no immediate reply. The pain in his eyes was like a fire.
It burned and burned.
BEFORE THE CORONER'S JURY STATEMENT OF DR. McIVER
I had personal contact with Michael Slade over a period of about two and a half months. For an hour a day I assisted him with his eye training. It was a slow process, as, after apparently recovering the first day, he had an unusually sharp retrogression.
When I asked him about any particular effects he had observed during his brief spell of good vision he hesitated a long time, and then shook his head.
At the end of ten weeks his third eye had a normal vision of only 10/400. He decided then that he was going to take a holiday on his farm at Canonville, in the hope that his childhood surroundings would relax his mind, and so effect a cure.
I understand he later returned to his home, but I did not see him again until I was called to identify his smashed body in the morgue.