NOR IRON BARS A CAGE

NOR IRON BARS A CAGE

The suspension of the maximum-security prison experiment at Piedra, California, can without question be attributed more to the unexplained disappearance of Warden E. W. MacLeash than to any other single factor. With the death last month of inmate Jasper Riggins, due, a thorough autopsy has disclosed, to natural causes, many feel that the fate of Warden MacLeash will remain forever a mystery, and prison reform has suffered a devastating setback.

I was the last person on earth to see Warden MacLeash. My name is Robert Inglewood, and I was associate warden of Piedra at the time the warden vanished. I accompanied him to the threshold of Riggins' cell that night and watched him enter, as I have testified before the Governor's Commission. But some things I left out of my testimony, because no one asked about them, because I feared no one would believe me, perhaps because I was not sure myself what should be believed, and because I was terrified beyond all reason by the strange events I had witnessed. With Riggins death I have at last come to accept my responsibility for chronicling those events, whatever the consequences might prove to be. The Piedra experiment is too important to be abandoned for the wrong reasons. Riggins death must not be viewed as the disappearance of all hope for a final explanation, but rather as the removal of the last impediment to the success of the project.

Piedra was an experimental prison, isolated from the rest of California by the dense mixed-conifer forests of the northern Coastal Range. Its purpose was to rehabilitate and reeducate long-term prisoners who displayed aptitude and incentive though they might lack formal education. In addition to the more customary institutional amenities, inmates were provided with classrooms, an extensive library complex, and optional tutorial instruction. Prison regulations encouraged trust and self-reliance. The cells were designed to each house but a single inmate and were so constructed that no one, not even other prisoners, could observe from outside the activities within a cell. Except under specified emergency procedures, the solid steel cell doors were not to be opened without the consent of the cell's inhabitant. The new facility was built without guard towers, without walls or barbed wire, and without bars, creating an atmosphere more like that of a hospital or modern school than a penitentiary.

In an examination specially prepared and administered to neutralize cultural bias, inmate Jasper Riggins obtained the highest score of any candidate seeking admission to Piedra. He was sixty-seven years old at the time, and his snow-white hair blazed against weathered, tar-black skin. While serving a life sentence for murder, Riggins had taught himself to read and write. Educators nonetheless quickly recognized in him a mental power of comprehension, which could only be categorized as genius. In light of his latent ability, the extraordinary depth of his cultural and educational deprivation, and his desire to participate, the venerable old Negro was the very first inmate selected for Piedra. In his progress many saw a barometer for the success or failure of the entire project.

In light of later developments, this was unfortunate, for without a doubt Riggins and his strange mental powers lie coiled at the heart of the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Warden MacLeash. The Governor's Commission Report, relying principally on my testimony, traced the warden's last-known steps to the cell of Jasper Riggins. The paucity of tangible evidence and other peculiar circumstances enveloping the entire affair prevented formal charges from being brought against Riggins, and when the elderly inmate passed away last month, the only tongue which might have explained the disappearance was forever stilled.

When Piedra received its first inmates on September 1, 1975, E. W. MacLeash held the position of warden. Hindsight persuades me that his selection for that post was the most uncanny and fateful accident to befall the experiment, if, indeed, it was no more than an accident. He was a wiry little man with bushy gray eyebrows and sideburns that framed a glistening, hairless pate. Meticulously neat in personal appearance and brusque in manner, what little humor he suffered himself was dry and crackling. He bore a passion for order in everything he did. At an age when other men grow mellow, the new warden refused to brook any nonsense in his administration of the otherwise progressive institution.

MacLeash had been chosen by conservatives as the result of the complex political compromise that provided the funding for the Piedra project. He was a hard-nosed retired army major of the old school who had built his military career during the Viet Nam War. After his retirement he had established a reputation for aggressiveness and cunning in a prosperous real estate investment practice. I recently inspected the legislative history of his appointment, and it all appears to be obvious and even inevitable. And yet I cannot help believing that other, more obscure forces, perhaps at a level and by a means that our petty sciences have not yet begun to suspect, played a powerful hand in his selection.

For a time I too had been on the list of candidates for the warden's position. My Ph.D. thesis in criminology at USC had proposed just the sort of experimental rehabilitation that Piedra came to represent. I was not surprised, however, when an older man received the appointment, and contrary to the malicious innuendoes that surfaced at the commission hearings, I bore MacLeash no ill will because of it. Indeed, when the offer of second-in-command came, I didn't have to think twice about leaving my work at Atascadero State Hospital and moving my family to the remote north coast. Not even the specter of toiling under "Bulldog MacLeash," as some of my colleagues called him, dampened my spirits.

I learned from MacLeash's personnel file that his parents had died in an airplane disaster when he was very young, and his only sibling, an older brother, had been lost at sea during the Second World War. He was a lifelong bachelor. Knowledge of these personal hardships helped me accept the warden's lack of customary social graces. It must be said that, despite our diametrically opposed views on the purpose and function of the prison, we somehow managed to pull together to get the program off the ground. By surmounting the numberless difficulties which plagued those first years of the experiment, a tentative friendship and, I might even say, admiration, began to grow between us.

It is undoubtedly true that, as in all things, MacLeash bore a certain mistrust for those in his command. It is generally agreed that his unyielding self-reliance and determination to solve problems in his own way drove him later to assume solitary command of the investigation of the unusual occurrences which began to surround Jasper Riggins. But more than that, I believe he perceived those incidents as personal affronts.

The first official mention of anything out of the ordinary concerning Jasper Riggins came on the night of August 12, 1979, in a brief memorandum submitted to the warden by Captain Oscar Medinger, chief guard in charge of the night detail in Block A. In the account, handwritten and stapled to the usual eight-by-ten shift report required for security and statistical purposes, Medinger relates that at 12:50 a.m. he was summoned by the third floor duty guard who complained that as he was passing Riggins' cell, he had heard a sound like the howl of a wolf emanating from behind the closed door. He described it as a lonely, plaintive cry. It chilled his blood. At first he thought that Riggins was making the sound. As he continued to listen, however, the howling was repeated, and a moment later a second similar cry overrode the first in such a manner that it would have been quite impossible for a single man to produce both sounds simultaneously. Thereupon the guard summoned Medinger, as he was required to do by prison regulations.

Medinger himself heard nothing when he arrived, but the duty guard was so adamant and agitated that Medinger knocked and requested admission to the cell. Riggins appeared to have been awakened from a sound sleep when the door was opened. The two guards found the outside window tightly closed, producing a stuffy, musty atmosphere inside like an overcrowded animal cage at a circus. A quick investigation revealed nothing to be out of the ordinary, and Riggins disclaimed any misconduct. Scrawled at the bottom of Medinger's report in his own handwriting, apparently added as an afterthought sometime later, were the words, "Subject was reading London's Call of the Wild," as if this statement could somehow be fitted into the causal sequence of events, and as if, in Medinger's reluctant mind, it needed to be included for a complete understanding of the incident.

Warden MacLeash took a special interest in the incident from the first. On the afternoon following his receipt of Captain Medinger's report, he summoned the two guards into his office for a lengthy interrogation. Perhaps, as some have speculated, the warden was concerned only with the reliability of his subordinates, for it is true that within six weeks Medinger had been transferred to Folsom prison. My own opinion, however, is that he believed the guards' story utterly. The records of the prison library show that the lone copy of Call of the Wild was checked out two days later in the name of Warden E. W. MacLeash.

On the morning of August 23, the maintenance trustees found in the cell of Jasper Riggins a primitive figurine of a tiger or a horse carved from a porous stone the color of ash. Its appearance was completely inexplicable, and Riggins refused to discuss the matter. No one else had set foot in his cell since the final cleaning of the previous day, and Riggins had spent most of the intervening day reading in the prison library. The rough totem was hauled away to the maintenance building, and a short report was made out which found its way into the hands of Warden MacLeash.

MacLeash seemed extremely agitated by the discovery. It struck me as peculiar at the time, but the warden immediately set about interrogating the library staff, trying to ascertain the names of the books Riggins had been reading. His search bore little fruit. Most of the shelves were open to the inmate community, and apart from the voluntary tutorial program, no records were kept of such matters. The following day the warden prepared and circulated a directive to all personnel that any further incidents involving Riggins should be promptly brought to his personal attention. He instructed me to drop whatever I was doing, assemble all available information on Jasper Riggins, and be prepared to discuss the matter in depth at our conference the following Friday.

I spent the next three days poring over rap sheets, court reports, psychological profiles, parole evaluations, and anything else I could find on Riggins in the prison files and CII and Adult Authority records in Sacramento. With increasing gloom I traced the hopeless plight of a poor Southern black man. Riggins had been born in Coopersville, Alabama, in 1912, the fifth of nine children. His father, a poor sharecropper, had been unable to provide adequately for his family, and Riggins had been needed to help on the farm rather than attend school. At the age of fourteen he drifted to Montgomery, where he was promptly arrested, convicted of loitering, and sentenced to six month's hard labor on a county road gang. Arrest and conviction records spanning 1927 to 1945 followed Riggins in and out of the jails of Montgomery, Elmore, and Jefferson Counties for a variety of minor charges from expectorating in public to petty larceny. He spent two terms in the Alabama State Penitentiary, for attempted rape in 1934 and assault and battery in 1940. When not incarcerated, Riggins hired out as a seasonal farm hand and, later, worked off and on in the steel mills of Birmingham. When the war ended, so did his chances for a good job, and his search for employment carried him to California. He possessed few skills and was pitifully uneducated, so he soon found himself again behind bars in the Contra Costa County jail, convicted of a theft in Richmond. On October 24, 1948, three days after his release from jail, a black man named Thomas Edward Washington was stabbed to death during a brawl in a bar in the Negro section of Richmond. Seven months later Jasper Riggins was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

During his first two decades of incarceration in the California prison system, the Adult Authority reports labeled Riggins "incorrigible." He had served several lengthy periods of solitary confinement. Following the last and longest period, a remarkable change was recorded. In 1969 Riggins swiftly taught himself to read and write and began to display a voracity for literature, science, and scholarly treatises on almost every subject. It was as if he had decided to make up in a few years for a lifetime of illiteracy.

Late Wednesday morning I came across correspondence indicating that Jasper Riggins had been one of three prison inmates selected in 1973 for a special federally funded sociological study. The subjects had been chosen on the basis of their scores on the Piedra experiment admission test and some other rather obscure sociological criteria I didn't really care to understand. The research was to be conducted by a Dr. Sylvia Richardson of the University of California at Davis. I couldn't find a copy of the study anywhere, so I telephoned Dr. Richardson to see if the work had ever been completed. Indeed it had, she assured me, and it included a fascinating in-depth investigation into the ancestry and social background of Jasper Riggins. She promised to send me a copy by express mail. The report arrived an hour before my meeting with Warden MacLeash.

Those Friday conferences always made me uncomfortable. Not that MacLeash was personally formidable. Quite the contrary. He often looked to me like a frail child lost in the folds of an old man's skin. But the plush leather and gleaming mahogany of his inner sanctum, the meticulous order, the dustless, odorless, soundless precision of everything standing just in its proper place kept me balanced uneasily on the edge of my chair.

I distinctly remember the morning of that first conference concerning Jasper Riggins. I had never before seen the warden so upset, so frightened, and I couldn't understand why the petty occurrences disturbed him so. At the time I attributed his reaction to an abhorrence for the anomalous and his insatiable appetite for order. I now suspect that he had already begun to dimly perceive on some non-rational or unconscious level, perhaps on some genetic level, the threat Riggins posed to him.

"There is something going on here out of the ordinary," the warden pronounced as soon as I had pushed the heavy door closed. He slapped shut the file he had been working on. "I shall not tolerate it, whatever it is, as long as I'm warden of this prison!"

I nodded and assumed my usual chair, a stack of files balanced on my knee.

He cleared a neat space in front of him. "Now, show me what we've got on this Riggins character."

One by one I lay the reports, files, records, profiles, photographs, and folders before the warden, giving him a short synopsis of each. He would leaf listlessly through a few pages, then look up at me for the next item, like a child waiting for just the right Christmas present, though I am certain he could not have said quite what he was expecting. I offered my own evaluation of Riggins based upon the sparse contacts I had with the prisoner and the several psychological profiles I had reviewed. He seemed to be only half listening. The guards who knew him better than I described Riggins as charismatic and extremely bright. The warden yawned. When I got to the California Adult Authority reports, his interest brightened. Riggins' abrupt transformation from an incorrigible ruffian to a cooperative, intelligent, studious model prisoner fascinated him.

Because I had only had time to glance briefly through Dr. Richardson's study, I did not mention it until last. Warden MacLeash snatched it from my hands. It was a thin volume of perhaps fifty pages bound in a clear plastic cover. He skimmed hurriedly through the document, then dismissed me with a preemptive wave of his arm. He took it home with him that night.

The following morning, a Saturday, Warden MacLeash burst into my office while I was still sipping my first cup of coffee, threw open the Richardson study, and without further introduction or explanation, began reading. In tones solemn, yet excited, he read several pages that I had basically discounted the previous day because they seemed to me to represent inadequately documented sociological pseudo-science of the worse kind. The warden obviously felt otherwise. Later when I found the study locked in his desk after his disappearance, I had no difficulty locating the paragraphs he read to me that morning.

Dr. Richardson asserts in those passages that the paternal great-grandfather of Jasper Riggins was a man of high prestige among his own people in Africa before being captured and sold into slavery in America. She relies principally upon a bill of sale dated June 3, 1814, between a Captain Bartholomew Horn, a slave trader, and one Essau Anderson, who operated a large tobacco plantation in South Carolina, for the sale and transfer of a slave named Adam Riggings for a sum of money ten times what was customarily paid for the highest quality slave. According to Dr. Richardson, Captain Horn enjoyed a reputation for guile and ruthlessness among his contemporaries, arising chiefly from a well-publicized incident reported to have taken place in 1813. On that occasion Captain Horn had been anchored off the Gold Coast concluding the purchase of slaves from a powerful tribal nation which had taken prisoners in a battle over territorial boundaries. Because the transaction was large, the slave trader negotiated directly with the chief of the victorious nation, a man highly venerated among his people and said to possess unusual spiritual powers. After the slaves had been herded aboard ship, but before final payment had been secured, Horn deceitfully protested that he had received ten fewer slaves than he had bargained for. The chief was invited aboard to count for himself the number of slaves delivered. Once aboard, he and his party were overpowered by the crew and themselves bound into slavery. Captain Horn's ship weighed anchor and easily outran the primitive dugouts that pursued.

Dr. Richardson contends that the betrayed tribal chieftain was the same person as Adam Riggings, sold to Essau Anderson the year following Captain Horn's notorious deception, and Jasper Riggins' paternal ancestor. I have reviewed two articles published recently in respectable sociology journals challenging her conclusions. Both regard the entire betrayal report as apocryphal and point out that while her conclusions are statistically possible, the probability is marginal. At the time the warden read to me from Dr. Richardson's report, I would have sympathized wholeheartedly with her critics' more scientific skepticism.

The warden, on the other hand, spoke with certitude and awe as he read the passages in which Dr. Richardson reexamines long- forgotten bills of sale and dusty estate inventories, purporting to trace the lineage of Jasper Riggins. The documents, she claimed, indicate that only the highest prices had been paid for members of Riggins' paternal line, and more than one contained a reference to some vague power possessed by those ancestors, often chilling in effect because the power itself remains unnamed.

Finally, as if concluding a ceremony of imponderable significance, Warden MacLeash replaced his marker, closed the manuscript, and awaited my judgment.

I was rather embarrassed by the whole situation, to say the least. At first I found a few nice things to say about Dr. Richardson's dedication and energy. The warden was not to be put off so easily. I suggested that Dr. Richardson's research may be somewhat deficient, and, in any event, even if the tribal chief was indeed Riggins' ancestor, his particular genetic makeup would have been so diluted over the subsequent generations as to be inconsequential. Distant ancestry ordinarily has little bearing upon present behavior and ability.

"Ordinarily," he replied, parrying my intent.

I had no alternative but to tell him point blank what he seemed to be ignoring, that Dr. Richardson's suggestions were tantamount to attributing supernatural powers to Riggins. "I feel bound to point out," I concluded, "that many people would consider such an approach unscientific, based upon incredible evidence, and considering your position and responsibilities here at Piedra, dangerous."

"Ah, yes, dangerous." His voice bore a quiet resolve. "Whatever it is that Riggins is doing, it is my responsibility as head of this institution to put a stop to it." My comments had evidently not shaken his conviction. For a moment longer he studied the binding of the volume from which he had read, softly repeated, "whatever it is," and returned to his office.

Three days later another interview was conducted in the warden's private chambers. This meeting lasted forty-five minutes, according to the administrative calendar for that day, and was attended alone by Warden MacLeash and inmate Jasper Riggins. No official record was kept, which was just one more of the myriad minor violations of prison regulations that never much seemed to bother the warden. It is generally accepted that nothing of substance was discussed, that the warden merely wished to become better acquainted with the inmate who had come to occupy so much of his attention. I am personally convinced, however, that a significant bargain was struck between the two men at that mysterious meeting, though I will not speculate upon its nature or purpose. Thereafter, the affair lay dormant for nearly six months.

In the first week of October the Parole Review Board convened at Piedra for its regularly scheduled hearings. Among the petitions on the agenda that day was a special application submitted at the last minute by Jasper Riggins requesting that the board make a complete review of his prison record and set an early release date. Incredibly, the sole character reference listed in the inmate's petition was Warden E. W. MacLeash. When the staff summaries arrived the morning of the hearing, I brought Riggins' petition to the warden's attention.

"He's pushing this thing too goddamned far!" the warden bellowed, snatching the summary from my hands and retreating into his office.

At the hearing, Warden MacLeash launched into a soliloquy of unprecedented venom, insinuation, and, it seemed to me, paranoia, charging Riggins with repeated attempts to undermine the administration of his prison by unspecified subversive acts. With an intensity that made most of the members uneasy, he urged the board never to release such a man, lest the board itself be held accountable for unleashing a devastating scourge upon an innocent free society. Riggins sat as inscrutable as a stone Buddha at the end of the long table and spoke not a word in his own behalf. His petition was summarily denied.

In the weeks following the Parole Board hearings, everyone commented on the warden's vigor and high spirits. I actually saw him laugh on more than one occasion. While I occupied myself with securing the funding for three new staff positions, preparing the fiscal year reports, and trying to complete the east ball field before the autumn rains began, Warden MacLeash managed to get in eighteen holes of golf almost every afternoon. Jasper Riggins was no longer mentioned at our weekly conferences.

Early one fine mid-October morning, the warden and I left the administration building a few minutes early on our way to a meeting with the recreation staff at the new field house. It was his idea to walk the long way through the central quadrangle to enjoy the sunshine. We were intercepted by an anxious young inmate dispatched as a messenger from the guard station in Block A. Something very odd had been discovered, he explained, and the warden's presence was urgently requested.

On the third floor of Block A, two trustees stood with mops and buckets containing a trickle of clear water running from under the door of Jasper Riggins' cell. All the residents of the floor, including Riggins, had been sent to the classroom complex pending further orders from the warden. Lining the east wall inside the cell and clinging to the inmate's shoes, which lay against the far wall, the last clumps of snow and ice, the remnants of an inexplicable drift, melted in the autumn warmth.

Warden MacLeash was infuriated. "I'll not have this! Who's in charge here?"

A lieutenant who looked much too young stepped forward and saluted crisply.

"Search this cell immediately, Lieutenant!" the warden commanded.

"Yes, sir, but prison regula--"

"To hell with prison regulations! Wait a minute. Inglewood!" He waived me over. "How do we get around these goddamned regulations that keep us from doing what's got to be done here?"

Fundamental principles of rehabilitation theory, methodology, and technique were being assailed by the warden's question, not to mention thorny Fifth Amendment search and seizure issues, but I could see he was in no mood for an academic argument. "There is a Regulation 34E," I reminded him, "which temporarily suspends prisoners' rights under the Piedra special program charter, but it was intended for use only in the case of--"

"How do I do it?"

"It can be invoked by a declaration of emergency."

"Who does that?"

"You do, sir."

"How?"

I looked into Riggins' cell and back down at the warden. His face was flushed, his jaw set, and veins stood out on his glistening forehead. I decided not to flirt with the inevitable. "A simple statement ought to suffice. We can let the paperwork catch up later."

"All right, then, I declare this here to be an emergency situation, and I hereby invoke . . . " He glared at me.

"Regulation 34E."

". . . Regulation 34E, or whatever the hell it is. Is that all?"

I nodded.

"Good. Now, Lieutenant, will you search this goddamned cell!"

Among the unusual objects found as a result of the search, presided over personally by Warden MacLeash, nothing could be characterized as violating the California Penal Code or the rules and regulations of the prison. Lying on its side beneath Riggins' bunk was another of the curious figurines of a tiger or horse, identical to the one discovered several months earlier. A small quantity of sand and microscopic sea shells were found beneath the bottom book shelf, and two stains in the corner farthest from the door were later determined to have been made from horse manure. Certain long hairs which had been caught on a nail protruding from the edge of Riggins' desk were thought to have come from a large mammal, not human, probably either a dog or a wolf. The crime laboratory in Sacramento concluded that the unexplained snow and ice formations were pure, as might occur naturally in freshly fallen snow, with no trace of chlorine or other additives customary used in domestic water treatment.

The warden spent the rest of the day with an agent flown in from the state crime laboratory going over the clothing and personal possessions of Jasper Riggins with meticulous care. They found nothing particularly out of the ordinary, nothing that would substantiate the need for disciplinary action. In the late afternoon, Warden MacLeash rescinded his emergency declaration and suspension of prisoners' rights, and by evening the prison was ostensibly back to normal. Below the surface, however, the inmate community buzzed with curious rumors and awesome conjectures, and long into the night the institution lay awake in a superstitious unquiet.

Next morning the warden asked me to step into his office. He was pacing back and forth, and his eyes wore the uneasy dread of a man whose worst suspicions had been confirmed. "He was reading this," he said, thrusting out a heavy volume bearing the mark of the prison library.

I took the book and perched myself on the arm of the leather chair beside his desk. It was Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago.

"And this is the only book Riggins owns." He handed me a well-thumbed copy of Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience. "Read what he's got marked."

I opened it to the page where a worn leather book marker protruded. One passage had been heavily underscored in pencil, presumably by Riggins. It read as follows:

". . . and as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up."

"Now you see why this man is so dangerous!" the warden demanded even before I had finished reading. It was not a question. He assumed I saw. "I want you to keep an eye on this situation for me, Inglewood. We're going to have to be very careful here, maintain absolutely complete records, document everything, you understand. When the time comes for action, we don't want those bleeding-heart ACLU lawyers dragging out any weak links in our chain of paperwork, right?"

I told him I really didn't understand what he was driving at.

He smiled as if he could not quite believe I was so naive. "Think about it, Inglewood," he said as he took both volumes from my hands. He stacked them neatly on the corner of his desk. "Think about it for a while." He opened the office door for me.

I reread the report of the third floor guard who had been on duty the night of the incident. As early as two o'clock that morning he had felt a cold draft in the vicinity of Riggins' cell, but at the time it seemed to him a matter of no great importance. In addition, twice during the night he had heard the faint, but distinct sound of whinnying horses from somewhere on the third floor. He could not locate the origin of the sounds, and because it was late and his mind was tired, the guard concluded he had imagined the sounds and paid them no more heed. In fact he would not have included them in his report at all, he explained, had not the warden brought them to light in his questioning and insisted that they be fully documented. Toward morning the chill draft from Riggins' cell increased, and then diminished abruptly at daybreak. A pool of water began forming under the door about an hour later.

I believe it is significant that Warden MacLeash did not personally interview Riggins following the search of his cell. It indicates to me that whatever bargain had existed between warden and prisoner had been broken so irreconcilably that further negotiations were impossible. The warden appeared unwilling to confront Riggins again until he had prepared himself thoroughly for the encounter. Instead he had me schedule a series of interviews for him with each guard who had worked the third floor of Block A at any time during the preceding six months. He apparently believed that others, like the guard who would have omitted the whinnying of horses from his report, may have experienced oddities, which they failed to document.

When he had concluded his interviews, the warden asked me to get him reservations on a flight to Salt Lake City as soon as possible. The cost of the tickets was to come from the prison administrative contingency fund, but he refused to tell me the purpose of his trip when I attempted to make the disbursement entry. He said he would take care of it himself when he got back. He never did. The warden was gone for four days.

At our usual Friday conference in the second week of November, Warden MacLeash informed me that he had gathered an extensive amount of evidence against Jasper Riggins from his interviews with the night guards, and from other sources he was not yet prepared to divulge. He seemed satisfied with whatever he had uncovered, though he refused to discuss with me the nature of the evidence.

"I intend to undertake decisive action in the near future," he confided rather ominously and winked at me.

Something in his manner suddenly alarmed me. All at once I perceived his obsession with Jasper Riggins to be something more than the mere onset of a benign senility as I had previously supposed, something beyond the bounds of harmless eccentricity. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps the warden was dangerously disturbed, that prison regulations might not be sufficient to contain his madness, and that he might do something to upset the delicate balance of the entire Piedra experiment. I managed to ask him, "What action do you have in mind, sir?"

"You shall see," he said, leaning back, smiling. "You shall see."

"Can I do anything to help."

"Yes, you can, Inglewood. I'd like you to keep a close watch on Riggins and keep me informed of his actions at all times. Don't let him know he's being watched. Particularly, I want to know what books he's reading. Do you think you can do that for me?"

"Yes, of course." The request seemed strange, but no stranger than the rest of the warden's increasingly bizarre fascination. "I'd like to be present when your 'decisive action' takes place, if I might. You'll have to admit, sir, that I'm a little more familiar than you are with the maze of prison regulations governing us here. Perhaps I can be of some help. Will you promise to call me before you do anything?"

"You realize it might come in the middle of the night?"

I nodded.

"Very well. I'll call you."

I didn't like spying on an inmate, but I couldn't see what harm could come of it. So I made arrangements for the chief trustee at the library to covertly watch Riggins and give me a report each afternoon on his activities and the books he was reading.

In the early hours of the following Monday morning I was awakened from a sound sleep by a jangling telephone. My wife handed me the phone. In hushed and somber tones Warden MacLeash instructed me to come as quickly as I could to the main guard station of Block A. Mystified and benumbed by sleep, I dressed hurriedly. When I arrived at the guard station, the warden was pacing nervously before the night captain and two uneasy duty guards.

Warden MacLeash took me aside. "It's Riggins again. Trouble on the third floor. What's he been reading, Inglewood?"

I thought for a moment. "Heart of Darkness," I told him.

His eyes were blank.

"It's a short novel by Joseph Conrad."

"Well? Damn it! What's it about?"

"It's about a man in tribal Africa, seduced by--"

"Exactly!" the warden exclaimed, smacking one hand against the other. His eyes narrowed as if he had just received some last bit of information to confirm a monstrous suspicion. "I'm going in, Inglewood." He grabbed my sleeve. "I want you to be my witness."

"In where, sir?"

"Into Riggins' cell. I'm forcing an entry. You act as my observer, just in case something happens."

One look into his fevered eyes and I knew it was no use arguing about prison regulations. "Are you declaring an emergency, sir? Are you invoking Reg--"

"Whatever has to be done, Inglewood. Do it. You take care of that end of things, okay?. We're on the same side, aren't we?" He smiled and let go of my arm. "Okay. I'm going in there. This is my prison. Riggins is threatening my administration. I'll not have it!"

As the warden turned away, I thought I caught a glimpse of a shoulder holster, but I couldn't see whether it held his service revolver. Under the circumstances I was reluctant to confront him on yet another violation of prison regulations.

The warden's plan was for the duty guards to station themselves at each end of the third-floor corridor. I was to accompany the warden and wait outside Riggins' cell as he let himself in with an emergency key. The night captain would remain at the main guard post for communications and backup.

Perhaps it was because I had so recently awakened from a sound sleep, but I couldn't clear my mind. I was overwhelmed by what I can only describe as a lucid unreality, not so much like dreaming as like stepping into someone else's dream. From the moment I first entered the cell block the feeling engulfed me, and it increased as I mounted the concrete stairway to the cells above. When the guard at last opened the hallway door, I heard the sound that faintly pervaded the entire third floor, as if coming from a great distance: the steady, hollow throb of drums. The warden still seemed highly agitated, but he delayed our advance until we saw the door at the opposite end of the sleeping corridor open and the second guard take up his station.

I clearly recall walking down that narrow corridor, numb, side by side with Warden MacLeash, as if in slow motion, or under water, with the light from the hidden neon tubes not dim, but dull, and the sound of our footsteps and breathing strangely muffled. We stopped before the cell of Jasper Riggins. The pulse of the steady drumbeat had grown only slightly louder, but it was now somehow all-pervasive, as if sounding from afar and resounding in rhythm to my own heart's quickened beat. I saw the warden step to the cell door with his key thrust awkwardly before him, shrunken and incredibly aged, and seeing him as from a great distance, I wondered if this was really happening, and I was afraid beyond all reason.

The drums grew louder as Warden MacLeash pushed open the cell door just wide enough to slip through. I stood transfixed outside. There sat Jasper Riggins cross-legged and Buddha-like on his bunk, his tar black skin testifying to unalloyed genes and glistening in the flickering light of a naked flame unseen somewhere behind the door, his eyes staring sightlessly ahead of him, unaware of what by contrast seemed an irrelevant intrusion. He seemed not to breathe at all.

The warden raised his trembling hand and seemed about to touch the prisoner on the shoulder when, in response to something behind him, he turned, and his eyes, lit now by the same uncanny flickering light, appeared to fix on something both marvelous and terrible, towards which he was drawn, out of sight, into the depths of the empty cell. For what seemed an endlessly long moment I watched in awe the godlike, powerful inmate who never moved and awaited the reappearance of the warden in the hypnotically flickering chamber. As the moment wore on, my concern for the warden faded, and forgetting the orders strictly forbidding me to follow, I was drawn by some primordial instinct to enter the cell. But before I had taken a single step, I was shaken by what sounded like pistol shots in rapid succession amidst the untiring drum beats, though the reports seemed to come from a very great distance, far beyond the confines of the tiny prison cell. Then there followed an unholy scream, a far-off, whining shriek, twisted and horribly frightened, perhaps that of the warden himself. It seemed for an unreal moment that the partially-closed cell door led into a jungle of limitless distances.

Abruptly the drum beats stopped, and I was gripped by a freezing terror that wrenched my heart. Without planning it, I heard my own voice screaming, "Riggins! In the name of God, man, wake up!"

Although I did not perceive the actual transition, the lighting was again normal, and again the ordinary prison sounds were everywhere. Jasper Riggins blinked, then stretched, and then stared incredulously at my ashen face through the open cell door.

Warden MacLeash was never seen again by me, by the bewildered night guards, nor by any of the authorities and investigators who converged on the scene the following morning. The inexplicable pool of human blood found at the base of the rear wall of the cell was determined to be of a type different from that of either Riggins or the warden. Riggins disclaimed any knowledge of the disappearance, and the intensive investigation conducted by the Governor's Commission turned up no evidence incriminating him, or even supporting the conjecture that a crime had been committed at all. Within six months the Preliminary Report of the Commission was released, recommending suspension of the Piedra experiment, and shortly thereafter the inmates began returning to the prisons whence they had first come.

I found the Commission hearings arduous, coming as they did just at the time of my divorce and at the time I was forced to take my first medical leave of absence for a nervous condition. The doctor advised me to try to forget about what I had seen. But the Commission would not let me forget. I was called back three times to testify. Each time I answered the questions which were put to me with the facts as I recalled them, but beyond that I refused to speculate. I volunteered nothing.

Shortly after the publication of the Commission's Final Report last year, I made a trip to San Quentin, where Jasper Riggins had been returned. At first Riggins refused to talk to me, but when I assured him that the official investigation was closed and I was simply trying to sort out my own recollection of events, he consented.

Riggins leaned heavily on a cane as he shuffled slowly into the interview room and painfully lowered himself onto a chair. He seemed so very old and withered, so unlike the powerful warrior I had perceived through the doorway of his cell that night. Quick to laugh, loose and friendly, he projected a sharpness of mind. I couldn't help liking him. Curiously, I had never before sat down and talked with him face to face. I did most of the talking, actually. He claimed to know nothing more than what he had testified before the Governor's Commission.

Yet it seemed to me he did know something more than he was admitting, and I told him so.

He laughed disarmingly. "You got all the facts, Warden. You gonna haf' to make up your own min'. The'ain't nothin' I could say you don' already know. Nothin'd change your way o' thinkin' 'bout it."

"But you understand what happened," I said.

"I do believe I un'erstan's 'nough. Wouldn't hardly suit you, though, way I sees it."

"Try me."

He was quiet for a while. "They say a man like me who's done spent half o' his life in prison, in an' out o' solitary, gets a perty damn good fantasy life agoin' in his head."

I waited, but he seemed to have finished. "I'm afraid I don't get your point."

"Let's jus' leave it at this." His big, friendly grin was belied for an instant by the menace in his eyes. "If'n a man is gonna go messin' 'roun' in 'nothe' fella's dreams, he damn well better watch out he don' get caught out when the othe' fella wakes hisself up."

Late last year I drafted a brief report summarizing and analyzing what I knew of the disappearance. I went beyond my oral testimony before the Commission and drew certain conclusions. I suggested that perhaps Warden MacLeash was in some manner being held a captive by the inmate he had intended to undo. I enumerated accounts of terrible rumors whispered among the inmates of San Quentin of unholy conjurings in Riggins' cell in the blackness of the night. The apparitions were always the same: the vague figure of a white man, bound and gagged and supported between two naked black men, lit by an eerie, flickering light, while the dull, staccato pulse of drums filled the cell block. Unscientific as my position was, the Governor's Commission Report, as an alternative, proved to be no better, offering neither conclusions nor an explanation for the disappearance.

I never found the nerve to submit that report.

With the death of Jasper Riggins even my slim hopes for Warden MacLeash have evaporated. For even if the warden had somehow survived until the inmate's death, at best he has lost the only bridge linking this world with the imaginary one into which he wandered, and at worst he has perished with the dream that can no longer be dreamed.

A thousand times my mind has traced the sweeping curve laid down by the evidence, much of which for me is beyond question, since I witnessed it myself. Yet the only explanations are not reasonable. My scientific sensitivities refuse to allow me that blind leap Warden MacLeash appeared all too ready to make, concluding that supernatural forces are at work here. But just as I am prepared to foreclose the paranormal absolutely, I stumble once again over the persisting question: where in the name of hell is Warden MacLeash? Thus for me the circle refuses to close, and I fear for my own sanity if I do not lay the matter aside once and for all.

I recently followed up a single remaining thread of evidence. Locked in the warden's top desk drawer next to Dr. Richardson's report was a name and Salt Lake City address. The address turned out to be the National Genealogy Center, and the name that of one of the staff researchers. I telephoned the man. Warden MacLeash had met with him and paid for the research and preparation of a genealogical chart. Before he had done his research, however, he had heard of the warden's disappearance on the news and so never completed the project. I asked him to finish the chart and send it to me.

Since that conversation, a new and unsettling train of thought has troubled my sleep. Who really knows what we may yet discover behind the phenomena we now refer to as ESP, faith healing, voodoo, and the soul? Our petty science has only scratched the surface. The mind's depths have scarcely been sounded, and yet the conscious mind is itself merely a belated creation of the truly powerful force underlying life: the DNA. The mind is but one of many tools conjured and conceived by four billion years of relentless natural selection. What other tools do those immortal spiral strands also wield to accomplish their blind, or at best undeciphered, purposes? Have the unconscious thoughts in our minds a master we have never met?

I think we may have witnessed more than a mere skirmish between Riggins and MacLeash. They were pawns. I doubt if either had any idea why he was struggling at all, or what his role was in the overall conflict. For all we know, natural selection has fashioned for us minds incapable of understanding, so that we may not tamper with the only thing in the universe which is truly sacred. I believe we may have just dimly perceived the worldly reflection of a total war being waged at a level and by a means that we cannot even begin to suspect. Undoubtedly we are all unwitting soldiers.

I recently received in the mail an additional piece of information which has quite unnerved me and made it clear that my sanity requires I write this report and then drop the matter forever. The genealogical chart arrived from Salt Lake City shortly after Riggins' death, and traces the ancestry of Warden E. W. MacLeash. The diagram shows the warden to be the last surviving male issue descended from a notorious Nineteenth Century slave trader by the name of Bartholomew Horn.