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Edgar Cayce – Joseph Millard

Al Layne poised a pencil above a sheaf of notepaper and bent towards the couch where Edgar lay in his deep sleep. When Layne spoke, his voice was sharp with nervous tension.

"You have in this room the body of Al C. Layne. You will go over his body carefully, noting its condition and, especially, any parts that are ailing. You will give the cause of such ailments and suggest treatments to bring about a cure." He stopped and sat holding his breath. His hand, holding the pencil, trembled with strain. The results he hoped for were so fantastic that he was afraid to let himself even consider success.

The sleeping Edgar Cayce spoke suddenly and clearly: "Yes, we have the body of Al C. Layne here. We have gone over it carefully. Now, here are the conditions of that body as we find them . . . " He talked on, crisply incisively. Layne's pencil flew across the note sheets. One after another, the filled sheets fluttered to the floor.

Edgar opened his eyes, blinked, yawned, and sat up. He looked anxiously at Layne. "Did you get anything?"

'Anything?" Layne said in an awed voice. "I got everything.  There's never been anything like this in the history of the world You're-you're a phenomenon, Edgar. You described all my symptoms better than I could ever do it myself. You told me exactly what was wrong with me and then gave a detailed course of diet and medicines and treatments to cure me. It's all here on these sheets, just as you gave it. I've got writer's cramp from trying to keep up with you. I had to tell you to slow down once or twice, and you did."

Edgar skimmed over a few of the scrawled sheets and then fell back on the couch, his jaw sagging. "That couldn't have come out of me. A lot of those words I never saw or heard of. I haven't the faintest idea of what they mean or even how to pronounce them."

"You did when you were asleep. Some are medical terms for organs and parts of the body, and the rest are drugs and herbs. I know enough medicine to be positive everything you said was exactly right."

"Hey," Edgar stiffened in sudden alarm. "Did you say drugs? Oh, no! Don't you go swallowing a lot of stuff just because I babbled about it in my sleep. For all I know, some of those things could be poison."

"Don't worry," Layne smiled. "I know every one, and there's not a harmful ingredient in any of them. I'm going right home and start following these instructions today. If it works on me, we'll try it with someone else who's sick."

Layne went to assemble the medicines prescribed by the sleep-voice. Edgar sat on the couch, staring at the wall with glazed eyes. He was stunned and bewildered and frightened - more frightened than he had ever been in his life……….

Then one day, Layne bounded in, threw his arms wide, and shouted., "Look at me! Just look at me! After one week of the treatments you gave me, I feel better than I have in years.  I even look so much better that people stop me on the street to ask what I'm doing for myself."

Edgar blanched. "You're not telling them about me?"

"Telling them?" Layne cried. "I'm proclaiming it from the housetops. I've got the whole town talking. If I continue to improve like this, everybody in the county will be swarming in for psychic diagnosis."

"You've got to stop them," Edgar moaned. "It's all a fake. It even fooled me until I figured it out. I've got a power, all right - the power to read minds when I'm hypnotized, that's all. You know medicine, and you know what the doctors say about your stomach trouble. All I did was pick that knowledge out of your mind and say it back to you a little differently. You admitted yourself that most of what I said agreed exactly with what doctors had already told you."

Layne threw back his head and laughed. "You'll have to do a lot better than that, boy. Sure, a lot of what you told me was identical with my reports. The doctors were right as far as they went, but they didn't go far enough. You went on to the basic cause of my trouble, something nobody even suspected. Then you gave the additional medicines and treatments to cure the cause. You didn't get that out of my mind, because it wasn't there. If that's a fake, then tell me what's improved my health a hundred percent in one week."

"I don't know" Edgar cried wildly. "I don't want to know just go away and let me alone.  Stop messing up my life”  He ran into the darkroom and locked the door.