SO WHEN did I begin to suspect that I was going mad? When the first of those creatures appeared in the bathtub, perhaps, or when that entity made from exploded, frozen darkness appeared to me in the night? Yes, I came close to doubting my sanity then, although they were real to me, of that I was convinced. Was it when I met Fawnsley, and he told me that a week, not a day, had passed since his telegram to me? Possibly then. Yes, perhaps that really was the start of it. The presence of two more of those strange segmented crustaceans in Maggs’s rooms was simply further proof that, if I was being tormented by my imagination, then it was in a most profound way, and my grip on reality was weakening so much that eventually all doubt would cease, and I would be well advised to end it all with a bullet while some clarity of thought still remained.
But I truly began to fear for my sanity when I returned to Maggs’s quarters, buoyed with Dutch courage and ready to throw his body into the Thames, and found that Maggs was gone. His body no longer lay on the kitchen floor.
And that was not the worst of it. The very rooms themselves had changed: the position of his furniture, the distribution of his books, even the arrangement of his lodgings—all were different. The kitchen was now to the left as one entered, not to the right. The bed was near the doorway, not on the other side of the room. The bookshelves were gone, and the books were now arranged in neat formal piles, like the beads on an abacus.
“No,” I said aloud. “This is not possible.”
But it was. It had happened. I could see it with my own eyes.
I checked the pocket of my coat. The envelope was still there. I looked at the palms of my hands and saw the marks left upon them by the broom handle. I felt giddy, and the whisky was curdling something in my stomach. There was a chair by the window, and I sat down on it and tried to compose myself.
I had been seated for only a few seconds when I observed movement in the shadows of the laneway below. I stayed very still, hidden by Maggs’s filthy, flyspecked lace curtains, and watched as Dunwidge, adrift from his daughter’s anchorage, slipped away into the night.