“I am going crazy.
“Charlie Swann is going crazy, too. Maybe more than I am, because it was his dingbat. I mean, he made it and he thought he knew what it was and how it worked.”
As I read page after page I handed them to Charlie and he read them too. Yes, it was this story. The story you’re reading right now, including this part of it that I’m telling right now. Written before the last part of it happened.
Charlie was sitting down when he finished, and so was I. He looked at me and I looked at him.
He opened his mouth a few times and closed it again twice before he could get anything out. Finally he said, “ T-time, Hank. It had something to do with time too. It wrote in advance just what—Hank, I’ll make it work again. I got to. It’s something big. It’s—”
“It’s colossal,” I said. “But it’ll never work again. Yehudi’s dead. He shot himself upon the stair.”
“You’re crazy,” said Charlie.
“Not yet,” I told him. I looked down at the manuscript he’d handed back to me and read:
“I am going crazy.”
I am going crazy.