Perpetual Uncertainty

The decisiveness that seemed to have taken hold of me only day before yesterday has vanished, and once again I am at a loss regarding the direction my life will take. For one, the journey I'd planned, to a city where I'd hoped to learn more of the problem of "lycanthropy," became suddenly untenable, at least for the time being. For another, my night was once again occupied with tracking the beast, an occupation which has come to seem oddly futile. In Caledon, fear of this thing is waning, and why should it not? To date, no one has been harmed by the beast, save Miss Gloriana Maertens, and her harm was minor and appears to have been accidental. The peril begins to seem less perilous.

Just before dusk, I strolled across Babbage to Capt. Susenko's estate. Miss Maertens was there, as was Col. Scaggs and his betrothed. As was Mr. Sin. The latter took suddenly ill as the sun began to sink over the sea, just as he'd taken ill at my flat only the day before. He walked to the sea wall and was rather violently sick, then quickly took his leave. Already, I had confided in the Capt. that the gathering felt somewhat like a masquerade, as I was quite certain that Mr. Lucius Sin and the creature were, in some manner, one and the same being. When he had gone, as the moon rose and conversation turned towards the creature, I asked if I might speak freely. When Capt. Susenko said that I might, I told all assembled there what I had discovered, and the methods of my discovery. Miss Maertens seemed unable to accept this possibility, and when asked what my plan was, I confessed that I had no plan. Only the information I'd presented. How does one lay a trap for a "monster" that seems able to escape any and all traps? Later, we traveled to Caledon, where the beast was once again on the prowl, but at no point did I catch sight of it.

Miss Paine has become entirely obsessed with the creature, though I have asked her to please show more caution in her investigation. She is an impetuous girl, and I fear she will not heed my words. But what matter, if the beast should prove harmless?

And here I am, pretending my mind is seriously occupied with the problem of Mr. Lucius Sin, when so much else is at stake and when far more terrible and fantastic thoughts press in upon me. I have been once more visited by Mr. Oolon Sputnik, who I had almost come to believe I would never see again. I was taken into his fabulous cabinet, the time-traveling device Miss Lightfoot called a TARDIS and which he refers to as the ETC. I wished to record this in my last entry, but there was so little time, as I believed my departure from Babbage was imminent. And even now, I hesitate to record any particulars. He asked if he might conduct certain tests upon my person, and I was at a loss to refuse. I know, in my heart, that there is some strange convergence in our questioning of my identity, and I hoped that the answers to these tests might, in turn, answer questions of my own. He spoke of some substance or particulate called "DNA", which I suspect might not be so different from my own theory regarding an essential biological unit, some minute corpuscle which makes a living thing what it is (and which may even survive physical, outward transmutation).

His test, administered after I entered a sort of tank, which seemed both filled with liquid and entirely dry, and in which I was perfectly capable of drawing breath, indicated the presence of the alien "DNA" particles — the Nebari and Kalish, which came as no shock to me. This is the result of the accident I endured at age seventeen, and which left me as I am now. He seemed very preoccupied, and I left not long after the tests were administered. He promised that we would soon have a lengthy conversation about my heritage, and those words should have confused me, but they did not. I know that surely Miss Lightfoot must have relayed to him some details of our conversation, so he is almost undoubtedly aware of my questions concerning "the Eye" and Time Lords and the unknown entity, Sen.

Which brings me to truths I have not yet here spoken of, things I fear even to write down in secret for my own benefit. I feel as though I stand now at the lip of some bottomless chasm, tottering on the precipice, and any movement one way of another may be my undoing. But am I not already undone? Has that not been the problem all along?

I ask these questions "aloud" for the first time. Was Dr. Sadaaki Nishi my true father? Was my mother actually a San Francisco prostitute? What evidence have I of these things but a dead man's word, and the word of a man I have already confessed was not sane? Was the "accident" that stranded me in this world an accident at all, or was it only the next move in some pre-determined play? Was I splintered long before the age of seventeen, long before the more profound disaster of a month ago? Am I merely now the splinter of a splinter? Is the mind and body of Nareth Elenore Nishi naught but a convenient illusion? In my dreams, I have glimpsed and felt and known other versions of myself, versions beyond reckoning. Are they each as valid and whole as this me? And what secrets did my Father take to his grave? Perhaps the same secrets which drove him mad and led to his fatal obsession with time travel?

In the end, I am left wondering if I have ever known my true self, some elder, undivided whole, the memory of which I cannot quite ever seem to grasp. Am I some bizarre specie of changeling? Was the whole from which I might have been cut long ago so divided for a purpose beyond my present comprehension?

These questions would drive anyone mad. But now I have put them down, and soon, I hope, I shall speak of them with Mr. Sputnik. I pray he knows the answers, and that he will share them with me. But I would be a liar if I did not say, also, that the very prospect of those answers terrifies me more than anything ever has terrified me.