as much as was possible in a tiny bathroom and hope that they wouldn't climb on him again.
Ridiculous, he thought. I, a human being, driven into a corner by some bugs. After all, they are not even poisonous. Nonetheless, he could not overcome his fastidiousness. These creatures always caused an insuperable loathing in him. Always? It seemed that one more remembrance broke out from his unknown past. But cockroaches, probably, were afraid of the man, too. Soon they spread out–some slipping from the room, some running under the curtain–but where the others went, he did not notice.
He raised his eyes from the floor and looked in the mirror over the washstand. It was dusty and dirty too, but in the middle there was an irregular oval seemingly of pure glass, as if someone had hastily wiped a window. The man looked at himself from a distance, then stepped closer, studying with displeasure the unfamiliar sickly pale rumpled face with deep shadows under the eyes and dissheveled tufts of hair sticking out over a bandage. A bandage, yes. His head at forehead level had been sloppily bandaged by something like a used compress. No–he leaned into the mirror even more closely–it was not a gauze bandage with an open weave, but some continuous, dense yellowish-gray fabric with torn, fringed edges. And some bandages somehow stuck–probably dried on–and rags were on many other places of his body, on his neck, his right shoulder, his left forearm, the left side of his breast, his stomach. And scars were on his fingers like marks from rings.
It seemed that something began to clear up. He had been in an accident, received a head injury (not only a head injury), and therefore he could not remember anything. But in that case, where was he? In a hospital? The architecture of the building looked to be government issue. But if it were a hospital, it was closed and abandoned, maybe fifty years ago.
There was no blood on the bandages, nor any pain under them. He touched them, at first delicately, then more firmly. An attempt, however, to tear off at least the long rag crossing his abdomen from top down failed. At first he just simply pulled it, increasing the effort until he felt pain, then sharply jerked several times, each time producing a new impulse of pain. But the bandage held firmly–as if... as if it had grown into his body. No, that was nonsense, he told himself. It will be necessary simply to soak it off. There should be water somewhere around here.
He again lifted his eyes to the person reflected in the mirror and then suddenly recoiled. A huge cockroach ran up the mirror just centimeters from his eyes (it seemed to him–for just a moment–directly on his face). And now he had clearly seen that something was wrong with this insect. First, the cockroach was neither red nor black, but pale, sickeningly whitish. Second, it was too big for a household cockroach. And, more importantly–it had seven legs. Not six, as all other insects, and not even eight, as spiders do–but seven. There were three on the left side and four on the right.
The disgusting creature suddenly stopped in the middle of the mirror, as if to study itself to be convinced that this was no illusion. Overcoming his revulsion, the man looked at the insect for some time. No leg had been torn off. The limbs really grew asymmetrically and, apparently, were even of different lengths. The man helplessly looked around in search of anything with which to kill the freak, then angrily reminded himself that he had much more important problems. He turned to the bath. After all he had already seen, he had no real hope of a working shower, but he still drew aside the curtain.
And stopped dead. The wall over the bath was crossed by a wide inscription obviously made by a finger, generously dipped in something dark red. Only one word: "DESPAIR.”
From sloppy letters, long ago dried, the stains limped downwards. Involuntarily tracking their direction, he lowered his eyes to the bath–and for the first time truly wanted to cry.
At the bottom of the bath, reddened from the dried blood (yes, he could not cowardly convince himself anymore that it was not blood), a naked corpse lay face down. It was a man, not old and in rather good physical shape–though it had not saved him. There was no doubt that it was a corpse and not