Chapter XII Summary

The narrator finds his beloved bicycle and rides to his house, hardly believing that he is actually finding his way home. When he arrives, he sees Divney's girlfriend Pegeen Meers through the window, looking pregnant and much older. Ignoring this oddity for the moment, the narrator enters the house. Divney sits drinking by the fire, next to a young boy. He also looks much older. Divney starts at the sight of the narrator, beginning to convulse and rave that the narrator cannot be there and that Divney killed him with a bomb in the black box hidden in Mathers' house. No one else seems to see the narrator.

The narrator runs off, going past Mathers' house again, and finds himself on the road, having forgotten everything that happened. He approaches the police barracks just as he approached it before, with the...