It was a pleasure exquisite and unique. Once felt, it was unresistable.
I was no longer afraid. I did not have to be. I could stop my body and start it at will. So I let it slip away from me. The thuddings ceased and only the pauses remained—silent, shapeless things in endless procession. And then the great silence. It flowed over me and I was lost.
The silence was too heavy and my thoughts were not my own; they floated up away from me in the silence. I could feel them go, but there was nothing to bring them back. Each thought of protest winged its way into a void with all the rest.
And nothing else remained but the will to live. As the silence lapped around this will, it grew until it alone was I. The silence washed about it, but it stood.
Then the little rippings and the slicings and the tearings and the softening of things were there—heard without sound, felt without feeling, like the pulling of a tooth from a novocaine-deadened jaw.
It was then I saw the face.
Have you ever felt the terror of suddenly waking with a face—a face of eyes—staring into your unguarded and bewildered first glance? One feels as if this face would look into one's very life and wrest it from him. Perhaps it is a nascent fear of one's own mask of death.
But I could not escape the mask. It loomed above me with gaping maw and staring eyes; eyes that seemed more dead and deadly as my vision cleared. The mirror enlarged the horror that lay below it.
It was the wrench of nausea that pulled me from this nightmare. In the violence of the retching, I rolled from beneath the mirror and raised myself to hands and knees. I had knocked over the clock and it shouted up at me—10:05, July 15. Three days! Too long! Too horribly long!