Too bad. Garth had gone off the deep end, of course. Just when he was really becoming distinguished, he had cracked. Why didn't they have him in an asylum, Jimmie wondered, staring from the window.
Oddly, the landscape shifted. It blurred and twisted, just like it did when you looked through a pane of bad glass. But he wasn't looking through glass.
The air was tinged with a deep violet color. From somewhere, from nowhere and from everywhere, came a shrill whining note, a screaming frequency that lifted rapidly up the scale. It went quickly out of hearing.
The violet deepened to black and the light was gone. Suddenly knives were tearing at his flesh. His body was racked by a thousand pains.
Jimmie Blake screamed. The scream was choked off into horrible silence.
His father came to the foot of the stairs.
"What's wrong, son?" he called.
There was no answer.
His father went upstairs. Mystified, perplexed, he began to search.
"Jimmie!" he called. "Jimmie!"