“As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing,what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not the slightest inkling was there … it was total horror. It was all horror everywhere, distilled and given form. It rose in me, out of me, summoned somehow by the odd confluence of the fan and those notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more horrible than I shall ever have the power to convey. I dropped my violin and ran from the room … Shapelessness was one of the horrible things about it. I can say and mean only shape, dark, and either billowing or flapping. But because the horror receded the moment I left the room, within minutes it had become unreal. The shape and horror. It seemed to have been my imagination, some random bit of psychic flatulence, an anomaly”…
“I returned shortly to the room and the fan and picked up the violin again. And produced the same resonance again immediately. And immediately again the black flapping shape rose in my mind again. It was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I’ve ever confronted … Set free somehow by that one-day-only resonance of violin and fan, the dark shape began rising out of my mind’s corner on its own. I dropped the violin again and ran from the room once again, clutching my head at the front and back, but this time it did not recede… . It was as if I’d awakened it and now it was active. It came and went for a year. I lived in horror of it for a year, as a child, never knowing when it would rise up billowing and blot out all light. After a year it receded. I think I was ten. But not all the way. I’d awakened it somehow. Every so often. Every few months it would rise inside me … The last time it ever rose up billowing was my second year of college … One sophomore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time in years. It is the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt. There is no possible way death can feel as bad. It rose up. It was worse now that I was older … I thought I’d have to hurl myself out of my dormitory’s window. I simply could not live with how it felt … Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat with me until it went away. It took most of the night. We didn’t converse; he didn’t try to comfort me. He spoke very little, just sat up with me. We didn’t become friends. By graduation I’d forgotten his name and major. But on that night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself … It’s never come back.”
