And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.

His brain convulsed,
his mind split open.
Vertigo, hysteria, lurchings
and launchings came over him,
he staggered and flapped desperately,
he was revolted by the thought of known places
and dreamed strange migrations.

He is a writer. He makes the rest of them nervous.

To the man who is afraid everything rustles.

It was more than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world fused into wriggling, poison-jawed horror. It was every anxiety, insecurity, and fear in his life given a hideous, night-black form.

He’d lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he’d almost forgotten what real fear was.

I am a shipwrecked man who fears every sea.

His unconscious was rapidly becoming a well-stocked pantheon of tutelary phobias and obsessions, homing onto his already over-burdened psyche like lost telepaths.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.

As so often happens in life, he had thought so much and so often of the situation that now confronted him that he was somewhat nervous in its presence.

Everything seemed to flood over him then. It was as though he’d been the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, refusing to let the sea of reason in.

His mind had been unhinged by the blast of detonators, nights spent with corpses and by the superstitious incredulity of having killed so many white men.

And something inside the young man cracked. The small compartment in the back of his mind, where man closets his fears, ties them up, controls and commands them, broke open and they surged across brain and nerves and muscles — a nightmare flood in open rebellion.

Almost like being in the nightmare, that same feverish blur of the world slipping off its axis, but this time <i>he</i> was the one in control, this time <i>he</i> was the nightmare.