He woke to find a mirror-image of himself seated in a chair at the other end of the room. The other fellow did not look wise. Jack rose disheartened, only to find that he kept meeting after-images of himself in the small rooms of the cottage. When he suddenly turned he got a sense of himself where he had stood before. When he raised a hand to his face the action continued long after it had finished. He could feel the back of a chair pressed tight against his spine minutes beyond the moment he had risen from it. Though he stood, he could still feel the chair beneath him. He saw himself seated in the chair. Then from the chair he looked across at his own standing figure. He could see himself sitting there, scared, heavy-limbed, weighed down white-faced, shivering, because that person, too, was recalling where he had been a moment before.

Was this death, he wondered, when the time came that he did not know in which of the images his consciousness rested? Which was him he did not know.

Scattered round the room were representations of himself, and each viewed the other with trepidation. To go anywhere was to assemble a train of disparate images and fragmentary moments that moved along with him. First he’d wait on the image to catch up with him. In triplicate he moved from the chair to the middle of the floor, to the door. Each self looked at the other to see who was at the fore. Habitual movements, that were once natural, now appeared strange and distorted. Any movement increased his anxiety, and yet to remain still was even more terrifying for then the waiting made the horror in each image climax in his mind. The one mind was shattered into pieces. The pieces were stored in these ghosts that hovered round.

He waited, they waited behind him, the door closed twice, his feet came down the steps many times. Breathing furiously, he walked. Then, he waited on the others to catch up with him. This series of deep-breathing ghosts moved down the white road.

Objects took on other presences. For a certain amount of time the objects remained what they were-chairs, stones, shadows, a holy picture, a bend in the bed, a bottle – then there would be a slight alien encroachment, a vague déjà-vu, but before they could entirely become something else, the hint of change receded.

There was a tilt, a moment of horror. Then the irrefutable presence of the object took over again. A chair soon had a gagging, stifling presence like a clamp.