the Face In The Floor: the Substance unmasked
the last layer of jolly friendly mask comes off your old friend the Substance, it’s midnight now and all masks come off, and you all of a sudden see the Substance as it really is, for the first time you see the Disease as it really is, really has been all this time, you look in the mirror at midnight and see what owns you
Context
The addiction-as-horror-story climax, and the theme's central identity-claim. The Substance is figured throughout as a beloved ("your old friend," "your mother and lover and god and compadre") whose mask finally drops at the Bottom to show the predator underneath — and the terror is that the predator's face is your own in the mirror. The Disease does not afflict a self; it replaces the self, "devoured or replaced and become you," so that by the end there is no person left who has an addiction, only the addiction wearing the person.