Kate and Day and the billowing shape
‘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 had the slightest inkling was there.’ ‘But it was inside you, though.’ ‘Katherine, Kate, 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.’
Context
0245h in the Ennet House living room: Geoffrey Day — the House's professional ironist, speaking single-entendre for once — testifies to what a window-fan's vibration plus certain violin notes summoned in his boyhood bedroom. The book's fullest phenomenology of psychotic-depressive horror outside the essay itself, and Kate's quiet interruption — "But it was inside you, though" — is the whole theme's geography in six words.