Gately's hospital visitors (pp. 816–817)
He seemed to sort of sleep. He fever-dreamed of dark writhing storm clouds writhing darkly and screaming on down the beach at Beverly MA, the winds increasing over his head until Herman the polyurethane vacuole burst from the force, leaving a ragged inhaling maw that tugged at Gately’s XXL Dr. Dentons. […] It was now no longer clear if he was little Bimmy or the grown man Don. […] The beach house exploded and his mother flew through the air toward the funnel’s intake, arms and legs threshing, as if swimming in wind. She vanished into the maw and was pulled spinning up into the tornado’s vortex. […] He saw his mother for the last time when lightning lit up the funnel’s cone. She was whirling around and around like something in a drain, rising, seeming to swim, bluely backlit. The burst of lightning was the white of the sunlit room when he came up for air and opened his eyes. His mother’s tiny rotating imago faded against the ceiling.
Context
The Herman/tornado fever-dream, right after Ewell's whispered "I'm scared" and the ceiling coming all the way down. It fuses the whole Gately dream-cycle's materials: Herman the breathing vacuole, the warm deep water of 092's undersea dream, the mother lost upward into a breathing maw — and the waking hinge is seamless: the dream's lightning IS the sunlit room, her imago fading against the very ceiling that breathes. Trimmed: the blue brontosaurus sucked from the crib, the run to the breakers, the dropped Ginsu. "writhing… writhing darkly" as written.