The face-in-the-floor nightmare: the face leering up from the seams
maple reglet border at seam of ceiling and walls north and south no floor has a face your flashlight showed but didn’t no never did see its eyes’ pupils set sideways and tapered like a cat’s its eyebrows’ \ / and horrid toothy smile leering right at your light all the time you’ve been scanning oh mother a face in the floor mother oh and your flashlight’s beam stabs jaggedly back for the overlooked face misses it overcorrects then centers on what you’d felt but had seen without seeing, just now, as you’d so carefully panned the light and looked, a face in the floor there all the time but unfelt by all others and unseen by you until you knew just as you felt it didn’t belong and was evil: Evil. And then its mouth opens at your light.
Context
The apparition itself. The flashlight's careful inventory of the room buries "the face in the floor" mid-list, so the reader overlooks it exactly as the dreamer does; then punctuation drops away and the sentence panics — the unpunctuated run is authorial syntax-collapse, preserved as written. The face is dream-bound rather than a "real" ghost, but it's the book's first seen apparition, and "felt… but had seen without seeing" is wraith-optics avant la lettre.