Fackelmann's scam; the wraith returns — "just like the secret dread he’s…"
just like the secret dread he’s always felt whenever everybody happened to ever leave the room and left him alone in a room, a terrible stomach-sinking dread that probably dates all the way back to being alone in his XXL Dentons and crib below Herman the Ceiling That Breathed.
Context
The late-afternoon dread audited genealogically: "probably dates all the way back" is the faculty working at its outer limit, inferring an origin it can barely retrieve — the same crib the Dilaudid hallucination (173, p. 915) forces on him chemically, here reached by sober excavation.