...of nightmares

The man was no longer turned toward us; he was now looking at a blind man who walked toward him, feeling the ground with the iron tip of his cane.
He was a tall, blonde, young man, twenty or twenty-five, wearing an elegant windbreaker made of very fine leather, cream coloured, and open over a bright blue pullover. Black goggles hid his eyes. He held in his right hand a white cane with a curved handle. A little boy of about twelve was leading him by the left hand.
For a few seconds, I imagined, against all likelihood, that it was Simon Lecoeur, who was returning disguised as a blind man. Of course, looking at him more carefully, I soon recognised my error: the few points of resemblance that one could find in the general appearance, the dress, or the hairstyle of the two men, were in fact minor.
When the young man with the white cane and his guide got close to the character with the baggy clothes and the physicians bag, they stopped. But none of them gave any sign whatever. There were no salutations, none of those words or gestures of welcome that might have been expected in such circumstances. They remained there without saying a word, face to face, motionless now.
Then, with deliberate precision, in the same even motion, precisely as if the same mechanism are activating three heads, they turned toward us. And they remained that way, petrified once again, motionless now like three statues: the young man with the fair face half-hidden behind his bulky glasses, framed between the little boy on his left and the short man in the shapeless grey suit on his right.
All three kept their eyes fixed on me, the blind man too, I could have sworn it, behind his enormous black lenses. The skinny face of the boy had an extreme, abnormal, ghostly pallor. The ugly features of the short man had frozen into a horrible grimace. The whole group suddenly seemed to me so terrifying that I wanted to scream, as one does to end a nightmare.
But, just as in nightmares, no sound came out of my mouth.Why wasn't Caroline saying anything? And what about Marie, who was standing between the two of us, why wasn't she breaking the spell, bold and casual as children will be? Why was she standing there frozen, rendered speechless too, held in thrall by what enchantment?

[Djinn - Robbe-Grillet, A.]