...of a fright

There was no answer. I had expected none; possibly even then I did not expect Judith to answer, just as a child, before the full instant of comprehended terror, calls on the parent to whom it actually knows (this before the terror destroys all judgement whatever) is not even there to hear it. I was crying not to someone, something, but (trying to cry) through something, through that force, that furious yet absolutely rocklike and immobile antagonism which had stopped me - that presence, that familiar coffee-coloured face, that body (the bare coffee-coloured feet motionless on the bare floor, the curve of the stair rising just beyond her) no larger than my own which, without moving, with no alteration of visual displacement whatever (she did not even remove her gaze from mine for the reason that she was not looking at me but through me, apparently still musing upon the open door’s serene rectangle which I had broken) seemed to elongate and project upward something - not soul, not spirit, but something rather of a profoundly attentive and distracted listening to or for something which I myself could not hear and was not intended to hear - a brooding awareness and acceptance of the inexplicable unseen, inherited from an older and a purer race than mine, which created postulated and shaped in the empty air between us that which I believed I had come to find (nay, which I must find, else breathing and standing there, I would have denied that I was ever born) - that bedroom long-closed and musty, that sheetless bed (that nuptial couch of love and grief) with the pale and bloodless corpse in its patched and weathered gray crimsoning the bare mattress, the bowed and unwived widow kneeling beside it - and I (my body) not stopping yet (yes, it needed the hand, the touch, for that) - I, self-mesmerised fool who still believed that what must be would be, could not but be, else I must deny sanity as well as breath, running, hurling myself into that inscrutable coffee-coloured face, that cold implacable mindless (no, not mindless: anything but mindless: his own clairvoyant will tempered to amoral evil’s undeviating absolute by the black willing blood with which he crossed it) replica of his own which he had created and decreed to preside upon his absence, as you might watch a wild distracted nightbound bird flutter into the brazen and fatal lamp...

[Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner, W.]