The Yellow Fay
At noon the next day Annandale was not awake nor was he asleep. Through spaces in which memories met, entangled and sank, he was groping in search of himself. In these spaces there were things, some formless, others half-formed, that got between consciousness and interfered with the search.
These things pulled at him, tripped him, shoved him down to the memories that were sinking below. The spaces themselves were very dark. But, in the deeper depths, where memories swooned, the darkness was punctuated by slender flames the size of pins. They burned him.
Up and away he tried to rise. When he nearly succeeded, the things above, the things half-formed and formless that were waiting there, pushed him back. Again he tried. But the darkness was thick, the depths were thunderous, the things above pounded on his head, the thin flames lapped at him.
A force took and lifted him high, very high, and suddenly dropped him. In the abrupt descent he clutched at the things, but he was whirled through them to receding plains and up again, higher, still higher. There a ray filtered, in the light of which a memory staggered. He saw himself drinking in the rooms of that girl of Loftus. From there he passed into blankness at the end of which stood Sylvia, her face white and drawn. The vision vanished. Then it seemed to him that he was drinking with a fat man who had prominent teeth which he took from his mouth and changed into dice. But where? In hell, perhaps. Annandale was uncertain. He knew merely that he had been beastly drunk and that his head was simply splitting.