Psoriatic (Scott Walker)
After Suzie, the darkness is terrifying where it had once been simply there.
If Jack listens closely, he can here the dissonant presence of a great something, waiting for him. It sounds like a Hail Mary, but backward and scrambled and twisted. It sounds like saws. It sounds like the rakish laughter of corpses. It sounds like wind howling through nothing. It sounds like a broken heartbeat stuttering and distorted. Jack huddles in on himself in the darkness, trying to block out the harsh scream of too much-too little sound in the yawning black self-contradictory nothingness.
Coming back is almost as bad as being kept in the darkness. The cruel shriek of sounds gets louder, as if it wants to be heard and remembered, as if it wants to haunt. It grates against him as his senses are dually assaulted by the blackness and the coming corporeal world. He can feel himself being torn in two as he begins to come back.
And then there's one screaming, awful moment that he's terrified he might be pulled back, stuck in the blackness and he's shrieking so loud he can feel his throat tearing out and his teeth bleeding and he knows he's going to be stuck down here on the cross of deprived senses and antithetical awareness, and then he's being yanked back into life and he sucks air into his intact throat and waits for the dissonant sawing in his veins to lessen.