#page 525

Well, now or never. Go back to the right to save Gestalt.

What Ralph saw then would haunt his dreams for years to come. The left half of the outsider's head caved in as if it had been made of papier-mâché rather than bone. The brown eye jumped in its socket. The thing went to its knees, and its face seemed to liquefy. Ralph saw a hundred features slide across it in mere seconds, there and gone: high foreheads followed low ones, bushy eyebrows and ones so blond they were hardly there, deepset eyes and ones that bulged, lips both wide and thin. Buck teeth protruded, then disappeared; chins jutted and sank. Yet the last face, the one that lingered longest, almost certainly the outsider's true face, was utterly nondescript. It was the face of anyone you might pass on the street, seen at one moment and forgotten the next. Holly swung again, striking the cheekbone this time and driving the forgettable face into a hideous crescent. It looked like something out of an insane children's book. In the end, it's nothing, Ralph thought. Nobody. What looked like Claude, what looked like Terry, what looked like Heath Holmes . . . nothing. Only false fronts. Only stage dressing.

If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

"Don't punish yourself," she heard her say again, but there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.