My only body consciousness was the heavy _thud_ ... _thud_ ... _thud_ of blood being driven through my veins. I toyed with stopping the thudding, feeling and savoring the pause between those sledge-hammer strokes on my brain--knowing that any one of those pauses lengthened to eternity was death. Suddenly I shrieked and sat upright. For an instant, my body had completely stopped and I had known it. Only a nameless grasping fear had snatched me back. My heart beat wildly as I gasped for air. With shaking hands, I poured a drink and gulped it down. It had been close. Still trembling, I arose and slumped into a chair. I had to organize myself, to think my way along this thing. What had happened to me? This one thing I knew: I _could_ do it. I could stop my body at will and I had done it, if only for a second. This thought reassured me or perhaps the brandy opened my reserve of courage, for I had been sitting in the chair some time. * * * * * With caution, I approached the pallet. I regarded it with suspicion, as though there were a deadly scorpion in its folds. Then, jeering at my hesitation, I lay down and composed myself as before. The clock said 5:05. I stirred again only to record this on the pad. Despite my nervousness, things proceeded faster this time. A morbid excitement carried me along the path I now already knew. And at its end, I flirted with the _stopping_. Going over and stepping back, going over and stepping back. It was a pleasure exquisite and unique. Once felt, it was unresistable. I was no longer afraid. I did not have to be. I could stop my body and start it at will. So I let it slip away from me. The thuddings ceased and only the pauses remained--silent, shapeless things in endless procession. And then the great silence. It flowed over me and I was lost. The silence was too heavy and my thoughts were not my own; they floated up away from me in the silence. I could feel them go, but there was nothing to bring them back. Each thought of protest winged its way into a void with all the rest. And nothing else remained but the will to live. As the silence lapped around this will, it grew until it alone was I. The silence washed about it, but it stood. Then the little rippings and the slicings and the tearings and the softening of things were there--heard without sound, felt without feeling, like the pulling of a tooth from a novocaine-deadened jaw. It was then I saw the face. Have you ever felt the terror of suddenly waking with a face--a face of eyes--staring into your unguarded and bewildered first glance? One feels as if this face would look into one's very life and wrest it from him. Perhaps it is a nascent fear of one's own mask of death. But I could not escape the mask. It loomed above me with gaping maw and staring eyes; eyes that seemed more dead and deadly as my vision cleared. The mirror enlarged the horror that lay below it.