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The Enormous Room by E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings
page 87 of 322 (27%)

I had taken automatically some six or eight steps in pursuit of the
fleeing spectre when, right over my head, the grey stone curdled with a
female darkness; the hard and the angular softening in a putrescent
explosion of thick wriggling laughter. I started, looked up, and
encountered a window stuffed with four savage fragments of crowding Face:
four livid, shaggy disks focussing hungrily; four pair of uncouth eyes
rapidly smouldering; eight lips shaking in a toothless and viscous
titter. Suddenly above and behind these terrors rose a single horror of
beauty--a crisp vital head, a young ivory, actual face, a night of firm,
alive, icy hair, a white, large, frightful smile.

... The thing was crying two or three paces in front of me: "Come!" The
heads had vanished as by magic.

I dived forward; followed through a little door in the wall into a room
about fifteen feet square, occupied by a small stove, a pile of wood, and
a ladder. He plunged through another even smaller door, into a bleak
rectangular place, where I was confronted on the left by a large tin bath
and on the right by ten wooden tubs, each about a yard in diameter, set
in a row against the wall. "Undress" commanded the spectre. I did so. "Go
into the first one." I climbed into the tub. "You shall pull the string,"
the spectre said, hurriedly throwing his cigarette into a corner. I
stared upward, and discovered a string dangling from a kind of reservoir
over my head: I pulled: and was saluted by a stabbing crash of icy water.
I leaped from the tub. "Here is your napkin. Make dry yourself"--he
handed me a piece of cloth a little bigger than a handkerchief. "Hurree."
I donned my clothes, wet and shivering and altogether miserable. "Good.
Come now!" I followed him, through the room with the stove, into the
barbed-wire lane. A hoarse shout rose from the yard--which was filled
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