You wailed and tipped backwards as you ran, falling heavily—throwing yourself, in fact, from upright to supine upon the ground—choking on air and tongue. You lost sight of the man as you continued to slide forward, below the level of the table; you could see only the broad, heavy beams holding the central horizontal plane above you.
You blinked rapidly, through a number of small pains, glancing and darting with your eyes, seeking his current location and movement, even though it had been only fractions of a single second, call it that, since he had been clearly revealed before you. You tensed your torso and limbs, or co-opted their existing pre-tensed state, to give yourself a more stable base as you whipped your neck around. You remember only the fat pad under your chin pressing and rubbing at the upper part of your chest; any actual details of the room at the time are entirely absent from your recollection. You flapped your head, lids as wide as you could make them, in the hope that you would see some shadow or edge of the man as he skittered past, wherever he might be, before he leapt upon and bit you, if indeed he would do such a thing, which you had no reason to believe. You focused for a while on the invisible space immediately to you rear, tried to find him approaching from some blind-spot, even though you believed that only singles of seconds had passed, it had surely been more than that, tried to catch him as he moved as close as possible before revealing his pattern of attack.
This was your strategy then: from fat-pad-on-chest to crown-propped against the floor, neck and spine craning, you directed yourself as though you could see, as though you were not blinded in panic. You moved your head compulsively forward and back and from side-to-side, if those could even be called distinct states. Rather you turned your head continuously in great circles bounded by those points, at speed, while you revolved your eyes—small orbits within the larger—trying to take in as much of the room as you were able. You have no particular recollection of what you saw; it seems unlikely that you could have perceived anything at all in such a condition, save only the vaguest impression, something based entirely on motion or the lack of it. Your next actual memory is of a growing nausea, though not to eruption, at a point some dozens of seconds later: you have no real sense of the time involved, this scale is pointless. As you retched and keened, dry of eye and throat, with stone dread in your gut, you recognised that this was not at all the optimum manner in which to have approached the situation. Despite anything which may have happened previously, there was almost certainly now no rational way to escape the upcoming scenario, whatever it may be, without your taking harm or fit retribution. You hoped for some unforeknowable incongruity to jut itself across the situation, for an insight, random and complete, on this man’s behalf to save you. You hoped that he was both smarter and more merciful, wiser and sadder than yourself; you hoped that he would spare you and help you and heal you, perhaps even be a mentor to you in this place and so grow in his love of you and yours of him until, call it paternally, you parted, some time far in the future, melancholy but enlightened, better prepared for the things which you would find yourself having to face, whatever they might be.
Time, such as it was, continued to pass in snatches as you embellished this fantasy, until you fell furiously and strenuously unconscious.