I awoke and yet I knew I was still sleeping for my bed was now, in fact, an island in the middle of an immense lake. Night was approaching although I knew it was nearly dawn for outside – outside, that is, of the dream – a cock continued to crow. However, within my dream, the shadows of evening took the colours from the shifting waters round me and a small wind rustled the quills of the pine trees, for my island was covered with pines. Nothing moved except this little, lonely wind. I waited, for the dream imperiously demanded that I wait and I seemed to wait endlessly. I do not think I have ever felt so alone, as if I were the last living thing left in the world and this island and this lake were all that was left of the world. Presently I saw the object of my vigil. A creature was approaching over the water but it did not assuage my loneliness for though I could see it was alive, it did not seem to be alive in the same sense that I was alive and I shuddered with dread. I know I must have stood in an attitude of awed listening, as if to hear the scratching of the claws of the unknown on the outside rind of the world. The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown; I was afraid. I had been afraid when I was a child, when I would lie awake at night and hear my mother panting and grunting like a tiger in the darkness beyond the curtain and I thought she had changed into a beast. Now I was even more afraid than I had been then. As it drew near, I saw it was a swan. It was a black swan. I cannot tell you how ugly it was; nor yet how marvellous it was. Its vapid eyes were set too close together on its head and expressed a kind of mindless evil that was quite without glamour, though evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant. Its elongated neck had none of the grace traditionally ascribed to the necks of swans but lolled foolishly, now this way, now that, like a length of hose. And the beak, which was the clear, pinkish scarlet of scentless roses, striped with a single band of white, was flat, broad and spatulate, fit only for grubbing worms from mud. It swam remorselessly and terribly towards me but, when only a few yards of shifting water lay between us, it paused to unfurl its enormous wings as if it were opening a heraldic umbrella. Never have I seen such blackness, such a soft, feathered, absolute black, a black as intense as the negation of light, black the colour of the extinction of consciousness. The swan flexed its neck like a snake about to strike, opened its beak and began to sing so that I knew it was about to die and I knew, too, she was a swan and also a woman for there issued from her throat a thrilling, erotic contralto. Her song was a savage, wordless lament with the dramatic cadences of flamenco in a scale the notes of which were unfamiliar to me yet seemed those of an ultimate Platonic mode, an elemental music. The shadows deepened yet one last ray of the invisible sun drew a gleam from a golden collar around her throbbing throat and on the collar was engraved the single word: ALBERTINA. The dream broke like a storm and I woke.

Angela Carter, "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman"