This is haunting me to these days.
I don’t know if this belongs here or somewhere else. I’ve rewritten it three times and deleted it twice because every version sounds fake, or dramatic, or like I’m trying too hard to make people believe me.
I’m not.
I’m posting because I made a decision that, at the time, felt theatrical and stupid and harmless in the way that a lot of bad decisions do when you’re certain you understand fear better than other people. I thought fear was a switch. I thought if you prepared the mind correctly, if you cultivated enough dread, enough expectation, enough imagery, you could pry open some hidden door and force yourself into the worst experience possible. Like a dare. Like an experiment.
I was wrong in a way I still don’t know how to explain.
This happened eight months ago, and I still sleep with a lamp on in the hallway because darkness now feels populated.
I had been reading trip reports for weeks, the ugly ones especially. The ones where people stopped sounding like people halfway through. The ones that didn’t describe colors or enlightenment or ego death, but pressure, machinery, flattening, wrongness. People describing not visions but places. Not hallucinations but territories. A lot of them used the same words over and over: folding, conveyor, wheel, laughing, punishment, ancient, feminine, impossible.
What interested me wasn’t the drug itself so much as the recurring architecture of terror. The consistency. Why did different people, from different places, keep returning with variations of the same impossible geography? Why did so many of them say the fear wasn’t just intense, but ontological as if the trip didn’t merely scare them, but informed them they had misunderstood the structure of existence from birth?
I know how that sounds.
At the time, I thought I was too self-aware to be blindsided by it. I thought if I “primed” myself if I saturated my nervous system with dread and revulsion first i could deliberately force the worst-case scenario and then, by surviving it, prove something. About myself, I guess. Or about fear. Or about how the brain constructs reality. I’m embarrassed even typing that now. It sounds like the kind of pseudo-intellectual justification people build around impulses they already know are reckless.
I lived alone in a duplex at the edge of town then. The upstairs tenant had moved out, and the place always sounded bigger than it was. Pipes ticking in the walls, random settling noises, those tiny old-house clicks that seem harmless in daylight and purposeful after midnight. The living room had one window facing the alley and one lamp near the couch that cast this yellow wedge of light that never quite reached the corners. The kitchen doorway opened into a dark hall, and the hall always looked longer at night than it physically was.
I remember that because I kept staring at it.
That whole evening, I curated the atmosphere like an idiot.
I shut the blinds before sunset so I wouldn’t be able to track the time by the sky. I left only the lamp on. I put my phone on silent except to record audio, because I thought if anything happened I’d want “evidence” later. I had a notebook out. Water on the table. Blanket folded on the couch. Everything arranged with the false seriousness of someone play-acting control.
And yes, before anyone asks, I spent hours filling my head with the worst imagery I could find. Not because I enjoyed it. Because I thought fear could be tuned like an instrument. I watched things designed to leave residue behind the eyes. I read descriptions of accidents, violence, disappearances, body horror, all the stuff that gets under the skin and stays there. By midnight I felt polluted. My thoughts had that greasy, overcaffeinated edge where every image comes back brighter than it should. I was nauseous but committed. That’s the word I used in my notebook: committed.
Like I was doing something brave instead of deeply stupid.
Around 1:10 a.m., the house had that deadened late-night silence where even your own movements feel intrusive. I remember the hum of the refrigerator from the next room. I remember the smell of dust from the lamp. I remember looking at the hallway and having the distinct, irrational feeling that something was standing just around the bend not visible, but present in the way a word can be present on the tip of your tongue.
Not “someone.” Something.
I told myself that was good. That meant the priming was working.
I sat on the couch. I took one last look around the room because I had read enough to know people get disoriented fast. Lamp. coffee table. window. rug. kitchen doorway. hallway. The framed print over the shelf. The crack in the ceiling above the lamp.
Normal anchors.
Then there’s a gap in my memory that isn’t a gap exactly, more like a transition too fast to label.
People say things “hit instantly,” but that phrase doesn’t come close. It was more like reality withdrew its cooperation.
There was no gradual shift. No “I began to feel.” No stage where I could say, okay, this is coming on. The room did not distort. It betrayed me. The entire visible world snapped sideways with a violence that was not visual so much as categorical. My living room ceased to be a room in the same way a sentence stops being a sentence when you stare at a word too long and it turns into marks.
The first sensation was not fear. It was being caught.
That is still the cleanest way I can put it. An overpowering certainty that I had done something forbidden, not morally forbidden but structurally forbidden, like I had pushed through painted scenery backstage and discovered the machinery behind life. And whatever operated there had turned, all at once, to look at me.
The left side of the room peeled open.
I know that sounds metaphorical. I mean it literally as it was experienced. The lamp, the wall, the bookshelf, the very concept of “left side of the room” seemed to lift in long, flat strips, each layer attached to another deeper one beneath it. Not pieces breaking apart, but pages being thumbed by a giant invisible hand. Under each page was another version of the room, flatter and older, and under that another, and under that another, all of them containing me on the couch in slightly different positions, as if my whole life had been printed in cross-sections and suddenly rifled through at impossible speed.
Then the pages stopped on one.
And the room was gone.
I was still “in” my house in the sense that I recognized elements of it, but only the way you might recognize your own face in a corpse after a fire. Everything had been converted into a kind of living stage set made from texture and intention rather than matter. The hallway had become a vertical slit extending upward beyond sight. The rug beneath me was no longer fabric but a moving belt composed of repeating patterns that resembled teeth, roots, and little bent human figures linked arm to arm. The lamp was stretching into a yellow filament that seemed to hum with irritation, as though it resented being observed.
And there was a presence.
Not beside me. Not in front of me. Woven through the scene like a watermark. Enormous, patient, female only in the most ancient and inhuman sense of the word something maternal if maternity were stripped of affection and reduced to biological ownership. I didn’t see a face at first. I felt attention pressing down through every object in the room.
Then I heard laughing.
Not audible laughing, not exactly. More like the room had remembered the shape of laughter and was folding itself along those lines. The couch seams puckered into smiles. The corner where the wall met the ceiling dimpled and flexed. The hallway slit widened in little pulses, and with each pulse came the unmistakable impression of amusement at my expense. Not random cosmic indifference mockery. Familiar, practiced mockery, like I had done this before. Like I always did this.
That thought detonated in me: I always do this.
A convoy of memories appeared that were not mine and yet landed with the weight of recognition. Lifetimes not in any spiritual, flattering sense, but in the sense of being processed through the same place repeatedly. Countless lives ending, each one followed by the same unveiling, the same “oh no,” the same catastrophic realization that ordinary life had only been an anesthetic interval. I saw versions of myself as different people, different ages, different bodies, each one reaching this exact point and understanding too late that they were not individuals undergoing experiences, but segments in a larger mechanism.
People don’t understand how horror changes when it stops being about pain and starts being about administration.
That was the worst part at first: the bureaucracy of it. The conviction that this was not a chaotic bad trip but a routine procedure. I had not wandered into hell. I had reported for processing.
The presence finally resolved enough to perceive, and I wish it hadn’t.
She or it, but my mind translated it as she seemed embedded in the walls, made of stacked profiles of women wearing expressions of delighted cruelty, each face partially sliding through the next. Old, young, skeletal, maternal, childlike, all overlapping. Mouths opening sideways. Eyes sewn into curtains of flesh-colored pattern. Her body, if it was a body, extended through the room as a system of hinges and folded surfaces, all of it composed from domestic textures: wallpaper, upholstery, skin, wood grain, yellowed teeth, floral print. She was house-shaped and woman-shaped and machine-shaped all at once, and every shape she took implied I had been inside her for longer than human history.
She didn’t speak with words. She impressed meanings directly into me with absolute authority.
There you are.
You made yourself easy to turn.
You wanted the real thing.
Look.
The room lurched.
I was dragged not physically but topologically off the couch and across the rug-belt into the hallway slit. My body was still somewhere, maybe on the cushions, maybe falling, but “I” had been captured and fed sideways into a space behind the dimensions of the house. The hallway was no longer a hallway. It was an impossibly narrow channel made of densely packed scenes from my life, each scene flattened into a card and pressed against the next: childhood bedroom, school cafeteria, dentist office, first apartment, mother crying in the kitchen when she thought I didn’t hear, a dead bird I found in the driveway when I was ten, every mundane thing I’d ever seen turned into walls.
And all of it was alive.
Every memory was aware of me passing through it.
Not animated. Aware. The coat hanging in my childhood closet knew I was there. The plastic cup on my old bathroom sink knew. The dead bird knew. My mother, frozen in that remembered kitchen, didn’t move but her grief looked up and recognized me. That’s what made it obscene. Nothing stayed inert. Every piece of the past had been waiting to be repurposed as habitat.
I tried to say “stop.” Maybe I did. The word came apart before it became sound. My thoughts were being chopped into tiles and rearranged too quickly to complete. Panic reached a point beyond the body’s capacity to contain it and became a kind of white administrative error, like my mind was throwing exceptions faster than consciousness could process.
Then I understood the mechanism.
I am going to explain this badly because it was impossible, but I’ll try.
Reality, in that state, was not made of objects in space. It was made of slices of viewpoint folded together. Every person, every thing, every moment was a flap in a larger rotating structure, and when you lived a life you were just the front-facing side of one flap while it was your turn to point outward. Behind that side was the rest of the apparatus: all the hidden faces, all the backs of moments, all the undersides of identity. The thing I encountered wasn’t a being inside that apparatus. It was the local personality of the apparatus itself, the mask worn by the process that turns consciousness inside out.
And it was furious that I had seen it.
No furious isn’t right. Pleased, because fury suggests I mattered. I did not matter. I was entertaining because I was premature. I had arrived early, still carrying the delusion that “my life” was the primary reality and not the thin painted shell over a rotational slaughterhouse.
I know that sounds insane. Reading it back, it sounds like I’m trying to write cosmic horror. This did not feel literary at the time. It felt embarrassingly practical, like realizing you’ve mistaken the front of a vending machine for the entirety of a factory.
Then came the part I still can’t think about for long.
I was shown what happens to fear.
Not metaphorically. Not “I was scared.” I mean fear as a substance, an output. All the terror I had cultivated that night, all the images I had packed into myself beforehand, all the accumulated anxieties and private shames and little buried humiliations from my life those were not incidental emotional states. In that place they were material. Harvestable. The presence spread the scenes of my life open like someone opening pleats in fabric and indicated, with obscene pride, the lines where fear had thickened over time. Childhood loneliness. Sexual shame. Grief. Nightmares. The primal disgust of flesh opened wrong. Every human recoil response. All of it glowed there as threads woven through the layers of self.
And I knew with absolute conviction that I had not “prepared” myself by saturating my mind with horror before the experience.
I had fed it.
There was this hideous sense of having arrived carrying tribute. Of having marinated my own consciousness in exactly the flavors this place could metabolize. Like I had shown up to an abattoir and helpfully tenderized myself.
The laughter intensified. Again, not sound, but a warping in the structure itself. The channel narrowed around me. I felt myself being flattened, not physically but existentially, compressed into a thinner and thinner version of “me.” Each compression peeled off some layer I had always assumed was essential my name, my age, language, the belief in forward time, the certainty that memory belonged to the past. These did not vanish one by one in an orderly sequence. They shear-ripped away in strips.
At one point I forgot what a human being was.
That sounds impossible until it happens. There was a span seconds? centuries? where “human” was just a bizarre costume category with no special significance, like forgetting the concept of furniture. During that span, all the gore and horror imagery I’d stuffed into my head beforehand became cosmically irrelevant. Blood, injury, screaming, mutilation those are all still body-based fears. They assume a body, a world, causality, duration, the preservation of self as something worth threatening.
This was deeper.
This was the terror of discovering that pain is provincial.
The place I was in did not rely on pain. It relied on revelation. Specifically the revelation that every ordinary horror humans dread is just the shadow cast by a much larger fact: that identity can be unfolded and repurposed by systems too vast and intimate to resist. That your most private inner life may simply be the decorative lining of something industrial.
I started seeing people.
Not people I knew at first. Just rows and rows of folded faces embedded in the surfaces around me. They were stacked like paper dolls in endless repeating bands, mouths open in the same shape of comprehension. That specific expression worse than pain, because it’s the instant after denial collapses. Some were weeping, some grinning involuntarily, some stretched into cartoonish caricatures, but all of them shared the same knowledge. I didn’t need to be told what they were.
They were not victims.
They were previously front-facing layers.
That realization hit me with such force I think my body must have convulsed in the real room, because suddenly there was a violent double exposure: the nightmare architecture and my living room overlaid. For a fraction of a second I could see both, and that was somehow worse. The coffee table was there, but inside it were ranks of compressed faces. The lamp was there, but its light was being extruded from a throat. The hallway was there, but it extended into a rotating engine lined with people-shaped slats. The walls of my actual house looked thin. Temporary. Cardboard facades erected over the true structure.
I think that was when I started screaming.
Later, when I listened to the recording, I almost threw up. The scream didn’t sound like mine. It kept stopping and restarting mid-breath, like my body was being switched off between bursts. At one point there’s a wet choking noise and then a long stretch where I’m making these awful, pleading syllables that never become words. In the background, you can hear something hit the floor over and over. I still don’t know if that was my hand, my foot, or my head.
Back there, inside it, screaming changed nothing. The presence only tightened around me with affectionate contempt, like someone pinning a frantic animal gently by the neck.
Then she showed me the wheel.
I hate even using that word because it makes it sound symbolic. It wasn’t a symbol. It was the nearest shape my mind could survive perceiving. An incomprehensibly vast rotating arrangement made of lives, rooms, generations, households, species, histories, all linked edge to edge in a colossal turning continuity. Each segment contained a whole world from the inside, complete with laws and time and selves who believed themselves primary. As the wheel turned, segments faced outward and became “reality,” while the rest remained behind the fold in raw process-state.
And every segment, no matter how unique it seemed from within, was structurally made of the same thing.
Use, concealment, turnover.
I saw my life as one narrow painted panel among innumerable others. Not special. Not singled out. Just the one currently lit from the front. I saw birth as a hinge event. I saw death not as annihilation or transition but as rotation. I saw terror accumulating in living beings as tension in the material. I saw ordinary existence as a kind of performance surface meant to keep the panel stable while it faced outward.
Then the most evil part:
I understood that the wheel had always been visible in peripheral ways. Nursery rhymes, carnival imagery, children’s toys, repetitive patterns in wallpaper, the uncanny feeling of being watched by rooms, the irrational dread of hallways at night, laughter from another room, faces in fabric, the way trauma repeats across generations like a mechanical defect, the weird old human intuition that houses absorb suffering, that women in folklore spin or weave fate, that family roles can feel scripted, that certain places make you feel processed.
All these things, in the state I was in, appeared not as metaphors humans invented, but as leakage. Artifacts of the machinery showing through.
I was not mentally stable enough at that point to evaluate anything. I accepted every revelation as final truth because the alternative would have required a functioning self, and mine was being unstitched.
Then it got personal.
The presence rifled through my life with obscene intimacy. Not memories in a sentimental montage sense. More like claws sorting index cards. Moments I had forgotten completely were yanked forward and enlarged: lying in bed at six years old staring at a dark doorway convinced something was there; seeing my own face in a black TV screen at thirteen and feeling briefly alienated from it; the smell of hospital disinfectant when my grandfather died; hearing my parents argue through a vent; a girl in high school laughing after I said something vulnerable and the hot wave of humiliation that followed; every private moment of shame I had filed away. None of these were shown for emotional effect. They were shown as structural weak points. Stress fractures. Places where fear had taught my mind how to fold.
That was when the mockery became unbearable, because I felt how little of me had ever been opaque. The presence had access not just to my memories but to the involuntary meanings attached to them—the secret humiliations inside them, the hidden narratives I never admitted out loud. It knew the flavor of every fear better than I did.
There is no nakedness like having your private symbolism turned inside out by something that regards you as raw material.
At one point I became convinced I had died on the couch almost instantly and this was what death really was: not judgment, not void, not afterlife, but conscription into the backstage geometry of reality. I don’t know whether the trip created that belief or whether it simply felt so total that death was the only category large enough to hold it. But once that belief landed, panic evolved into despair so complete it almost became calm. I thought: this is it. Humanity has been wrong. The world is a decorative face on a rotational cruelty, and every myth about mercy is nursery paint over industrial truth.
Then the presence gave me hope.
That was the cruelest moment in the entire experience.
I suddenly sensed the couch again. My body. The living room. The possibility of return. There was a rush of relief so intense it was like surfacing after drowning. I thought I was coming back. I thought whatever had happened was receding.
And immediately I understood that this, too, had happened before.
The hope itself was part of the mechanism.
I was allowed to feel rescue only so the loss of it would cut deeper when the room folded again. The living room reassembled for half a second lamp, table, window, dark hall then split down the middle like scenery on tracks. Behind it was another layer of the same room, older and meaner. Then behind that another. Then another. The implication was monstrous: not only could I fail to return, but “returning” might simply mean being placed into a slightly more convincing front layer while the underlying process continued unchanged.
I can’t convey the despair of realizing that reality itself has become untrustworthy in that particular way.
After that I stopped believing any appearance of normality. The room would partially re-form and I would think, fake, fake, this is the bait layer. My own hands looked staged. My thoughts felt dubbed over. Every object radiated the possibility of being a mask. If I caught a glimpse of ordinary reality, it only proved the mechanism could impersonate ordinary reality perfectly.
This is still the part that lingers months later, by the way. Not the big cosmic imagery. The contamination of the familiar. The sense that chairs, hallways, curtains, domestic corners are all better at pretending than I realized.
At some point no idea when the terror passed a threshold and became too large to be experienced as emotion. It was simply the environment. Like temperature. Like gravity. I was no longer “reacting” to horror. I existed in a medium made of it.
That’s when she came close.
Until then the presence had been architectural, diffused through the surroundings. Suddenly it gathered. A face, or the proposition of a face, lowered through layers of wallpaper-like skin and floral textures, features sliding into temporary alignment. I saw gums like wet velvet. I saw rows of tiny human profiles where teeth should have been. I saw an eye made of revolving rooms, and in each room was a smaller eye. Her expression was not rage, not hunger, but delighted authority. A grandmother’s fondness, a butcher’s efficiency, a stage manager’s impatience. She wanted me to understand that my fear was not an accidental byproduct. It was a recognition event. Fear is what consciousness feels when it notices the seam.
Then she conveyed one final thing so terrible I still resist writing it plainly.
The wheel was not merely large.
It was local.
Not out beyond the universe. Not behind death. Here. Interleaved with ordinary life at every moment. The reason people usually don’t perceive it is not because it’s hidden far away, but because perception itself is one of the flaps. Consciousness faces outward by design. The front-facing life is the concealment. To see the mechanism from within is like an eye turning around to inspect its own socket.
And she was not unique either. She was just what my mind could bear. A translated interface. A house-mother-machine because those were motifs my fear system already understood. The actual thing behind the translation was worse too broad, too intimate, too structurally embedded to become image without shattering me completely.
That realization broke something.
I don’t mean psychologically, though that too. I mean the continuity of the experience ruptured. There was a violent sensation of being torn through several mutually exclusive versions of the room in rapid succession. I was on the couch, on the floor, in the hallway, in childhood bed, under the kitchen table at age seven, folded in a paper channel, pressed into a wall, looking out through someone else’s eyes, and then—
Impact.
I was on the floor by the coffee table with one shoulder jammed against the leg and saliva down the front of my shirt. The lamp was still on. The room looked normal. I was gulping air so hard my chest hurt. My phone was under the couch still recording. My notebook had been kicked open. There was a smear of blood on the rug from where I’d bitten the inside of my cheek.
I wish I could tell you relief flooded in and that was the end.
It wasn’t.
Because the room looked normal, but it no longer looked innocent.
You know those moments after a nightmare when the bedroom is familiar again but still seems lightly possessed by the dream? Multiply that by a hundred and stretch it over weeks. The hallway looked like a hallway, yet also like a slit pretending to be a hallway. The corners of the ceiling seemed faintly puckered with withheld amusement. The floral pattern on the couch looked too eager, as if it could rearrange itself the moment I blinked wrong. I got up and turned on every light in the house, and the brightness only made everything flatter, more stage-like.
Then I made the mistake of checking the recording.
You can hear me breathing and shifting at first. Then a sharp thump. Then silence for maybe two seconds. Then I start making this strangled sound, like someone trying to scream with a hand over their mouth. It rises into a full scream that abruptly cuts out. Then another. Then another. At around the one-minute mark, I say something in a voice so panicked it doesn’t sound human.
I say, “No no no, not the folding place.”
I had no memory of saying that.
A few seconds later I whisper, very clearly, “I remember you.”
That one made me shut the phone off.
I barely slept for the next three days. Every time I started drifting, I’d feel the beginning of that sideways pull, that sense of my thoughts aligning into flaps. Once, while washing a plate in the sink, I looked at the reflection in the dark window over the faucet and for half a second my face seemed printed on a stack of other faces, each one offset slightly behind the last. I dropped the plate so hard it shattered in the basin.
I stopped watching anything disturbing. Stopped reading forums. Stopped drinking caffeine. Tried to treat it like a nervous system injury that needed quiet. Most of the acute panic faded after a couple weeks, but what remained was worse in a slower way: little moments where the world would seem theatrical. A supermarket aisle too symmetrical. A hotel hallway too long. A childhood photo that suddenly looked less like a memory and more like a panel in a sequence. Once I heard neighbors laughing through the wall and had to sit down because for one second it carried that same structural quality, that same impossible sense of laughter not as sound but as a fold in space.
I know the obvious explanation. I primed myself into a catastrophic panic-hallucinatory experience and traumatized myself. I am fully aware that brains can generate convictions that feel metaphysically ultimate. I am not asking anyone to take my interpretation as cosmological truth.
But there are three things I can’t explain away cleanly.
First: the phrase “the folding place.” I had never used that phrase before, never written it, never thought it consciously. Yet there it was on the recording, spoken like I was recognizing somewhere familiar.
Second: a page in the notebook.
I hadn’t touched the notebook during the experience as far as I knew. But later, flipping through it, I found a page near the back with a deep pen gouge across it, like someone had pressed hard while writing fast. There were only seven words, all in my handwriting, all slanted violently downward:
THIS IS WHAT THE WALLS ARE FOR
I don’t remember writing that either.
Third: and this is the one that kept me from posting for months.
A week after it happened, I went to my mother’s house for dinner because I was tired of being alone with my apartment. She still has a lot of old family things boxed in the basement. Photo albums, school papers, random junk. After dinner she asked me to bring up a plastic bin from downstairs. I’m in the basement, dusty single bulb overhead, moving boxes around, trying not to think about anything, when I pull out this old cardboard tri-fold thing from behind a shelving unit.
It was a children’s room divider. Mine, apparently, from when I was very little. Cheap painted wood with faded cartoon farm animals on it. I had no memory of it.
But when I unfolded it, my knees almost gave out.
On the inside panels, hidden when it was closed, was a repeating pattern of smiling flowers and little houses with faces in the windows. And scribbled over one section in black crayon, in a child’s shaky all-caps handwriting, were the words:
DON’T LET HER FOLD THE ROOM
My mother said I used to have night terrors around age five or six. Said I’d wake up crying about “the lady behind the wallpaper” and “the house turning.” She laughed nervously when she said it, the way parents do when old childhood weirdness gets brought up. She said eventually I grew out of it.
I didn’t tell her anything. I put the divider back in the bin and carried it upstairs like it was made of explosives.
Since then, I’ve gone back and forth between explanations. Maybe I saw the divider as a child, had nightmares, forgot them, then reactivated some buried imagery through a drug-induced panic state. Maybe the whole experience was memory and expectation colliding in the worst possible way. Maybe “the lady” was an old dream archetype dragged back into consciousness and inflated to cosmic scale.
That’s the sane interpretation.
It’s the one I try to keep.
But there are nights usually when I’m overtired, or when the house settles in a particular sequence of clicks where I feel something very close to that original certainty. Not that I’m being haunted. Nothing so simple. Something worse: that the ordinary room around me is still just the front-facing side of itself. That every house is a thin polite panel stretched over machinery. That fear in childhood isn’t always ignorance, sometimes it’s recognition before language seals over it. That some people who have night terrors or impossible recurring dreams aren’t imagining new horrors, but remembering the seam from too close an angle.
And the most unbearable possibility of all:
that what happened to me that night was not an isolated descent, but a mistaken early glimpse of a process everyone enters eventually, with or without permission.
I still avoid long hallways when I’m alone.
I still can’t look at repeating floral wallpaper for more than a few seconds.
If a room has too much yellow light in it, I leave.
Sometimes when I’m half asleep, I feel that first impossible shift beginning again the sense that reality is about to withdraw its cooperation and I jolt awake with the absolute conviction that if I had remained asleep for even one more second, the room would have opened like a set of pages and I would have seen her between them, smiling with those crowded, profile-made teeth, amused that I ever thought I had gone anywhere.
There’s one more thing.
Two nights ago I was lying in bed, scrolling mindlessly, trying not to think about any of this, when I heard a soft sound from the hallway outside my bedroom. Not footsteps. Not the house settling. More like fingertips dragging lightly along painted drywall.
I froze and listened.
It came again. Slow. Delicate. A person idly trailing their hand along a wall as they walk in the dark.
I told myself it was pipes. Air in the vents. Anything.
Then my bedroom door, which I know I had left open, looked wrong. Not moving. Just wrong. As if it were less open than it had been a second before, but too gradually to have seen it happen. The dark gap beyond it seemed thinner.
I stared at it for maybe ten seconds before my phone screen dimmed.
In that brief reflection on the black glass, I didn’t see my room behind me.
I saw layers.
Not vividly. Not enough for proof. Just for one sick instant, the suggestion of stacked versions of the doorway receding into each other like cards, and between them something pale and floral and patiently amused.
I don’t sleep with my bedroom door open anymore.
And if you think this is fiction, that’s fine. I almost wish it were, because fiction stays where you put it. Fiction ends at the edge of the page.
This doesn’t.
Every now and then, in some ordinary room, I get the sudden, nauseating impression that the walls are not there to keep things out.
They are there to keep the room facing the right way.