The Book of Weston

I'm pacing the hallway again, restless, lost in a labyrinth of problems and possible solutions when I feel a sensation like a strong magnet that makes me stop. Something behind the wall is pulling me toward it, into it, and the house grows dark. Hours pass as I search around, groping for a working light switch. And for an agonizing time, there's nothing but darkness, and sometimes shapes gliding silent in the distance, and sometimes spotlights shining through my windows, searching, scanning. I scramble toward them but they flee, leaving me in the swirling dark.

I focus on my only companion, my breath, and on my questionable progress, and after an age, a grey light pervades the house and outlines form. But this is not my house anymore. I am enclosed in an empty carpeted room without windows, doors, or exits except a small dark opening in one wall. I doubt I'll fit but I must try, so I crawl on my belly, barely sliding through the hole, which becomes a winding tunnel, twisting before ending in another empty room: cool, dark, and lined with carpet stretching to infinity in both directions.

I pick one infinity and walk, and the rooms continue unceasingly, separated by occasional doorframes of various shapes and sizes, spaces holding scattered furniture in silence, no sign of life in this corpus of rooms except my muffled footsteps. Then I spy a distant light that draws me forward, but my feet and heart and breath stop when I see the source: a large cocoon glowing, hanging from the center of a final room that terminates in a blank, beige wall.

The cocoon pulses and swings gently, and a shape moves behind the cocoon, oily white appendages caressing its fragile surface, and there is a sound like liquid whispering. I hold my breath, but the shape senses me. The tentacles retreat and coalesce into a humanoid figure wearing a long white coat, white trousers, and polished white shoes. It glides around the cocoon, its face human-like, ovular, pale and glistening, empty of wrinkle, eyes and hair jet black and shiny. It is alien but familiar, as if seen somewhere in some forgotten past. It's still for a moment, calculating, then its eyes widen and it lurches forward, and I yelp and jump back, falling. And once down, an extra gravity prevents me from lifting myself. Panic tightens, and I dare to look up into the figure's eyes that shine as if a fire burned inside its long translucent skull.

How did you get here? it says in a gurgling voice as if its throat is filled with phlegm. You should not be here yet. Go, now! And I am flung by a force that crushes my chest and compresses the long chain of rooms flying past me as I hurtle back beyond the room through which I entered until my body strikes a surface and I wake on the floor of my hall, sweating and shaking. This place is the same but no sense of ownership remains. There are things behind the walls of reality, shaping our future for for the moment we're ready. There are no shortcuts.