As he drew near the bathroom, he discovered that when this glow touched him, he was able to feel it, and not merely as he would have felt the heat of the summer sun when stepping out of the shade of a tree. This light seemed to crawl on his skin, to bustle like hundreds of ants, initially on his face as he first stepped into the wedge of out-falling brightness, but then more busily on his right hand as he put it against the door.
Although Jilly, at his side, remained less directly illuminated than Dylan, her face had a faint red sheen. With one glance, he saw that she, too, experienced the extraordinary tactility of this light. With a start and with a little grimace of revulsion, she wiped at her face with one hand, as though she had walked into the clingy spokes and spirals of a spider’s web.
Dylan wasn’t a science buff, except as knowledge in the fields of biology and botany served to improve the accuracy of his depiction of the natural world in his paintings, and he didn’t qualify as even an armchair physicist. But he knew that deadly types of radiation, including that from a nuclear bomb, never stimulated the sense of touch, just as the less mortal X-rays administered in a dentist’s office never caused the slightest tingle when passing through your jaw; the survivors of the historic blast in Hiroshima, who later died of radiation poisoning, had never felt the many billions of subatomic particles piercing their bodies.
Although he doubted that the flesh-prickling effect of the light represented a danger, he hesitated anyway. He might have pulled the door shut, might have turned away, leaving his curiosity unsatisfied, if Shep had not been on the other side and perhaps in need of help.
When he spoke his brother’s name, he didn’t receive a reply. This came as no surprise. While Shep was more talkative than your average stone, he often proved no more responsive than granite. Dylan called out again, and pushed open the door after the second silence. He was prepared for the sight of the shower stall. The toilet, too. The sink, the mirror, the towel rack.
What Dylan had not been prepared for, what caused his adrenal gland to squirt another dose of epinephrine into his bloodstream, what caused his guts to tweak in a less than pleasant fashion was the doorway in the wall beside the sink, where earlier no door had been. The source of the strange red light lay beyond this postern.
Hesitantly, he crossed the threshold into the bathroom.
Doorway didn’t accurately convey the nature of this mysterious opening. It wasn’t rectangular, but round, like a hatch in a bulkhead between two compartments in a submarine. Hatch didn’t qualify as the mot juste, either, because no architrave surrounded the hole in the wall.
Indeed, the six-foot-diameter opening itself appeared to lack depth, as though it had been painted on the wall. No header, no jamb, no threshold. And yet the scene beyond appeared convincingly three-dimensional: a radiant red tunnel dwindling to a disc of blue light.
Dylan had seen masterpieces of trompe l’oeil in which artists, relying on nothing more than paint and their talent, had created illusions of space and depth that completely deceived the eye. This, however, was not merely a clever painting.
For one thing, the murky red glow from the luminous walls of the tunnel penetrated to the motel bathroom. This queer light glimmered in the vinyl floor, reflected off the mirror – and crawled on his exposed skin.
Furthermore, those tunnel walls ceaselessly turned, as if this were a passage in a carnival funhouse, a sideshow monkey barrel in which to test your balance. Trompe 1’oeil painting could produce the illusion of depth, texture, and reality – but it could not provide an illusion of motion.
Jilly stepped into the bathroom beside Dylan.
He placed a restraining hand on her shoulder.
Together they marveled at the tunnel, which appeared to be at least thirty feet long.
Impossible, of course. Another motel unit backed up to this one; plumbing-to-plumbing design saved construction costs. A hole cut in the wall would reveal only another bathroom identical to theirs. Not a tunnel, never a tunnel. There was nothing to bore a tunnel through; the bathroom had not been built into the side of a mountain.