Nonetheless, a tunnel. He closed his eyes. Opened them. Tunnel. Six feet in diameter. Glowing, revolving.
Welcome to the monkey barrel. Buy a ticket, test your balance.
In fact, someone had already entered the barrel. Silhouetted against a disc of azure light, a man stood at the far end of the passageway.
Dylan had no doubt that the distant figure was Shep. Out there past the terminus of the tunnel, his back to them, Shepherd gazed into the blue beyond.
So if under Dylan the floor seemed to shift, if he felt that he might drop through a hole into a shaft as deep as eternity, this was not an associated effect of the tunnel. This was just a psychological response to the sudden perception that reality, as he’d always known it, was less stable than he had assumed.
Breathing hard, exhaling words in a hot rush, Jilly sought an explanation for the impossible: ‘The hell with this, the hell with it, I’m not awake, I can’t be awake.’
‘You’re awake.’
‘You’re probably part of the dream.’
‘This isn’t a dream,’ he said, sounding shakier than she did.
‘Yeah, right, not a dream – that’s exactly what you’d say if you were part of the dream.’
He had put a restraining hand on her shoulder not because he feared that she would rush forward into the tunnel, but because he half expected that she would be swept into it against her will. The revolving walls suggested a whirlpool that might inexorably swallow anyone who ventured too close to the mouth of it. Second by second, however, his fear of a cyclone suction receded.
‘What’s happening,’ she asked, ‘what is this, what the hell is this?’
Not a whisper of sound issued from the realm beyond the wall. The turning surface of the tunnel looked as though it ought to be emitting a noisy scrape and rumble, or at least the liquid sound of churning magma, but it revolved in absolute silence.
No air escaped the opening, neither a breath of heat nor the faintest cool draft. No scent, either. Only the light.
Dylan moved closer to the portal.
‘Don’t,’ Jilly worried.
At the brink, he tried first to examine the transition point between the bathroom wall and the entrance to the tunnel, but the junction of the two proved to be… fuzzy… a blur that would not resolve into concrete detail no matter how hard he squinted at it. In fact, his hackles rose and his gaze repeatedly slid away from the joint line as though some deep primitive part of him knew that by looking too directly at such a thing, he would risk glimpsing a secret kingdom of fearsome entities behind the veil of this world, beings that operated the machinery of the universe itself, and that such a sight invited instant madness.
When he’d been thirteen, fourteen, he’d read H. P. Lovecraft and thrilled to those macabre tales. Now he couldn’t shake the unnerving feeling that Lovecraft had written more truth than fiction.
Abandoning an attempt to examine the point of transition between bathroom and tunnel, he stood at the brink and squinted at a spot on the revolving walls, trying to determine the nature of the material, its solidity. On closer study, the passage seemed to be formed from shining mist, or maybe he was peering along a tunnel of pure energy; this was not unlike a god’s-eye view down the funnel of a tornado.
Tentatively, he placed his right hand on the wall beside the mysterious gateway. The painted sheetrock felt slightly warm and gratifyingly normal.
Sliding his hand to the left, across the bathroom wall, toward the opening, he hoped to be able to feel the point of transition from motel to tunnel and to understand how the connection was made. But as his hand slid off the sheetrock and into the apparently open doorway, he detected no details of structure, nothing but a coldness – and also the red light crawling more vigorously than ever across his upraised palm.
‘No, don’t, no!’ Jilly warned.
‘No, what?’
‘No, don’t go in there.’
‘I’m not going in there.’
‘You look like you’re going in there.’
‘Why would I go in there?’