He opened the book on his bare lap, fingers tracing the flavescent page, bent and creased from some forgotten moment of distraction. The story itself was about patricide — grim, unsettling, and yet he couldn’t look away. The words reached into him like an infection, twisting something already restless inside. It was a kind of perverted perversion, a fascination that felt alien and yet entirely his. Power radiated from those sentences: the power of imagination, of annihilation, of mutilation, amputation, and ultimately… of contemplation.
Closing the book, he rose and found himself walking down a corridor. At first it seemed ordinary — long, sterile, clinically clean, the sort of place where echoes linger long after footsteps fade. But something was wrong. Something shifted. At the far end loomed a door, heavy and waiting.
He paused, listening. Nothing. The air hummed faintly, as though alive. With a breath that caught in his throat, he turned the handle.
The world on the other side wasn’t right. The corridor continued, yes, but now its walls pulsed with a fuzzy purple light, static and liquid at once. The surfaces moved yet remained still, a contradiction that defied reason. He reached out, hand trembling, and the material resisted like gel, then rippled away into silence.
And then he saw it: the void. Where one wall should have been, there was only blackness — infinite, hungry, bottomless. The purple corridor clung to existence on the edge of that abyss, as though straining against being swallowed.
Along the single remaining wall stretched countless doors. Closed, identical, each one humming with unseen possibility.
A chill ran through him. Each door, he knew without being told, contained a future. Not a metaphorical choice, but a literal one. Only by opening a door and stepping through would he discover which life awaited him.
He hesitated. His hand hovered at the nearest knob, sweat beading at his temple. What if he chose wrong? What if the wrong door led only to deeper voids, to darker corridors? What if none of them led back?
The silence pressed in, thick and suffocating. His heart raced. For a moment he almost turned back — but when he glanced over his shoulder, the clean corridor was gone. There was only purple static and the infinite dark.
No retreat. Only doors. Only futures.
His hand touched cold metal. He drew a breath, braced himself, and—
—suddenly, awareness hit him like a crash of light.
The corridor dissolved. The void melted. The doors vanished. He was back on the threadbare carpet of his first flat in Bath Street, Rhyl. The book was still in his lap. The walls were still nicotine-stained. The buzzing wasn’t cosmic energy — it was the fluorescent strip light.
It had been an acid trip. One of many in those days, when his experiments with LSD carved out strange journeys through his own mind. That night, 1984, he had wandered corridors of choice and stared into black voids of possibility. And though the drug had rattled him with visions of futures unknown, somewhere in that trip — and in the years that followed — he’d like to think he chose the right door.
