By the light of the moon

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?'
    'After Shep.'
    'No way am I going in there.'
    'You'd jump off a cliff after Shep.'
    'I wouldn't jump off a cliff,' he impatiently assured her.
    'You'd jump off a cliff,' she insisted. 'Hope to catch him on
the way down, hope to carry him down into a haystack. You'd jump,
all right.'
    He just wanted to test the reality of the scene before him, to
confirm that indeed it had true dimension, that it was a gateway
and not just a window, an actual entry point to some otherworldly
place rather than merely a view of it. Then he would retreat and
think over the situation, try to arrive at a logical course of
action with which to approach this monumentally illogical
development.
    Firmly pressing his right hand against the plane where the wall
should have been, he discovered no sheetrock underlying the image
of the tunnel, encountered no resistance whatsoever. He reached out
of the bathroom, into that forbidding other realm, where the air
proved to be icy, and where the baleful light squirmed over and
around his fingers not like hundreds of ants any longer but like
thousands of hard-shell beetles that might strip the flesh from his
bones.
    If he'd allowed himself to be guided by instinct, he would have
withdrawn his hand at once; but he believed that he needed to
explore this incredible