edges

Walking down the hall one day, I stop and feel a presence just outside my perception: a body lying on a strange bed, the pressure of this body weighing on the mattress, and somehow connected. I feel pulled toward it, into it, and the house grows dim. I flee and hours pass as I run, groping for a working light switch. And for an agonizing time, there's nothing but darkness all around, and sometimes shapes gliding silent in the distance, and sometimes dim spotlights shining through my windows, searching, scanning, and 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 dim grey light pervades the house and outlines form. But this is not my house. I am enclosed in an empty carpeted room sans 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 and walk, but the rooms continue unceasingly, separated by occasional doorframes of various shapes and sizes, spaces holding scattered furniture but no noise, 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, but my relief is stained by fear as a shape moves behind the cocoon, oily white appendages caressing the cocoon's fragile surface, and there is a sound like liquid whispering. I hold my breath, but the shape senses another presence, so the tentacles retreat and coalesce into a humanoid figure wearing a long blue coat, black trousers, and polished black shoes. It glides around the cocoon, its face human-like, ovular, pale, glistening, empty of wrinkle, eyes and hair jet black and shiny, alien but familiar, 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, and panic tightens, and I dare to look 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. 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. Was it just a dream, or something more?