The image inside the book tilted, shifting into three dimensions, the room angling as in a mirror, and Mike felt the amusement park vertigo of toppling forward into unexpected depths. He wasn’t looking at the hospital room anymore but somewhere else, the boundaries of his body dissolving into a fine mist, drifting through the page into a bright rectangle of cool air.

In front of him now, the steering wheel of a car with a windshield above it, cruising through the wooded autumn countryside. There was the smell of apples and dry hay, the sky blue and clear for miles in all directions. Soft jazz played on the car radio, a trumpet he somehow knew was being manipulated by someone named Art Farmer.

The road curved and through a clearing he saw a farmhouse with cars parked out in front. None of the cars looked like they had rolled off the assembly line after the mid-seventies. A sign out in front of the barn read: ESTATE SALE TODAY.

The car stopped and Mike felt himself getting out. That was the first time he realized that the body that his consciousness had settled back into was not his own. The hands, while masculine, were too slender, the fingers too long and agile to be his. As he crossed the lawn to the house, his pace was smooth and confident, almost as if he were gliding rather than walking. Up ahead, two men in overalls were lugging a vanity down the front steps and he saw a flash of himself in the mirror. The face of Dr. Walker, the younger Walker, gazed back at him from the mirror’s depths.

I don’t want to go in there.

Not a choice: he was inside the book now, a prisoner of its pages, seeing what it wanted him to see. Entering the old farmhouse, moving among the men and women examining the items for sale, he was already ascending the stairs. His gaze hovered here and there, an old chair, a painting of an elderly woman, floating from room to room but never lingering longer than a moment.

In the corner bedroom, one of Walker’s slender hands reached out to examine the workmanship of a Shaker headboard. It pulled the headboard forward and something fell out from behind it, an object that had been trapped behind the bed and the wall.

The point of view swam down for a better look.

It was the leather-bound book. Mike saw Dr. Walker’s beautiful smooth hands lifting it, brushing off dust and dried spider carcasses, opening it to scan pages of faded writing.

Put it down!

It was too late. He was already downstairs, paying for the book, carrying it back to his car.

Here a big chunk of the footage was missing. The images came quicker after that, spliced erratically.