Worse yet, there is a bed against the east wall, with a gross discolored mattress and a threadbare blanket that must have been white, once. I cannot imagine spending a night in this room.

Even standing here in the gray light observing the room is giving me a headache. The sick energy in the air makes me want to sit, but I refuse to go near that bed. It repels me like the wrong end of a magnet, and it seems to hold the indentation of forgotten souls on its surface. The infinity wallpaper makes me dizzy.

I have not mentioned this yet because I have been trying to ignore it, to convince myself it is only my imagination, but the more I stare, the more the things before me seem to warp and bend, as if I have taken some kind of hallucinogenic. It is almost, but not quite, like the time I tried mushrooms in college with my roommate and her boyfriend, and we danced out onto the quad at midnight while the stars pulsed with a great eternal heartbeat, and then, when we returned to the dorm, I felt feverish in the harsh light that made their eyes balloon strangely.

When I look around, everything seems normal at first, but the longer I allow my eyes to linger on any one spot, the more the warping creeps in from the edges of my vision, like a tunneling, as if trying to compress everything down to a single point.

It all becomes a bit too much, so I find my way to the table and sit heavily on a rickety chair. As I do, I hear a low groan, like a woman in pain, and it sets the back of my neck prickling.

The table is bare but for a dusty notebook that doesn’t warrant too much interest, but I pick it up anyway and flip it open, wondering what sort of forgotten murmurs might have been etched in its pages. To my surprise (I’d half assumed the notebook would be blank, just another empty element of this soulless void, this nonplace), the pages are filled with sprawling handwriting.

As if the room left it here just for me!

An artifact for me to document.

I thumb through yellowed pages, mentally narrating what I will note down of this find. Five by eight inches, soft leather cover, worn binding, handwriting in black ink, most likely ballpoint pen. There is no name on the inside cover—the journal refuses to identify itself. When I flip to a random page, I find … Well, I’ll let you read the entry for yourself: