What lies at the heart of this room is what I have been trying to get at. I am working my way toward it. The no-time, the un-time.

My wife would know what I am trying to say, but I feel that I cannot talk to her. She is somehow far beyond me now, in the past or the future or in some other non-temporal sense. I have been keeping it from her, these dreamy midnight wanderings to this room, which draws me back. I can feel it during the day when I am away, my skin buzzing, needing to return. She must by now have noticed my distance, noticed that I get up and leave the bed cold at night, but she will want to know how I got in, how I found the key.

There was a pregnant girl in the house—I don’t know who she was, but she paced the third-floor hallway, back and forth, as if in the midst of some dilemma. She kept looking at the door to this room, like she was afraid of it. I followed her to that room with all the old furniture—that storage room—where she pried up a loose old floorboard and dropped this key inside. And, wouldn’t you know it, when I went in and pulled up the old floorboard, there it was.

But I am thinking, now, that maybe I shouldn’t have opened the door.

The room seems to change, subtly, every time I enter it such that I cannot figure it out. When I first came in, it was no more than a closet, a bare little room from some other time that had no business being in this expansive house, as if it had wedged its way in where it wasn’t originally in any sort of floorplan—and then it was as if it had grown with my being there, with a bed now that invited me to lie down in it and the walls having moved away to accommodate my expectations—and then it was a whole room grown where none had been! Yet it felt old and lived-in, as if it had been here all along but had merely shrunk over the ages because no one had been in it for so long, no one had watered it or nurtured it. Now I am onto something, yes, that is it, the reason it has been locked up all this time. Eventually if it had remained locked and unvisited it might have shrunk and disappeared entirely with no witness, until it was just a door that opened onto a blank wall. But it is too late, I am here, and now it is grown cavernous as a catacomb. Choked with dust and smelling faintly of rot, of the swamp, of burning, of ash.

And it was in this room grown vast and cancerous that I looked, and I saw it—the Zero. Like a hole burned through the world.

If you had seen what I have seen, you would know how impossible it is to look at the world the same way after, knowing it is filled with shadows, that reality lies somewhere beyond us still, or is merely cast on us by what never really existed in the first place, glimpsed through the hole that I have called the Zero, in the Never.

And now it has followed me out of the room, too, through the walls of the house. It’s following me through the mirrors. I see it, from the corner of my eye, in the reflections—some vast dark nothingness behind the facade of this reality, and I cannot look directly at it, I cannot look any longer into any of the mirrors or I will see what no one should see and if it comes again—

if it comes again I should step through the circle

should I?

or failing that I can tie myself a Zero of my own to step through

oh god god help me