Adrian didn't sleep that night.
He couldn't. Every time his eyes closed, the static returned—burning white across his eyelids, a flood of whispers that didn't belong to him. Every time he blinked, he saw the sketch reaching further, the spiral widening, pulling.
By dawn, his body trembled from exhaustion. He sat slumped in the kitchen chair, staring at the slip of paper on the floor.
"Next time."
Two words. Written in his own hand. But he had no memory of writing them.
Adrian pressed his palms to his face, trying to rub away the panic. This isn't real. It's my mind breaking again. That's all.
But somewhere deep, in the part of himself he'd spent years trying to bury, he knew better.
This wasn't the first time.
---
The kettle whistled sharply, yanking him back. He hadn't even realized he turned it on. His body moved on its own now, as if guided by someone else's hand.
He poured the boiling water into a chipped mug and stared at the steam curling upward. The way it bent, twisted—spiraling. Always spiraling.
That shape had followed him since childhood.
He remembered the night his mother found him at six years old, crouched in the hallway, drawing circles on the wall with a broken crayon. Over and over, never-ending spirals. She asked him what it was.
He told her the man in the wall wanted out.
She slapped him, hard enough to make him bite his tongue. "Don't say that, Adrian. Don't ever say that again."
But she never explained why.
---
By the time he was ten, his notebooks were filled with the faceless figure. Not that he remembered drawing it. He'd wake in the morning to new sketches on the page, his fingers smudged with graphite. His mother burned the books, but the drawings always came back.
That was when the whispers started.
Soft at first, like secrets traded through vents. Then louder, clearer. Promises. Threats. Questions.
Do you know who you are, Adrian?
Do you know why you can hear me, when no one else can?
He tried to silence it with music, with noise, with his own screaming. But nothing drowned it out.
And then one day, when he was fourteen, his mother was gone. No note. No trace. The neighbors said she left in the night. The police called it abandonment. Adrian always knew better.
The Dimensional had taken her.
---
The mug slipped in his hand, shattering across the floor. Adrian gasped as hot water splashed his wrist, burning him, but the pain felt distant. Secondary. His eyes weren't on the mess—
They were on the reflection in the shards of broken ceramic.
Not his own face. Not this time.
His mother's.
Pale. Hollow-eyed. Her mouth opening, forming words he couldn't hear—until the shards began to hum.
Static poured from the broken pieces, filling the room like radio interference. The reflection of his mother leaned closer, lips twitching into speech.
"...you brought it here..."
Adrian staggered backward, his breath ragged. "No. I didn't. I—I didn't ask for this!"
Her reflection flickered, breaking apart, reassembling into the spiral void, into the faceless figure he'd been drawing since before he even knew what fear was.
And then, her voice warped into its voice.
"...you were mine before you were born..."
---
Adrian fell against the counter, clutching his head, the world spinning around him. Memories he'd buried clawed back to the surface—his mother whispering prayers over his crib, salt lines across doorways, strange symbols painted under rugs.
She hadn't been trying to protect him from paranoia.
She'd been trying to protect him from this.
And she failed.
The static snapped off. The shards on the floor were just shards again.
Adrian collapsed to his knees, chest heaving. He wanted to scream, to cry, to tear the walls down just to prove he wasn't trapped inside some nightmare.
But deep down, he knew the truth now.
The Dimensional hadn't just chosen him.
He had been born its doorway.