Adrian barely remembered crawling back to his own room. His body moved through the apartment like a ghost, clutching his mother's journal so tightly his knuckles whitened. He hadn't eaten. He hadn't slept. He only read.
Hours blurred into one another. The world outside the window—if there still was a world—didn't matter. All that mattered were the words she left behind.
Because the more he read, the clearer it became: this wasn't madness. This wasn't coincidence. This was blood.
---
The journal contained more than daily entries.
Halfway through, Adrian found diagrams. Rough sketches of the spiral, drawn again and again, sometimes filling entire pages. Underneath, notes scrawled in frantic shorthand:
Not geometry—topography. A map, not a shape.
It doesn't live here. It presses through.
Each spiral is an opening. Each opening is a mouth.
Adrian traced the lines with a shaking finger. A map. A map to where? To it?
He turned the page. This time, the spiral wasn't alone. Around it were symbols—circles with jagged lines, triangles layered over black suns. Some he recognized from childhood: the chalk marks his mother used to draw on the floor, the salt patterns she insisted he never step across.
Protective wards. Except she had scribbled them out.
None of it holds. None of it binds.
---
Later entries grew darker. His mother's handwriting broke apart, as though written in panic:
It whispers in my sleep. Not words—equations. Instructions. It wants me to understand how it moves. Through walls. Through mirrors. Through him.
Adrian's skin prickled. Through him.
He snapped the book shut, breath ragged, and pushed away from the desk. He wanted to scream. To tear the pages apart, burn them, scatter them to the wind. But a sick weight in his stomach stopped him.
Because part of him wanted to know more.
If he was a doorway—if he had always been—maybe knowledge was the only thing standing between him and madness.
---
He forced himself back to the journal. Near the end, pressed flat between two pages, he found something else.
A photograph.
Faded, creased. His mother, younger, holding him as a baby. But the longer he stared, the more wrong it became. The background wasn't their old house—it was black, empty, a void without depth or sky.
And behind them, in the photo, a faint spiral shimmered like frost on glass.
His stomach dropped.
This thing had been there since the beginning.
---
The last page wasn't written like the others. It wasn't a diary entry. It was a warning, scribbled in block letters.
IF YOU SEE THE SPIRAL WHEN YOU'RE AWAKE—IT MEANS IT ISN'T DREAMING ANYMORE.
Adrian's chest tightened. He looked up slowly, heart hammering.
And he saw it.
On the far wall of his apartment, faint but growing, lines etching themselves across the plaster. Not pencil, not paint—movement. The wall itself curling inward, forming a spiral that pulsed like a living thing.
The journal slipped from his hands.
The spiral expanded, stretching wider, warping the room around it. His desk bent, the floor rippled, the ceiling sagged as if reality itself was folding inward. Objects slid toward it—papers, a cup, the broken lamp—sucked into the vortex.
The sound came next. Static, deafening, vibrating through his teeth, rattling his skull.
And over it, a voice. Low. Endless. Inescapable.
"...doorway..."
Adrian stumbled backward, clutching his ears, but the voice wasn't in the air—it was in his head.
"...you are open now..."
The spiral flared with blinding light, and for the first time, Adrian saw what was inside.
Not a figure. Not a shadow. But an entire dimension of twisting geometry, wrong angles, and endless void. A place that should not exist, pressing through the wall like a nightmare made flesh.
And then—
It reached for him.