But to the left was a distorted fun-house nightmare that looked as if rags of flickering shadow and light had been sewn together into a crazy quilt of conflicting and unstable realities. Shapes shifted and jumped so that nothing—not the furniture, not even the walls, floor, and ceiling—seemed able to hold a consistent shape.“What is this?” Peter asked, clutching the doorjamb as a sudden wave of vertigo washed over him.“There’s no time to explain,” Julia said, recapping the used syringe and slipping it into her pocket, along with the vial of antidote. “Come on.”She strode purposefully down the fluctuating hallway as if to her it was all perfectly normal, and Peter had no choice but to follow. As he moved down the hall toward the fire stairs at the far end, he realized that what his eye had first interpreted as light and shadows were actually fragments—the same kind of grungy, variant version of the hotel that had appeared inside the room.One moment the wall was clean and covered in creamy, gilded wallpaper, then, only a few feet further along, it was water damaged and grimy, patched and marked with graffiti.
