Author: Aubrey Williams

The cheap hotel room was draughty, the shadows ink in the recesses. Each sheet of green William Morris wallpaper was peeling in at least three places. For all the dinginess, though, it was a room, and I needed one. By a feeble light I’d tried to work, but the sound of the storm outside kept distracting me. I decided to poke around the place and see if any previous guests had left anything unusual— a pack of playing cards, some cigarillos, and so on. Nothing like that came from my searches, but I did notice, tucked away under the bed, a mariner’s chest. I hauled it out— it was sparingly light, but it made a noise as if it were full of something crushingly heavy. No one knocked at my door to complain, though, so I looked it over, and then opened it. What can I tell you, I’m the curious sort.

It smelled of something faintly metallic and damp air, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It was, however, so dark I couldn’t see the bottom, and it wasn’t because of the weak candlelight. Attached to the inner lid was a crudely-written note:

“DON’T—! Leave it be. Not worth it.”

If the person who wrote such a thing truly wanted to keep me away from what was inside, they ought to have said “dreadfully boring” or “contains dead wasps”. Instead, they’d lit a fire under my curiosity, so I stuck my head in. Some terrible force seemed to tilt my chair, and I fell face-first into the chest, but— well, I didn’t, because I fell into my desk chair, in the same hotel room, the chest open on the floor where I’d left it. This was shocking, but not so much as the astonishing view of the moon and stars out of my window. They were large, like diamonds in the sky, and the moon so close I felt like I could jump towards it if I was outside. The town seemed different, too, the buildings of a fairytale height, though still the same mess of rough houses I’d last seen. I scrambled over to the chest, seeing a new note, in the same hand:

“Be satisfied, stop.”

Hardly that! I couldn’t wait to see the next… place? World? Alternative? Wherever it was, that was where I was bound. I dove into the chest, and appeared in my room, but the ceiling taller, as was my window, and the night much brighter out. I could see Mars, an umber coal in the sky, and the houses were like the crooked towers of a Medieval city. I also noticed the walls were closer than they’d been before, my once-ample room now rather small. Strange, but intriguing, and I examined the chest again.

“Do you see? Stop! Wait for morning, Hawk-Keppler in the library.”

Again, the writer of the note had failed to judge my character. Whoever this Hawk-Keppler was, I’d find out tomorrow *after* I tried to get to the bottom of this myself. I reasoned that either there was an end to the chest-worlds, or someone was trying to keep me out of the secret. I leapt in again.

“ONLY DESTRUCTION AWAITS—!”

I saw the ceiling stretch, and the edge of the universe halt. I looked into a void, and there was Nothing. I screamed as my skull pressed-up against the walls, and I looked into the firmament crammed into the atmosphere, incinerating and then exploding into a collapse as the universe finally stopped and compressed.

The cheap hotel room was draughty, the shadows ink in the recesses.