1408- Room's Geometry

Before him, the room had begun to melt.

It was sagging out of its right angles and straight lines, not into
curves but into strange Moorish arcs that hurt his eyes. The glass
chandelier in the center of the ceiling began to sag like a thick glob of
spit. The pictures began to bend, turning into shapes like the wind
shields of old cars. From behind the glass of the picture by the door
leading into the bedroom, the twenties woman with the bleeding
nipples and grinning cannibal-teeth whirled around and ran back up
the stairs, going with the jerky delirious high knee-pistoning of a
vamp in a silent movie. The telephone continued to grind and spit,
the voice coming from it now the voice of an electric hair-clipper that
has learned how to talk: “Five! This is five! Ignore the siren! Even if
you leave this room, you can never leave this room! Eight! This is
eight!”

The door to the bedroom and the door to the hall had begun to
collapse downward, widening in the middle and becoming doorways
for beings possessed of unhallowed shapes. The light began to grow
bright and hot, filling the room with that yellow-orange glow. Now
he could see rips in the wallpaper, black pores that quickly grew to
become mouths. The floor sank into a concave arc and now he could
hear it coming, the dweller in the room behind the room, the thing
in the walls, the owner of the buzzing voice. “Six!” the phone
screamed. “Six, this is six, this is goddam fucking SIX!”
…

His head was clear—the strong whiff of sulfur and the sudden ris-
ing heat from his shirt had done that much—but the room main-
tained its insanely Moorish aspect. Moorish was wrong, not even
very close, but it was the only word that seemed even to reach
toward what had happened here . . . what was still happening. He was
in a melting, rotting cave full of swoops and mad tilts. The door to the
bedroom had become the door to some sarcophagal inner chamber.
And to his left, where the picture of the fruit had been, the wall was
bulging outward toward him, splitting open in those long cracks that
gaped like mouths, opening on a world from which something was now
approaching. Mike Enslin could hear its slobbering, avid breath,
and smell something alive and dangerous. It smelled a little like the
lion-house in the—

Then flames scorched the undershelf of his chin, banishing thought.

- 1408, chapter II