Having no desire to remain in the mind-numbing gray room any longer than necessary, I set out to find an exit. It seemed to me that the key to escape probably must have something to do with the wall that dropped back as I approached. Locating it once again, though, was not proving a simple task. I felt blindly along the walls, searching for any slight anomaly that might signal the boundary of the preternatural corridor. After what I determined had been a complete circumnavigation of the gray room, I had discovered nothing. Certainly not finding that the chamber lacked fixed dimensions was what one would have expected, but in light of my earlier observations I was astonished and annoyed by the sudden normality. I reversed my direction and retraced my steps, in growing alarm and frustration.
I devoted my full concentration toward minute exploration of what I now was coming to think of inexorably as my prison. After a considerable time had elapsed I was finally overtaken by fatigue. I stepped back from the dreary gray panoply and glanced around the room dizzily, my eyes amblyopic from the strain of close focus.
I shook my head and blinked until visual acuity returned. As it did I began to realize that something was different. My surroundings had been subtly altered by an as yet unfathomed change that for the moment defied my critical analysis. I knew something was different--could feel it with a sense of certainty--but I could not see what the difference was. I closed my eyes briefly and steadied myself to face this latest perceptual challenge. A chorus of screaming night birds echoed in my inner ears.
I opened my eyes suddenly and tried to take in as much of the room as possible, before anything had the chance to become filtered out, as it were. The first thing that struck me was that it seemed somehow to have stretched along one dimension and narrowed along another. It was some time before my disoriented mental processes managed to work out that I had apparently found the corridor I was seeking. Not only had I discovered the corridor, I had by all evidence traveled some unguessed distance along it. I realized with a start that I had no way of knowing the direction from which I had come, and the speculation that I might be inadvertently returning to the gray room sent me into a brief stomach-churning fit of anxiety, which I finally relieved only by whistling atonically. I stared in both of the directions afforded me by the hallway, and eventually chose what seemed most likely to lead away from the gray room.
To all visual clues I was moving along a straight path, yet my positional sense insisted that I was somehow describing a gentle arc to my right. It was, as previously noted, very difficult to orient in this phantasmal realm, so I eventually just had to set aside the perception as unimportant, even if true. Since I didn't have any idea whatsoever where I was going, it didn't seem to matter much what path I took to get there.
The limitless expanse of gray was now punctuated by the occasional flicker of softly diffuse light. Whenever I tried to look directly at one of these vaporous glows, however, it softly and silently stole away from me, a mere smudge in my peripheral vision. Whispers of events and vaguely familiar vistas floated past my mind's eye; I found myself clenching and extending my fingers (my toes were too cold to be of much help) in concert with my frustrated inability to grasp the meaning of these fleeting glimpses of what might represent my own past. The images were as equally likely, I reflected grimly, to illustrate the past of someone entirely different. I felt somehow violated by this notion.