He came to and blinked, slowly. The sun blazed in through the window and his head was pounding. He tried hard to focus, but his eyes refused to cooperate, a combination of the bright light searing his retinas and a peculiar bobbing sensation. Why was everything slowly moving by itself, he thought with much confusion.
He tried to get up, but his limbs flailed uselessly. His legs felt moist, the floor had a strange softness and he simply couldn’t coordinate his movement. Suddenly, the ground lurched sideways and swung back sharply, then rocked to and fro eventually slowly returning to a disturbing bob. This wasn’t right. How did he get here? Where even was here? He tried to think back but everything in the past was even more of a blur than what his eyes currently failed to see correctly. Had I been drinking, he ventured. Do I even drink?
Then he became aware of a noise. Something more than just the throbbing in his head, and something… wet? Slurping? With it came more movement, a spinning motion and he was sure he was also moving down. He held on to what he was decreasingly convinced to call the floor and hoped the room would stop spinning soon. Out of focus shapes rose up out of sight as he dropped down, and he opted to close his eyes and ride it out. The wet sucking continued however, and he couldn’t shut that out. It was getting louder and he was sure the spiralling was getting faster. He felt sick.
After a nightmarish age, everything ceased; the sudden jolt almost ejecting him from his perch. He opened his eyes again to a wall of white, no longer blurred vision but no more distinct. He ventured a leg off the side of whatever he’d been clinging to, and another joined it. Climbing down the large pink edifice, that he could now see had been his slightly damp and squishy ride, he reached a firmer but more slippery floor. White, like the walls, and wet – small rivulets ran here and there, all seemingly towards the same point – he found it hard to tell where the ground ended and the glossy cliffs began. What was he to do now? His head still ached and he was no wiser as to how he’d arrived in this predicament.
He investigated the walls. Three of them, which curved into each other at two corners, were unscalable. They were slippery and wet like the floor and were too sheer to climb even if they had footholds, which of course they had not. A large dark hole in the ground appeared at first to be a possible means of escape, but it was full of water and a grim sort of froth, neither of which were pleasant to his touch and besides, he couldn’t swim on the surface let alone submerged in a tunnel he had no hope of navigating in the dark – he would surely drown. A fourth wall was just visible in the far distance, perhaps he would fare better there? He reasoned he’d be no more trapped there than here, so began a trek.
The journey was hard going. It hadn’t seemed so at first, but the ground was actually a slight incline and because there was still wetness everywhere and he found it difficult to retain a footing, stumbling frequently and sliding backwards on several occasions. The fourth wall seemed forever away, and the sun’s glare reflecting off every surface was tiring his eyes and not doing his headache any favours. He struggled on.
Despair reached him as he reached the wall. It was less vertical than the others, but not much, and was just as slippery. He was tired, hot, ill and his legs hurt almost as badly as his still-throbbing head. He attempted several ascents, but just couldn’t get purchase on the sleek terrain and failed to gain any height, slipping down time after time. It was hopeless, but what now? Where would he go? Trapped on all sides with no way out other than a desperately unappealing hole barely bigger than himself, without any promise of freedom even if he could brave the water and unknown; that way seemed more like suicide. He was pondering his lack of options when without warning came a shout.
“Mum!” somebody yelled, sounding decidedly panicked. “Mum!”.
“What?” came the reply from another, more distance voice.
“There’s a spider in the bath!”
