No wonder he had seen a figure standing in the window of the other hotel building when he had first arrived at the hotel. That should have been his current self.
But that figure had later disappeared and never appeared again. What would happen if he kept standing here?
Schiller heard a sound coming from the bathroom.
He turned and stared at the bathroom for a while. In the end, he walked over and pushed open the door. The toilet was intact and looked as though it had already been repaired. The sound was coming from the bathtub drain.
Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle...
Schiller remembered noticing that the bathtub drain had not been draining very smoothly when he had first entered the room. Now, the sound had grown more intense, as if something underneath was letting out breath.
Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, gurgle...
Schiller felt his headache worsening, his vision repeatedly going dark. He desperately covered his ears and ran out of the bathroom. The sound chased after him for quite a while, finally falling silent only after he returned to the living room.
There seemed to be no hallucinated monsters in the room. The toilet was perfectly fine too, as if this were nothing more than an ordinary hotel room.
That was not it. Schiller leaned against the door and caught his breath for a while. He felt himself growing weaker and weaker. Some unseen thought warned him that he did not have much time left.
"Where the hell am I???"
When Schiller stood up, he stumbled into the coffee table and knocked it over. Everything on it clattered to the floor. A bottle of mineral water toppled over, spilling water that soaked into the carpet.
Countless bubbles rose from the water.
Schiller seemed to realize something all at once.