Click. The screen melts into *Goosebumps*, R.L. Stine’s neon nightmare—horror wrapped in plastic, terror on a budget. The dummy laughs. A kid disappears. A mask fuses to a face. The horror is childhood itself, the vague understanding that the world’s rules are bending in ways you don’t yet understand. I close my eyes.
When I open them, I am in Davos. *The Magic Mountain* rises before me like an alpine hallucination. The sanatorium hums like an old television set left on after midnight. The patients drift through the corridors like specters of a show that never ends, rewinding, replaying, stuck in a loop of philosophical debates and sickness as entertainment. The world below is gone—Hans Castorp has lost track of time, of reality, of self. And so have I.
Thomas Mann’s novel is a fever dream in prose, a slow decay of the concept of "visiting" into the fog of "belonging." Like *Pale Fire*’s Kinbote, I am no longer sure whether I am watching the novel or if the novel is watching me. Who is speaking? Who is writing? Hans Castorp or Settembrini or Mann himself, staring through the screen like Slappy the Dummy waiting to whisper something you won’t understand until it’s too late? I try to leave, but the channels keep flipping, faster now, too fast to grasp.
Click. TV Guide channel. Click. Weather Channel. Blizzard still coming. Click. Click. Click. A snowscape on the screen, a hospital, a voice murmuring about time, death, and progress. Static swallows everything.
I close my eyes again. But I am still here.
The static thickens, folds over itself like slow snowfall, like ash, like the dust settling over a long-forgotten room where someone once coughed, and no one dared enter again. The sanatorium breathes around me, walls sweating memory, corridors stretching in ways that shouldn’t be possible. The rooms are numbered but don’t seem to exist in sequence. Am I in Hans Castorp’s dream, or is he in mine?
Click. The Weather Channel. “Expect whiteout conditions.” The screen flickers, but the forecast never changes. Click. TV Guide channel. The list of shows scrolls like a conveyor belt to nowhere, a Möbius strip of sitcoms and forgotten reruns. I try to read the names, but they blur, collapse into letters that mean nothing, a code no one was meant to crack.
In the depths of the sanatorium, a voice is speaking. Settembrini? Naphta? No, it’s coming through a tinny old speaker, the kind that crackles with the dust of a thousand dead transmissions. *History is a disease.* *Progress is a fever that never breaks.* *Stay awhile, the air is good here.* The voice dissolves into the hum of the building itself, a body with lungs of shadow, arteries of winding halls, its heartbeat lost in the tick-tick-tick of a clock that no one can find.
Hans Castorp is staring at me now, his face flickering like bad reception. His fevered mind is a perfect antenna for what I am beginning to understand—time doesn’t pass here, it loops. It tunnels inward, a spiral of echoes.
Click. *Goosebumps.* The Haunted Mask, the one that won’t come off. The face that is no longer your own. The creeping suspicion that you were never meant to leave this place. That maybe you were already here before you arrived.
Click.
The TV sputters. The screen goes dark. But the snow keeps falling.
The snow swallows sound. The sanatorium walls shiver like they know something I don’t. The static behind my eyes is louder now, a white roar, a blizzard in my skull. Hans Castorp is gone—or maybe he never was. The hallways have become tunnels, deep drifts of time-powder choking the exits. No doors, no windows, only the slow suffocation of a dream that refuses to end.
Click.
The Weather Channel again. The jazz is gone, replaced by a voice too calm for the warning it delivers: *Heavy snowfall. Travel impossible. Do not attempt to leave.* The map behind the weatherman is a blank white void. The storm has eaten the world.
Click.
TV Guide channel. But the words are gone. Just a black screen, the scrolling never-ending, no shows listed, no time markers. No past, no future. Just *now*, forever.
Click.
Hans is back. His eyes are wide, fever-bright. He is speaking, but the words are submerged, floating up through layers of ice. I lean in, my breath fogging the screen. The static crackles in my ears. He is whispering something, something crucial. I almost hear it—
Click.
*Goosebumps.* Slappy the Dummy is laughing, but his mouth doesn’t move. His glassy eyes lock onto mine. “You’re still here?” he says, and the voice is not his, not mine, but something older, something from deep inside the mountain.
Click.
Nothing. The TV screen is a mirror now, and the reflection is…wrong. The sanatorium behind me, not my living room. A corridor stretching back and back and back. A figure standing at the far end, barely visible through the swirling snow.
I drop the remote. The sound it makes is swallowed before it reaches my ears.
The figure is moving toward me now. Slow. Deliberate.
The storm outside rages, but there is no outside anymore.
There is only the mountain.
And the snow keeps falling.
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