Free Acid Bubbles by Paul H. Round

water pushed out by fear, driven by dread.
    All around the void was in flux, becoming lighter with the increasing volume of the onrushing wall of sound. The noise wasn’t loud. I don’t think it was loud, but it was assaulting my senses. Given my new ability to hear at this molecular level, I couldn’t discern how loud, loud could be. This sound engulfed my entire being, as was blank whiteness. I was now standing in a void of white being crushed by an oncoming barrage of sound.
    Change came with breathless speed. In the white, tiny black flecks appeared. These grew and with this my apprehension that this was a swarm of cancer demons starting to grow. Everything started to fill in around me until I was surrounded by a whole universe of colour. I was falling or was I standing as the new universe introduced itself to me? Perhaps I was being introduced to the universe, or someone was asking if I could join. The price I had to pay might be too much, the inner me was going to be crushed to dust by the onrush of the super sensation.
    Green, a fabulous green, had appeared all around, and was transforming itself into the most beautiful country landscape I’d ever seen. It was spoiled by man’s invention, the tarmac my bare feet were standing on belonged to the platform of a very small country railway station. I was standing quite still. I hadn’t tried to move. The noise I could hear was a train coming, and the feeling of dread had disappeared with the onset of all this beauty. I was now excited and full of desire to know more.
    Standing on that platform I started to survey my surroundings. The place was beautiful with its hanging baskets and perfect paint on the ornate woodwork. This place possessed everything and more. A stationmaster’s office announced itself in gold, gilt paint on the immaculate, clean window glass. Fire buckets full of sand lined up against the wall glistening in the sunlight. The whole thing was a complete experience as if placed there from some period movie.
    The difference was I knew at some level deep inside this was not my construction. I wasn’t dreaming this vision I’d been invited into it. I was a guest in a dimension I didn’t yet understand. There was always the lurking suspicion in the background that things could revert back to the damp, yellow nightmare of painful death I’d visited before. This thought was fading as my eyes began to absorb this new world. Everything around me was an intense kaleidoscope of colour where I could sense the intensity of each shade with my inner feelings. An intense pleasure flooded through my being, what a delight to be allowed into this paradise.
    The train was out of sight around a curve in the track that disappeared down a beautiful deep flower filled verdant valley. As the train approached I could feel a new sensation pressing against my body. The pressure grew until my outer shell gave way and a sensation flooded through my life. A wind of pleasure was in the literal sense passing through me giving an intense feeling almost like a warm wind playing in a reed bed, touching every part of my soul, my heart, my mind. The intensity of pleasure grew more and more with the onrush of the train. All my senses were on fire and the train still hadn’t appeared around the long steel curve. The onrushing iron monster was several hundred yards away out of view. My senses were becoming saturated to the point where I couldn’t believe there would be any more pleasure available. I was mistaken. The train came into view, and the joy was several hundred percent more than I’d ever experienced in all my life. I thought I was going to die of pleasure. Was this possibly a new torture?
    Then, for some reason, I looked away from the magnetic attraction of the train and down to my feet which were bare. The rest of my body was a greater surprise because I was dressed in what looked like a tweed suit from the 1950s. Was I in the 1950s?