Echoes in the Infinite Hallway
The building seemed ordinary at first: a street-level concrete lobby, a single elevator, a corridor that stretched beyond sight. Yet as I stepped forward, the air thickened with a damp, old-marble scent and the hum of fluorescent lights settled into a patient, listening quiet. The hallway, which should have narrowed behind me, instead kept widening, as if the walls were drawing a deep breath and inviting me to listen.
Panels of plaster repeated themselves like a secret code I wasn’t meant to decipher. Doors appeared with tired hinges, each one painted a different shade of regret, but when I pressed my palm to the nearest handle, it yielded nothing but a dry click and the echo of a step I hadn’t taken. My own footfalls returned to me a heartbeat later, mismatched and wrong, as if the hallway were a mirror that reflected not my image but my inner doubts.
“If you listen long enough, the hall will tell you your real name,” a whispered voice admitted from nowhere and everywhere at once.
With every mile of corridor that unfurled behind me, the distance between doors grew longer and shorter at will, a trick of architecture that seemed to favor memory over map. A soft wind carried whispers of other walks—three people lost here before me, each leaving a mark on the wallpaper, each becoming a rumor that stood still long enough to frighten the air. I traced a line in the dust with my finger, and the line rearranged itself into a different model of fear as if the hallway was writing me back into existence.
- The walls breathe, exhaling the stale scent of rain after a long drought, as if the building had lungs and used them when it thought no one watched.
- The floor tiles pulse with a faint rhythm, syncing with my own heartbeat until I can no longer tell which belongs to me and which belongs to the corridor.
- Doors swing open and close of their own accord, revealing nothing but a cold draft that empties the room of sound and memory.
- A soft chalky message appears on the doorframe and vanishes before I can finish reading it, each attempt rewriting the last line of my life I thought I remembered.
At last I reached a bend where the hallway bent again, and the bend bent back, looping in on itself until I stood facing a wall that wore my face like a mask someone else had forgotten to remove. The face was mine, yet older, a version of me I hadn’t met before, tired and learned from endless wandering. The hallway did not push me forward; it invited me to stay, to listen, to acknowledge the memory I carried—the memory of walking away from a place I never truly left.
In that moment I realized the echo was not a sound but a person: me, returning to the origin I’d tried to outrun. The corridor did not trap me; I had always been the echo of someone who walked these steps before. I lowered my gaze, accepting the quiet that waited at the end of every endless passage, and felt the hallway finally choosing its traveler—me. The lights steadied, the air warmed, and the walls, for a single breath, ceased their endless murmur, as if the hallway had decided it was time to listen to a story that finally belonged to someone who had learned to stay.