The Corridor That Devours the Night

The Corridor That Devours the Night

The moment the hotel’s midnight wing yawns open, a corridor leaks from the walls like smoke. It isn’t long—the distance folds back on itself, the tiles whispering underfoot with a dull, deliberate cadence. I tell myself I’m imagining it, a trick of the fluorescent glare and the quiet that follows a power outage, but the air tastes like cold metal and old rain, and the ceiling buttons up in a way that makes the horizon feel wrong. Each step draws a longer breath from the hall, as if the space itself is inhaling with me, waiting for something I cannot name to exhale into the dark.

The corridor has no end, only versions of itself. Doors line up on either side, each more tired than the last, their brass handles chilly as if they were teeth. When I press one, it sighs and opens onto another stretch of sameness: more doors, more carpet that swallows sound, more echoes that refuse to settle. My footsteps learn a rhythm the walls cannot hear—two steps, a half-step, a long pause—and suddenly the pauses begin to matter. In the quiet between beats, the hallway rearranges itself just enough to vanish the exit I thought I saw a moment earlier.

Somewhere the night itself leans into the corridor, pressing outward from the blackness between the lights. The banner of darkness seems alive, tugging at the corners of my vision until I question whether I am the one walking or merely the silhouette the hall keeps dragging along. A whisper travels past my ear, not spoken so much as remembered: you came for a way out, but the night wants a place to stay. The line between fear and hunger dissolves, and I realize I am not running from the corridor; I am running toward its appetite, toward the thing that devours the hours when no one is watching.

“If you listen close enough, the night tells you its name: stay, and be fed; go, and be found again in another corridor, with your own footsteps echoing louder than the clock.”

At a junction that looks precisely like a junction I passed a dozen times, a small list appears on the wall, as if scrawled by someone who forgot their own handwriting:

• Echoes that repeat your full name, a beat late.
• Carpet that breathes beneath you, steady and unyielding.
• Doors that don’t open so much as invite you to step through time.
• A clock that ticks backward, then forward, then stops as if stealing a breath.

I choose not to call out for help, not because I am brave, but because the corridor answers with a different voice each time I speak. Sometimes it is a grandmother’s lullaby, other times a clerk’s sigh, until the night itself grows patient with me, as if it has waited centuries for a companion who will walk until the sound of their own heartbeat forgets how to fear. And so I walk, one more time, past a door that reorients my memory and a light that refuses to stay lit. If the corridor is a hunter, I am its oldest prey and its oldest witness, both, in equal measure. The end might be a door, or it might be the act of staying, of listening, of letting the night swallow fear until there is nothing left to lose but the very idea of losing.

When dawn finally flickers across the hallway’s teeth, I am still walking, a little taller and a little emptier, with answers unspoken and questions that have learned to breathe. The corridor remains, not defeated but patient, as if it knows this is not a road to be conquered but a space to be understood. And perhaps tonight, or the next, I will discover that the night was never outside me at all, only the length of a corridor measuring the distance between survival and surrender.