Whispers on the Infinite Hallway
The corridor began as a rumor in the building’s hushed corridors, a rumor the night clerk dismissed as a draft. Yet the moment I stepped through the door, the air narrowed, the lights sighed, and the walls took a slow, intentional breath. The hallway stretched before me, not straight, but with a stubborn, impossible tilt that suggested both eternity and imprisonment. Each footstep sounded too loud for a space that looked empty, and every reflection in the polished floor showed a person I had never met, or had once known too well.
It wasn’t the height or the chill that frightened me at first. It was the way the hallway remembered me—how my name found its way into the faint frost along the baseboard, how my footsteps echoed with a tempo I could not control. Doors lined the hall like patient witnesses, each one closed, each one bearing a small inscription I could not quite read: a date, a habit, a fear I thought I’d shed. When I pressed my ear to a door, I heard not a room, but a memory—my own laughter when I was younger, my mother’s voice calling me home, a promise made and never kept. The whispering grew bolder with every step, a chorus of things I did not want to hear, yet could not resist listening to.
“You are not lost, traveler,” a voice murmured, not from any door but from the air itself. “You are choosing the way you fear most.”
As I moved deeper, the corridor began to change its mind about me. The walls learned my secrets and wore them like patches on a coat. The air grew cooler, then warmer, then humid with rain I never heard outside the building. The floor’s reflections multiplied, showing versions of me from other moments—an old version that wore a smile I no longer recognized, a younger self who believed the road would end at a gate, a present self who realized there were no gates, only more hallway. The infinite length was not a trick of perspective but a map of choices, each door a decision I had already made and forgotten.
- Doors that recur in the same place, as if the hallway forgot where it placed them last time.
- A clock whose hands spin backward whenever a memory grows too loud.
- Smells that shift with emotion—wet concrete after rain, old candle wax, something sharp like steel and rain combined.
- A whispering chorus that knows your name but never reveals its source.
In the end I understood the true horror: the hallway does not trap you with walls, but with choices. Every step is a vote for a future you are meant to abandon, and every silence between whispers is the weight of a door you refused to open. I stood at last before a door I knew I must not open, and yet I opened it anyway, not out of courage, but out of exhaustion. Beyond lay a room that was both a memory and a lie, and as the door closed behind me, the hallway stretched once more toward the edge of waking, leaving me to listen for the next traveler—the next memory—who would brave the infinite and learn its last secret: that the end, too, is only another beginning in disguise.