The Corridor

I wrote The Corridor for the NYC to Midnight Scary Short Story Competition, where it got placed with other writers in the second runner-up round, earning me a place alongside a much smaller selection of finalists in the third and final round of the competition.

I didn’t win the final round, but I was very chuffed to have made it that far and thought worth sharing today.

Happy Halloween! 🎃

*******

I am already drifting, suspended inside the vast abandoned house that has followed me for as long as I can remember.

I never question how I arrive.

The place receives me as it always has. Tall windows cradle remnants of light that thin and surrender before reaching me.

The rooms are stripped back from what they must once have been. A bed, a chair. Dust and echoes of memory cling to corners. I drift cautiously from room to room, keeping to the lower levels where shards of light still dwell.

As I enter beyond closed doors , I think I hear the faintest hint of whispering bristling against my ears – settling in my spine.

But only vacant rooms stare back at me.

The emptiness feels alert, as if it has been waiting, and I know not to linger.

The house is always the same. I am never sure if it welcomes me or not.

Every room, every corridor is familiar, though I have never truly been here.

I have been visiting since childhood. Time passes in my waking life; here, it does not.

Yet I know I have never seen all of it.

Beyond the rooms I dare to enter, corridors stretch into cavernous darkness deep in the belly of the house.

Doorways open onto spaces I have never explored. I cannot see where they lead, but each time I drift close, I feel their pull. Each time, I resist, retreating towards the last fragments of light.

I move towards the grand stairwell at the centre of the house. It rises as if it might never end, leading upwards to rooms I have never reached, darker, colder and more abandoned than those below.

I sense the corridors growing wider and longer with every floor, disappearing into places untouched by light.

Something always holds me back. I come close enough to sense resistance in the shadows. I never go further.

I am usually relieved to wake before I do.

Tonight, I find myself back in my bed, but the familiar relief does not come.

The room is spinning. I reach for my husband, but my arms refuse to move.

My body burns from the inside out, slick with sweat.

My breath turns against me.

A crushing weight pins my chest. I struggle to draw air, but each breath seems smaller than the last.

My husband’s voice reaches me through a hundred tunnels.

“Darling… please!”

I can feel his hands against my face. I try to speak, to tell him I can hear him, but no words come. The room begins to slip away, and I fight to hold on to his voice.

He is crying. Pleading with me to come back to him, but his voice is fading.

I try to form the thought, wake up, but it fractures before it can take hold.

Then, with a violent jolt, I am back in the house.

The heat has left my body, and it is colder than I remember.

I am shivering and lost. Searching for someone, but I don’t know who.

The rooms I know are behind me now. I can barely make out their windows through the gloom.

The stairwell rises ahead, its upper reaches lost in darkness.

Stillness pools at its foot.

Then I see her.

A small child is standing beside me, close enough that her sleeve brushes my arm. I do not hear her arrive.

Blonde curls. An impish face. And with the sight of her comes a certainty I cannot explain. She has been here since the very first dream. Through every room, along every corridor, always just beyond my awareness.

I have never been alone in this house.

I watch as her lips curl upward into something other than a smile. Her eyes are pools of glass, fixed on the darkness that beckons us.

Tiny icy fingers wrap around mine. I know that grip. I cannot remember how, only that I have felt it before.

I glance back towards the familiar rooms, now barely visible behind me.

Somewhere, far beyond the walls of the house, a voice is calling me back.

For a moment, I resist. But our hands have become bound in an impenetrable knot.

I surrender .

She is stronger than me.

She always was.

We drift as one now.

Towards the shadows ahead and into the darkness calling us in beyond the deepest corridor.

Author’s Note

The Corridor was inspired by a recurring nightmare I’ve experienced since childhood. The house, its endless corridors and the feeling of being drawn towards places I dare not enter.

Curiously, since writing this story a year ago, I haven’t had the dream again.

Make of that what you will…