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The Hallway-A short atmospheric horror

(Note: Best played in the dark with headphones)


"I've discovered a hallway leading into my bedroom. I see it when I wake up in the middle of the night, cold sweat and panic from a sense of impending threat. The room's blurry without my glasses, but by the light of the streetlamp outside my window I can see it clear enough, sitting by my bureau, opening into an impenetrable darkness beyond. Every time is the same, I stare at it, not moving, not daring to even breathe for fear of being noticed by half-sensed somethings. After a while, a long while, the hallway disappears. My conscious mind fully asserting itself, burying once more the instincts that kept us alive long before we took this human form, when we only crawled hidden in the weeds.

By days exhaustion grips me, the distant fuzziness of sleep taking turns with strange senseless fits fits of panic. I find myself daydreaming, imagining a form drifting out of the hallway. It's details hidden by diaphanous shrouds...but not so hidden they don't seem familiar. Graceful hands slipping free with fingers that gouge when they caress.
Part of me knows it's just night terrors again. The same waking manifest of misfiring neurons that turns a heater vent into a swollen spider, or a ceiling pattern into razor drifting down to slice you to pieces in your bed. By morning's light these all fall back to their real shape. But the hallway...

I'm afraid to look at it by day, at the wall where I know it should be. Where it won't be, where there will be only plaster and paint, plain as anything. I know it, and I hope it. And because I hope it, because I can't bear to finally place my hand upon it, I don't even look at it. Not until that moment when the parts of me that feel wake before the parts of my that think, that know better. That know if a hallway like this leads into my bedroom, there might be one like it that leads into every bedroom.

Or into just enough of them to get what they want.

When I was a kid I used to dream all the time about finding magic hidden doors to other worlds. I even looked for them, wherever I went. But I've never considered getting up and walking through this one. Walking down that impossible hallway to see what's on the other side of nowhere.

Until now.

Because I know what it has to be there for. There's only one thing, only one possible thing, in that bedroom of any value.

Me, at my most vulnerable."