Deathdream #9

On reaching the top, Marina stopped, one hand still resting on the banister, staring down the long corridor in front of her. The walls were raw plaster, grey and rotting, punctuated with doors on either side. The end of the corridor was lost in darkness.
She took a hesitant step forward, and then stopped. She could feel something pulling on her. Treacly strings of... something... were seemingly attached to her bones and organs, exerting a gentle tug. Not enough to drag her backwards, but enough to drag on her soul when she tried to move forwards. Fearfully she glanced over her shoulder. Nothing but the continuation of the corridor stretching away into shadow behind her. No stairway, no atrium, no light source that she could see. No sound but the soft hissing of her breath, and the venous hum of her blood, rushing through her flesh.
Her left hand was resting on another round brass doorknob. The door itself was a greyish white panelled affair - heavy and solid. The surface of the paint leprous with bubbling and peeling patches, a sticky amber substance oozing through the odd crack and join. It was not an inviting door. But she grasped the handle with both hands and turned it, nonetheless. This one turned more easily than the outer door, but was still stiff. It availed her nothing, however, since the door, when she tentatively pushed, did not budge a millimetre. It was very firmly jammed. She thought at first that it may be locked, but she could not see a keyhole. Then, looking closer, she saw that it did not have a crack between the frame and the door itself, either. She could not, when she tried, even get a fingernail between the two. The door was part of the frame. Not a real door at all, but an elaborate piece of panelling.

A joke. A three dimensional trompe l'oeil.

This gave her pause. She tried another door, then another, moving from door to door with increasing desperation as she tried, again and again, to find the one true portal in this corridor of falsehoods. Mindlessly, now, she banged on doors, rattled handles, and shrieked for someone to let her out, let her in, let her free, let her breathe, as she noticed that the corridor walls were beginning, almost imperceptibly, to move closer and closer together. Her panic increased to the borders of hysteria as she imagined the walls closing in on her completely, crushing her organs, grinding her bones against each other, until she could no longer move or breathe.


Then she saw, through the haze of her madness, light seeping under one of the nearby doors. Flinging herself at it, she wrestled with the handle until it grudgingly turned, and threw herself into the room beyond.

In the centre of the room sat Purly on a straight-backed wooden chair. Glancing up from her embroidery, casual and unsurprised, she said, "Oh, hello Marina."

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