Halls and Spaces - Revised - 09/22/11

The revised version of "Walls and Spaces". This should clear up all the tense problems(unless I've missed some), and be a bit more descriptive.

                The dream is as familiar to you as your own hands; you’ve dreamed it for as long as you can remember. There is always some long narrow corridor, and it never changes, nothing does. Not the walls, the ceiling, the décor, or the fixtures. There is always a room at the end of hallway and it’s a room you have no choice but to walk towards, even though you know what is waiting for you at the end.

                The floor is made of a rich mahogany wood with the slats pointing towards the door at the end, vertical lines that keep you moving forward. The hallways sweep upwards in whorls and swirls of mulberry and merlot and if you bring your face too close you can smell the sweet scent of Shiraz. The ceiling is concave and the dark reds of the walls morph into black at the very top. There are thick golden chains attached to glittering gilded chandeliers, with glass ornaments dangling from their curved arms. Ruby pendalogues and prims sway and clink in time to your steps, a rhythm that rolls along the path. Candles are perched in some of the chandeliers, flickering in the same faint breeze that swoops in and kisses your skin and whisks away again.

                There are doors on the left and right, framed in white and bright against the dark and dimly lit background. Crimson slashes screech across some of them while others were weighted closed with chains and locks. The doors thrrumm against your fingertips if you touch them, the grains of wood splinter into your skin. The door handles of the unmarked and unchained doors are hot to the touch and refuse the hand that tries to hold and turn them; it is clear that you are not allowed to deviate from the hallway. Paintings hang in-between the doors, paintings of places and people, hunts of hinds, and forbidden foliage. There are no faces on the people but they still follow your back and whisper, leaving the distinct impression that if you turn around what would meet your eyes would be something grotesquely unpleasant.

There is a door with two red marks on its surface, and the painting to its right is of a woman in a thin cream dress that looked more like a nightgown with dusky skin and white hair. She stands against a wall of mirrors. There is a small side table with a glass pendulum resting on it at her left. The side table in previous dreams was a desk, and at one point was even a table with scraps of cloth. The last time it was a loom, in which she wove some pattern you couldn’t see out of an oddly wet red string. She has no face like the others, but her hands are thin and cracked like some of the mirrors behind her.  You look at one of the mirrors very closely and you see your own face a few shades paler than you remember it being. The mirror next to it has a beating heart; unconsciously you count out the beat and rhythm, matching it to your own. The mirror below shows your bare neck and shoulder though you know you have clothes on. You let your eyes roam about to the other mirrors you would see more of your own body parts and organs. You see your rib cage, the rise and fall of the bones and lungs. You see your wrist, and the pale delicate blue veins that trace their way across the underside of your arm and disappear inside of you. You see a vein on your neck, the pulse faintly pounding against your skin. A lone mirror to her left has the reflection of a pocket watch, the second hand is loud and heavy as it flits around the hours. When you look back at the lady, she is three steps closer than before, head bowed, her hand is reaching forward. You stumble back and away from her.

                You’re not allowed to try to turn and run away from the end of this hallway. When you first dreamt about the hallway, the corridor simply rearranged itself when you had tried to run. If you turned to look behind, you found you were still looking forward, towards the door at the end. If you turned back around, so did everything else. It seemed to enjoy throwing off your sense of direction. There was a time long ago when the doors opened too, but each door simply led back to the hallway. Eventually the hall stopped playing and if you turn around now you see nothing but darkness creeping along the walls and slithering out of frames and doorways. You’re forced to run then because if you stay still the prisms and glass ornaments will fall and shatter around you, tinkling to the ground.

                That’s when you discover that you’re now barefoot.

                You flee then, and the spirals and curls of the walls begin to move and dance in time with the swaying of the prisms and pendalogues that haven’t fallen. The paintings turn to stare even without their eyes, and the lady with the wall of mirrors is closer to the frame than before, now smiling with lips she didn’t used to have. There are fewer doors as you run towards the end of the hall; the paintings are beginning to disappear though their whispers are still there. The chandeliers grow more numerous and cumbersome, crystals like dewdrops strung together and flung like a net to connect them in a single web above your head. The lights fade out as the darkness begins to consume them. You don’t see the door at the end that you’ve been running to, you crash into it.

                This door is covered in wet paint and the syrupy scent of overripe fruit drips steadily. The carpet in front of the door is slick and hard to stand on. If you try to turn around and get off the carpet, there is nothing behind you; it’s a void of space and light, consumed by the whispers. You have no option but to open the door in front of you, fall against it as you try and turn the slippery door handle. Your face hits the surface of the door, wet by bitter tears mixed with the paint as it burns your tongue and the back of your throat. You throw yourself against it again and again, anything to escape the void that is trying to consume you, seeping ever closer. The door gives way finally and you fall inside, but it’s not a room that you’ve fallen into. It’s a closet, or rather a very small box where you can’t stand or sit because you’ve fallen face first and the door was shut behind you. You can hear the rasping and grating of the chains and taste the charcoal flavor of the velvet-like lining of the box. You see nothing, you smell your own sweat and skin, and you scream.

                You scream because now that’s the only sound you can hear beyond your heartbeat, you squirm and struggle against the walls and door but all you feel is the furred velvet lining squeezing tighter and tighter around you. Your throat constricts and a pressure builds up in your head and chest because you can’t move, you can’t see, you can’t smell anymore. All you can feel is the soft walls crushing in on your chest and back taking away what little space you have left, and all you taste is the acrid sharpness of despair.

Author's Note

Let me know if you see any grammatical issues(or abuse of commas), and if you see tense problems.