The first sound is the hum.
It lives somewhere in the walls—low, even, almost kind. It smooths the silence of the corridor into something that feels intentional, like the world is holding its breath on purpose and not because it forgot to exhale.
The figure walks.
Their footsteps make no echo, only a faint suggestion of weight moving through thick air. Paper fragments drift at knee height and above, each one roughly the size of a hand, each one turning slowly in currents that have no visible cause.
When the figure passes, the pages tilt as if listening.
On one scrap: a charcoal sketch of a staircase that spirals up and up until the lines thin into nothing. On the next: a circle, crosshatched and shaded, that might be a moon or a closed eye seen from the inside.
None of the drawings stay the same.
Whenever the figure’s gaze lands on a page, even for a heartbeat, the lines twitch and rearrange. The staircase forks into two opposing spirals. The circle opens into a ring, then a tunnel. A face appears, then flattens into an arrangement of geometric shapes, as if embarrassed to have been caught being a face.
The figure does not speak. They are not sure if speech would work here.
Light spills from no visible fixtures, bending around corners and along the seams of the corridor, pooling in gentle gradients that blur the edges of things. Sometimes it looks like liquid running uphill. Sometimes it hangs midair in thin, slow streams, like someone has drawn rays with a very fine brush and forgotten to erase them.
The corridor lengthens as they walk.
They notice it gradually, the way you realize a dream has been going on for longer than you can remember starting it. The far wall never gets closer. The papers grow more numerous, more layered, drifting in overlapping sheets. Some pages are blank at first glance, then resolve into maps made of tiny arrows. Others carry symbols that feel almost legible, like words from a language the figure half remembers from a life they never lived.
The hum deepens, finding a second note beneath the first.
The air thins.
The figure takes another step, and the corridor exhales.
Walls pull away, cracking open into distance. The straight line of the hall bends outward into impossible depth. Shelves rise smoothly from the floor like growing bones, except where they don’t; some appear half-formed and then dissolve into pale fog, leaving only the memory of their shape.
The corridor has become a library by deciding to be one.
There are no ladders, no desks, no lamps. Only aisles that do not stay parallel, only shelves that curve and intersect and vanish into mist. The books are not really books, not bound—with every blink the figure realizes that each “spine” is just another page, another fragment, suspended and aligned with its neighbors for a moment before drifting slightly out of place.
The figure stops.
In the stillness, the pages adjust around them, like birds resettling in a tree. The sound follows: a soft, layered whisper of paper moving against paper, tiny edges brushing, corners kissing, a static rustle woven underneath the constant hum.
Something about the pattern of movement draws the figure’s attention. A single page, hovering just at shoulder-height, refuses to drift away. Its edges are unusually sharp. The light collects along the fibers.
The figure lifts a hand.
They hesitate an instant, fingers poised a breath away from the surface. The page is unmarked, or appears to be—blank, slightly yellowed, with a faint crease near one corner.
They touch it.
The contact is almost nothing: just skin and paper, cool and dry. But the effect ripples outward.
Symbols blossom from beneath their fingertips. Lines sprout and curl, ink-dark and luminous at once, sliding along the grain like a slow spill of oil. A diagram emerges: circles nested inside circles, threaded with arrows and small annotations in that not-quite-readable script. For a few seconds the meaning feels close enough to grasp, a pressure at the back of the figure’s eyes, a word forming just beyond memory.
The symbols glow as though lit from behind.
Then the light drains away, leaving the page bare again.
The figure’s fingerprint remains, faint and matte, like a shadow burned into old film.
More pages drift closer.
Some carry portraits with no eyes, their empty sockets filled with miniature landscapes. Others show blueprints of structures that could not stand in any gravity the figure understands. A page passes directly in front of their face, and for a heartbeat it displays their own silhouette from behind, walking alone down a corridor lined with floating pages.
The hum climbs half a note and steadies.
They realize, with a slow clarity that feels placed gently in the mind rather than thought, that the pages are not simply changing when looked at.
They are recording the glance.
Each touch, each flicker of attention, each almost-interpretation becomes a pattern, a layout of lines and marks that glows briefly, then retreats into some layer the eye can’t hold. The drawings are versions of these encounters, replayed and reassembled in small variations, forever approaching and withdrawing from comprehension.
The library fills itself with what people almost understood.
The figure walks between the aisles, now moving more slowly, as if not to disturb a sleeping animal. Shelves on their left dissolve as they pass, the volumes unstacking themselves into free-floating sheets that lift and disperse. On their right, new shelves condense from the mist, already crowded with pages that have been watched, touched, misread by others—by who, they cannot say.
At one junction, the aisles converge into a circular opening. Here the hum is loudest, deep enough to feel in the ribs. A column of pages rises in the center like a slow, spinning storm, each fragment orbiting an invisible axis.
Cinematic close-up: the corner of one page, frayed and soft. A single word appears there, in letters the figure can finally read.
Stay.
Then the letters diffuse into a grainy cloud and rearrange into a different word in a different language, and then another, and another—each one meaning nearly the same thing, not quite.
The figure reaches out again.
Their hand passes through the column without resistance. Pages bend around the intrusion. Some brush their skin, leaving the faint sensation of static and the smell of dry dust and old ink. With every contact, symbols flare and fade, flare and fade, like small, patient bioluminescent creatures reacting to disturbance in deep water.
They could remain here.
They understand that now. The library would not object. It would continue to unfold corridors and chambers and spiraling, mist-framed alcoves, offering endless small, almost-complete revelations. A place where nothing is entirely fixed and nothing is entirely lost. Where every glance matters enough to be kept.
Calmly, they pull their hand back.
The column slows.
One page breaks orbit and descends to hover in front of them. This time, the drawing does not change under their gaze. It is a simple image: a corridor, quiet and narrow, fading into distance. No shelves. No mist. Just a few floating scraps of paper catching soft, bending light.
This, the figure understands without knowing how, is the way back.
They take a breath that the library does not need but allows.
Then, stepping forward, they walk into the drawing.
The hum thins. The shelves recede like a dream pushed gently behind the eyes. The light straightens, losing its curves. The air grows heavier, more ordinary.
They are in the corridor again.
Pages drift, turning lazily. The images on them are different now: small, precise sketches of a hand reaching into a spinning column of paper; a silhouette standing in a circular chamber; a close-up of a fingerprint glowing on a blank sheet.
Behind them, the space where the library opened is just another stretch of wall.
The figure begins to walk.
They do not look back.
The hum remains, low and calm. Somewhere, just out of hearing, something turns the pages.
For the dream journal entry, see “The Corridor”
(Stomari | Dream Journal – yyyy/mm/dd).
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