Corridor of Dreams (Prompt 078, 100OriginalFics Challenge)
Title: Corridor of Dreams
Author: ravanasnape
Prompt: 078 (Where?)
Rating: PG
Length: 486 words
Summary: There is an endless corridor with infinite rooms. It's the myth that will begin her journey.
In a place beyond the recall of most beings, there rests a dark and dusty corridor, lined with equally dark and dusty doors. The corridor is panelled, the doors are wooden and each one has a different pattern embossed in flowing filigree designs. There is a tangible sense of the possible in the air, heavy and slow on the tongue, it curls into the corners and around the walls, touching the ceiling and embracing the floorboards. Time has neither meaning nor reference here, although the word ancient is more readily applied to the surroundings than any other.
You could walk, run, jog or crawl down the passageway and still never reach an end; the horizon stretches until it is swallowed by the gloom that seems to creep from every corner. Those with keen eyesight could make out gargantuan spider webs, stretching from cornice to cornice. Here, the potential is endless and without form.
Only the very daring, brave - or perhaps stupid - venture to open the doors. Each swings slowly, takes the whole weight of the person on its hinges before it cedes passage. All of them open silently, yet you expect a massive scream from the metal that never comes.
Behind the doors lie a plethora of worlds, each and every one of them contained within card and paper covers, which rise, in regimented rows, all the way up to the ceilings. It is a bibliophile’s heaven and the illiterate’s hell. Each room is different; some are cosy and small, some are stark and immense. Some are light, some are dark. There are windows and lamps and curtains and drapes from every culture, time and material imaginable. Occasionally there are paintings, more often there are tables; low-slung, slanted or tall and narrow. The rooms hold an invitation, to sit and read and lose your life in the printed word. The topics covered are both fact and fiction or fact that is so impossible as to be fiction, or fiction so careful guised as the truth that it makes no difference. In one it is spring, another autumn. You can encompass the whole world in an afternoon and yet never leave yesterday if you read for a year.
It is addictive and compelling, made of fable and myth and legend. Whispers on the wind hint at the contents, the corridor and the pathway that leads there.
***
The girl is eight when she picks up an old storybook in a tiny, grubby little shop in an ancient town with narrow cobbled lanes. She reads, entranced, for a whole afternoon and then, much to her eternal regret, places the book back on the pile and walks out with her mother. The next day she cajoles her parents into searching for the shop, to no avail.
She will spend the rest of her life hunting for the book and the place it described: the corridor of dreams.
Author: ravanasnape
Prompt: 078 (Where?)
Rating: PG
Length: 486 words
Summary: There is an endless corridor with infinite rooms. It's the myth that will begin her journey.
In a place beyond the recall of most beings, there rests a dark and dusty corridor, lined with equally dark and dusty doors. The corridor is panelled, the doors are wooden and each one has a different pattern embossed in flowing filigree designs. There is a tangible sense of the possible in the air, heavy and slow on the tongue, it curls into the corners and around the walls, touching the ceiling and embracing the floorboards. Time has neither meaning nor reference here, although the word ancient is more readily applied to the surroundings than any other.
You could walk, run, jog or crawl down the passageway and still never reach an end; the horizon stretches until it is swallowed by the gloom that seems to creep from every corner. Those with keen eyesight could make out gargantuan spider webs, stretching from cornice to cornice. Here, the potential is endless and without form.
Only the very daring, brave - or perhaps stupid - venture to open the doors. Each swings slowly, takes the whole weight of the person on its hinges before it cedes passage. All of them open silently, yet you expect a massive scream from the metal that never comes.
Behind the doors lie a plethora of worlds, each and every one of them contained within card and paper covers, which rise, in regimented rows, all the way up to the ceilings. It is a bibliophile’s heaven and the illiterate’s hell. Each room is different; some are cosy and small, some are stark and immense. Some are light, some are dark. There are windows and lamps and curtains and drapes from every culture, time and material imaginable. Occasionally there are paintings, more often there are tables; low-slung, slanted or tall and narrow. The rooms hold an invitation, to sit and read and lose your life in the printed word. The topics covered are both fact and fiction or fact that is so impossible as to be fiction, or fiction so careful guised as the truth that it makes no difference. In one it is spring, another autumn. You can encompass the whole world in an afternoon and yet never leave yesterday if you read for a year.
It is addictive and compelling, made of fable and myth and legend. Whispers on the wind hint at the contents, the corridor and the pathway that leads there.
***
The girl is eight when she picks up an old storybook in a tiny, grubby little shop in an ancient town with narrow cobbled lanes. She reads, entranced, for a whole afternoon and then, much to her eternal regret, places the book back on the pile and walks out with her mother. The next day she cajoles her parents into searching for the shop, to no avail.
She will spend the rest of her life hunting for the book and the place it described: the corridor of dreams.