The Color Of The Fluorescent Hum

(Trigger warning. This triggered my own claustrophobia to write. Hope you like it though!)

The smell comes first. Always the smell... A low, wet carpet reek, like a hotel that hasn't been aired since 1987, like old coffee pressed into synthetic fibers, like the inside of a mouth that hasn't spoken in a very long time.

Mara knows, even before she opens her eyes, that she is somewhere she should not be... though, she opens them anyway.

The ceiling is yellow. Not the yellow of sunflowers or taxicabs... a yellow that has long since rotted in surrender.

A yellow that was once white and has been slowly, privately losing the argument for decades...Overhead, a strip of fluorescent light buzzes at a frequency she can feel in her back teeth. It does not flicker. It simply hums, continuous and self-satisfied, as though it has been doing this forever and intends to go on doing it well long after she is gone.

She is standing in a corridor.

She doesn't remember standing up. She doesn't remember arriving. She is simply here, the way you are simply in the middle of a sentence without remembering how it began...

The corridor extends in both directions for an identical distance or what her eyes insist is identical, a geometric stubbornness that feels wrong. The way a room looks wrong when you've rearranged the furniture and can't name what changed. The walls are covered in a wallpaper pattern of small repeating diamonds, the color of old mustard, and when she looks at them too long, the pattern begins to breathe. As though the paper on the wall sucks in air and arches its patterns they way she imagines her lungs would appear if she had patterns on them. She looks away.

She starts walking. There is no decision to it. Her feet simply go. No way to know where you will end up if you don't move. No way to find the way out if you don't look... She rationalized to herself.

The carpet is the worst part.

It is the particular carpet that seems to be from everywhere and yet nowhere. The carpet in airports and low-rent offices and the basements of churches... that brown-green-orange color that exists to hide stains. Every step she takes produces a sound like a whisper: shff, shff, shff. When she stops, the sound continues for a half-second longer than it should.

She stops. She listens. The echo drains away.

Then, from somewhere behind her, from the direction she came from, or perhaps from the direction she's going, because in this place she is beginning to suspect they are the same direction in all directions, she hears it again.

A sound like someone walking on carpet, even though she is still.

Shff. Shff. Shff.

Her body does not wait for her mind. Her body simply runs. Logic was not home today but she needed to be.

The rooms she passes are all ajar. She knows she should not look into them but she cannot stop herself, the way you cannot stop your tongue from finding a new wound in your mouth.

In the first room: a folding table with a paper cup of coffee, steam still rising from it, no chair, no person, no context. The coffee steams like its fresh but she knows no one has been here in years. She doesn't know how she knows... its just a gut feeling.

In the second: a child's drawing taped to the wall. She almost runs past it. She doesn't. In the drawing, a figure stands in a long yellow corridor, and even in crayon, even in a child's approximate hand, she recognizes the figure is her. It is wearing what she is wearing. It is looking in the direction she came from.

She runs faster.

The carpet sound behind her grows closer, or perhaps she is running toward it. How was its sound not speeding up but still getting louder? Direction has become a courtesy here, a mere suggestion. The fluorescent lights above do not flicker in warning. They simply hum, neutral and indifferent, illuminating everything equally, mercilessly, with the flat brightness of a place that has never known shadow.

She turns a corner.

Another corridor, identical.

She turns again. Again. The geometry should not work. She understands this but the halls don't seem to. She has turned left, left, left, left... she should be in a loop. She is not in a loop. The corridor continues to unspool ahead of her, infinite and indifferent, yellow walls and humming ceiling and breathing wallpaper.

And then she sees the door.

It is an ordinary door. Hollow-core, off-white, the kind found in every apartment building in every mid-tier city in the world. But it is the only closed door she has seen, and it has a window. A small rectangle of wire-reinforced glass. On the other side of it, she can see light. Not the yellow hum that invades the space here, but something warmer. Something that moves. Something that looks, from this distance, like morning.

The carpet sound is close now. Very close. She does not look back. She hits the door bar with both hands and it swings open and she goes through.

Cold air. Real air. The smell of grass and damp soil and something faintly sweet, like cut apples.

She is outside. Or something like outside. The sky is the particular grey-white of early morning, that indeterminate hour before the world has decided what kind of day it will be. Around her: a small garden, a rusted iron fence, a dirt path leading toward a row of houses. Ordinary houses. Bay windows, satellite dishes, one with a bicycle leaning against the gate.

She puts her hands on her knees. She breathes. The door behind her clicks shut.

She does not look at it. As though looking at the building may suck her back into its relentless yellow halls.

She walks toward the houses.

She tells herself: I'm awake. It was a dream. It was only a dream.

This is how nightmares end, isn't it? A door. A threshold. The relief of return. She can already feel it fading, the way all dreams fade, the details dissolving at the edges like watercolor left in rain. The carpet sound is gone. The hum is gone. There is birdsong, thin and distant, but real. Definitely real.

She finds the path and follows it. The houses are terraced, Victorian, exactly the kind of street she grew up near. She knows this feeling. Familiarity is a comfort. Familiarity means home.

She passes the first house. Net curtains in the windows, the kind that people use to look out without being seen in return. She doesn't look at them. She keeps walking.

Past the second house. Past the third. The street is very quiet for morning. No cars. No people. The bicycle is still leaning against the gate at the fourth house, and when she looks at it more carefully she sees that its tires are flat not recently punctured, but anciently flat, collapsed into themselves, the rubber cracked and grey.

The bicycle has been there a long time.

She walks faster.

At the end of the row, the street turns, and she turns with it, and stops.

The street continues. Another row of terraces, identical. Bay windows, satellite dishes. The same bicycle, she almost thinks and then she sees it is a different bicycle, but also with flat tires, also cracked and grey. As though bicycles arrive on this street and slowly become fossils.

She keeps walking.

It is on the fourth turn that she hears it.

A sound from inside one of the houses. A low, continuous sound, muffled behind glass and curtain. A hum. Not quite the same frequency as the corridor. This one has a slight resonance, a tremor in it, like a note held slightly flat, but unmistakably in the same family. The same genus of sound.

She stops at the window of the house it's coming from. The net curtains shift, not in a draught. There is no draught. They simply shift, as if something behind them has moved, or leaned in.

She presses on.

She counts her steps to calm herself. She gets to a hundred and seventy and turns another corner and there it is: a door in a garden wall. Ordinary door. Off-white. A small rectangle of wire-reinforced glass. On the other side: something warm and moving that looks, from this distance, like daylight.

Her legs slow. Her body knows before she does.

She takes a step backward. Then another. She turns around and looks at the street behind her, really looks at it for the first time, and sees what she has been walking past.

The net curtains in every window. All of them, in every house on every street she's walked. They are not still. Not a single one of them is still. They all shift, gently, rhythmically, as if something stands just behind each of them, breathing in time.

As if they have been watching her walk this whole loop and will go on watching when she comes around again.

She turns back to the door and goes through it anyway, because there is nowhere else to go. What else does a person do? You go through the door. You believe in the morning on the other side. You choose the version of things that lets you keep walking.

The door swings shut behind her with a click she feels in her chest. She didnt touch the door to close it...

She is in a corridor.

The carpet is the particular carpet of everywhere and nowhere, brown-green-orange geometry that exists to hide stains. The walls are covered in a pattern of small repeating diamonds, the color of old mustard. Overhead, the fluorescent light buzzes at a frequency she can feel in her back teeth.

From somewhere behind her, from the direction she came from, or perhaps the direction she is going... she hears it.

Shff. Shff. Shff.

She does not run. Not yet. She stands very still and she notices, for the first time, something she did not notice before. On the wall ahead of her, taped at eye level, there is a child's drawing. A figure standing in a yellow corridor. But this time, the figure is not looking back the way it came.

This time, the figure is smiling.

She has not been running from the thing behind her.

She has been running toward it.

The light hums. The wallpaper breathes. From somewhere in the corridor, from both directions, from all directions, from the particular direction that this place reserves for sounds that should not be possible. Something moves on carpet.

Shff. Shff.

Mara closes her eyes.

She is still here. Its all fabricated to keep her from leaving. She felt her heart panic. There must be a way out...

She walked into the nearest room she could thinking there is little else to do but give up. This room was decorated like her old bedroom. A small twin bed, with big pink flowers. A desk with mismatched color legs. A ceiling with glued stars on it.

She fell on the bed and closed her eyes. The sound moved closer.

Shff. Shff... Shff.

She closed her eyes tighter and gripped the blanket.

Just sleep. Just sleep. Just sleep!

Finally, she fell asleep and she dreamed that she woke up home. She dreamed that this was all a dream. She dreamed she was safe.

When she woke up, she woke up at her desk in a classroom. Completely empty. Save for child drawn images of her everywhere. On the floor. Drawn in chalk on the board. Hanging from the windows. The windows!

She sprinted for the windows and desperately tried to open them. There was sunlight outside! It was midday! She just, had to... The window slid up and off the wall. It flopped in her hands like paper and fell to the ground. She screamed and fell backwards. Staring at this paper drawing that was just glowing with the light and warmth of the sun.

Then her scream echoed from down the hall followed by the voice of a little girl giggling loudly. "No fear tastes better than that of which follows false hope. Go on Mara! Try again!" The girls voice tripled, echoed and growled. "ESCAPE!"