The Corridors Beyond the Mirror

The air flickers—

not a theater, not an audience, just the soft hum of a bulb caught between life and death.

Light ripples across an invisible floor.

You stand there, alone, as if someone has turned on the projector of your mind but forgotten to load the film.

Then, a stain appears.

A black dot, pulsing against the white emptiness.

It breathes. It grows. It learns to walk.

It takes shape—something between smoke and skin, memory and mistake.

It grins, crooked and wrong, the way cracks grin across broken glass.

When it speaks, the sound scrapes the walls like nails through aluminum:

“Step closer, traveler.

You’ve already turned the key.

The journey is inward now.

Come—see what sleeps beneath your name.”

You want to laugh. You want to scream.

You do both.

And you take its hand.

A burst—then silence.

When you open your eyes, you’re standing in a long hallway painted in shades of white, black, and electric blue.

Everything hums faintly, as though running on memory.

A man steps forward, clean and ordinary, the kind of face you’d forget immediately.

He smiles politely.

“Don’t mind the Gatekeeper,” he says. “He’s not a demon, just… transitional. We designed him from your earliest emotional patterns. Birth-level data, roughly six seconds in.”

“He terrified me.”

“Ah,” he nods, writing a mental note, “I’ll let administration know.”

He gestures down the hall. Twelve doors shimmer into existence.

“Each door opens to a memory. Some are stable. Some are not. Choose carefully—if you fall through the wrong one, you might end up in the Deep Subconscious. No one ever comes back from there.”

You reach for the first door.

He shakes his head.

You try the second.

Another shake.

The third—he gives a small nod.

You turn the handle.

You’re sitting on a carpet, soft as breath.

Voices chatter somewhere beyond comprehension.

You remember being eight, sneaking extra slices of pie after everyone else had gone to bed.

Eleven pieces later, your stomach hurt, your mother laughed, and the memory fossilized into sweetness.

Snap.

The world folds.

Now you’re on a platform surrounded by ladders and slides—blue and red, gleaming, endless.

Rules whisper in your ear:

Blue goes up. Red goes down.

You pick a blue ladder.

And suddenly you’re running—

a windy schoolyard, hopscotch drawn in chalk, your legs burning as the sky pushes you faster.

The wind laughs and you laugh back until your chest catches fire.

Then it’s gone.

A purple plank appears, hovering midair.

You step onto it.

It cracks halfway across, and the world dissolves.

Now you’re in a field, digging with friends, the dirt dry and whispering secrets.

You find a box.

Inside—things you shouldn’t understand yet.

The memory tilts, folds, erases itself.

Back to the platform.

Blue, red, gray.

You’re dizzy.

Then comes a voice:

“Hey! I’m from the same tour. Could you keep it down?

Every time you shout, the maze shifts.”

You look up. A woman waves from a platform tilted against gravity.

She smiles faintly.

“Try the gray ladder. Up or down doesn’t matter here—it depends which direction your guilt is heavier.”

You climb.

Another memory opens:

Headlights.

A dark road.

A blur of fur and motion.

A sickening thud.

You stop. Too late.

Twenty years, and it still hurts.

The ladder turns darker. Gray deepens to black.

You keep climbing.

Then a basement.

A metal cell.

Your father’s laughter echoing from the dark as the lights go out and eternity passes in a breath.

The ladder ends.

A flat gray platform, silent as a tomb.

It feels safe.

You sit.

You rest.

You sleep.

You wake up.

You take another nap.

Then another, so you won’t miss the first one.

For a while, it’s peaceful.

Then boredom curls around your neck like a scarf.

You stand. You jump.

Gravity forgets you exist.

You drift through black space, past floating signs:

“Left: Permanent Migraine Pools. Eternal pain.”

“Right: Cocktail Bar of Social Anxiety. Last call never ends.”

“Straight ahead: Gift Shop. Donations welcome.”

Everything fades to darkness.

Music begins—soft, wordless, cinematic.

On an invisible screen, words appear:

THE CORRIDORS BEYOND THE MIRROR

Before You Wake

You turn, smile at yourself, give a little thumbs-up, and whisper:

“I’m greenlighting it. One in every dream.”

And then—

you wake up.