The Long Hallway

The house was not mine. I had it for eleven days while a friend of a friend was somewhere colder, and the arrangement came with a list of instructions about the boiler that I never read. I mention this because it matters that I did not know the building. When the hallway began to lengthen, I had no baseline to argue against.

It started as an ordinary observation. I walked from the kitchen toward the bedroom and noticed, halfway, that I had been walking for a while. Not long — just longer than the walk had been that morning. The carpet was the same carpet. The light fitting overhead was the same one I had ducked under for over a week. But there was more of it between the two ends than there had been.

I stopped. That was the mistake, I think. Standing still gave the corridor room to work.

Counting

There had been three doors. I was confident about three: bathroom on the left, airing cupboard on the right, bedroom at the end. Standing there, I counted five, and then, when I looked back toward the kitchen to check I had not turned around, six. The new ones were not sinister. They had the same brass handles, the same four panels, the same badly applied cream paint with a run down the left side of each. Whatever was extending the hallway was doing it faithfully. It was building in the local style.

I decided to count them properly. This felt like the responsible thing — a census, something with a beginning and an end. I got to four and lost my place, because between four and five I had started thinking about whether the counting was what was making them, and the thought took long enough that when I returned to the corridor there were more.

That was the trap, and I want to be exact about how it worked, because it was not frightening in the way I would have predicted. It was frightening the way a sum that will not come out is frightening. There was a correct number of doors. I simply could not get to it, and the failure felt like mine.

The hour

I do not know how long I stood there. Afterwards I decided it was an hour, but I chose that number the way you choose a number for a jar of sweets. Time in the hallway did not pass so much as accumulate, thickly, the way silt does.

At some point I understood that I could simply walk. Not to the bedroom — the bedroom had stopped being a destination and become a rumour at the far end — but back to the kitchen, which was three steps behind me and had never once misbehaved. The knowledge that the kitchen was still three steps away was the only fixed point I had, and I have thought about that a great deal since: how the mind, when the room stops cooperating, will grip whatever is nearest and hold it like a rail.

I went back to the kitchen. I sat on the floor with my back against the dishwasher, which hummed, and the humming was regular, and I counted that instead. The dishwasher did not add cycles. It ran its one cycle and stopped, and when it stopped the silence had an ordinary shape.

After

In the morning the hallway was a hallway. Three doors. I checked twice, then made myself stop checking, because checking was how it had begun.

What stayed with me was not the corridor. It was the census — the conviction, absolute at the time, that if I could only arrive at the right number the room would settle and agree to be a room again. I have wanted that in other places since. A correct number that would make a thing hold still.

The friend of a friend came back. I did not mention the doors. I did ask, in a roundabout way, whether the house had ever felt long, and they said that all rented houses feel long in the winter, which is the sort of answer that closes a subject kindly.