Alphabet Rising

On finding himself in a dim, open plan bar that felt like it was at the edge of the world, a traveler makes a half-hearted attempt to speak to the people lined up on bar-stools. Predictably he fails to find enough commonality to warrant any communication further than the faintest show of acknowledgement. The traveler then wanders tentatively away, looks around and notices a bookshelf. He moves toward it, attracted by the familiarity – the lingua franca of books. He reads the spines, finds a book by an author that he knows and begins, indecisively, to pull at it but, before it reaches his hands, the bookshelf opens – the bookshelf was a door and the book he chose was its key. The traveller found it a little clichéd that a bookshelf served a duel role as a secret door and he found that this cliché was just as reassuring as it was tedious.

No one else in the bar seemed to care about the door any-more than they cared about him. He walked through it more out of boredom than curiosity. There was a corridor on the other side that reminded him of a corridor in an Egyptian tomb, not that he had first hand experience of corridors in Egyptian tombs. He couldn’t see far in front of him, the only light came from the bar through the, still ajar, bookshelf. He walked down the corridor for a while. What began as a light wind slowly turned into sharper, colder wind. He glanced behind him, the sole light source was now a distant pin-prick but his eyes adjusted as if he were a nocturnal animal. As the wind began to screech faintly and to howl he began regretting his decision to leave the bar, he was becoming increasingly anxious and so he decided to turn back.

He could no longer see the entrance and when he looked up at the walls of the corridor he found that they were made of randomly arranged letters of the alphabet rising up as far as his eyes could see, his heart began beating faster; the distant screech of the wind was mixed with the close, hunted animal sound of his own breathing.