A little before dawn, Ethan woke up tangled in his sheets with a terrifying drumbeat of a heart thundering in his chest. The dream had been the most gruesome, and he could still hear the echoes of a scream, sounding a wet, gurgling howl trapped somewhere under the floorboards of Room 4A-it had sounded like a girl. Perhaps Irene. Perhaps someone else.
He looked around the room as he sat up. Darkness was draping shadowy fingers over the walls. The air was all quiet, calm. Alas! The dream dragged on, heavy in the air. He checked the phone: 5:38 a.m. No messages. There were no missed calls. Only school calendar notes as if that were normal.
He took to thinking about Kelsey.
In homeroom, she had been three seats behind him. Quiet. Shy. Always sketching something. He remembered he had, at one time, glimpsed what one of her drawings depicted; he was struck by the image of a headless woman who had dozens of eyes down her spine. She had hesitated and then whispered to him, "They live in the walls. Talk when no one listens."
To think it was a joke.
It was not.
Morning school was dull. The hallways pulsed, far too bright as if the fluorescent lights were buzzing a little louder; humming with static. Ethan kept catching glimpses from the corners; on turning, they vanished. Locker doors opened by themselves. Teachers murmured in monotonous voices. No one dared stare at him directly.
Only Irene.
She was standing next to her locker and looked so much paler than she usually was. Her eyes were rimmed with sleeplessness. "You saw it again, didn't you?"
"Dream," Ethan muttered, but they felt more like a memory.
"That's how it starts," she went on. "The dreams get clearer. They try to show you things. And once it knows you're listening..."
"It doesn't let go," Ethan finished for her.
She nodded slowly.
They walked toward Room 4A together. For some strange reason, the hallway leading up to it felt longer than it normally did. Almost as if the school stretched overnight. Ethan kept counting tiles beneath his feet. Forty-ninth. Fiftieth. Fifty-first. Fifty-second...
"Wait," Irene said, grabbing his arm. "Someone's already in there."
They stood still in front of the door. Leaks of whisper sounds flowed through the wood-not exactly a voice-more like breathing. But multiplied, like twenty people exhaling at once.
Ethan pushed the door open.
At first sight, the room looked quite normal. Desks. Chalkboard. That ever-present dusty and damp smell. Kelsey occupied the last row, her head bent over a notebook. She would not raise her eyes.
"Kelsey?" called Ethan.
No response.
Irene came closer, hesitating. "She wasn't here yesterday. I don't think I've seen her for days."
Ethan made his way to her desk. "Hey-Kelsey."
There was still nothing. He reached out to tap her shoulder.
At the moment his fingers touched her, the air went icy-cold.
Kelsey snapped her head up. All that could be seen was black pits where her eyes used to be; her face was streaming with tears the colour of ink. Her mouth opened, impossibly wide, and a low sound poured out, something akin to the sound of dripping water played backward.
Irene screamed.
The coldness greatly took Kelsey down.
The ink spread in pools over the tabletop. The pages of her sketchbook soaked it up, completely warping and shredding. Ethan clawed the book from her hands and took a step back. Kelsey, now, did not stir.
Dead.
Her skin gray, visibly drained of her life, as if a shroud had been lifted. Etched deep into her skin there were the letters,
SEEN
Ethan dropped the book.
The room began to hum.
The walls breathed.
A voice, soft and echoing, whispered all around: "You should not have come back."
Ethan and Irene ran.
They did not speak until they were far outside the building.
The silence at the back of them, the school. No alarms. No screams. Like nothing had happened.
Irene gasped, holding a hand to her chest. "It marked her. She knew too much. Drew too much. It hates that."
Ethan nodded, his own breath hitching. "And now it knows we are trying to see it."
She turned to him, "We have to fight back. We find out what happened here. Why this room is a gate. Why it chooses. And we stop it."
He looked down at the sketchbook still clutched in his hand.
The cover now bled black ink.
And on the first page, in shaky handwriting that hadn't been there before:
Help me. I'm still here.
They met in the basement of the library, abandoned after school hours. Irene had stolen keys from the janitor last week, granting them access to most of the locked doors. Ethan had brought the sketchbook. They laid it on the table between them, afraid to touch it.
"Irene whispered. "My sister disappeared 5 years ago. Same school. Same room. Her name was Ellie. She was just fourteen. One day she just disappeared. No one cared. No investigation. As if she never existed.""
Ethan looked up. "You think it was the room?"
"I know it was. I found her name etched into the underside of one of the desks. Right next to the phrase: IT TAKES WHAT SEES."
Ethan shivered.
Irene opened the sketchbook. More drawings had appeared. The pages Ethan was sure had been blank glittered with jagged lines and crude impressions of figures slumped in corners and blood pooling across floorboards. One of the drawings: Room 4A, in almost perfect detail. But chains hanging from the ceiling and a silhouette gazing at its reflection in the chalkboard.
"We're going back," Irene said.
"Tonight."
Ethan stepped right behind her, shaking but unmarked by the forceful presence slowly encroaching into her view. Importantly, the smiling yet wretched visage turned ever so slightly, followed by a guttural word: "Fear."
The crying of the last pages on the floor signified the only message that would come from the spirit. As Ethan never gazed into that book again, he might consider that it had offered him an escape.
In the following days, in his insatiable quest fueled by the fear of that night, Ethan hunted ever deeper into the secrets of Harrington until rumors faded with time. He scoured the net for anything he could find: Harrington High disappearances, Room 4A, urban legends, student deaths. Most were more like rumors—buried forum posts, blogs from long-deleted sites. Saving the strangest for last was an article buried so deep he almost skipped it.
An obituary littered with deception titled "The Room Where They Watch."
It explained how other schools have similar rooms. Places not found on blueprints. Desks that relocate themselves. Students marked by something ancient. Something that only sees those who tried to see it.
There was one name in there too: The Hollowed.
Ethan leaned closer.
A shadow flickered across his monitor.
He turned around with a racing heart only to find an empty room.
Or so he thought.
Behind him, something moved outside the window in the reflection.
He spun around in his chair.
Nothing: just his bed, a glimpse of the open closet door, and the faint creaking of settling floorboards. The movement in question had been real; it had felt far too tangible and purposeful. He turned back towards the window and squinted through the glass. The reflection showed his room but not quite.
His reflection sat at the desk-but the face was wrong. Deep-set eyes looked gaunt, with a mouth creasing into an unnatural grin. It raised a hand and waved.
Ethan remained motionless.
The reflection leaned in closely and seemed to whisper a secret from another world while mouthing words he couldn't hear.
Lights flickered.
His computer screen went haywire, flashing rapidly through distorted images of Room 4A, of Kelsey's ink-filled eyes, of chains swinging from the ceiling of a classroom. It then faded to black.
One word remained on the screen.
STAY.
Ethan lunged forward to close the laptop, trembling fingers working away. Said laptop started buzzing violently on the nightstand. He picked it up.
Unknown number.
Message one:
"Did you see it too?"
Ethan stared at the screen, unable to process any thoughts. The message glowed like it had been seared into his cellphone. After a long lapse, he replied: "Who is this?"
Three dots appeared.
Now, typing.
Then the message: "Someone who saw it once... and made it out. But not whole."
He took a gasp of breath. Another message immediately followed:
"You need to leave. Not just the school. The town. Before it binds you. Before it becomes you."
Ethan's hands were trembling. He typed back: "What is it?"
"It doesn't have a name. Not one you can say. It's not a ghost. Not a demon. It's a hole that eats memories and replaces them with itself. And once you let it in, you stop being you."
Another suspension of time. Then:
"It knows your name well enough by now. It found it out while you were touching her."
The phone slipped from Ethan's hand and landed on the carpet, cushioned by plushness. He backed away and crashed into the desk.
Then it buzzed again.
He lifted the phone.
A picture.
It was a photo of his room. From outside his window. And in the reflection of the window, standing over his shoulder, was a figure: pale, tall, its face was an obscure cloud of shadows.
And beneath the photograph came the last message.
"You are already inside."
He stared at the screen, his heart pounding so hard it hurt. The message was more than a warning. It was a death sentence.
The lights flickered once again in his room. A low, droning hum began—barely audible, more a sensation than sound, like pressure building behind his eyes. The walls pulsed, breathing.
Ethan dropped the phone.
From the corner of his eye, the closet door opened slightly more. It was neither wind nor draught, just the slow creaking of old hinges that had just begun to complain.
He picked the baseball bat beside his bed and slid toward the closet. Each step became hard. The air thickened.
He froze.
Through the darkness, he heard the whisper: "You let me in."
He stumbled backward.
The lights went out.
Complete silence.
And then came a voice, a voice not loud but inside him:
"We see from behind your eyes now."
The closet door slammed shut.
He bolted out of the room, nearly tripping down the stairs, through the sitting room, and into the yard. The cold air felt like a slap.
Every light in his house flicked on at once just behind him.
And at the window upstairs-his window-stood a silhouette watching.
His silhouette.
Smiling.
The reflection was frozen- lips apart in a smirk too wide, too knowing. Ethan's breath stopped. He simply could not move. Could not scream. The figure in the window turned its head by a fraction, the same way he had just done a moment before.
Except he had not.
Something cold ran down his spine, felt like a finger made of ice. He stumbled back across the yard, keeping his eyes on the figure. It did not follow. It did not have to. The message was clear.
You belong to me now.
Lights inside his bedroom were flickering behind the glass, in a rhythm- three flashes, black, then three again. A pattern. Morse code? A signal? Or perhaps just the thing's heartbeat: smashing against the walls of reality.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He pulled it out with shaking hands.
One new message.
No name. No number.
Just four words:
Let me wear you.