Behind the Sheet

We moved into the house in late fall, the kind of season where daylight fades before you feel ready. The nice elderly landlord walked us room to room with a natural smile, pointing out upgrades and fresh paint and how the furnace had been recently serviced. He kept talking, but every time we reached the hallway, he angled his body away from the last opening at the far end. He never looked at it directly. He never mentioned it.

It never felt like a private room because it had no door. No hinges. Just an open frame leading into a narrow room with a whirlpool tub, two tall windows, and a closet with its own door that never closed straight.

“Kind of odd to have no door,” Sherry said, tilting her head toward the frame.

The landlord smiled quickly. “Just a design choice. Adds space.”

I noticed how his eyes never matched his smile.

It wasn’t a bathroom. It wasn’t a bedroom. It was a tub in a room that felt like it had been put there to hide a secret.

When we first toured the house, the tub room had a second entrance that opened into the small bathroom, creating a little loop from the tub room, through the bathroom, and out into the kitchen. By moving day that opening had vanished, sealed with drywall and fresh paint like it had never belonged there at all. The landlord brushed it off with a quick line about nobody needing two ways into a bathroom, then rushed back into talking about square footage. We let it pass because the truck was half unloaded and the day had already worn us down.

Winter settled in and proved the house could hold heat almost everywhere. That room was the exception. No matter how high we turned the thermostat, the tub room stayed cold. Not drafty. Not leaky. A cold chill that sat in the air and waited.

Sherry took off her clothes and tried to relax in the tub a few times that first week, then came out wrapped in a towel with the same nervous look every time. “It feels wrong in there,” she said on the third night. “Like the air presses down instead of surrounding me.” She stayed away from it after that.

I pressed my palm to the wall once and felt a temperature that made no sense, an almost freezing cold that refused the warmth of my hand. We hung a plain gray sheet across the opening to keep the cold from creeping into the hall. A tension rod held it up on two small metal hooks screwed into the trim. It helped a little. It kept the air where it belonged, but more importantly, it made the empty doorway feel sealed, like the house could finally pretend that opening had never been part of it.

We called it the Bathtub Room at first. Then the Back Room. Then the Forgotten Room, because forgetting something is easier when you give it a name that says you already have. We stopped using it. Boxes went in and never came out. Storage replaced purpose.

The only one who refused to forget was the cat. He sat low in the hallway with his body tense and his eyes on the sheet. His ears tracked sounds I never heard. Sometimes he made a sound deep in his throat that sounded like neither a hiss nor a warning. It was awareness.

“Leave it alone,” I told him one night. “Nothing for you in there.”

He stayed where he was.

Animals know what we deny.

We hung the sheet on March sixth. It was a leap year. February had an extra day. We paid no attention at the time. It was also the month everyone had to start wearing masks everywhere, which made the outside world feel as strange as the inside of our house. Days passed. Then weeks. Then months. The room stayed sealed behind thin fabric and a decision not to look too hard.

We were sitting at the kitchen table when the number found us. The room was quiet except for the refrigerator hum. Sherry had been scrolling, trying to see how long it had been since we hung the sheet. I thought nothing of it. It should have been a simple count of days.

She stared at the screen a beat too long and said, very softly, “This can’t be right.”

She turned the phone toward me. Her hand shook just enough to notice.

“Six hundred sixty-six days,” she said. “Exactly.”

She refreshed the page, and the number stayed the same.

“Leap year,” she whispered. “The extra day made it exact.”

The number itself meant little to me. Its perfection scared me. It felt like something had been counting. Not us. The house. Not counting the days that passed, counting our time with it.

That night I sat on the couch half awake and heard my name. Soft. Familiar. The kind of voice a person uses when they need a light turned off or a glass of water.

“Jason.”

I walked down the hall without thinking and checked the bedroom. Sherry slept on her side, breathing evenly. The blanket rose and fell in a way that didn’t match what I had heard.

Then her voice came again from the other side of the sheet. “Can you help me? I’m in here.”

The sound was right. The pattern was wrong. Sherry would have said come here or just my name. The sheet moved a little, a thin ripple like fabric reacting to breath from inside our forgotten room.

I reached out. The moment my fingers touched it, a cold surge shot up my arm. Not normal cold. Not a temperature. A presence.

I spoke low, unable to raise my voice. “You’re not her.”

Everything went still, like a decision had been made. I returned to bed and lay beside Sherry without closing my eyes, staring at the thin line of hallway light under the door as the hours dragged past. Sometime near morning, the metal whispered. The hooks that held the sheet shifted against the tension rod with a small, slow creak, the sound of motion that tested what kept it in place. I stayed still. I waited for sunrise, because sleep felt like permission, and I had given enough.

The following night I woke to light where no light belonged. A clean rectangle of brightness spilled along the hallway floor. The bedroom door stood open, the way we had left it, and the sheet was drawn aside and gathered hard at the trim like a hand had pulled it and forgotten to let go. Sherry slept, unaware. The cat stayed away from the doorway. He refused to go near it anymore.

I checked my phone. The smart light in the Forgotten Room showed on. I tapped it off. Nothing changed. The app refreshed and turned it back on by itself. I walked toward the opening with one hand on the wall because my legs felt unreliable.

When I reached the threshold, the air tightened around me. The boxes inside had been rotated so every label faced the door, like an audience waiting for a cue. The closet stood open. The tub caught the light in dull streaks that never looked clean no matter how often we wiped it.

I stepped one foot inside and felt it instantly, not a touch but attention, a focused awareness that settled on me the way a person settles their eyes. I slid the sheet back across the opening, tapped the light off again, and kept my hand on the fabric until the cold left my fingers.

For a few nights after that, nothing happened. The silence felt like relief and then turned into something worse. Silence has intention.

One night I woke to three taps on the top of my head. Intentional. Firm. Enough pressure to pull me fully awake. The cat sat at the bedroom doorway and stared down the hall toward the sheet without blinking.

Another night I forced myself to stay up on the couch and watched the opening. The sheet rippled. Not from air. From intention. The smart lights dimmed on their own, and in that made quiet, I heard breathing on the other side. Slow. Even. Controlled. Not human, but trying to be.

Sherry appeared behind me with her eyes half open. She moved toward the sheet with an unnatural calm that had nothing to do with sleep.

“Sherry,” I whispered, grabbing her arm. “Stop.”

Her eyes blinked, focused, and filled with confusion. “I want to stay away from it.”

“We’ll stay away from it,” I said. “Come on.”

We went to bed, and I watched the hallway until morning. I told myself I would stop feeding the room my attention and starve it. But attention never seemed to be the food it wanted. Fear offers no choice. Fear is a warning.

The next time it escalated, it started small, and then it refused to stay small.

A single heavy thud shook the hallway wall, hard enough to rattle a frame. I sat up and listened. A second thud followed. Heavier. Closer. The cat launched off the bed and disappeared under the dresser without a sound.

I opened the hallway camera on my phone. The feed was black, like something covered the lens. It shook once, twice, a violent jolt like hands slamming the camera, then the image died to static. Fabric dragged. A long pull. The sound of the sheet sliding on wood.

I stepped into the hallway and the air hit me like heat from a sealed attic. Warm. Thick. Wrong. The metal hooks groaned against the frame as weight pressed forward from the other side. I realized the room no longer felt cold. Something had warmed it.

A voice came from behind the sheet. It spoke my name like it was learning the shape of it. Slow and careful. “Jason. Come in.”

Not an invitation. An instruction.

The sheet bulged forward around a tall shape that refused to look right. I should have run. I walked closer. My hand lifted as if someone else owned it. The closer I got, the slower I moved, like walking into deep water.

My fingers touched the fabric. It was warm. Something slid down the other side of the sheet and mirrored my hand. Not a palm. Not fingers. Something longer, with too many joints.

Whatever hold it had on me broke. I jerked back. The sheet pulled with me like it had hands. My head hit the hallway wall and burst white behind my eyes. Before I could stand, something yanked my ankles out from under me and dragged me across the floor. The sheet brushed my face as I crossed the threshold.

The room erupted. Boxes launched and slammed against the tub. Not fell, thrown. The closet door banged open and shut like something inside it wanted out. The whirlpool shook on its base as if something heavy tried to stand up inside it.

I grabbed the porcelain edge and pulled myself to my knees. Pressure slammed into my chest and made my vision shake. My breath stopped in my chest. Something leaned close to my ear and pressed a thought into my head that came from somewhere else.

“You brought me back.”

Sherry screamed my name from the hallway, and the sound cut through the fog in my skull. I turned toward her and crawled. The sheet clung to my shoulders like wet skin. She grabbed my wrist and pulled. Something on the other side pulled back. For a second I felt both forces on me, one warm and desperate, one cold and patient.

The fabric tore. Metal hooks shot past us and scraped the wall. The tension rod bounced and skittered along the floor. I collapsed into the hallway, and she dragged me to the bedroom. We shut the door and held each other on the floor while the house shook and then slowly, carefully, became motionless.

Silence followed. Not peace. Not safety. A silence with the shape of a smile.

We left the sheet where it had fallen. We never covered the opening again. The frame at the end of the hall is naked now. Some nights I lie in bed and see the outline of something standing there. Not a person. Not a shadow. The absence of shape where shape should be.

The cat refuses the hallway entirely. He sleeps pressed against us, eyes fixed on the dark. I woke last night to warm breath on my face. I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling while footsteps moved down the hall, slow and steady, toward the Forgotten Room, the Bathtub Room, the room we ignored until it learned our names.

I understand what it wants now. It wants no fabric. It wants no light. It wants a clear path and our attention. It studies the house. It studies us. Every time I look at the opening, I feel it learn a little more.

I mostly sit on the couch because sleep feels like a risk. The cat is under it with his ears pinned. The hall is quiet, but not empty. Something shifts its weight on the boards near the opening. The floor gives a small sound.

I tell myself not to look. I tell myself the rule is simple.

If I don’t look, it can’t have me.

If I don’t look, I haven’t agreed.

Something exhales close to my ear and speaks in a low, careful way that isn’t a voice, but still is.

“You already did.”

Last night, I gave it my answer. A middle finger.

The next time just might be both.