Room Five

The new job was in an old building. He took a wander round and eventually settled in his ground-floor office. He had a nice wooden desk. Most of his peers had jobs in modern offices, but he thought this would be different and interesting.

He felt that the company seemed Dickensian in look and feel, but the pay was actually better than all the other jobs on offer, and people asked him why he had gone there he said it was the location, the job and the money.

He was not tied to his desk and office and often wandered outside to admire the building and its surroundings. The Addams Family could have lived here, although it was now home to a firm of well-to-do solicitors.

He often had to go up to the first floor to file and retrieve documents, and noticed that the rooms were numbered, but there was a blank wall between doors four and six. He wondered what had happened to room number five. Had they just not had a number when numbering the rooms, or had there been a room number five?

On one of his walks out, he saw there was a large spread of brick between two of the windows, and it looked like a window had been bricked up. That piqued his interest even further.

He decided to ask one of the solicitors what had happened to Room Five.

"Ah, the mystery of Room Five. It was sealed when we bought the place, and it was part of the sales agreement that we would never open the room up or try to enter it. There is nothing sinister about it, but it is kept like that as a sort of tribute to the original owners of the building.

It was, and I suppose still is, a chapel and a "hidey hole" for Catholic priests and other clergy during the religious persecutions by Henry the Eighth and subsequent Protestant rulers. Though they managed to save some, others were taken, tortured and killed.

They commemorated the ones they lost who were martyred for going against the edicts of the Protestant monarchs, but that was the religion of the time, dangerous if you were on the wrong side.

The house owners were never threatened, though and while the clergy were in the room, they were safe, but eventually they had to leave for whatever reason, and that is when they were taken and imprisoned and sentenced to death.

Eventually, religious tolerance happened, and people were safe to practice their chosen beliefs. The owners kept the room as a chapel, but eventually it fell into disuse. The owners decided to preserve the room as a tribute to what their ancestors did and the martyrs who had used it for sanctuary.

To preserve it, they bricked up the window and sealed the doorway, and that is as it is now.

We have respected their wishes, and we have no need for the room. The building, as you know, is very large.

If we ever sell this place, we will probably stipulate that the room should stay untouched. Yes, it's a mystery, and I like that, but we need to give the past some respect, don't we?

Very often, things like this come with a curse or a warning, if they are disturbed, but we have never heard anything or been disturbed by ghosts or demons.

So that is the story of Room Five and why it is like it is. There's nothing special about it, but this room is not forgotten, and few people know its history, but now you do."