The Room Upstairs

For Vocal's How it Feels The Second Time Challenge.

The second time should feel--honest.

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Da Xiang had all been forgotten--an obscure village tucked away in Ulu Belakang Mati's remote woods. As if someone had grown the trees to seal it off.

The forests of Ulu Belakang Mati (Road Behind the Dead) were dense.

Dark.

Morose areas of troubled vegetation--except for a colonial terrace, once clothed in European grandeur.

Its walls were now lined with overgrown bougainvillea, its rooms--the room--cages of grief.

Trauma therapist Clara Lum's own trauma still left mental scars. Scars left by the room in the abode of affluence--that she had not discussed with anyone for 18 years.

Then, her mother passed.

Clara knew that the past didn't rest until faced and buried. And doors, though familiar, never opened the same way twice.

That pulled her back to the house--home remembered differently.

Perhaps better. Perhaps not.

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Planning to sort out the nitty gritty of the estate's matters, Clara reluctantly moved in. 

But she avoided the room upstairs.

The room.

Until the third night, when she finally heard a familiar, but unwanted hum.

Carina's lullaby.

She opened the room door a tiny crack. The things inside were just as she left them 18 years earlier--two made beds, a shared diary, and a window.

But the status quo didn't remain.

She searched for her therapist's notes before a meeting one afternoon and found them.

Not unusual.

Except they were covered in blood.

And in the bathroom attached to the room where she slept, a second toothbrush.

She fell asleep, though not without tossing and turning.

A familiar little girl appeared in her dreams.

Laughing.

Then, a voice she'd heard before--and never wanted to again.

Repetition in its cruellest form.

It was a reckoning---a homecoming in disguise.

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Clara entered the room again the next day—not by choice.

She found herself there.

Awake.

Ten years earlier, with HER in it.

With Carina.

But her sister's eyes were—Wrong. Unseeing.

"Let's play again. But now, you'll hide."

Mouth rounded in a silent scream, she backed towards the door.

But the scene before her shifted.

Reset.

"Let's play again. But now, you'll hide."

There was no window. No door.

It wasn't déjà vu—A loop.

A trap.

Made by Carina.

Clara wasn't coming home.

She was a substitute.

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Her mind whirred--her sister wanted out. 

And wanted her IN.

And it hit. 

Her parents never knew, because she never told. 

They cried.

She just watched.

Soundless. 

Souless. 

Just an accident--she had trapped herself in that crawlspace.

An honest mistake. 

Or...

Carina remembered her anger with her younger sister. 

Giving her that push. 

The sound of the lock, clicking. 

Satisfying. 

But she knew it was time. 

She had to confess the truth aloud--it was the only stop button.

The only way to reset--without recurrence. 

The walls shifted.

Carina appeared. 

Half a shadow.

Incomplete.

"You remembered. That's all you needed to do."

The house collapsed---in Clara's mind.

She awoke in her mother's chair, ten years older.

Surrounded by a space--and dust.

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Clara left the house. 

Without Carina in it. 

Just a blank, upstairs room.

She never returned. 

She didn't need to. 

In her therapist practice, a new patient. 

With features too similar. 

Her sister had died, breathless, in a crawlspace.

Because she didn't help her out.

Refused to.

She had been too angry.

She smiled faintly at her new patient.

The new patient's name?

What else.

She fixed an empathetic gaze on young Clara, her new patient. 

The girl was morose.

Quiet, refusing to speak.

But Clara the adult sensed that her young charge had the potential to break free.

To redeem.

"Let's discuss how it felt to be in the same house with Carina a second time..."

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Original Story by Michelle Liew. AI tags are coincidental.