The Room With No Window – Part 5

For years, the boarding house remained untouched—a silent shell of wood and dust, sealed behind caution tape. Locals whispered that no one should go near it after dark. But eventually, the city council ordered it torn down. To them, it was just another forgotten ruin.

To Lukas Vance, demolition foreman, it was just another job.

He and his crew arrived before dawn. The air was heavy with fog, and the building’s warped frame loomed like a skeleton. Lukas’s flashlight flickered across faded wallpaper, collapsed beams, and a single corridor ending at a door painted red: Room 119.

The same number from the urban legends.

The one where Jonathan Hale had vanished thirty years ago.

“Creepy old stories,” muttered Ellis, the youngest in the crew. “You think he’s really buried in there?”

Lukas forced a grin. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

The door creaked open before he even touched it. Inside, the room was perfectly preserved—as if time had frozen. Dust motes floated through pale light from a single crack in the ceiling. The bed was still made. A chair sat by a desk where an old, scorched book lay open. On the wall above the headboard, faint words were scrawled in something darker than paint:

*The window will open when the room is full.*

Ellis laughed nervously. “What window? There’s no window here.”

Lukas didn’t answer. His attention had caught on the mirror above the dresser. It was cracked down the center, the glass clouded like smoke. Beneath the grime, someone had carved a name into the wooden frame.

*Jonathan Hale.*

He wiped the surface—and froze.

The reflection showed him, yes, but the room behind him was not the one he stood in. The wallpaper was clean, the light warmer… and there, standing just behind his shoulder, was a man in old-fashioned clothes, his eyes hollow.

“Ellis?” Lukas whispered. “There’s someone—”

He turned. The room was empty.

When he looked back, the man in the reflection smiled.

The temperature dropped. Breath turned visible. Then came the scratching—from under the floorboards. The walls began to groan as if something inside them wanted out.

“Let’s get out of here,” Ellis said, voice trembling. But when they tried the door, it didn’t open. No matter how many times they turned the knob, it only revealed the same room again—unchanged, unending.

Then, from nowhere, came a whisper—familiar, echoing, layered.

*The window will open when the room is full.*

Lukas looked back at the mirror. The crack had widened. From its fracture seeped a thin line of dark liquid, glistening like ink. The smell of iron filled the air.

“Break it,” Lukas ordered.

Ellis grabbed a wrench and struck the mirror.

It didn’t shatter—it breathed.

A pulse rippled through the glass like a heartbeat, and dozens of pale hands pressed outward from the other side. Faces appeared in the reflection—frozen, screaming, the same faces Lukas had seen in the old photos of missing tenants.

Jonathan Hale’s voice echoed from the glass:

“You brought them back. The room remembers.”

The walls began to close in. Ellis screamed as the mirror stretched toward him, swallowing his reflection first—and then him. Lukas ran to the door, pounding until his fists bled. Behind him, the mirror’s surface now shimmered with hundreds of eyes, all open, all staring.

The voice whispered again, right next to his ear now:

*The room is full.*

A deafening crack split the air. The mirror imploded, sucking the light from the room. Lukas felt himself pulled backward, into the cold dark, into the reflection that was no longer his.

When the demolition team returned the next morning, Room 119 was gone. The corridor ended in a blank wall of fresh plaster, still damp.

But if you stood close enough, you could hear a faint heartbeat behind the wall—and see, for a second, a human eye watching from beneath the surface.

In the reflection of that very wall, when the moonlight hits just right,

Jonathan Hale stands smiling…

And now, Lukas stands beside him.