The Room With No Window – Part 6

The town of Hallowmere had learned to forget.

They boarded the house long ago, paved the street, and renamed the block so that no one would remember where it stood. But stories have a way of surviving, even when walls crumble and people disappear.

Elena Vance knew that better than anyone.

It had been three years since her brother Lukas vanished inside the boarding house — the one sealed with concrete, the one the council claimed never existed. She never believed their report. Lukas didn’t just vanish. Something took him.

Now, Elena stood where Room 119 once was, the chill of early winter crawling across her skin. The building was gone, replaced by a parking lot. Yet when she closed her eyes, she could hear the faint hum beneath the ground — a low vibration like breath.

She had brought with her a single thing: the cracked mirror recovered from the demolition site. It was the only item found intact, though the workers swore it wasn’t there the day before. The frame was charred, the glass fractured in a spiderweb pattern.

As she knelt beside it, frost forming on the asphalt, something inside the mirror moved.

At first, she thought it was just her reflection — tired eyes, trembling hands. But then, another figure appeared behind her in the glass. A man, pale and distant, his expression unreadable.

“Lukas…” she whispered.

The reflection smiled — but it wasn’t him. The eyes were too dark, too empty. The same emptiness described in the reports, the same hollow expression every survivor claimed to have seen before the building disappeared.

The mirror pulsed once, and the world tilted.

The parking lot was gone.

She was standing inside a hallway that shouldn’t exist — old wallpaper peeling, the air thick with dust and the smell of iron. The hum beneath her feet grew louder, rhythmic, like a heartbeat. Doors lined the corridor, each numbered differently, none matching. The walls seemed to breathe.

“Elena.”

The voice came from everywhere at once. Her flashlight flickered. A shadow darted across the ceiling.

She followed the sound until she found a door marked *119.*

It opened on its own.

Inside, the room looked exactly like the photos she’d seen in Lukas’s report — bed, desk, scorched walls. Only now, the mirror was whole again, glowing faintly. The words above the bed were fresh, dripping like new paint:

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

She felt something beneath her shoe — the diary. Its cover was damp, warm to the touch. Pages flipped on their own, stopping at a new message:

*Welcome back, Elena. The room remembers.*

She stepped backward, heart pounding. The mirror began to ripple, and through it she saw not her reflection but dozens of faces — Lukas among them — staring, pleading, whispering in unison:

*Don’t let it open.*

A sound cracked through the air like a bone breaking. The window — the one that was never there — began to form on the far wall, stretching out of the plaster as if the house itself were birthing it. Light spilled through, blinding, golden, alive.

Elena screamed and hurled the mirror toward the window. The impact sent a shudder through the room. Every reflection shattered at once — Lukas, Jonathan Hale, all of them screaming in silence as the mirror exploded into shards of light.

Then came stillness.

She awoke outside, alone, snow falling softly around her. The mirror lay beside her, now dull and lifeless. The parking lot was empty.

But when she looked up, she saw a faint glow in the air —

a rectangular shimmer, like a window hanging in the sky.

Through it, for a split second, she saw them — Lukas, Jonathan, and dozens of others — staring out, trapped behind glass, their hands pressed against the invisible barrier.

Then the light vanished.

Weeks later, Elena disappeared too.

And now, when the wind blows through Hallowmere,

people say you can see a single window appear above the street —

with two faces looking down.

One of them always smiles.