The Room with No Window — Part II

Jonathan Hale thought he had escaped the nightmare, but the room had other plans.

The night he burst out of the boarding house in London, he was barely able to breathe. His clothes were torn, his fingernails cracked and bleeding, his eyes wild with terror. When the police found him, he babbled about a room without windows, about walls that whispered and a door that never stayed shut. They dismissed it as hysteria. The old building, they said, had plenty of cellars and crawlspaces. A trick of the dark, a bout of madness. Doctors labeled it sleep deprivation and trauma. But Jonathan knew the truth. He could still feel the weight of the walls pressing in when he closed his eyes, still hear the low hum of something waiting behind that door.

For weeks, he tried to bury the memory. He threw himself into work, avoided dark rooms, kept every light in his flat burning. Yet sleep betrayed him. Every night the same dream returned. He was back inside the room. Only this time he was not alone. He saw others—a woman in a red scarf, a stooped old man, even a boy no older than ten—pounding the same walls, screaming the same silent screams. Their mouths moved, but no sound came, as if the air itself had been stolen. Jonathan woke each morning with raw fingertips, the sheets torn as though he had been clawing at them in his sleep.

Fearing he was losing his mind, Jonathan left London. He rented a cottage in a remote Yorkshire village, far from the city noise. The cottage had wide windows overlooking the moors, endless skies above. “Here,” he thought, “there is air, there is space.” Yet the villagers looked at him strangely. His pale face, his restless eyes—he was already marked. At the pub, he overheard whispers: *the man haunted by his own shadow.*

The first nights in the cottage were calm, but then it began again. The reflection in the windows didn’t always show the moors. Sometimes, faintly, he saw the outline of a door. A door that shouldn’t exist. The villagers noticed his windows glowing at odd hours, though no lamp was lit. Some muttered about old places on the moors, stones where the dead were said to walk. Jonathan ignored them. He had to prove it to himself—prove the room was not just in his head.

One evening, he set a tape recorder beside his bed. “If I dream again,” he whispered, “I will have proof.” That night, the dream deepened. He walked down a long corridor, a single bulb swinging overhead. At the end stood the door. Behind it, whispers rose like the sea—his name, repeated by dozens of unseen voices. Against his will, he reached out. The handle was ice cold. The door opened.

He woke on the floor, nails torn bloody, the lantern overturned. Shaking, he pressed play on the recorder. At first, only the sound of restless turning. Then, at precisely 3:15 a.m., the tape hissed. A door creaked open. Dozens of voices murmured his name, layered over each other. And then—his own voice joined them, calm and steady: *“I’m coming.”*

Jonathan smashed the recorder, but it was useless. Each night after, the dream consumed him further. He no longer woke in his bed but in the endless corridor, the door always waiting. Sometimes cold hands brushed his shoulders. Sometimes the door opened by itself, revealing only a darkness that seemed to breathe. He woke screaming, throat raw, his journal filled with frantic scrawls: *The room has no window, but it sees me.*

On the stormiest night of October, his landlord came to check the cottage after hearing strange noises. The front door was wide open, rain sweeping inside. The cottage was empty. Jonathan was gone. Only his journal remained, its last pages covered in a single phrase written over and over: *“The door is open. The door is open.”*

The police searched the moors for days. They found no footprints, no trail. Just silence. The cottage was abandoned, its windows boarded shut. Yet villagers swear that on certain nights, when the wind drops suddenly, the boards glow faintly from within. If you dare to look through the cracks, you won’t see the moors at all. You’ll see a room with no window, and a man standing in its center, staring straight back at you.

And behind him, the door never closes.