The Breathing in Room 14

It started in the autumn of my ninth year, in the old red-brick boarding school of St. Dunstan’s, perched on a wind-scoured cliff above the North Sea. The term had begun with a new dormitory assignment: Room 14, a narrow room at the far end of the west wing, which had been closed for years due to ‘structural work’. The caretaker, a gaunt man named Mr. Thorne, had hammered a fresh coat of paint over the walls, but the smell of salt and rot lingered.

My roommate, a quiet boy named Edmund, claimed he’d heard the previous occupant, a student named Alistair, had drowned himself in the sea after a prank went wrong. I dismissed it as ghost story fodder. But on my third night, I awoke to a sound: a wet, rhythmic breathing, right in my left ear, as if someone lay inches from me on the pillow. I held my breath, and immediately the sound stopped. When I exhaled, it began again, but this time louder, more ragged. I buried my head under the blanket and didn’t emerge until the morning bell.

Word spread among the boys that I was ‘haunted’. Edmund, for his part, refused to speak of it, but I noticed he had taken to sleeping with a small brass cross under his pillow. He said his grandmother had given it to him ‘for protection’. One night, after lights out, I felt a cold draft and then a pressure on the foot of my bed, as if someone sat down. I whispered to Edmund, but he was asleep. The breathing returned, now deep and throaty, like an old man’s. I tried to scream, but my throat closed.

I grew desperate. I started sleeping in the common room, but the breathing followed me. It was as if the sound had attached itself to me, not to the room. I began to lose weight, to flinch at the sound of my own breath. The school nurse suggested I see a doctor, but I knew it wasn’t physical.

One evening, I decided to confront it. I lay in bed, deliberately breathing slowly, and waited. The breathing began, synchronized with my own, but then it diverged, becoming faster, more frantic. I whispered, ‘Who are you?’ The breathing stopped. Then, from the darkness near the window, a voice, thin and watery, answered, ‘You have my breath. Give it back.’ I saw a shape coalesce, a boy my age, dripping wet, his face pale and bloated.

I fled to the headmaster’s office, babbling about the ghost. The headmaster, a stern man with a silver watch, listened without interrupting. When I finished, he sighed and opened a locked drawer, pulling out a yellowed photograph. It showed a group of boys from the 1920s, and in the back row stood a boy identical to the one I had seen. ‘Alistair,’ the headmaster said. ‘He was a boarder here. He died in a dare, trying to swim to the cove during a storm. They never found his body. But his breath, they say, never left.’

I demanded to be transferred. The headmaster agreed, but warned me that the sea always calls its own. I was moved to a room on the east wing, and for a week I slept soundly. But then, on a moonless night, I woke to the sound of the sea, and to the breathing again, now on my right ear. I turned and saw Alistair’s face pressed against the window pane, his mouth moving silently, forming the words, ‘Your turn.’

I fled the school that very night, leaving behind my trunk and my parents’ letters. I hitched rides until I reached my aunt’s house in the inland hills, a hundred miles from the coast. I thought I was safe. But now, as I write this, I realize the breathing has been with me all along, just beneath the crackle of the fireplace, under the hum of the refrigerator. It is there now, in the silence between my keystrokes. And it is getting faster.