The Catalogue of Unfinished Rooms

My name is Elias, and I have spent all of my eighteen years inside a house that breathes. It is a crooked, three-story Victorian relic on the edge of a town that has long forgotten its name, its windows like cataract eyes staring out at a yard that never grows. I know every creak in its floorboards, every draft that slinks through the gaps in the frames, but that weekend, the house decided to show me something it had kept hidden in its bones.

My bedroom is on the top floor, a narrow room with a single window that overlooks the overgrown garden and the skeletal trees beyond. Across the hall is a door I have always been told is a storage room, but the lock has been rusted shut for as long as I can remember, and the key hangs on a nail beside my own door, useless and cold. On that Friday, I had just climbed into bed, the sheets pulled up to my chin, when I heard it: six slow knocks, almost polite, from the other side of my door. I assumed it was my younger brother, Marcus, who was fifteen and had a talent for mischief, or my father playing a prank after a late drink. I swung my legs out, padded to the door, and pulled it open.

The hallway was empty, lit by the single bulb that buzzed overhead. The door across the hall stood as always, locked and ancient. I stepped out, peering down the stairwell, but there was no sound, no shadow, no giggling brother. I called Marcus’s name, but the house swallowed my voice. I went down to his room on the second floor, but his bed was empty and his window was open, the curtain fluttering like a flag of surrender. I closed the window, puzzled, and went back to my room, deciding it was nothing.

The next night, Saturday, I was reading by the lamp when the knocks came again, but this time they were from inside the wall beside my bed. I froze, the book slipping from my fingers. The knocks were rhythmic, like a heartbeat, and they seemed to move, traveling down the wall and toward the floor, as if something were crawling inside the plaster. I pressed my ear to the cold surface, and I heard a faint, rhythmic scratching, like fingernails on wood, but deeper. Then, a voice, muffled and shredded, whispered my name. ‘Elias.’ I stumbled back, my heart thrashing. I told myself it was the wind, the old pipes, my imagination, but I did not sleep that night.

It was on Sunday morning that the house truly opened its mouth. I had awakened to find my door ajar, although I was certain I had closed it. The hallway was darker than it should have been for midday, and the door across the hall was standing open. I had never seen it open in my life. I approached, my feet bare on the cold floor, and looked inside. It was not a storage room. It was a corridor, one that should not have existed, stretching into darkness that seemed to breathe. The walls were papered in a pattern of fading roses, but the flowers looked like they were bleeding, the red ink running in tears. At the end of the corridor, there was a room, and in that room, a figure stood with its back to me, wearing a long coat that hung to the floor.

I called out, my voice cracking. The figure did not turn, but it began to speak in a voice that was not one voice but many, layered and wrong. It said, ‘You have been here all along, and you never noticed the rooms that are not finished.’ I took a step back, but the floor behind me had vanished, replaced by a deep pit filled with a soft, whispering dark. I turned, and the hallway was gone, and I was in the empty room, and the figure was gone, and there was only a mirror on the wall. In the mirror, I saw myself, but my reflection was older, my eyes hollow, and behind me, in the glass, stood a row of doors, each one slightly ajar, each one with a faint light spilling out. And I realized I was not in my house anymore. I was in a place that had always existed beneath my house, a maze of unfinished rooms, and the knocks were not warning. They were invitations.

I ran, but there was no direction. The rooms shifted, and I would find myself in a kitchen where the stove was burning but no fire, in a nursery where the crib rocked by itself, in a library where the books had no words. The figure appeared at the edges of my vision, always watching, always waiting. I heard my mother’s voice from somewhere, calling my name, but it was distorted, stretched, like a record playing at the wrong speed. I followed it, and I came to a door that was slightly ajar, and through the crack, I saw my own bedroom, exactly as I had left it, but in the corner, there was a shape that was not furniture.

I pushed the door open, and I was back in my room, the morning light slanting through the window. The door across the hall was closed, sealed as always. I checked the lock, but it was rusted solid. I went down to breakfast, and my mother and Marcus were there, asking where I had been. I said I had been sleeping. They looked at each other, and Marcus said, ‘You were knocking on the wall all night. I heard you.’ My mother frowned and said, ‘It was probably just the house settling.’ But I saw their eyes, and I knew they were lying. They knew about the rooms. They had always known.

I have not slept in that room since. I have moved my bed to the far side, facing the window, but the house is patient. It waits. Last night, I heard the knocks again, six slow raps, and they came from inside my closet. I lay still, staring at the door, and the doorknob began to turn, slowly, from the inside. I do not know what I will find when it opens, but I know it will be a room that has been waiting for me all my life, and I will have to walk in, because the house has decided it is time.