The Cold Room

My friend Lena lived in a rundown Victorian house on the edge of Blackwood, a town that seemed to be permanently shrouded in mist. We’d been friends since we were twelve, and now at twenty, I still spent most weekends at her place. The house itself was a relic, with peeling wallpaper and creaking floorboards, but the thing that struck me most was the cold. Not the kind of cold you get from a drafty window, but a deep, bone-aching chill that seeped into your skin no matter how many layers you wore. Even in the middle of July, when the sun blazed outside, the house felt like a walk-in freezer.

Lena’s mom, Mrs. Hargrove, had tried to explain it away by pointing to the old fireplace in the living room that was missing a chimney cap, but I knew better. The cold was worse in certain rooms, especially the spare bedroom on the second floor, which they had converted into a computer room. We spent hours in that room, hunched over our laptops, but I always felt a prickling sensation on the back of my neck, as if something unseen was watching me from the corner. The walls were painted a sickly yellow, and the room had a single window that looked out onto a dead tree in the backyard. Every time I glanced out, I could have sworn I saw a figure standing among the branches, but when I looked again, it was gone.

The bathroom was the worst. It was at the end of the hallway, and the door always stuck slightly, as if it didn’t want to be opened. Inside, the tiles were cracked and stained, and the mirror was old with black spots on the glass. Whenever I used it, I felt a cold draft coming from the vent above the tub, and once, I heard a faint scratching sound, like nails on plaster, coming from inside the walls. I never mentioned it to Lena, thinking I was just being paranoid.

But Lena knew something was wrong. She began to sleep with the lights on, and she started to avoid the computer room altogether, saying she felt like she was being watched. Her grades slipped, and she became withdrawn. Her mother tried to brush it off as teenage angst, but I saw the dark circles under Lena’s eyes and the way she flinched at every sudden noise.

One night, I stayed over. We were in the living room, wrapped in blankets, trying to ignore the cold that seeped through the floorboards. Around midnight, Lena went to the bathroom, and I heard her scream. I ran to the hallway and found her standing outside the bathroom door, her face pale as paper. She was pointing at the door, whispering, ‘There’s something in there.’ I pushed the door open, but the room was empty. The mirror was fogged up, even though no one had been in there for hours, and there were wet footprints on the floor, leading from the tub to the wall, where they disappeared.

We fled to my house that night, and Lena’s mother followed a week later. They never went back. Later, we learned that the house had been built on the site of an old insane asylum, and that a patient had died in that exact bathroom, having scratched his own name into the plaster before he passed. The real estate agent never mentioned it, but Mrs. Hargrove found a newspaper clipping tucked behind a loose floorboard in the computer room. It was a story about a man who had been kept in the room, chained to the wall, and he had frozen to death in the winter because the heating system failed. The cold we felt, the whispers we heard, they were echoes of that poor soul, trapped in those walls forever.

Even now, years later, I can’t shake the feeling that I brought something back with me. Sometimes, in the dead of night, I feel a chill in my own apartment, and I swear I hear a faint scratching in the walls, right behind my bed. I never told anyone, but I know it’s him. He followed me home.