The Cold Room of No. 12

I was four when we moved into the old carriage house on the edge of the marsh. The place was a relic from another century, its brick walls sweating with damp, its windows rattling like loose teeth. My parents, Lorna and Dale, thought it was charming. My older siblings—Elsie, twelve, and the twins, Marcus and Miles, eight—thought it was an adventure. I just wanted a room that didn’t smell like wet earth and rot.

My room was at the top of the stairs, a narrow space with a slanted ceiling. But the room I hated was at the bottom of the back staircase, a windowless cubby that Dale used as his study. He called it ‘the office,’ but it was really a dungeon. The floor was poured concrete, always slick with moisture, and the air was perpetually cold, even in July. The twins dared me to go down there once, and I did, stepping over the threshold to find the room empty except for a desk and a chair. But the walls—the walls were alive. Dark shapes moved across them, not quite solid, sliding like oil on water. I ran back upstairs, heart thudding, and told Lorna. She said it was my imagination, that the curtains from the adjacent window cast shadows. But there was no window in that room.

That night, I had a fever dream. I was running through a black forest, my bare feet slapping on wet leaves, and something huge was chasing me—a shape that had no edges, just a void that drank the light. I woke gasping, my pajamas soaked, and found myself at the bottom of the back staircase, standing in the doorway of the cold room. My legs were bare, and I felt a sensation like fingers trailing up my calves. I screamed, and Dale came running, carrying a flashlight. He found me shivering, and he wrapped me in a blanket, but he didn’t ask why I was there. He just said, ‘You must have been sleepwalking.’

But it happened again. Every night for a week, I’d wake up in front of that room, or sometimes inside it, the black shapes swirling around me. I’d feel the cold creeping into my bones, and a whisper would start, so faint I couldn’t make out the words. I told Elsie, and she gave me a talisman—a small stone with a hole in it—and said it would protect me. I clutched it, but it didn’t help. On the sixth night, I woke in the room, and the whispers were louder, almost like a chorus. They were saying my name. ‘May, May, May.’

Then the dreams changed. I was running again, but this time I stumbled and fell into a pit of cold water. The void above me coalesced into a shape—a woman with long black hair, her face featureless. She reached out a hand, and her fingers brushed my cheek, and I felt a terror so absolute that I couldn’t scream. I woke up vomiting, the bile burning my throat, and I was face down on the concrete floor of the cold room. My parents were frantic, talking about hospitals and exorcisms, but I knew it wasn’t my body that was sick. It was the room that was sick.

On the last night, I decided to confront it. I crept downstairs with the talisman in my pocket, and I stepped into the room, my teeth chattering. The shadows were still, as if waiting. I took a breath and said, ‘What do you want?’

The room grew even colder, and the shadows converged into a single mass that took the shape of a child—a girl about my age, but transparent, and her eyes were black pits. She opened her mouth, and a sound came out, like a distant echo, but it formed words: ‘You have my room. I want it back.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I said, ‘I don’t want it. It’s yours.’

She tilted her head, and the whispers faded. Then she walked toward the far wall and dissolved into it. The cold vanished, and for the first time, the room felt like a normal, empty space.

I never had the dreams again. But sometimes, late at night, I still go down to that room, just to check. The walls are blank, the air is still. But I swear, sometimes I see a faint outline of a girl’s face in the concrete, and I hear a whisper that says, ‘Thank you.’