The Cold Room Swap

In the autumn of 2019, I took a journalism internship in a small town in the Scottish Highlands, staying with a retired couple, the MacLeods, in their sprawling, drafty manor house. The house was a maze of creaking corridors and forgotten rooms, and I was given a cozy bedroom on the second floor, across from another guest room that was clearly neglected. That room had peeling wallpaper, a faint smell of damp, and a single bare mattress with a moth-eaten blanket. I was told to avoid it, that it was used for storage, but curiosity gnawed at me.

My own room was warm and welcoming, with a roaring fireplace and a thick quilt. Every night, I’d drift off to the sound of wind rattling the windows, feeling safe. But on my final night before returning to the city, something odd happened. I woke up shivering, my breath visible in the cold air. The room was pitch black, and I was lying on something hard and damp. I reached out and felt the rough texture of old wood, then the scratchy wool of a blanket. Panic surged as I realized I wasn’t in my bed. I fumbled for a light switch, but my hand met only crumbling plaster. My heart pounded as I stumbled to the window, pulling back a heavy curtain to see the moon casting silver light across a familiar, yet wrong, view: I was in the forbidden room, diagonally across the hall.

The door was locked from the inside, and I had no memory of walking there. I banged on the door until my fists bruised, and after what felt like an eternity, Mrs. MacLeod’s sleepy voice came from the other side. She unlocked it with a spare key, her face pale in the hallway light. ‘Oh, dear, you must have sleepwalked,’ she said, but her eyes betrayed a deeper worry. I didn’t tell her that my own mother, a light sleeper, would have noticed any sleepwalking at home. I didn’t tell her that I’d never done this before. I just thanked her and retreated to my room, but I couldn’t sleep.

The next morning, as I was packing, I noticed something on the nightstand in that room: a small, faded photograph of a young man, with a date on the back: 1974. I asked the MacLeods about it, but they dismissed it as an old relative. They seemed eager to get me out of the house, and I was eager to leave. But as I drove away, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the photograph’s eyes had followed me, and that the cold I felt was not just from the night air.

A year later, I received a letter from Mrs. MacLeod. It was handwritten and smelled of mothballs. She wrote that after I left, the room grew colder, and they found the blanket I had used torn to shreds. She enclosed the photograph, saying she felt it belonged with me. When I turned it over, I saw new writing on the back: ‘You were not the first.’ I haven’t slept well since.