The Fifth Room Key

My assignment in the highlands of Scotland was supposed to be routine, a three-day audit of a client’s remote distillery. The company had booked us into the Craigellan Arms, a grey stone hotel that clung to a hillside like a barnacle. It was old, yes, but it had a certain grim grandeur, with its creaking floorboards and portraits of stern-faced lairds. My colleague, a taciturn actuary named Douglas, and I were given separate rooms on the third floor, connected by a narrow corridor and a heavy fire door that groaned whenever it moved. I was relieved, I admit, for Douglas’s company unsettled me rather than comforted me. He had a habit of staring at nothing, and his thin lips rarely parted except to state the obvious.

That first night, after a dinner of overcooked lamb and lumpy mash in the hotel’s dimly lit dining room, we both retired early. The wind outside moaned through the loch, and the old building let out its own symphony of sighs and pops as it settled. My room was a suite of sorts: a small sitting room with a moth-eaten sofa, a tiny bathroom, and a separate bedroom with a heavy oak door that I’d left ajar to let in the heat from the sitting room’s electric fire. I crawled into the stiff sheets, exhausted, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

At around half past two, a pressing need for the toilet pulled me from my slumber. I stumbled through the dark sitting room, my bare feet flinching at the cold of the worn carpet. After I’d finished, I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, blinking in the darkness. That’s when I heard it: footsteps on the landing outside my door. They weren’t the heavy, deliberate steps of a hotel guest returning to their room. These were soft, shuffling, almost dragging, as if someone were wearing felt slippers and had no intention of being heard. The sound moved along the corridor, stopping at intervals, as if the walker were pausing to listen. My door was locked, of course, but the suite’s main door was solid except for a brass letterbox, and I felt a draft ooze through it, as if something on the other side had pressed its mouth against the gap.

The footsteps halted directly outside my door. I held my breath, my heart thudding painfully against my ribs. The fire in the sitting room had died to a few embers, throwing long, wavering shadows that mocked me. Then, I heard a sound that froze my blood: the soft jingle of keys and the scrape of a key trying to enter a lock. Not my lock, but the one on the door to Douglas’s room! I heard the key turn, the door creak open, and then silence. I strained to hear anything, but the corridor was as quiet as a tomb. I sat there, paralyzed, for what felt like an eternity, until the exhaustion of my body won over my terror, and I fell into a fitful sleep, haunted by dreams of something crawling in the walls.

The next morning, I woke to a pale grey light filtering through the cheap curtains. I dressed quickly and knocked on Douglas’s door. There was no answer. I knocked again, harder. With a dread that was fast coiling around my guts, I tried the handle. It opened. The room was as neat as a pin, the bed made, but Douglas was gone. His suitcase was still there, his toiletries bag on the dresser, but his coat and shoes were missing. I hurried down to the front desk, assuming he’d gone out for a walk, or perhaps to the distillery early. The desk clerk, a man with a waxy complexion and a nervous smile, said he hadn’t seen Douglas leave. He checked the key rack; the key to Douglas’s room was there, placed back as if he’d returned it, but Douglas’s own key, the one that hung on the inside of the door, was gone.

I tried his mobile phone. It went straight to voicemail. I called the police, but they sent a constable who filed a report and said it was probably just a walk that went on too long. But I knew better. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I bolted the main door, wedged a chair under the handle, and left the bedroom door wide open. I lay in the dark, every nerve taut. At 2:30 AM, I heard it again: the same shuffling footsteps, but this time they were in my sitting room. I could hear them padding across the carpet, between the sofa and the table. I reached for the lamp, but before I could switch it on, a cold draught hit my face, and the bedroom door slammed shut with a deafening crack. The footsteps were now right outside the bedroom door, and I could hear a faint, terrible whispering, not in any language I knew, but rhythmic, like a chant. I pressed my fists against my eyes, willing the sound to stop. After a minute, the whispers ceased, and the footsteps retreated. I fumbled for my phone and called the night porter, who arrived with a trembling flashlight. He found nothing, but he noticed something odd: all five keys to the fifth-floor rooms were missing from the board. He whispered, ‘It’s the old caretaker. He used to move the guests at night, for their own safety, he said. But he’s been dead for forty years.’

I fled the hotel that night, leaving my belongings behind. I drove through the wind-lashed moors to a tiny bed-and-breakfast, where I barricaded myself in my room with the lights blazing. I never learned what happened to Douglas. The distillery audit was cancelled; the company never followed up. But sometimes, when the wind is high and the night is still, I hear them again, those shuffling footsteps, and I know that somewhere, in the dark corridors of Craigellan Arms, Douglas is still walking, and waiting for me to join him.