The Lattice of Unfinished Rooms

The bus groaned up the winding mountain road, carrying our class and a thick, unspoken dread. Last year, our school had booked a retreat at a place called Crestwood Hollow, an old convent turned retreat house, and the rumors had followed us like a stray dog. My friend Dana had whispered that her cousin, who’d been there the previous spring, claimed a girl in her dormitory walked the halls at night, her feet never quite making contact with the floor. The boys in the adjacent wing, she said, had complained of a cold weight pressing on their chests, keeping them from sleep. I tried to laugh it off, but the chill that ran down my spine was real.

When we finally arrived, the building stood against the gray sky like a forgotten hymn. Its architecture was elegant but aged, with ornate wooden eaves and stained-glass windows that seemed to swallow the light. As we were led to our dormitories, I noticed, behind the main building, a cluster of skeletal structures—half-finished houses with exposed beams and empty window frames, their foundations overrun with weeds. They looked like a abandoned attempt to expand the retreat, frozen mid-construction. I wondered why they’d never been completed, and a quiet unease settled in my stomach.

Our dormitory was a long, narrow room with rows of bunk beds, the mattresses thin and musty. I chose a lower bunk near the window, which looked out onto those unfinished houses. As I unpacked, I noticed that the window latch was painted shut, and the glass was so old it distorted the view, making the buildings appear to waver. I tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. The room itself felt cold, despite the warmth of the afternoon, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching me from the trees beyond the structures.

That night, after lights out, the silence was heavy. I lay in my bunk, staring at the ceiling, listening to the breathing of my classmates. Then I heard it—a soft, rhythmic creaking, like the sound of a rocking chair moving slowly back and forth, coming from the direction of the unfinished houses. I held my breath, and the sound grew louder, closer. It was as if someone were walking on the exposed wooden beams, testing their weight. My heart pounded. I pulled the blanket over my head, but the sound seemed to penetrate the thin fabric, entering my ears like a whispered secret.

I don’t know how long I lay there, but when I finally peeked out, the room was bathed in a strange, pale light. The moon had come out from behind the clouds, and its beams spilled through the window, casting a lattice of shadows on the floor. And there, in the middle of the room, stood a figure—a girl in a white nightgown, her hair hanging over her face, her feet not quite touching the ground. She was rocking back and forth, just as the sound had suggested, and as she tilted her head up, I saw that her eyes were empty sockets, black voids that seemed to drink the light.

I wanted to scream, but my voice was locked in my throat. The girl began to glide toward me, her motion barely human. She stopped at the foot of my bed, and I could feel the cold radiating from her, like standing in a cellar in winter. She lifted a hand, and her fingers were long and gray, her nails cracked. She pointed at the window, toward the unfinished houses. And for the first time, I understood: those houses were not unfinished because of neglect. They were unfinished because something had claimed them before they could be completed.

The girl’s lips moved, but no sound came out, except a soft, rustling whisper, like wind through dead leaves. She seemed to be trying to speak, to warn me. But the effort twisted her face, and she began to fade, dissolving into the shadows like smoke. When she was gone, the room was dark again, and the creaking had stopped. I lay awake the rest of the night, staring at the window, watching the lattice of shadows shift with the moon.

In the morning, I tried to tell my friends, but they dismissed it as a nightmare. Yet, when I looked out the window, I saw something that made my blood run cold: on the highest beam of the nearest unfinished house, a white nightgown was hanging, swaying gently in the breeze, even though there was no wind. And I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that the unfinished rooms were waiting, and that the girl in white was the only one who had tried to warn us—but we were too blind to see.