The Unfinished Room

The humid air of Muar clung to us like a second skin as my parents and I trudged from one dim, dusty house to another. My father, a retired teacher with a perpetual frown, and my mother, whose optimism usually outshone any inconvenience, were both showing the strain of weeks spent hunting for a new home. Our flat in Seremban had been sold, and we had exactly a week to find somewhere to live. I had taken a break from my studies at the university in Johor Bahru to help them, my brother being abroad on a scholarship.

Our agent, a wiry man with a perpetually cheerful voice named Mr. Tan, drove us through the outskirts of Muar, past palm oil plantations and rows of shophouses. ‘There’s one more,’ he said, his voice laced with a hint of hesitation. ‘It’s a bit older, but the price is right.’ He turned into a narrow lane flanked by overgrown hedges, and we stopped before a two-story house with peeling paint and a sagging verandah. The compound was claustrophobic, dominated by a massive, gnarled banyan tree whose roots had begun to crack the front path.

But the moment we stepped through the heavy wooden front door, my mother gasped. The interior was surprisingly spacious, with high ceilings and polished marble floors that gleamed despite the dusty afternoon light filtering through the stained-glass windows. The living room opened into a grand dining area, and a wide staircase curved up to the upper floor. My father ran a hand over the carved balustrade, his frown softening. ‘This is beautiful,’ he murmured. My mother nodded, her eyes bright. ‘We’ll take it,’ she said to Mr. Tan without another glance at me.

The seller, an elderly Chinese man named Mr. Lim, arrived to finalize the sale. He was a stooped, thin figure with deep-set eyes that seemed to avoid ours. ‘I had this house renovated for my son, who was studying in Australia,’ he said, his voice barely above a whisper. ‘He never came back. Decided to stay there and start a business. I have no use for it now.’ He looked around the empty hall, and for a moment, his face flickered with something like regret. ‘The room upstairs, the one at the end of the hall, is locked. I lost the key years ago. You might want to have a locksmith open it, but I’d suggest you leave it as is.’ My father shrugged, and we signed the papers in a silence that felt almost ominous.

We moved in three days later. My parents busied themselves unpacking boxes and rearranging furniture, while I wandered the echoing rooms, fascinated by the house’s odd angles and hidden corners. True to his word, the door at the end of the upstairs hallway was indeed locked. I pressed my ear to the wood and heard nothing, but a faint, sweet scent, like old perfume, seeped through the keyhole. I mentioned it to my mother, who dismissed it as dust and mold.

Within a week, the house began to reveal its secrets. It started with the clocks. Every clock in the house—my father’s wristwatch, the wall clock in the kitchen, the mantelpiece timepiece in the living room—stopped at exactly 3:15 in the afternoon. We’d reset them each morning, but by the same time they’d all freeze. My father blamed the humidity, but I noticed a pattern: the stopped time always coincided with a faint, rhythmic tapping from the upstairs landing, like a finger on glass.

Then, I began to hear a child crying. It was a soft, muffled sob, emanating from the locked room. I asked my parents if they heard it too, but they shook their heads. My mother, ever practical, suggested I was overworked from my studies and needed rest. But the crying grew louder each day, until it invaded my dreams, painting them in shades of grey and sorrow.

One afternoon, while my parents were out running errands, I decided to confront the mystery. I fetched a set of tools and, with a mixture of trepidation and resolve, forced the lock on the forbidden door. The door swung open with a groan, revealing a room that was entirely out of sync with the rest of the house. The walls were covered in faded, peeling wallpaper depicting a nursery rhyme scene—cowboys and Indians, trees and rivers—but the colors had bled together into a sickly, brownish smear. The floor was bare concrete, and in the center stood a single, empty crib with broken rails. The sweet perfume I had detected earlier was stronger here, almost cloying. And on the windowsill lay a child’s sock, tiny and stained with something dark.

I stepped closer to the crib, and I saw that the mattress bore an indentation, as if a body had lain there recently. The crying was now unmistakably coming from my right. I turned, and in the corner, huddled next to a heavy wardrobe, sat a small figure—a girl, maybe five years old, with long black hair that obscured her face. She was wearing a white nightgown, and her shoulders shook with silent sobs. My heart pounded. ‘Hello?’ I whispered.

She looked up. Her face was pale and gaunt, and her eyes were inky black—no whites, no irises, just endless darkness. She pointed a trembling finger at the wardrobe, then the world tilted. I found myself on the floor, my ears ringing. Blood trickled from my nose. The girl was gone. The room was silent, save for the ticking of a small, old alarm clock on a shelf—a clock that showed 3:15, but seconds were ticking normally.

I fled the room, slamming the door behind me. I staggered downstairs and called my parents, my voice shaking. They returned quickly, and I recounted everything. My mother’s face went pale, and my father’s usual frown deepened into something akin to fear. He said, ‘We should have listened to the old man. There’s something wrong with this place.’

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my bed, listening to the wind outside, when the crying started again. It was louder now, more desperate. I got up and crept to the top of the stairs. The locked room’s door was ajar, and a faint light emanated from within. I approached, my bare feet cold on the floor, and peered inside. The girl was standing by the wardrobe, her back to me. She turned slowly and gave me a bleak smile. ‘You see me,’ she said, her voice like rustling leaves. ‘I’ve been waiting for someone to see me.’

‘Who are you?’ I asked, my throat tight.

‘I was the lock,’ she said. ‘I was the key. He didn’t want me to go, so he made me stay.’

‘Who made you stay?’ I said.

She pointed to the window. Outside, the banyan tree’s branches scratched against the glass. ‘The old man,’ she said. ‘Mr. Lim. He locked me in here when I wouldn’t be quiet. I was his daughter, but he hid me away because he was ashamed of my illness. The drugs made me sleep, but the sleep was like dying. And one time, he gave me too much, and I never woke up. Not fully. I’ve been here ever since, waiting for the clock to stop, for the doors to open, for someone to remember.’

Her form flickered, and for a moment I saw the room as it might have been: bright, cheerful, with toys scattered on a rug and the child playing. Then it dissolved back into decay. ‘Now that you’ve seen me, you must finish what he started,’ she said. ‘You must bury my body. It’s under the floorboards, in the space where the banyan roots have cracked the foundation. Then I can rest.’

I woke up in my own bed, drenched in sweat, unsure if I had dreamed the encounter. But the next morning, I told my parents everything. They listened in stunned silence, and then, to my surprise, my father nodded. ‘We’ll do it,’ he said. ‘We can’t live with a ghost.’

We dug under the house, where the banyan roots had indeed lifted the foundation, revealing a shallow grave. Inside was a small, hastily made coffin. We called the police, and the remains were identified as those of Mr. Lim’s daughter, who had been reported missing thirty years ago. The old man was arrested, and he confessed to the murder in a fit of drunken rage, later passing away in prison.

After the body was properly interred in a local cemetery, the house grew quiet. The clocks ran normally, the crying ceased, and the door at the end of the hall remained open, revealing an empty, ordinary room. We decided to stay, and the house eventually embraced us, its eerie corners becoming familiar, its creaks a comfort.

But sometimes, at dusk, when the banyan tree casts long shadows across the lawn, I still see the faint outline of a little girl in a white nightgown, standing by the window of the room, watching. She no longer weeps. She smiles—a smile that knows the secret, a smile that remembers the day the clock finally stopped and she was free.