The Unfinished Room

In the autumn of 2009, my family and I moved from our cramped apartment in Kuala Lumpur to a sprawling two-story house in the quiet town of Taiping. It was a rush decision—my parents wanted my twin brother and sister, who were finishing their studies in Melbourne, to have their own rooms. The house was old, with a certain musty smell that no amount of cleaning could erase, and the garden was overgrown, as if the previous owners had left in a hurry. My mother, always practical, said it had potential.

The renovation was chaotic. Workers came and went, painting walls, fixing the leaky roof, and installing new plumbing. My room, at the end of the upstairs hallway, was the last to be touched. It was the largest, with windows overlooking the back garden, but it felt oddly cold, even in the afternoon heat. When I complained, my father joked that the air conditioning was just efficient. I didn’t laugh. The feeling was not of chill but of something pressing against the air, like the room was holding its breath.

The workers finished everything except the wallpaper in my room. A pattern of faded roses, peeling at the edges, was left incomplete on one wall. My mother said it was a temporary fix, and we would replace it later. I didn’t mind. The pattern unsettled me—the roses seemed to droop, their petals dripping like tears.

On the first night, I couldn’t sleep. The house was too quiet, but there was a faint scratching sound from the wall beside my bed. I pressed my ear against the wallpaper and heard it distinctly: a slow, rhythmic scrape, like fingernails dragging across a rough surface. I thought it might be rats, but the sound was too deliberate. It stopped after a few minutes, only to resume when I lay down again.

The scratching continued every night, always between 2 and 3 AM. I told my parents, but they dismissed it as the house settling. My sister, Shireen, who had just returned home, said I was imagining things because I was stressed from the move. My brother, Danial, laughed and said it was probably a gecko, but we both knew geckos don’t sound like that.

After a week, the sound grew louder, and I started to see a faint outline in the wallpaper where the roses were missing. It looked like a woman’s profile, gaunt and hollow-eyed, staring at me from the wall. I would blink, and it would fade, but at the periphery of my vision, it lingered.

One night, I woke to the scratching and found myself standing at the wall, my hand pressed against the cold surface. The wallpaper was torn, revealing a dark gap. I don’t remember pulling at it, but I saw that a piece had come loose, exposing a small cavity in the wall. Inside, there was a single photograph, yellowed with age. It showed a young woman, her face blurred but her eyes distinct—the same hollow stare I had seen in the wallpaper. On the back, there was a name and a date: ‘Nora, 1987.’

I showed the photo to my parents the next morning. They exchanged a look that I couldn’t decipher. My mother finally said that the previous owner had an adult daughter who died in the house, but they didn’t know the details. I pressed for more, but they were vague, changing the subject.

I couldn’t get the photo out of my mind. That night, I decided to search the house for clues. In the attic, under a pile of moth-eaten blankets, I found an old diary. The pages were brittle, and the ink had faded, but I could make out Nora’s handwriting. She wrote about her illness, how it confined her to her room, and how she felt the walls closing in on her. She described a feeling of being watched, and that she would scratch at the wallpaper to pass the time. The last entry, dated a week before her death, said, ‘I am finished. But the room will remember.’

My blood ran cold. I went back to my room and looked at the incomplete wallpaper. It wasn’t incomplete by accident; it was unfinished because Nora had died before she could finish scratching her story into the wall. The scratching I heard was a repetition of her dying motions, like a loop in time.

And then, I realized that the wallpaper wasn’t just peeling; it was writing. The pattern had altered. The roses now seemed to form letters, scratches that spelled out a name—my name, Maya. I tore the rest of the wallpaper off, revealing a wall covered in hundreds of thin gouges, like claw marks, all inscribed with the words ‘Nora was here.’

I fled to my parents’ room, but they were gone. The house was silent. When I walked through the hallway, I saw that all the doors were open, and every wall was covered with the same scratches, but with my name. The house had been waiting, and now it had claimed its new resident.

I don’t know how I escaped, but I found myself outside, the cold night air biting my skin. The house loomed behind me, its windows dark, but I could feel its gaze. I never returned, and my family dismissed my tale as a breakdown. But sometimes, when I sleep in my new apartment, I hear a scratching at the wall. I know it’s the unfinished room, calling me back.