The Wrong Room

It was a gray, wet Thursday in late autumn, and the air in the school corridor smelled of damp coats and floor cleaner. Leo and his friend Mira had just finished their recorder practice with the music teacher, missing the first twenty minutes of their science lesson. They hurried back to their classroom, Mrs. Vance’s room, only to find the door slightly ajar and the room empty. The usual hum of twenty-six kids was replaced by a low, mechanical drone coming from the teacher’s desk.

On the desk, the class’s new digital thermometer device—a sleek silver gadget that looked more like a spaceship than a science tool—was showing a reading of 12 degrees Celsius. Next to it, a note in Mrs. Vance’s neat handwriting read: ‘Groups have gone to measure temperatures in assigned rooms. Find your group’s location on the whiteboard. Return when done.’ Leo and Mira scanned the whiteboard. Their group, the Ferns, was scheduled to measure the temperature in Room 7, which was at the end of the East Wing, a dusty part of the school that had been unused for years.

They grabbed their clipboards and walked down the long, fluorescent-lit corridor. The school seemed quieter than usual, the only sound being the squeak of their shoes on the linoleum. As they approached the East Wing, the lights flickered, and the temperature seemed to drop. Room 7’s door was at the end of a dark hallway, a single bare bulb humming above it. Mira hesitated. ‘Are you sure this is right?’ she asked. Leo shrugged. ‘It’s what the board said.’ They pushed the door open.

The room was a forgotten storage space, filled with broken chairs, old textbooks, and a layer of dust that made them sneeze. The air was cold and stale. In the center of the room, on a rusty metal table, sat a thermometer—an old-fashioned mercury one, not the fancy digital kind. It looked ancient, with a glass tube filled with red liquid. Its reading was -15 degrees Celsius, impossibly low. Leo went to touch it, but Mira grabbed his arm. ‘We should just use our digital one and leave.’ They aimed the device at the room, and it confirmed the -15 reading, then the screen glitched and went black.

A strange hum emanated from the old thermometer, growing louder. The red liquid inside began to climb, not down. It shot up past 0, 10, 20, and then the glass cracked. The cold in the room deepened, and frost began to crawl along the walls. The door slammed shut. Leo and Mira tried the handle, but it was frozen. They were trapped.

Suddenly, they heard a sound—a soft, childish giggle from behind a stack of old desks. They spun around. There, in the shadows, a small figure sat on one of the desks, its back turned to them. It wore an old-fashioned school uniform, and its hair was matted. ‘Who’s there?’ Leo’s voice trembled. The figure slowly turned, its face pale and featureless except for a wide, lipless smile that was too big for its head. ‘Welcome,’ it said, its voice too high-pitched, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to come to my class.’

Leo and Mira backed away, but the floor beneath them turned to ice, and their shoes stuck. The figure stood up, and they saw that it had long, spidery arms that reached almost to the ground. ‘Time for our lesson,’ it said, and from the dust, dozens of other children materialized, all with the same blank face and stretched smile. They began to close in, chanting in unison, ‘Stay. Stay. Stay.’

Desperate, Leo remembered the digital thermometer in his hand. He aimed it at the figure and pressed the button. The device beeped, and the screen flickered back to life, reading 37 degrees Celsius—human body temperature. The figure tilted its head. ‘That’s not right,’ it said, and for a split second, its smile faltered. Leo slapped the thermometer onto the figure’s chest. There was a blinding flash, and the figure shrieked, its form dissolving into steam as the temperature in the room skyrocketed. The frost melted, the door swung open, and the other children disappeared into piles of dust.

Leo and Mira ran out, not stopping until they reached their classroom. Their classmates were just returning from their own measurements. Mrs. Vance looked at them, her eyes widening. ‘Where were you? You’re soaked,’ she said. They tried to explain, but she just shook her head. ‘Room 7? That room has been sealed for years. There’s no thermometer there.’ They looked at each other, and Leo checked the digital device. It was still on, but now it read -18 degrees, and the screen flickered with a single word: ‘Soon.’

Weeks passed, but the digital thermometer never lost that frozen reading. Every time they passed the East Wing, they heard faint giggling, and sometimes the door to Room 7 was ajar, revealing the old thermometer on the table, its red liquid climbing. Leo and Mira never told anyone else, but they both knew: the lesson was only just beginning.