Horror

by Scribes Stories · 5 min read · 1 view

The Guest Room The estate agent had called it "full of character," which Maren now understood was the phrase people used when a house had a room they didn't want to explain. The rest of Thornbury Cottage was exactly what she and Colin had wanted, low beams, a kitchen with a real fireplace, a garden gone pleasantly wild. It was only the guest room, the small one at the end of the upstairs hall, that gave her pause the first time she saw it, though she couldn't have said why. It was just a room. Faded wallpaper, a single bed, a window that looked out over the back field. Nothing wrong with it that she could point to. And yet she found herself closing its door every time she passed, an instinct she didn't examine too closely, the way you don't examine why you flinch from a spider before you've even consciously seen it. They had been in the house six weeks when Colin's sister Rae came to stay, and of course she was put in the guest room, because it was the only spare one, and Maren said nothing about her strange discomfort because it sounded, even in her own head, like nothing at all. Rae came down the first morning looking thinner around the eyes than usual. "Bad night?" Maren asked, pouring coffee. "I kept dreaming someone was counting," Rae said, frowning like she was trying to remember something already dissolving. "Not talking. Just numbers, over and over, like they were keeping track of something in the room with me. Silly, I know. New bed." Maren laughed it off, the way you do, and did not mention that she had woken twice in the night herself, certain she'd heard the guest room door open, though when she'd checked, it was shut exactly as she'd left it. Rae left after four days, citing work, though Maren noticed she avoided the upstairs hallway entirely on her last morning, taking the back stairs instead, and did not offer to stay again despite Maren's invitation. It was Colin's mother, three weeks later, who finally said something Maren couldn't laugh off. "Your neighbor mentioned the Whitfield boy," she said carefully over dinner, not quite looking at Maren. "Apparently he used to live here, years ago. Before the house changed hands twice. Kept in that room, from what I understand, for reasons nobody in the village likes to discuss." "Kept how?" Maren asked, feeling something cold settle low in her stomach. "I don't know the details," Colin's mother said. "Only that people say he used to count things. Out loud, for hours. The floorboards, maybe, or his own heartbeat, nobody's quite sure. He counted, and then one winter he simply stopped, and nobody in the family who lived here after ever slept easily in that room again." That night Maren lay awake long after Colin had fallen asleep beside her, listening to the particular quality of silence a house holds when it is not, in fact, entirely silent. Just past two, she heard it. Faint, rhythmic, coming from down the hall. One. Two. Three. She told herself it was pipes settling, the old radiator ticking as it cooled, any of the dozen mundane explanations a rational mind reaches for at two in the morning. She got up anyway, feet cold on the floorboards, and walked toward the guest room with her heart going hard and fast against her ribs. The door was open. She was certain, absolutely certain, that she had shut it that evening, the way she shut it every evening, the small ritual she'd never examined. The counting stopped the moment she reached the doorway. The room was empty. Moonlight fell across the single bed, undisturbed, sheets tucked exactly as she'd left them after washing them that morning. Nothing was there. Nothing she could see, anyway. But the air held a stillness that felt occupied, the specific silence of a held breath, and Maren found herself speaking before she'd decided to, voice barely above a whisper. "What are you counting?" The response, when it came, was not a voice exactly, more an impression settling into her mind the way cold settles into a room through an open window. Days. He was counting days. He had been counting them for a very long time, and the number, whatever it was, never seemed to reach an end that satisfied him. "Days until what?" Maren asked, though some old animal part of her already suspected she did not want the answer. The stillness in the room shifted, and for one unbearable moment Maren felt something like sorrow pass through the space, ancient and exhausted, the feeling of a mind that has been alone with its counting for so long it has forgotten what completion would even mean. She did not get an answer. The moonlight simply dimmed slightly as a cloud passed outside, and when it cleared again, the room felt, unmistakably, empty in the ordinary way rooms are empty, and Maren realized she was shaking, standing barefoot in a cold hallway at half past two in the morning. She shut the door, and this time, out of some instinct she didn't fully understand, she left it very slightly open instead, a crack of hallway light falling across the threshold. "You can stop now," she said quietly, to the closed house, to whatever remained of a boy who had once been kept in that room and never let out to properly finish. "Nobody's counting you anymore. You don't have to keep going." She did not know if it helped. But the following nights were quieter, and though she never told Colin what she'd heard, and never fully explained to guests why she preferred to leave the guest room door slightly ajar, she noticed, over the months that followed, that the house seemed to settle into something closer to peace, as though something inside its walls had finally, after a very long count, been allowed to stop. Sometimes, late at night, Maren still hears something faint down the hall. But it no longer sounds like counting. It sounds, if anything, like a long, tired exhale. The sound something makes when it has finally been told it is allowed to rest.