ROOM 204

​Every night at exactly 2:17 a.m., the apartment above mine dragged something heavy across the floor. Tonight, the sound came from under my bed.

This frightened me. I had three options: peek under the bed, ignore it, or leave the room.

So I chose to leave the room.

I grabbed the doorknob, but before I could pull it open, something under the bed whispered in my exact voice.

“Don’t. That thing in the hallway heard you move.”

Now this frightened me again. Again, I had three options: turn around, ask a question, or open the door.

Even though I was afraid, I chose to ask the question.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Your question should be, what are you?” it replied.

The room fell silent after that sentence. So silent that I started to hear my heart beat loud and clear. Then, very slowly, something moved from under the bed. It felt like a stack of wet photographs crawled out of bed and was trying to stand up.

“I borrow shapes,” it whispered. “Tonight, I borrowed yours.”

These words made a chill run down my spine. Just as I was about to turn around and look at it.

Knock knock knock. Three soft knocks sounded on my door. These knocks were of the exact rhythm I used on doors without realizing it.

“Room service,” the voice echoed through the room.

Behind me, I heard the creature’s crawl. Hiding itself under the bed .

“Don’t open the door,” it pleaded.

My hands started to shiver.

What should I do? The thought resided in my mind. But I made my decision; even if it was scary, it wouldn’t be scarier than the creature under my bed. I turned the doorknob. The door slid open. Standing outside the room was… me.

It was me. Not someone who looks like me or almost like me. But me. The same shirt as me, scar on the chin, and even the terrified look on its face resembled me. It was like a mirror reflection of me. With those terrified eyes, he looked past my shoulder toward the bed and went pale.

“It got in?” he whispered.

Behind me, under the bed, the creature began to laugh softly. A quiet, bubbling laugh. The version of me in the hallway slowly raised one shaking hand.

“Listen carefully,” he said. “Whichever one of us you believe… the other one gets to keep your life.”

My life? These words drilled into my head like a sharp knife. I stood frozen, my legs shaking, my mind fogged with puzzlement.

“Who are you?” I asked again. “Your question should be, what are you?” he replied.

All the lights went off.

Hearing this, I quickly turned my head back. My eyes drifted across the room. The bed was empty. No creature. No movement. Just the dark space underneath, yawning open like a missing tooth. Somehow, to me, this emptiness felt more dangerous than being taken by that creature.

A cold gust slid through the room, although the windows were shut.

The hallway version of me stepped back instantly.

“Don’t look directly into the corners,” he warned.

Too late. My eyes were already fixed in that direction. Something in the top-right corner of the ceiling moved. Not a body. But a shadow with its glowing eyes was looking at me. In those eyes, it felt like reality had been erased and redrawn badly.

My eyes tried to understand it and failed. The longer I stared, the more my childhood memories began surfacing randomly:

My first school bag.

The smell of rain on concrete.

A face I forgot years ago.

The thing pulsed once.

Then every object in the room tilted slightly toward me, as if gravity had changed its mind.

And both versions of me spoke at the exact same time:

“If it learns your name, you stay here forever.”

“What is happening?” I cried. Crying for answers from them. Their presence started to make my chest heavy, and my whole body started to shake. I bit my lips, lifted my feet, and started running through the hallway.

There I saw a room at the end of the corridor.

Knock. Knock. I started banging on the door.

“Please!” I shouted. “Open the door!”

The handle slowly turned. An old woman peeked through the crack. Her black hair floated slightly, as if underwater.

But what froze my blood was the relieved look on seeing me.

“Finally,” she whispered. “You came back.”

Before I could answer, she grabbed my wrist with startling strength and pulled me inside.

The room was identical to mine. Same lamp, Same bed, Same mirror. Except on the bedside table sat a framed photograph of me standing beside the old woman… smiling like family.

Then I noticed the date printed on the photo.

August 14, 2041.

I turned back to ask her how she knew me, but just as I turned, I saw another me behind her holding a diary in his hand. His lips curled up, giving a bizarre smile as he opened the diary and started reading loudly:

“May 22. Subject finally noticed the hallway changing shape. Fear response stable. Memory erosion is accelerating.”

My stomach dropped. The handwriting in the diary was mine. Not similar but… Mine.

The other me flipped the page.

“Important note: the copies improve each cycle. Current version still believes he is the original.”

The old woman slowly stepped away from me. Not frightened but careful. Like someone handling unstable chemicals.

I backed toward the mirror behind the bed, breathing hard.

“Stop calling me a copy,” I snapped. “I’m real.”

The other me looked genuinely sad for a second. Then he held up the diary so I could see the final line written at the bottom of the page:

If he reaches Room 204 again, do not let him see the mirror.

Too late. My hands were on the drawer, my eyes looking in the mirror, but the reflection in the mirror wasn’t copying my movements anymore. Tears flowed from my eyes. My reflection looked frightened. Because in front of the mirror I stood with teary eyes and a creepy smile on my face.

The room became unbearably quiet. My reflection trembled violently in the mirror, staring at me like I was the monster now. And slowly, horrifyingly slowly, it raised a hand to the glass. Not copying me. Begging me.

“Please,” my reflection mouthed silently. “Don’t let it wear us again.”

Behind me, the diary slammed shut. The other me took a step back. The old woman covered her mouth as if she already knew what came next.

I could feel it then. That smile on my face. I wasn’t controlling it. The smile was growing bigger and bigger.

My hands began opening the drawer beneath the mirror without permission. Inside was a stack of photographs. Hundreds of them. Different years. Different clothes. Different rooms.

But always the same three things: me, the hallway, and that smile.

And in the very last photograph, dated tomorrow, stood a person knocking desperately on a hotel room door. A younger version of me. The exact moment this all began.

I opened the other drawer. There I saw a photo from my school days with my friends on a trip. I looked closely at the photo and noticed something disturbing.

Every child and teacher was looking at me. I flipped the photo over, and on the back were the words:

“We seek stars, but do stars seek us too?”

A pressure built inside my skull the moment I read the sentence. Then I noticed something worse.

There had originally been twenty students in the picture. Now there were only nineteen. My younger self was gone.

“It started on that trip.” The old woman whispered behind me.

“Don’t tell him that.” The diary-holder snapped his head toward her.

But she continued anyway.

“You found something in the observatory.”

The lights flickered. For one impossible instant, the ceiling above me disappeared. Beyond it stretched a sky crowded with stars that pulsed like living eyes.

Watching. Waiting.

And from somewhere impossibly far away, something enormous seemed to notice that I had finally looked back.

In the sky was a pair of huge eyes fixed on me.

To avoid their gaze, I ran into a corner and crawled under a table. I kept my head down and stared at the floor.

Suddenly, the floor vanished.

Far below, I saw a boy standing in an apartment room looking at me from impossibly far away. Beside him stood a boy with a diary in his hand and a lady.

The terrified boy under the table…was me.

The diary-holder suddenly lifted his head and looked directly at me. Not at the boy under the table. At me watching from beyond. Slowly, he pointed upward. Toward my hiding place. And the boy beneath the table began to raise his head too. Above my head, the ceiling had returned.

I blinked in surprise and tilted my head to ask the diary-holder what it was.

But there was no one there. The room was normal again.

My room! I looked down and found my bed and blanket over my legs. The digital clock beside the bed glowed softly:

2:16 a.m.

I touched my face. No horrible smile, no blood. I lifted the blanket away and got down from the bed. I felt like my foot touched some paper.

A photograph lay on the floor beside the bed. The school trip photo. I stared at it before slowly turning it over.

Blank. The sentence was gone. Relief crawled into my chest.

“A dream,” I whispered.

Then something answered from beneath the bed. Very softly.In my own voice.

“Check the clock again.”

I lifted my head to look at the clock but instead saw someone’s feet.

My body lay on the ground beneath a bed.

I was under it. Above me, something wearing my body shifted beneath the blanket. Then it sat up. I heard someone walking down the hallway. The thing wearing me stepped toward the door.

“Room service,” came the voice outside.

The thing stopped. Then it whispered:

“Come in.”

The bed suddenly collapsed onto me, and I sank into the floor. I felt my bones break and my consciousness fade. But the next instant, my eyes opened. I was standing in the hallway. I walked down the corridor and found my room. I tried opening the door, but it was locked. So I knocked on the door. And tried to push with my shoulder.

Then I heard a whispering voice from inside:

“Don’t open the door,” it pleaded.

I froze. The voice behind the door was terrified.

Human. And unmistakably mine, but at the same time, it was different. I checked the room number and noticed that it was not 204 but 214.

I wasn’t reliving the night anymore. I was ahead of it now.

Inside the room, something heavy scraped slowly across the floor. The exact sound that started everything. I opened the door and saw another me. A younger me. A schoolboy unpacking things from a trip.

“So how’s your trip been?” he asked.

His presence creeped me so much that I lost myself to this fear and picked up a crowbar from the floor.

Thud. I hit the boy on the head. He collapsed. Before I could figure out what had happened. I heard the voices of many people chatting. The voices were coming from the first floor. The voices were coming closer. Afraid that people would know what I did , I started to drag the boy’s body to the third floor, where no one would find him. I left his body in Room 301 and was about to leave when his suitcase suddenly burst open.

A photograph slid out. The school trip photo. Twenty students. And there, beside the teacher… was I. Not the schoolboy. Me. The boy coughed up blood and said in a weak voice.

“We only become it after we try to stop it.”

Then he… died. Filled with anger, fear, frustration, and confusion, I decided to kill the cause of all this. The creature under my bed.

I went to Room 204 and knocked.

“Room service,” I said.

A frightened voice answered from inside:

“Who is it?” My voice.

The lock clicked. The door slowly opened. And there I was again. Terrified, exhausted, and confused. Behind him, beneath the bed, something shifted softly in the darkness. The other me stepped backward.

“Don’t let it out,” he whispered.

Then the thing beneath the bed spoke.

“You finally understand.”

The mirror cracked. A hand slowly emerged from beneath the bed. My hand.

I grabbed it and dragged it out. It was me. Dead. A crowbar in its hand. Blood all over its face. My face.

I turned around to ask the other me what this was.

DHADAM. A crowbar smashed into my face. Glass exploded around me.

The other me who opened the door for me stood there trembling, both hands gripping the weapon.

“I’m sorry,” he cried. “You were going to become it.”

Behind him, the corpse began to move. Its ruined mouth curled upward. Then it spoke in three voices at once: A child’s voice, a lady’s voice, and lastly, my voice, all mixed together. It said,

“There was never a creature under the bed.”

And in that darkness, I finally understood. The hallway, The copies, The diary, The observatory. None of it was haunting me. It was reproducing me. Then came three soft knocks.

Knock. Knock. Knock. A frightened voice whispered from behind the door:

“Who is it?”

“Room service,” the voice echoed.

Just as the owner of that voice was about to enter the room.

My eyes opened.

Morning sunlight flooded the room.

The clock read 10:00 a.m.

I checked my body. Everything was fine.

“It was a dream,” I whispered.

A knock came at the door. I rushed over.

“Who is it?” I asked cautiously.

“Hey, I’m your landlord. Open the door.” An old man’s voice came from the other side.

I opened the door for him. The landlord entered, handed me some bills and documents. He advised me to read the documents before the evening, then left.

After locking the door, I sat down to check the papers. Among them was a handwritten note. Probably written by the landlord, it said:

“There is going to be some restoration work on the second floor, so you are advised to shift to Room 301 for some days.”

I placed the papers aside and walked into the bathroom. I was afraid to check the mirror, but I gathered all my courage and lifted my eyes. The mirror was normal, and my reflection was perfect according to my condition. I rinsed my mouth and just as I spat the water, something in the mirror caught my eye.

In the mirror, I saw words written on the wall behind me.

I turned around.

Nothing. There was nothing written on the wall.

I looked back at the mirror. The words were still there. The words said:

“Let’s meet there. 204.”

THE END