Shift

We told ourselves it was nothing. She was fine. She was alive.

There was an unspoken rule in the compound house never to go near the third room on the second floor. The story changed with every teller. Some swore it was the lair of a malevolent spirit. Others whispered that anyone who stepped inside would shed their skin and die. One narrator, Patrick, even claimed to have witnessed this with his own eyes, until everyone reminded him that he was a chronic liar, and his words carried no weight. Another version told of a pregnant woman who had died there, her ghostly child still haunting the room, crying in the silence of the night.

I found all these tales mildly ridiculous. Still, I will not deny that I was spooked. There was something odd about the air that leaked from that room, a strange energy that clung to my skin whenever I passed by. It felt colder there, as if a shadow lingered too long. Luckily, my own room was on the opposite end of the floor, so I only crossed its door when heading to my best friend’s room, and even that, rarely. Everyone else seemed content to live with the myth. Life went on.

Until the new girl moved into the third room on the second floor.

Her name was Eirene. She arrived in the middle of the semester, a surprise to us all. She scoffed at the warnings, brushing off Divine’s frantic attempt to convince her to bunk elsewhere. With a defiant lift of her chin, and a flip of her short, dark hair, she claimed the room as hers and settled into a very private life.

I felt a secret thrill of pride for her. She had walked right into the jaws of our greatest fear and remained unhurt. While everyone else whispered and waited for the curse to strike, Eirene went on with her life. Days passed. Weeks. She was perfectly fine.

But then small things began to shift.

A neighbor swore she heard whispers from Eirene’s room long after midnight, though no one had gone in. Someone else claimed to see her standing by the window at odd hours, staring out blankly, not moving for minutes at a time. When she passed us in the compound, her smile seemed thinner, strained, as though it didn’t quite belong to her face. Even I noticed the faint hollows beneath her eyes, the way her footsteps dragged just a little slower each evening.

We told ourselves it was nothing. She was fine. She was alive. The room hadn’t claimed her.

Until three weeks later, when she turned up dead.

We first noticed the smell. A foul, rotting odor that seemed to ooze out from beneath her door. At first, we ignored it, hoping it was just a dead rat or spoiled food. But by the fourth day, no one could deny it. Together, we broke her door down.

The silence that followed was heavy. It was truly suffocating. Clothes lay scattered across the room in chaotic piles, and beneath them, we found her.

Her body.

Her face was swollen, her skin blue. It was as though someone, or something, had stolen the very breath from her.

Eirene was dead.

And from that day on, none of us could ever agree on one thing; whether she had defied the room, or whether the room had finally shifted and claimed her.