When I moved into the boarding house on Whitaker Street, I was told the room across the hall was empty.
It wasn’t.
Every night, I heard faint movement: drawers sliding, a chair scraping the floor, a cough. But every morning, the door remained closed, untouched, the dust on its handle unbroken.
Mrs. Lin, who ran the place, was kind but blunt. “There’s no one in that room. Trust me.”
“But I hear someone,” I insisted.
She narrowed her eyes. “You’re the third tenant to say that.”
***
I came to Whitaker Street after my divorce. After the job loss. After the friendlessness. I didn’t choose the room so much as surrender to it. $600 a month. No questions. A view of the alley.
I worked nights—copyediting, mostly—and slept during the day. Or tried to.
The sounds always came at night.
The chair. The cough. The drawer.
I knocked once. Nothing. Knocked harder. Still nothing.
I pressed my ear to the wall.
Silence.
Until one night… I heard a voice.
Faint. Cracked. Male.
“Don’t forget.”
I froze.
I asked Mrs. Lin again.
She shrugged. “You’re probably just hearing the pipes. Old house. Strange acoustics.”
But I knew the difference between pipes and words.
***
A week later, I left a note under the door:
Are you real?
The next morning, the note was gone.
Replaced with a new one, slipped back under my own door.
Define real.
***
From then on, we wrote back and forth.
Every night.
We never used names.
He asked about my life, my regrets, my favorite season. He always signed with the same phrase:
“Don’t forget.”
I told him I didn’t understand.
He replied:
“You will. You’ve forgotten before.”
***
I grew obsessed.
The letters gave me structure. Meaning. I bought better pens. Nicer paper. I stopped drinking.
Sometimes I asked him to come out, to meet me. He always refused.
“Not yet,” he wrote. “We’re not ready.”
We?
***
Then came the morning I found the hallway door ajar.
Just a few inches.
Enough to see a crack of dusty light spilling from inside the mystery room.
I stepped in.
***
The room was identical to mine.
Same layout. Same curtains. Same scratch on the window frame.
But everything was… reversed.
The bed on the opposite wall.
The desk in a mirror position.
And on the desk: a journal.
With my name on the cover.
***
I opened it.
Every page was filled.
Handwritten entries.
About my life.
Things I never wrote down. Things I never told anyone.
Memories from childhood. Thoughts I’d had in secret. Even dreams I barely remembered.
But here they were, logged in ink I didn’t recognize.
***
The last page read:
“You always forget.
So I always remind you.”
***
The door slammed shut behind me.
***
I ran to Mrs. Lin, trembling, holding the journal.
She blinked at me.
Then said, “You’ve been living in that room for a year.”
***
I laughed. “No, I’m across the hall. Room 5.”
She looked genuinely confused. Then led me upstairs.
To Room 5.
Unlocked it.
The room was empty.
Dusty.
Unoccupied.
“I haven’t rented this room since Mr. Weller left. That was… six years ago.”
“But…” I whispered, “I have clothes in my closet. My toothbrush. My—”
She stared at me.
“You live in Room 6. You always have.”
***
Back in Room 6—the one I thought was ‘his’—everything was familiar. The bed, the mug, the little burn mark on the curtain from the candle I’d once left too long.
And the letters?
Gone.
All of them.
Even the journal.
***
I moved out the next week.
Got an apartment with windows that faced the street. No shared walls. No voices in the dark.
I told myself it was stress. Trauma. A brain rewiring itself after loneliness.
I almost believed it.
Until last week.
A letter arrived.
No return address.
Just one line:
“Don’t forget.”
Bhavish is a writer of psychologically rich fiction that often blurs the lines between reality and perception. His work explores themes of isolation, memory, and human fragility. When not writing, he studies human behavior and storytelling structure, searching for the perfect twist. This is his first submission to Every Day Fiction.
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