At Lakeside School, Ada and her new roommates follow a rumour to a locked room that seems to feel everything they do - until the room starts asking its own questions.
Lakeside School looked almost peaceful from the outside, with its long windows glowing above the water and the lake lying black and still beyond the grounds. Inside, though, the corridors breathed with whispers, and the older students talked about the place the way people talked about storms: half teasing, half afraid.
It was Ada’s first night in a boarding school, and the silence in her dorm room sat heavy in her chest. She kept listening for sounds from the corridor, for footsteps, laughter, anything that would make the place feel ordinary. When the door finally creaked open, her new roommate, Nadia, slipped in and shut it behind her with the careful tension of someone trying not to wake the building itself.
Nadia glanced toward the window, where moonlight lay silver across the lake. “Do you fancy a night out?” she asked quietly.
Before Ada could answer, Igor appeared in the doorway, headphones hanging around his neck, his expression alert as if he had already decided this was a bad idea and was coming anyway.
The three of them moved through the corridor together, barefoot and silent, passing dark classroom doors and framed photographs that seemed to watch them go. On the second floor, they stopped outside a narrow room at the end of the hall. The rumours had found their way to Ada within hours: a room where people felt things that were not their own, a room that somehow knew what you were hiding.
“Have you heard about this place?” Igor whispered, brushing his fingers over the cold wall beside the door.
Ada had, and that was the worst part. She had also heard that no one stayed in there long enough to explain what happened.
Nadia reached for the handle first. Her hand trembled only once before she pushed.
The door opened without a sound.
Inside, the air was much colder than it should have been. The wallpaper was faded into shapes that almost looked like faces if you stared too long, and at the back of the room a green light blinked on and off, slow and patient, like an eye refusing to close. For a moment nothing happened.
Then sadness hit Ada so hard she nearly folded in on herself. It was not her own sadness. It was deeper, sharper, as if someone had just been torn away from everything they cared about.
“I feel awful,” she whispered, gripping Nadia’s sleeve.
Nadia’s face had gone pale. Igor took one step back, bumping into the door.
“I’m angry,” he said, and his voice cracked on the words. “But it isn’t mine.”
The green light flared.
The door slammed shut behind them with a violent bang, and in the sudden dark Ada saw pale letters spreading across the walls, one after another, as if the room were writing them by hand.
Who are you really?
The whispering started then, all around them, too many voices to count, rising and crossing over one another until the room felt crowded with unseen people. Ada’s skin prickled. Something in the darkness was moving closer, not touching, only searching. Probing.
Then she felt it again, stronger than the rest.
Not fear. Not sadness.
A pull, sharp and direct, as if something inside the room had found her first and was waiting for her to answer.