r/nosleep • u/Everblack_Deathmask • Jul 25 '25
Series Room 409 - Part 2
If you’re just joining, you probably think I’m another grieving man seeing ghosts in a hotel. But if you read the first part (which I will link in the comments so you can get caught up), you know better. You know I checked into Room 409 looking for answers. What I found instead… was myself. And not the version I wanted to see.
I didn’t remember falling asleep.
But I remember the moment I woke up.
My eyes snapped open to a darkness that wasn’t nightfall, but annihilation- a void so complete it devoured edges, bled through form. It pressed against my skin like wet cloth. My lungs struggled to draw in air that didn’t feel like mine. Breathing felt… borrowed.
And for a few seconds, I forgot where—or when—I was.
Hadn’t I just—been holding something? I thought in confusion, the metal imprint still ached in my palm like muscle memory from a dream I was only half awake from.
Then, my eyes caught it: a sliver of golden light spilling from the cracked door of Room 409.
It hadn’t closed.
The door was still ajar, still waiting.
⸻
I sat up, the sheets clinging to my skin like they remembered a different body. Sweat – or something colder – soaked through, as if the bed had wept with me.
I noticed the carpet was gone and in its place: splintered floorboards, raw and gray, warped by moisture. My shoes and socks had vanished, and I could feel the grain of the wood digging into the soles of my feet, as if the hotel had peeled back a layer of comfort on purpose.
There was no sound, no droning sounds from the lights, no wind against the windows. Just…silence, thick and watchful.
And then, a child’s laugh pierced the quiet.
It was soft and familiar, but it didn’t come from in front of me.
It came from behind like a memory masquerading as sound, muffled by time.
I followed it into the hallway, eager but slightly frightened at where I was being led.
The geometry of the hallway had changed once again.
It stretched unnaturally long and narrow, the walls bowing inward like something exhaling. Wallpaper peeled in uneven strips, revealing something beneath that pulsed faintly. Not wood, not concrete…skin.
Somewhere ahead, a door creaked open.
Then another.
And another.
Door after door stretched down the corridor. No room bore a number now. Their placards had rotted away or fused to the walls. Some doors were marked with ash. Others bore sigils carved deep and angry into the surface—some I recognized from dreams I’d never spoken aloud. None of them were inviting.
The laugh came again. This time, layered.
A woman’s voice, humming beneath it. A lullaby.
I knew that melody.
I walked on, deeper into the hallway that shouldn’t exist.
It narrowed into a point, terminating in a single, untouched door.
Unlike the others, this one was perfect.
Gleaming cherrywood. Brass doorknob. A soft orange glow leaked from underneath, pulsing like breath.
The scent hit me before I reached it:
Lavender shampoo. Baby powder. The soft warmth of blankets left in the sun.
And something else.
Pine. Old plaster. Mold.
The smell belonged to her room.
I opened the door and stepped inside.
⸻
It wasn’t like her room. It was her room.
Every detail—down to the plastic horses lined on the shelf in height order, the stained rug with dried juice marks, the crooked poster she made me promise not to fix, the crack in the ceiling from the night we tried to hang fairy lights, and even the paper stars taped to the ceiling — some curling, some half-fallen, was here.
A bookshelf stood by the wall. Dog-eared fairy tales. A journal with puffed unicorn stickers. Crayons scattered like fall leaves all over the floor.
But some details were too perfect.
The drawings were recent, dated with today’s date in a crayon she didn’t have. And her stuffed elephant Mr. Grey that rested on her bed? He had his missing eye sewn back on…with a needle still stuck in the seam.
The air felt heavier here — not oppressive, but sacred.
My throat tightened, lungs refused to fill.
The room that shouldn’t even exist anymore.
We boxed most of it up after the funeral. The rest was sold or thrown away.
My knees buckled at the realization that this wasn’t a memory, this was something more.
“Daddy?”
I was startled by the voice; it was one I hadn’t heard in years.
I froze in place like a snapshot in time.
The room was empty except… it wasn’t.
In the corner, beyond the lamplight, stood a silhouette. Child-sized. Flickering like old film. Its edges frayed and wrong.
“Did you find the story yet?” it asked in her voice—but not quite. It sounded faintly distorted.
I felt a lump form in my throat as I asked, “What story?”
“The one you stopped telling me.”
The voice didn’t come from her mouth anymore; it came from inside me.
I doubled over and felt the world fold in on itself.
The light flickered and the room contorted itself in a sickening metamorphosis to reveal that…I was back in the hospital.
The bright lights beamed overhead, making the bleached walls glisten in a melancholic way. The sterile silence of the room was broken only by the mechanical rhythm of beeping monitors.
I saw my ex-wife Claire sobbing next to me as I sat beside her and the girl in the bed, my daughter.
Her hand was warm in mine as she lay in the bed with IVs in her arms.
“I’m scared,” she murmured, her smile cracked but defiant.
I continued to gently hold her hand in mine, tears fighting to be released from my eyes. I couldn’t let them out; I had to be strong for her.
The most I could do was deliver a small smile as her hand slowly curled into a gentle fist.
That’s when she uttered the words, “Tell me the story again.”
I remember the silence and the way I held her hand, but I didn’t tell the story.
My mouth opened but no sound came, I couldn’t find the words.
I’d told it so many times… until I couldn’t anymore. Until the endings became too hard to fake.
“Am I gonna go to the Room too?”
I flinched, my blood turning to ice. “What room?”
But I already knew what she was talking about. My heart plummeted as she looked past me toward a corner of the hospital room where something unseen loomed.
“The one with whispering walls,” she breathed, her voice seemingly echoing off the walls. “The one in your head.”
That’s when the monitor flatlined.
I didn’t kill her. I just didn’t stop it when I could have. That’s what makes it worse.
I snapped back to the present with a horrific gasp as I staggered and caught myself against a nearby doorframe.
I was back in the hallway, my hands on the floor. Bloody, splinters embedded in my palms.
The elephant, the hospital room, my ex-wife, my daughter…all gone.
The only proof she had ever been here were five small fingerprints across my chest-still warm, still soft, still hers.
I didn’t know what was real or not anymore. That’s when I made the decision to escape.
I ran or maybe I didn’t.
It felt like my legs were carrying me, but it also felt like I was just running in place.
The halls looped and twisted like paper curling in fire.
The ceiling lowered and the walls folded inward.
Doors multiplied and opened, fanning outward in impossible angles like veins branching from a central artery.
And behind each one: a different version of myself.
One screaming.
One begging.
One silent and holding the elephant.
All of them mouthing the same thing:
“You’re not the first. But maybe you’re the last.”
The words echoed like a bell struck underwater, it was muffled, warbled, but deep. Anchored.
One hallway gleamed with new wallpaper, champagne trays, laughter. The next: bloated ceilings, black mold bleeding from vents. The Lotus flickering between what it was and what it became.
Time wasn’t moving forward anymore, it was folding, breathing, watching me.
I stopped – lungs burning like a raging inferno, thoughts unraveling – feeling like time had been gnawing at my sanity, one loop at a time.
I noticed a mirror that had appeared beside an elevator that hadn’t been there a second ago.
I peered into it but the man staring back didn’t follow my movements.
He watched with a sinister smile mouthing the words, “You’re already here.”
The elevator chimed and I turned to see its doors open, as if it were imploring me to leave this nightmare behind.
Inside: no numbers, just a single downward arrow. The button pulsed.
I stepped in.
The descent was silent.
Each time the doors opened, I saw glimpses:
A hallway where figures stood with their backs turned, whispering in unison.
A ballroom decaying on one side, pristine on the other.
A room of floating clocks all set to different times ticking backward – my name etched on every face.
I pressed no button.
The elevator seemingly choosing where it wanted me to go, what to see.
When it stopped, I stepped into what looked like the front desk, or a dream of it.
The air shimmered like a memory trying to hold itself together.
There was a journal open on the counter with my name on the front.
I turned the pages and noticed that the entries were all dated from years ago but were all in my handwriting.
Even more peculiar was that the contents of the journal were comprised of things that I didn’t completely remember writing. Some I did—but they had ended differently.
One note in the margin caught my eye, circled repeatedly until the ink bled through:
“You stayed because you couldn’t forgive yourself. You can leave, but you will have to leave him behind.”
The desk drawer creaked open.
Inside: her crayon drawings. Letters addressed to me.
I didn’t remember ever seeing them. I don’t know how she sent them, but her handwriting was unmistakable.
The last one just said:
“It’s okay, Daddy. You don’t have to be sad anymore. I’ll remember the story for you.”
Below it: a child’s handprint. Tears I didn’t even know had formed in my eyes began falling like rain as I realized that the bloody print on my clothes was the same handprint from her.
It glowed faintly as I touched it.
The hotel exhaled, not metaphorically, but as if it had been holding its breath in anticipation.
The walls breathed and the light pulsated before ceasing to do so.
The air froze and the consistent buzz went silent.
I turned my attention to the light shining through the glass of the entrance doors.
I walked towards the door, no whispers. no humming. no warping of reality.
Just silence and plumbing somewhere overhead.
I placed my hand against the glass
Cool. Solid. Real.
Outside, life was happening.
A man pacing on his phone. A woman lighting a cigarette. A mother walking hand-in-hand with her daughter.
I could see my car, the parking lot, the world, home.
The rain that was once coming down in a torrential downpour had stopped.
I could go.
I could finally leave.
Then:
I heard someone speak my name.
Before I could even react, I found myself back in Room 409.
The lights flickered and the mirror on the wall no longer showed my own reflection.
The door was open, revealing the hallway and a figure walking down it.
A man.
Same build. Same coat. Same stride.
Same face.
But the posture was too confident.
The eyes too dry.
Not his eyes.
Not anymore.
⸻
The journal was open again; all the previous entries of mine were erased now.
New pages.
New ink…that was fresh and wet.
“That’s the man you became when you stopped feeling. He remembers how to pretend, how to smile. He’s the version who left her. The one who never cried.”
My breath hitched as the memory stabbed me behind the eyes:
A playground.
A father in a car.
Watching children laugh.
Feeling…nothing.
No ache. No yearning.
Just an all-consuming void emptiness.
Absence where pain should be.
That version had survived.
And now…he was walking away.
“You can still follow him,” the journal offered.
“But if you do, you will forget all of this. You will forget her.”
My fingers hovered above the page momentarily with hesitance, before flipping the page. I let out a pained cry as I felt the paper scorch my skin with an intense heat and I pulled my hand away immediately.
I gasped, recoiling as the journal slammed shut with a wet thud.
The mirror shattered.
I turned back toward the open doorway.
The hallway was gone, erased.
Replaced by a wall of black.
Not shadow.
Not void.
Just absence.
And then—
Footsteps.
Behind me.
Measured.
Soft.
Intentional.
I turned—
And came face to face with myself.
It wasn’t a reflection, nor was it a memory.
It was a man.
Same height. Same build. Same trench coat.
But the eyes?
Dead.
Glass marbles where grief used to live.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” my reflection spoke, his voice was clinical. Hollowed of heat.
“People like us don’t get closure. We get consequences.” He stepped closer. “I buried it, all of it. The guilt. The noise. Her. And you—you’re digging it back up like it’s going to save you.”
I backed away. “I didn’t come here to be saved.”
The other laughed. Once. Cold and humorless. “No. You came here to bleed.”
I clenched my fists. “I didn’t want this.”
“Yes, you did,” the other said, stepping closer.
“We built this place. You and me. Brick by brick. Memory by memory. We are the Room.”
A long silence, and then: “The Room doesn’t forgive.”
And the journal on the desk opened itself.
The final page.
No scrawl.
Just five words:
“If you want to leave…”
Another line appeared.
“One of you must stay.”
I watched my reflection dissipate with a dark smile as a door suddenly creaked open.
Not the door to the hallway.
Another door.
One that hadn’t been there before.
The closet.
Now wide open.
I should’ve left but something kept pulling me deeper—not a force. A thread.
Something I’d tied myself.
I ventured into the darkness of the closet, away from Room 409. I don’t know how long I walked, minutes, hours, years?.…Until I was there again.
Eventually, the hallway changed. The flickering lights stopped. The mildew faded. The walls turned crisp and clean, bathed in a warm amber glow.
I’d made it. The front lobby.
It was too quiet.
No one at the concierge desk. No guests. No bellhop. Just menacing tranquility, like the building was suppressing the urge to tell a secret.
I walked toward the front desk. The lights above buzzed. Something about the air felt staged, like a photograph.
That’s when I saw the frame.
A cheap black-and-gold plaque sat crooked on the counter like a forgotten joke beside a dusty pen jar. Inside it: a photo.
Me.
Dressed in the same clothes I was wearing now, only smiling. Forced. Wrong.
Below the picture: “Employee of the Month — January 2015.”
My stomach turned. The blood drained from my face. I reached for the photo with a trembling hand but a voice stopped me.
It was calm and familiar.
“It’s always someone’s turn.”
I turned.
And the man standing in front of me… was me.
But not quite. His eyes were tired. Worn out like an old VHS tape that had been played too many times. He smiled with his mouth, not his eyes.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said. “We all do.”
Then he stepped aside, gesturing back toward the long hallway behind him. The door to Room 409 stood open at the far end, waiting.
My nameplate was already back on it.
Somewhere deep inside me, a voice whispered, “Tell me the story again.”
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u/AdAffectionate8634 19d ago
I so cannot even imagine how hard it would be to live it all over and over and over again..