A STRANGE ROOM -Md Sazzadul Islam

Imran didn’t remember opening the door. That was the first thing that bothered him, a cold prickle of intuition that sat heavy at the base of his skull. One moment, he had been navigating the long, desolate corridor of St. Jude’s Academy, his footsteps echoing against the polished linoleum. He had stayed late to finish a biology project, the kind of meticulous work that required the silence of an empty building. But the silence had grown too thick, and the shadows in the corners of the hallway seemed to be stretching toward him. Then, with the suddenness of a camera shutter flicking shut and open again, the familiar hallway was gone. He was standing inside a room he had never seen before. The air here was immediately different. Above him, a series of long fluorescent tubes buzzed with a rhythmic, dying hum, flickering in a sequence that felt almost like a heartbeat. They cast uneven, jagged shadows that danced across the floor, and Imran could swear those shadows moved with a life of their own the second he turned his gaze elsewhere.

Panic, sharp and metallic, rose in his throat. He spun around quickly, reaching for the handle of the door he must have just walked through, but his hand met only smooth, cold plaster. The door was gone. There was no seam, no frame, no evidence that an exit had ever existed. “Okay… not funny,” he muttered, trying to keep his voice steady despite the tremor in his hands.

“Very funny, guys. Rifat? Shawon? You got me.” He waited for the burst of laughter, for a friend to step out from behind a prop with a camera in hand. No laughter came. No sound at all, actually. The usual hum of the school’s ventilation system and the distant rumble of city traffic had been swallowed by a vacuum of absolute silence. The room was almost empty. In the center sat a single heavy table and a lone wooden chair. On the far wall hung a mirror. It didn’t look like a normal mirror, though. The frame was too old, too detailed, carved with patterns that twisted and coiled in ways that made his eyes hurt if he stared for more than a second. It felt less like a piece of furniture and more like a hole in reality.

Imran approached the mirror slowly, his sneakers squeaking against the floor like a frantic warning. His reflection stared back at him. But as he drew closer, he realized something was off. The perspective felt wrong, as if the room inside the glass was a few inches deeper than the one he actually stood in. He raised his hand to touch his face, testing the reality of the image. The reflection raised its hand too, but it did so a fraction of a second too late. Imran froze. He did it again, a quick flick of his wrist. Again, the lag. It was as if the person in the mirror was watching him, trying to mimic him but failing to keep up with the speed of his fear. “Nope,” he whispered, stepping back. The reflection didn’t. It stayed where it was, its hand still hovering near its cheek, its eyes locked onto his with an intensity that felt predatory. Then, slowly, a faint, chilling smile began to spread across its face.

Imran’s heart slammed against his chest like a trapped bird. “This isn’t real,” he said quickly, his voice rising in pitch. “This is a dream. I fell asleep in the library. This is just a stress-induced hallucination.” The reflection tilted its head, the movement fluid and unnervingly graceful. Then it spoke. The voice didn’t come from the mirror; it seemed to vibrate directly inside Imran’s skull. “You always say that.” Imran stumbled backward, nearly tripping over the heavy chair. “How are you? What are you?” he gasped. The reflection leaned forward, its face pressing against the interior of the glass. “You shouldn’t have come here,” it interrupted, its voice calm, almost bored. “But you always do. You’re like a moth to a flame, Imran. You find the gap in the hallway, you see the door that shouldn’t be there, and you just can’t help yourself.”

“What do you mean ‘always’?” Imran cried, panic fully taking hold. “I’ve never seen this place in my life!” The lights flickered again, plunging the room into near-total darkness for a heartbeat. In that brief interval of shadow, the room changed. For a split second, the pristine walls were covered in deep and frantic scratches. When the lights steadied, the room looked normal again, but the image remained burned into his mind. “You don’t remember,” the reflection said softly. “That’s the problem. Each time you enter, the room takes a little more of your memory as payment for the visit. You’ve been here dozens of times, Imran. You’ve sat in that chair until your bones ached, and you’ve begged me for the way out.”

The reflection stepped forward. It didn’t just move closer to the glass; it pressed its hands against the surface, which rippled like water, and stepped out of the mirror. Imran couldn’t breathe. It moved exactly like him, but its expression was wrong. It circled him slowly, studying him like a puzzle it had already solved. “You keep finding this room,” it said, leaning in so close that Imran could see the perfect, artificial clarity of its eyes. “And you keep trying to leave.” Imran backed away until his spine hit the cold plaster of the wall. “And?” he whispered. The double smiled wider, reaching out to straighten Imran’s tie with a possessive tug. “And you never do.”

The lights flickered one last time, and then they went out completely. Darkness swallowed the room, heavy and suffocating. For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of Imran’s own ragged breathing and the terrifyingly steady heartbeat of the thing standing in front of him. Then, a door appeared. It was right in front of him, a thin line of golden light spilling through the cracks, showing the familiar, grimy linoleum of the school corridor. Imran didn’t think. He didn’t weigh the logic or the trap. He ran, grabbing the handle and throwing it open with a burst of desperate strength. He stumbled through the threshold and collapsed against the wall of the hallway, gasping for air as the door behind him vanished back into the solid wall.

Bright. Normal. Safe. The familiar smell of floor wax and old paper flooded his senses. “It was just a dream,” he whispered over and over, his voice a frantic mantra. “Just a dream. Too much caffeine, too little sleep.” He forced himself to stand, his legs shaking as he began to walk toward the main exit. He passed a classroom window, glancing briefly at his own reflection in the dark glass. He stopped dead. In the reflection, he was walking away. But just behind him, standing perfectly still in the glass-world hallway, was another figure. It was him, but it wasn’t. The figure was standing there with its head tilted at an impossible angle, wearing a wide, triumphant smile, holding the very biology project Imran thought he had left behind.