The Thirteenth Dormitory
On the edge of Old Crescent Academy stands the Thirteenth Dormitory, a building with windows like eyes that never blink and a rumor that it is never truly empty. When the autumn wind howls through the halls, the rumor grows teeth and gnaws at the nerves of students who pretend not to listen.
When I arrived for my first semester, the campus doors clicked shut behind me as if the night itself was sealing me into something kept in cold, careful memory. The twelve dormitories housed the living; the Thirteenth housed the memories that refused to die.
- Each door bears a number, except the thirteenth, which is plain stone and cooler than the rest.
- Footsteps never echo the way they should; they drift, as if stepping from a ceiling to a floor.
- At night, the hall smells of rain and old ink, like something trying to write itself back into existence.
One storm-lashed evening I found a corridor that wasn't on the map, a seam behind the broom closet near the stairwell. A wooden door without a knob waited there, breathing in and out with the clock. When I pressed my palm to the cold wood, the air thickened, and the walls leaned closer, listening for a name I may someday forget.
The diary of Miss Alder, class of '79: "Do not wake the room when the rain begins, for the rain remembers every knock and every promise made in the dark. If the thirteenth opens, you must close your eyes and pretend you never learned the word time."
Inside, the rooms are not rooms but tunnels of being. The residents are silhouettes that never leave, portraits that blink in unison, a chorus of sighs that knows your secrets before you do. The thirteenth dormitory does not steal your sleep; it lends you a night of restraint, and with that restraint, you begin to forget what it means to be awake elsewhere. I caught my reflection in a glass not of this world—a child I may have once become, grown heavier with the years I did not count.
When the dawn pried me from the threshold, the corridors returned to dust and the doors settled into their ordinary silence. Yet I could not pretend nothing had changed. The school no longer asked where I had gone; it asked who I had been when I returned. And somewhere, beyond the map, the Thirteenth Dormitory waited for the next seeker, patient as a graveyard, hungry as a memory.