Chapter Eight: The Room That Cannot Be Opened
Sometimes... there are doors that don't close—not because they are open, but because they refuse to be closed.
And sometimes… there are doors that won't open—not because they are locked, but because they know what lies behind them.
I wasn't asleep. I never sleep. But I was in a state close to stillness—that kind of timelessness where your thoughts freeze, and your mind gets stuck between "What is happening?" and "Is this real?"
The voice came again. Not from outside, but from inside my head. I can't explain how a voice can echo within you and still not be your own. It wasn't a hallucination—I didn't just hear it; I felt it.
"Open the room that cannot be opened."
The room was there, at the end of the long hallway. The one sentenced to be forgotten. Dust piled in front of it as if the air itself was afraid to come near.
No one talks about it. Not in the novel, not in my memories.
But I know it exists.
I swear I passed by it once when I was a child. I saw a shadow behind the door. I imagined the door breathing... or that something behind it was waiting to be opened, just to devour me.
Why now? Why does the novel want me to open it?
I walked toward it, barefoot, over the cold floor. Everything was silent. Even the sound of my breath disappeared.
I arrived.
I placed my hand on the doorknob. It was warm, as if someone had held it just moments before.
I turned the knob...
But it didn't budge.
The voice grew sharper:
"Open the room that cannot be opened."
"I can't."
The novel wrote, on page 98:
"You alone hold the key, because you were the one who closed it the first time."
Me?
I stepped back, trying to remember. What had I locked away? And why?
Blurry images began to seep into my mind. A dark room. A crying child. My mother praying behind the wall. And... a key.
A small, rusty key. I had buried it.
I went out to the old garden. Dug beneath the tree my father had planted.
It took long minutes before I struck something metal.
The key.
I returned to the door. The dust had grown heavier, as if the house itself rejected the idea.
I inserted the key.
The door made no sound. It didn't open—it vanished.
And what I saw behind it... wasn't a room.
It was a past.
The place was a distorted replica of my childhood room, when I was nine. The walls were slanted. The objects unstable, as if they were breathing.
In the corner sat a child. Writing. His face looked just like mine.
I approached.
He spoke without looking up:
"You're late."
"Who are you?"
He raised his head. His eyes had no pupils. His face had no color. But he was me.
"I'm the writer who never grew up."
"And what are you doing here?"
"Writing an ending you never let me finish."
I looked at the paper in front of him.
He was writing page 113, but the number wasn't clear—it kept changing every second:
113
117
101
Then it froze on:
"The page that never ends."
He said:
"You won't survive until you write it fully."
"But no one writes a page that never ends."
He laughed. A cracked child's laugh.
"Exactly. That's why we're stuck here."
I walked out of the room.
Or so I thought.
But when I returned to the hallway, the door was gone.
The house was gone.
I found myself in a white room. Its ceiling endless. Its walls moving—made of words.
And on the wall, a single sentence repeated:
"Open the page before it opens you."
Everything became mirrors.
Everything became writing.
And for the first time…
I felt I was neither the writer nor
the written.
I was… the page.
The one being rewritten… over and over again.
And the chapter… hasn't ended yet.