Chapter 7: The Whispers in Room 12
Chapter 7: The Whispers in Room 12
She fled the gas station like a thief, leaving behind a twenty-dollar bill on the pump and a car full of frost in the middle of a temperate night. The ice on the windows didn’t melt. It remained, a crystalline cocoon insulating them from the world, a testament to the impossible cold emanating from the small, silent passenger in the backseat. The subtle wrongness of the child’s face, that fractional distortion Samantha had noticed in the gas station’s glare, was now all she could see. The space between the eyes just a millimeter too wide. The curve of the upper lip a degree too flat. It was a masterful forgery, but a forgery nonetheless.
The highway offered no sanctuary, only miles of hypnotic repetition. She needed to stop. She needed walls. A lock on a door. A place to collapse.
The motel sign was a flickering, neon beacon of last resorts. "The Starlite Inn," it promised, though half the letters were dead. The name was a cruel joke, a cosmic taunt aimed directly at her. You loved the stars more than you loved the road. Pulling into the mostly empty lot, she parked the sedan in the furthest, darkest corner, as if to hide her shame and her impossible companion from the world.
The man behind the bulletproof glass in the lobby didn't even look up from his crossword puzzle as he slid a key attached to a plastic diamond across the counter. Room 12. It felt appropriately anonymous, a number signifying nothing.
The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke and bleach. The carpet was a tapestry of faint, brownish stains, and the brown floral bedspreads felt thin and greasy to the touch. It was a room meant for secrets and transient miseries, an echo chamber for despair. It was perfect.
Samantha guided the child inside and locked the deadbolt, the sound echoing the one she had made in her own home what felt like a lifetime ago. The chill from the car followed them in, a cloying, invisible miasma that immediately began to battle the room’s musty warmth. The thing that looked like Sophia walked to the bed nearest the window and sat on the edge, her small legs dangling, her posture unnaturally straight. A perfect little doll placed on a dusty shelf.
Samantha sank onto the other bed, the springs groaning in protest. The exhaustion was a physical weight, pressing down on her chest, her limbs, her very soul. She stared at the child, the question she’d been screaming internally since the breathalyzer incident now a deafening roar in the silence. What are you?
The entity seemed to sense the shift in the nature of her fear. Her terror was no longer just about the police or being called crazy. It was now directed squarely at it. The hunt could begin.
It started as a sound so soft Samantha thought it was the hum of the ancient air conditioner. A faint, childish whisper.
“...remember the park, Mommy?”
The voice was perfect. It was the real Sophia’s voice, sweet and lilting, the sound Samantha ached to hear more than anything in the world. Her head snapped up, her heart giving a painful lurch of hope so sharp it felt like being stabbed.
“Sophia?” she breathed.
The child didn’t move, her back still ramrod straight as she stared at the grimy window. But the voice came again, clear as a bell in the silent room. “The big slide. The yellow one. You pushed me so high on the swings. You said I could fly all the way to the moon.”
The memory was a clean, sharp pang of love and loss. A sunny Tuesday two and a half years ago. Sophia’s bright red coat. The smell of cut grass. It was a perfect, happy memory. Samantha’s throat tightened, tears welling in her eyes. Maybe… maybe this was her daughter’s spirit. Maybe this was a miracle.
Then the whisper came again, and the miracle curdled into poison.
“You were so happy then,” the sweet voice murmured, a hint of something cold now woven through it. “Before you got tired. Before you started drinking the sad juice.”
Samantha flinched as if struck. Sad juice. That’s what Sophia had called the wine Samantha started drinking in the evenings when the loneliness of her failing marriage became too much to bear. A secret, shameful nickname between them. Something no one else could possibly know.
The cold in the room deepened perceptibly. The air grew heavy, thick.
“No,” Samantha whispered, shaking her head. “Stop it.”
But the voice was relentless, a surgeon skillfully dissecting her past, laying open old wounds. “Remember my birthday? The unicorn cake with the pink horn?”
Samantha remembered. It was Sophia’s last birthday. The memory was a sun-drenched photograph in her mind.
“You promised we’d get a real unicorn one day,” the voice whispered, the innocence of the words a terrifying contrast to the intent behind them. “You promised to always keep me safe, Mommy.” The voice paused, letting the words hang in the freezing air. “Was the car safe? Was it?”
A sob tore from Samantha’s chest, raw and ragged. “Please, stop! Please, you’re not her!”
The whispering grew more insistent, a collage of stolen moments, each one twisted into a barb of guilt.
“My shoes, Mommy. You never finished teaching me how to tie them. My hands were too small…”
“You read me the book about the little bear, but you fell asleep before the end. I never found out if he found his mommy…”
“It was so dark in the car. And then so bright. So bright. Why didn’t you look at the road, Mommy? Why were you looking at the stars?”
Each memory was a fresh wave of agony, and with each wave, the temperature in the room plummeted. The condensation that had formed on the car windows now bloomed on the single pane of glass in the motel room, the faint glow of the Starlite Inn sign blurring into a watery haze. Samantha wrapped her arms around herself, shivering uncontrollably, her teeth chattering. The chill wasn't on her skin; it was inside her, a parasitic cold feeding on the heat of her anguish.
She looked at the thing on the other bed. It was still sitting there, perfectly composed amidst the storm of her grief. Its head slowly turned, and in the dim, distorted light, its face seemed to swim, the features momentarily losing their cohesion. The glitch. It was happening again. She was looking at the monster.
This thing wasn’t the ghost of her daughter. A ghost would be sad. A ghost would want comfort. This thing was a predator. It wasn’t sharing memories; it was consuming them. It was feasting on her love, her grief, and the soul-crushing guilt that bound them together.
"What do you want from me?" Samantha cried out, her voice breaking.
The whispering stopped. The entity on the bed became utterly still. The silence that followed was more terrifying than the whispers had been. It was the silence of a predator that has cornered its prey and is now simply enjoying the spectacle of its terror.
Then, it gave her an answer.
The voice that spoke was not Sophia's. It was the flat, cold, resonant tone from the car. The voice of the thing itself.
“Everything,” it said.
With that single word, the last of Samantha's denial shattered like ice. She was trapped in a dingy motel room with a creature from a nightmare, a thing that wore her daughter’s skin and used her most precious memories as instruments of torture. The police couldn't help her. Doctors couldn't help her. The entire world thought she was a grieving, delusional mother.
The officer's words came back one last time, no longer as a question, but as a horrifying, undeniable fact. Your daughter passed away two years ago.
And the restraining order from Connor… it wasn’t an act of cruelty. It was an act of fear. He wasn’t trying to punish her. He was trying to protect himself.
From her.
And from the thing she was dragging across the country with her.
In the freezing, suffocating silence of Room 12, a new, desperate plan began to form. There was only one person left in the world who knew the truth of that night two years ago. One person who might understand the nature of the ghost that haunted her. She had to break the restraining order. She had to find Connor. Not to beg for his help, but to see for herself the truth he was so terrified of. The truth she had been running from. The truth that was buried, somewhere, under a stone.
Characters

Connor Brown

Samantha Brown
