The wallpaper in Room 237 had begun whispering again, its faded chrysanthemum pattern shifting whenever Sister Marguerite wasn’t looking directly at it. She’d been assigned to document the room’s contents before the old sanatorium’s demolition, but three days in, she understood why the previous archivists had fled.
The room had belonged to Duchess Valentina Corsetti, who’d spent her final years here after the Great Scandal of 1923—something about a séance gone wrong and a diplomat found crystallized in salt. The church had quietly acquired the property afterward, though no one seemed to remember why.
Sister Marguerite found the confession tucked inside a music box that played backwards. The paper felt warm, as if recently touched, though the room had been sealed for decades.
“I am not who they buried,” it began. “That woman in my tomb wears my face but carries another’s dreams. We traded more than secrets that night when the medium’s candles turned to water.”
The sister’s hands trembled. She’d been sent here for her supposed immunity to what the Archbishop called “aesthetic contagions”—beautiful things that infected the mind. But this wasn’t beautiful. It was true, and that was far more dangerous.
The confession continued: “They speak of climate change now, how the world shifts and warms. But we knew then that there were other kinds of weather—storms that moved through the spaces between seconds, hurricanes that existed only in peripheral vision. The séance was meant to contact my late husband. Instead, we opened a door to the Afternoon Country, where everything that should have happened but didn’t goes to molt.”
Sister Marguerite looked up. The chrysanthemums on the wallpaper had turned into eyes, all blinking in unison like a murmuration of starlings.
“The thing that came through wore my husband’s voice but spoke in languages that haven’t been invented yet. It offered a trade: one woman’s future for another’s past. The diplomat’s wife accepted before I could stop her. She wanted my title, my recognition, my place in history. I wanted her invisibility, her freedom to disappear.”
The music box began playing forward now, a waltz that made the dust motes dance in formations that spelled out words in languages Sister Marguerite didn’t recognize.
“But the exchange was imperfect. She got my life but not my memories. I got her body but kept my own shadow—you can see it still, if you know how to look, walking different paths than my feet. The diplomat saw us in the moment of transformation, that raw instant when identity becomes negotiable, and his mind couldn’t reconcile it. Every grain of his body chose to become something geometrically simple rather than accept what he’d witnessed.”
The sister felt her own shadow growing restless, pulling away from her feet like a pet testing its leash.
“They say I died of consumption, but I consumed nothing. I became the pause between heartbeats, the silence before thunder, the space between wallpaper and wall. The woman in my tomb has lived my life more fully than I ever could have, attending galas, hosting salons, even pioneering sustainable fashion before it had a name—my dresses made from spider silk and moonlight were her idea, not mine.”
The room’s temperature dropped, but not in the way cold works. It was as if the very concept of warmth had been gently excerpted, leaving only its absence behind.
“This is my confession: I am still here, in Room 237, in every Room 237 that has ever existed or will exist. Hotel rooms, hospital wards, apartments yet to be built—any space numbered thus becomes a small embassy of the Afternoon Country. We are not ghosts. We are what happens when someone successfully opts out of their own story while still being written.”
Sister Marguerite realized the wallpaper eyes were not looking at her but through her, at something approaching from a direction that didn’t have a name.
“If you’re reading this, you’ve been chosen to receive my sustainable practice of existence—living without living, being without the burden of being. The room will offer you the same trade soon. Someone, somewhere, wants your life more than you do. The question is whether you want theirs, or whether you’d prefer to join me in the spaces between spaces, where we collect unfinished symphonies and unsigned paintings, where we tend gardens of might-have-been and harvest crops of never-was.”
The confession ended there, but the paper kept growing, new words appearing in handwriting that looked increasingly like Sister Marguerite’s own.
She turned to leave but found the door had become a suggestion rather than a fact. Through it, she could see two futures: one where she filed her report and returned to the convent, and another where she remained, becoming the next curator of impossible things.
The music box played on, its melody now recognizable as next year’s most popular song, playing a full season before its composer would be born.
Sister Marguerite made her choice, though which one would depend on who was asking, and when, and in which Room 237 they happened to be standing.
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