Room For One

Diane hadn’t left the house in six weeks.

For some reason , it felt like a century.

The doctors told her that isolation might make things worse, but worse than what? Her husband was dead, her daughter wouldn’t answer her calls, and the world outside the windows felt thinner somehow—like cheap scenery painted too quickly.

As if what she called life, was real and she was just a doll.

So she stayed in.

The house was quiet most of the day. Too quiet. No hum of the fridge. No ticking of clocks. Even the birds had stopped gathering at the feeder outside the kitchen. Sometimes she walked through the halls just to listen to the floorboards creak. Just to prove she was real.

She lived on canned soup, dry toast, and memories.

But there was one comforting constant.

The caretaker.

He came every morning at 7:00 sharp. Tall. Pale. Wore a grey suit with no tie. His eyes were soft, expression neutral, never intrusive. He’d check the thermostat, dust the frames, replace the lightbulbs she didn’t remember burning out. Never said more than a few words, but his presence made the silence more bearable.

When she asked who sent him, he just smiled and said, “You did.”

She didn’t remember. But a lot of things had started slipping.

The one thing Diane found herself thinking of the most , her loving husband. When she tried her hardest, she could see him as the man of her dreams and as was she the woman. She thinks of their life before he passed only not remembering most days that he was no longer walking the same floors in the home they once shared. The fleeting memories of everything that once was a living embodiment of what life meant.

What it felt like.

To be.

Loved.

What it meant to be something more than isolated into a home of emptiness and confusion doused into dementia.

FEEDING at everything you have left to hold onto.

Sometimes at night she’d hear voices in the attic—soft, wet whispers. Sometimes she found photographs she didn’t recognize tucked between the pages of her books. Pictures of herself in rooms that didn’t exist. Standing beside people with no faces.

Once, she found a note in her own handwriting.

“Don’t go near the basement. He lives deeper than you think.”

She laughed it off. Dementia, she told herself. Grief playing tricks.

Still, she avoided the basement.

One night, the caretaker knocked on her door later than usual. His hair was damp. His eyes were darker. He said he’d come to perform a more “thorough check.”

He moved through the house differently this time—touching the wallpaper, pressing on doorframes, stopping too long outside the bathroom.

“I don’t remember requesting that,” Diane said softly.

He looked at her and said, “You wanted the memories to have , but not to keep always.”

The next morning, she found a photograph sitting on her nightstand.

It showed her sitting at the kitchen table.

Next to the caretaker.

But the caretaker wasn’t in his suit anymore. His head hung at an unnatural angle, eyes glassy, throat black with bruises.

In the photo, she was smiling.

Hands wrapped tightly around his neck.

The phone rang once.

She picked it up.

No dial tone.

Just her own voice, whispering:

“He doesn’t work here. You do.”

She looks straight forward, and into the hall, and then behind her, dozens of doors.

Each labeled with a number.

Each locked from the outside.

She looked down.

Her clothes were stained.

Grey.

A uniform.

Her name tag:

Diane – Facility Attendant

But she still remembered the caretaker.

His soft voice. His presence. His hands.

She killed him.

“Did I?”

“Wait…

The basement , why wouldn’t I go into my own basement ?”

The urge hit her like a wave — sudden, nauseating.

She turned from the hallway and walked toward the basement door. The one she’d avoided.

The one she had warned herself about.

It had a padlock on it now. Thick. New.

But a key was waiting on the hook beside it. Hanging alone. As if it had been placed there just for this moment.

She unlocked the door.

It moaned open into darkness.

Each step down was heavier than the last. The air was wrong — heavy, wet, breathing. The basement wasn’t dusty or cluttered. It was… smooth. Seamless. As if carved from living flesh and bone. The walls pulsed slightly, as if listening.

And at the bottom—

A room.

And in the center of that room:

A bed.

Not a hospital bed.

A child’s bed.

Small. Pink. Covered in toys that had long since rotted into unrecognizable shapes. One stuffed rabbit, blackened with mold, lay face-down beside a broken mobile.

Diane dropped to her knees.

Memories slammed into her skull like hammer blows.

A girl.

A man.

Her daughter.

Her husband.

Sick.

Crying.

Then not crying anymore.

Silence.

She remembered screaming.

She remembered lying.

To the paramedics.

To herself.

To the voice that whispered from the mirror:

“If you don’t want to feel it…

Give it to someone else.”

The caretaker hadn’t been real.

The house hadn’t been real.

Nothing was real.

She had built it all.

A prison of hallways, roles, and other people’s memories.

She’d taken them from the residents upstairs — worn their faces, mimicked their grief, layered their pain on top of hers until even she couldn’t remember what she’d done.

The truth?

She wasn’t a patient.

She wasn’t an attendant.

She was the thing in the walls.

The crawling void in the corners of their minds.

The darkness every resident saw in their sleep.

The reason they screamed when they were alone.

The story they tried to forget.

Feeding.

On what?

Guilt.

Regret.

The fading warmth of a girl who never made it to seven.

And

A sudden realization she had taken the lives of the ones she once held dearest, with no remembrance of why.

And then she heard the voice again. Not from behind her. Not from the walls.

From inside her.

“You came back down. Good.”

“There’s room for one more.”