Zara barely slept.
Every creak of the building felt like a warning. The image of the girl in the showers haunted her—the lipstick on the mirror even more so.
Zara Quinn is next.
She kept replaying it in her mind: the crimson scrawl, the way Cain went pale when he read it. And the name—Quinn. Madeline's last name. A threat or a mistake?
She was at her desk by sunrise, sifting through articles on the university's hidden history, missing students, whispers of cursed rooms. Most threads led nowhere. But then she found something strange.
A student newspaper from 1993. A headline: "THE WHISPERS RETURN TO 304."
Zara clicked.
The article told of a girl, Amelia Cross, who vanished mid-semester after claiming the walls spoke to her. She kept a diary, some of which was printed in the article:
"The room dreams. And when it dreams of you, it changes you. I can't sleep. I hear it humming beneath the floor."
Zara sat back, chills running down her spine.
Cain returned that afternoon, after vanishing again all morning. His face was pale, eyes rimmed red.
"Where were you?" Zara asked.
"Library archives. Trying to find Madeline's full file. Someone's wiped half of it."
Zara showed him the newspaper article.
His eyes scanned it, and he nodded. "That's the second one."
"Second what?"
"Second documented case of whisper codes."
He retrieved a worn leather journal from under his bed.
"This belonged to my older brother. He stayed in 304 when he was a student here."
Zara blinked. "You never told me you had a brother."
Cain's jaw tightened. "He disappeared too."
They sat on the floor and flipped through the pages. They were filled with handwritten Latin, strange diagrams, and pages of scribbled poetry that made no sense—except one line that repeated like a chorus:
"Do not whisper back."
Cain turned to a page marked with a red 'X.' It held symbols she'd seen before: the same ones etched beneath the mirror in the bathroom earlier that week. They weren't random. They were part of the code.
"Elise was right," Cain muttered. "The room responds when you speak its language."
Zara stared at the notebook. "So what happens if we solve it?"
Cain looked at her, eyes hollow. "Then we can either control it—or shut it down forever."
That night, they followed the codes.
Each symbol corresponded with a sound or word. Together, they formed riddles—phrases meant to be recited in the dark, facing the mirror.
Zara stood in the bathroom, Cain behind her, the old journal in her hand.
The lights flickered. Water dripped slowly from the faucet, even though it was turned off.
She whispered the line.
"It's not a room, it's a memory."
The mirror fogged instantly.
Cain gasped. "Zara, step back—"
Words began to appear on the glass:
Who is Zara Quinn?
Zara froze.
"That's... it's asking a question," she said.
Cain grabbed her arm. "Don't answer it."
But something deep inside her pushed forward. Her voice trembled.
"I'm me. I'm not her."
The fog cleared. For a split second, Zara saw something behind her in the mirror—long dark hair, pale skin, black eyes.
She turned.
Nothing there.
They returned to the room shaken.
Cain paced, muttering about 'binding rituals' and 'echo loops.'
"What if this is why the room stays alive?" Zara asked. "What if it keeps recreating her story, like it needs someone to play Maddie over and over again?"
Cain froze.
"That would mean it wants to replace her."
Zara swallowed hard.
"Then we stop playing along."
The next day, Zara and Cain visited an old professor who used to teach Folklore and Superstition.
Professor Vellum, gaunt and half-blind, remembered Cain's brother.
"He was a gifted student. Obsessed with the dorm's history. Thought it was built on something darker than bones."
"Like what?" Zara asked.
The professor chuckled darkly. "Faith. Or what came before it. The kind of thing they buried with salt and warnings."
He handed them a book. A faded, hand-bound copy of The Hollow Watcher.
Cain opened it to the first page. Etched in fine ink:
To awaken the watcher, whisper your pain.
Zara and Cain exchanged glances.
"Now what?" she asked.
Cain looked up. "Now we find the original ritual site. And we end this."
Later that night, Zara returned alone to the mirror.
She stared at her reflection. Her breath trembled.
She whispered her pain.
"My name is Zara. I never knew Maddie, but I know what it means to be forgotten. I know what it means to be alone."
The mirror went dark.
And then—her reflection smiled.
But she didn't.