The Room

The motel’s the kind of place you go to disappear.

Halfway between somewhere and nowhere. A slice of American purgatory. Neon sign flickering like a dying star. VACANCY in sickly green, buzzing with the hum of a cracked bulb. A line of sagging doors, each one with a story nobody wants to tell.

But room 7? Room 7’s different.

Room 7 has the novel.

It’s not in the bed, or the pillows, or the shitty TV that gets three channels of static and an adult movie from 1994. It’s on the walls. Every inch covered. Floor to ceiling. A manic sprawl of words, sentences, paragraphs, entire pages scrawled in red ink, black ink, blood-red ink—nobody’s sure.

And no one knows who wrote it.

The manager—Jim, chain-smoking husk of a man—says it just showed up one night. He swears on his mother’s grave (not that anyone believes that dried-up old bat’s actually dead) that he left Room 7 clean as a whistle. But the next morning? Words. Words everywhere.

They started in the corner. Then spread like a disease.

People come to see it now. Crazies. Artists. Writers and burnouts. They pay in crumpled bills, stay for an hour or two, eyes wide, mouths slack, just staring at the walls. They read in silence, fingers tracing the lines. Some leave crying. Some leave laughing.

Some don’t leave at all.

The novel isn’t a story. Not really.

It’s a scream. A confession. A suicide note that never ends.

You walk into Room 7, and it’s like walking into someone’s head. A head that’s cracked open, brain spilling out in jagged letters. No chapters, no breaks. Just an unbroken stream of thought—disjointed, violent, beautiful. It makes War and Peace look like a pamphlet.

There are characters, sure. A man. A woman. A murder, maybe. Or a love story. It’s hard to tell. The words twist and warp, reality bending with them. One minute, it’s a kitchen argument over coffee, words flying like knives. The next, you’re knee-deep in a jungle, blood in your teeth, guts on your hands.

The grammar’s fucked. The punctuation’s a mess. It’s full of weird symbols, like hieroglyphs. Like someone was trying to write a new language and went insane halfway through.

And there’s a voice.

It whispers between the lines. A voice that’s desperate, angry, pleading.

Help me.

I’m here.

I’m still here.

But no one knows what it means. Because you can’t finish the novel. It just keeps going. You start reading, and an hour later, you realize your eyes are bleeding. Two hours, and you’re whispering the words under your breath. Three, and you’re not reading anymore.

The novel’s reading you.

There’s a rumor. A story wrapped around the story.

They say if you read it all, if you really read every single word, something happens. A door opens. A hidden chapter. Like a cheat code for life. And then, just like that, you know who wrote it. You know why. And if you can get to the end—if you can finish it—you get to leave. You get to walk out of Room 7, out of the motel, out of reality, and into… something else.

Something better.

But no one ever does. No one ever can.

They try. Oh, they try. Fresh-eyed lit majors with highlighters and notebooks. Washed-up novelists scribbling frantically, hands trembling. All these wannabe Hemingways, these Kerouacs, these Bukowskis, looking for a way to be remembered.

But the room eats them.

They find them sometimes. Weeks later. Curled up in the corner, nails bitten down to the quick, muttering “Just one more page… one more…”

They all think they can break it.

They all think they’ll be the one.

And then one night, the kid shows up.

Barely old enough to shave. Skinny, pale, eyes like black holes. He doesn’t look like much. Quiet type. The kind who gets swallowed up in crowds. But he’s got something—a spark. You can see it in the way he looks at the walls. Not like they’re words, but like they’re a challenge.

He checks in without a word, pays in cash. Takes the key to Room 7 like he’s shaking hands with the devil.

Doesn’t come out.

A week passes. Then two. No sign of him.

By the third, people start whispering. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe the novel’s finished him off, sucked his soul into its ink-stained depths.

But then, the door opens.

And the kid walks out.

He’s not smiling. Not calm. He looks wrecked. Eyes red-rimmed, face drawn and hollow, like he’s seen something so deeply wrong that it’s burnt into him.

Jim—the manager—he’s standing there, cigarette halfway to his lips. Staring.

“Y-you finished it?” he croaks.

The kid just blinks. Shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. “No.”

“But—”

“I—” The kid’s voice cracks. He licks his lips, and for the first time, there’s fear in his eyes. Real, palpable terror. “I added to it.”

Jim stares. “What?”

“I tried to finish it,” the kid whispers, voice shaking. “Tried to—figure it out. Make it—make it make sense. But it—it wouldn’t stop.” He presses his palms to his temples, squeezing his eyes shut. “So I—I changed it. Just a few words. Just a sentence, here and there.”

Jim feels the ice settle in his chest. “You added to it?”

The kid nods, slowly. “Yeah. But it—it changed me back.”

“What do you—”

But the kid just turns, stumbles to his car, throws it into gear, tires squealing as he tears out of the lot. And when Jim goes inside—when he pushes open the door to Room 7—it’s different.

The words. The walls.

The writing’s moving.

The sentences shift and twist, bleeding into each other, letters crawling up the wallpaper like ants. They pulse, writhe. Like something’s alive in there. Something that wasn’t there before.

And in the corner—top left—there’s a new line. Fresh. Scrawled in shaky, frantic hand.

“HELP ME. I CAN’T GET OUT. HE WON’T LET ME LEAVE.”

And beneath it, in a different, jagged script:

“Yes. I will.”

Jim stumbles back, heart pounding.

Because here’s the thing. The kid didn’t just add to the novel.

He wrote himself in.

And now, he’s part of the story. Trapped in the words. Stuck between the sentences, screaming silently as the lines twist and warp around him, closing tighter and tighter, squeezing the life out of him.

And the worst part?

The writing won’t stop.

It just keeps growing. Unfolding.

Spreading.

So Jim does the only thing he can.

He locks the door.

Hangs up the sign: “Do Not Disturb.”

And hopes, prays, that no one else ever tries to finish it.