The reflection cried.
Only one drop, but it was enough.
Enough to confirm I was inside.
Not just inside the apartment.
Inside the Room.
Whatever the Room truly was.
---
The journal's last entry sat open like a warning:
> "If it bleeds, it remembers.
If it remembers, it rewrites."
The ink curled at the edge of the page, as if alive.
I couldn't stop staring at the mirror.
That version of me wasn't smiling anymore.
He looked exhausted.
And afraid.
Like he was waiting for me to say something.
---
> "Who are you?" I asked quietly.
My reflection mouthed the same words.
But the blood remained.
It hadn't dried.
It never dried.
---
I backed away.
Grabbed the journal.
Wrote three words:
> "What comes next?"
And the answer bled through without ink:
> "You do."
---
The lights in the hallway flickered again—this time erratic, panicked.
Faint, metallic scraping noises began to echo from the vents.
A sound like scissors dragged across tile.
Then—
A voice.
Female.
Not a whisper now.
A recording.
> "Patient Foster, please return to your designated memory shell."
> "This is not your script."
> "Do not rewrite the spiral."
---
My blood turned cold.
Memory shell?
Script?
I ran to the kitchen window and yanked open the blinds.
No city.
No neighbors.
Just black glass.
As if the building floated inside a snow globe full of dark water.
---
> "You're not in the world anymore," I whispered.
And from behind me—my own voice:
> "You never were."
---
I spun.
The other me stood in the hallway.
Cracks now split across his face like shattered porcelain.
Eyes gone milky.
No emotion.
Just exhaustion.
And he was holding the journal.
But mine was still in my hand.
---
He walked closer.
No footsteps. Just glide.
And opened the book to a page I hadn't written yet.
On it:
> "THE PATIENT WHO WROTE BACK."
Below that, a single sentence:
> "I am the author of nothing, and yet it all remembers me."
---
He handed me the page.
The moment I touched it, something snapped inside my skull.
A scream not from my mouth—but my mind.
Memories I didn't remember—flooded.
---
A corridor lined with locked doors.
Each labeled with my name.
Versions.
Tests.
Failures.
Elijah. Eli. Ian. Subject 13B. Patient Foster.
And at the center of it all—
Her.
Dr. Isabelle Sayer.
Not a doctor.
Not a patient.
The Room's first writer.
The one who turned memory into walls.
Who bound pain into blueprints.
Who made forgetting a ritual.
---
She had written me.
And I had tried to rewrite her.
That was my sin.
That was the spiral.
A loop of authorship no one could win.
Until now.
---
I looked up at my other self.
> "Why show me this now?"
His lips didn't move, but I heard the answer:
> "Because the Room is tired."
> "Because the silence is full."
> "Because someone must end the book."
---
He stepped back into the mirror.
Bled once more.
And vanished.
---
The journal glowed.
Page turned.
A blank one.
Waiting.
I knew what to do.
With trembling hands, I wrote:
> "My name is Ian Foster.
I am the final memory.
I am not a version.
I am not a rewrite.
I am the one who wakes."
And below it—
My signature.
Not printed.
Not typed.
Written in my own hand, as if for the first time:
> Ian.
---
The walls of the apartment groaned.
Mirrors cracked, then melted into the floor like wax.
The vents exhaled one long, final breath.
Then—
Silence.
True silence.
No memory.
No reflection.
No Room.
---
And the journal shut itself.
Pages turned to ash.
One last phrase burned across the cover:
> "The patient who wrote back… ends it."
---
I stood in the hallway of 4B.
No longer shifting.
No longer wrong.
Just a hallway.
Just me.
Not a draft.
Not a shell.
Real.
---
I opened the front door.
For the first time…
It led outside.