Chapter 2- The Room Opens

WHEW, I actually fell asleep when I told myself I couldn't sleep until I finished Chapter 2. Cuz, now for Halloween JJ here is gonna write the horror part. YEEEEE Am an excited pretzel. Ngl.

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Samuel was awoken late into the morning by the beeping of his ever stubborn alarm clock. He groaned as he reached blindly for it only to find that it hadn't been the alarm clock all along. The poor cubed shaped clock lay face down on the floor in a puddle of its own shattered glass. Samuel sighed as he reached down to pick the thing up. Tiny little pieces spilled out from inside and he set it on his night stand beside his phone. He got up to find a somewhat clean pair of pants when he paused. The TV was blaring in the living room and he had never turned it on. His newest roommate had just moved out a while ago so there was no way it could have been Alex. The TV wasn't on any random channel either, it was just endless static that grated against his nerves.

"That's weird," Samuel commented to himself before he pulled on a shirt.

His phone buzzed once more on the nightstand, spooking him and he almost tripped over his own feet. He cursed before shuffling over to get it. With a quick swipe of his finger, he put the phone up to his ear.

"Samuel," Garrick snapped on the other line. "You should have been here 5 minutes ago. Where the hell are you?"

Samuel mouthed a curse word. Fuck. He'd forgotten which was totally like him. He should have set an alarm on his phone as well, instead of ignoring it. "I'm literally on my way. I'm on the freeway right now actually."

"Your TV is on, I can hear it," Garrick growled back. Someone called Garrick's name on the other end of the line but Samuel couldn't make out what they were trying to say. It was all muffled.

"It's my radio, I swear. I'm on my way. I'll be there in ten minutes at the latest," Samuel amended. "Seriously."

"You were late to her funeral and now this? Did you even love your mother?" Garrick replied before he sighed. Samuel could feel how frustrated the other man was. Garrick had come from a poor home when an accident had taken his mother and before the paramedics had arrived, she'd already passed. The accident had been what had brought the pair together because the accident had involved him to.

It had been really slippery that night, the rain had turned to ice within an hour. Garrick's mom had been fiddling with the heater when she'd suddenly realized that she'd been a lot closer to the intersection then she originally believed. She slammed on the brakes, but the road was all ice and she had slid into the intersection. It was at that time that Samuel's mother had been driving through her respective green light and had been hit. Both cars rolled and when they finally came to, Garrick's mother had died. Throughout the months that followed, they'd become friends. Unlikely friends that were polar opposites, but friends nonetheless.

"I loved her… she just… she's the one that quit loving me," Samuel replied as he rushed to slip into his shoes. He picked up the remote and shut the TV off before snagging his keys to head out.

The first time he slammed the hefty door to his room, it bounced back open. Samuel knit his eyebrows before hanging up the phone. It'd never done that before. He tried lifting it up slightly to slam it shut once more, pegging it to being old just as the apartment building was.

"Don't go," Someone whispered and he whirled around in shock.

"Margaret? Are you wandering about again?" He asked, eyeing the hallway that led towards the stairs of his apartment. He'd moved into the small upstairs apartment about two years ago and beneath him lived an elderly old lady with two of the smallest, yappiest dogs Samuel had ever met.

When he'd turned 18, he'd moved out immediately to start a new life away from that house, and his mother. By then, she was nothing but quiet and distant. He didn't even recognize the woman anymore and he had tried. He had really tried to be there for her when she needed him. However, his mother had just clammed up without much thought so he was left scrambling for the pieces. Samuel wasn't in much better shape, either. He'd suffered from depression all his life and a kind of pain that few could understand. When the seasons changed and the sun started to disappear, he was always at his lowest. It seemed, the Room would also be its most active.

Samuel shook his head and steeled his shoulders. It was hard to shake off something so scary in his childhood. He'd been to three separate psychologists who suggested the fears and hallucinations he'd had as he was growing up was because of his mother. That the truth that Samuel had believed in so heartedly as he grew up wasn't, in fact, the truth. They'd stated that it must have been some kind of unspoken trauma from a distant mother who only knew how to drink her life away and let her child run free.

Eventually, Samuel started to believe the same thing. The Room wasn't real, but despite that, he had never opened the door. Perhaps it was because he didn't want to out of fear or just the inconvenience of it all. The questions had been haunting him his whole life though. What was behind that door? Today, with Garrick's help, he was finally going to open the door and put all his worries and fears to rest.

Half the time, the nightmares weren't as bad. Sometimes they were nice dreams, something he'd never gotten to experience living inside that house. But sometimes, he felt like he was back inside the hell that he once knew. He used to dream about walking through those halls for the first time in years, yet it felt all too real. Dreams were never supposed to feel that real. He would reach out and touch the handle and the door would scream as if it was on fire. The door knob was always boiling hot and he couldn't escape its grasp once he touched it. Despite how much it hurt, he couldn't take his hand away from the metal. It would burn through his hand and he would cry and plead for it to let go but the door never let go. In his dreams, it would drag him past the threshold and into the Room where his nightmares were more alive. Things would crawl out and grab at his legs and he would cry. It didn't matter if he got older, he would still sob for hours afterwards and refuse to go back to sleep.

The doctors claimed it was an untreated case of anxiety and prescribed him anxiety pills and sleeping pills. Psychiatrists called it unhandled trauma that even Samuel couldn't access. He used to doubt what the doctors said, but now he found that he'd nod his head along with them. Every kid had something they feared, something irrational, but to them it was very real. For some, it was a specific toy, for others it was a window in which a tree branch would occasionally tap against it in the darkest nights. Garrick's greatest fear had been his closet where his mom had stored all the toys that looked scary in the dark. So, it was logical that the Room was the closet for Samuel. Yet, he knew not to open the door.

The apartment corridor was quiet and finally, Samuel was able to fully close his door. He tucked his keys into his pocket before taking off down the stairs. God, he was so late.

~ ~ ~

The second he pulled his car up to the curb just outside from his front door, Garrick came running towards the door. With the warm snap that had come, Garrick was wearing a simple blue t-shirt and a pair of worn jeans. His white sneakers were scruffed up and holy with seams that were starting to become frayed and bust. The man didn't appreciate his shoes. Where Samuel had eight separate pairs he took very good care of, Garrick only had one pair that had been drugged through literal hell. The circles under his baby blue eyes seemed to be less prominent, so perhaps, he'd finally gotten some sleep.

He was wrenched from the car and pulled up the stairs where a neatly dressed woman stood. Her long strawberry colored hair had been neatly fixed up into a braid and her clothes were perfectly ironed. Samuel couldn't see a single, feeble wrinkle. The woman was small, but she held her shoulders high. Pretentious. She cleared her throat before eyeing Samuel. In her hands sat a dainty little clipboard complete with a fancy pen.

Samuel looked up at his mother's old house. He hadn't seen it in three years, and the building seemed to have aged in that time. When they'd first bought it, the house had been beautiful. There'd been a flower bed filled with tulips and rose bushes in the front yard and more flowers growing in window boxes beneath the windows. It had been a pale yellow color with thick white pane that seemed to have stayed clean regardless of the season changes. Now, the yellow paint seemed sickly and it seemed to be peeling off in large chunks. Roofing tiles lay on the cement driveway after being torn free in the recent storms. There'd been a thin brown picket fence around the front yard that seemed to have finally fallen in heaps on the yard. The bushes that his mother and he had planted lay wilted along the path towards the front door like rotting corpses. Only, they were just skeletons now.

He felt someone pat his shoulder as he came up to the front door where the woman stood. The closer he got, the more neglect he could see. The inside porch that was only separated by a thin screen was filled to the brim with beer bottles and trash bags. He was horrified.

"Finally glad you could join us," the woman snapped before handing him the clipboard. "Please sign this."

The woman checked her watch briefly before continuing. "The time is 10:54 am. At this time, we met on site and I handed you the keys. You also signed the ownership over to yourself, as per your mother's will. Now, the residence of 231 S. Peach St., Herrington Iowa belongs to you."

Samuel signed it before handing the paper back to the woman. She handed over a set of keys before descending down the stairs. The keys were heavy in his hand and he looked down.

"Let's go in," Garrick stated before opening the screen door that led towards the inner porch.

Unlocking the front door was hard. Samuel let it swing all the way open before he took a deep breath. The house was a mess. He could tell that just by the living room and the hallway leading to the stairs. Her clothes lay scattered over the floor and even more beer bottles had settled to the floor. Samuel stepped in regardless of everything that told him not to.

Once Garrick had passed through, the door slammed shut behind them. It shocked the pair but Samuel shook it off. "Just the wind." Just his nerves.

The house hadn't changed on the inside since he'd left. It'd gotten messier, but it remained familiar. He should get one of the big dumpsters to start cleaning it out before selling it.

"This room. The one that you mention all the time, can I see it?" Garrick asked before eyeing the stairs with a quick glance. "You have me curious."

"Yeah," Samuel replied, scratching the back of his head. "Yeah, come on."

They ascended the stairs quickly and the old wood beneath their feet creaked with each heavy step. At the top of the stairs, just on the other side of the banister sat the two rooms he hated most. Being a small house, the rooms were close together. The doors were only two feet apart from each other on separate sides of the wall. His room still had the sticker letters that spelled out his name. On the other side, the Room sat. It was closed, as it had always been. The door had physically aged though, since the last time he'd seen it. The white had faded from it's wooden surface and it seemed to have weathered terribly. They stepped towards it before pausing just on the other side. Samuel held his hand out and rested it against the wooden frame.

"This is the Room?" Garrick asked before trying the knob. Samuel didn't have time to shout at him to stop, because the fear washed over him suddenly and in waves. However, the handle didn't budge. It clicked once and didn't move any further. "It's locked."

Locked? The door had never been locked. For as long as Samuel knew, the door had always been open. He tried the handle too, but found that even he couldn't open it.

"There's a key that looks super old on the key ring. Maybe it's the one that locked the door? You said you were afraid of the Room after all, wouldn't this be the chance to ease the fear and help you move on? This is something your mom probably wanted you to face but didn't rush you."

His mom couldn't want anything for him. She was dead, and she'd given up on him first. Who'd been the one that had stayed by her side when things started to go south. And south they went. Quickly, terribly. It had gotten bad.

"Don't open the door Sammy," Something whispered down the hall. "Don't open it!"

There was something about reverse psychology that made human beings terrible people. You tell someone to not do something, and they do it anyway. Samuel needed to know what was on the other side of that door. He jammed the key into the lock, and surprisingly, the skeletal key fit. He twisted it and the lock clicked twice. He turned the knob and swung the door open. It screeched in the mere seconds it took to open.

Everything inside Samuel told him to turn and run. It screamed and pounded against his skull. The second the door popped free from the frame, glass shattered throughout the whole house. It wasn't the wind. No, not this time. Escape. Run. Because the Room…. Well….

It was empty. But it didn't feel empty. It laughed at them in amusement.