Eli was the kind of boy who always looked like he’d been pulled out of a different world and dropped into this one too fast.

He was seventeen, though people usually guessed younger—something about the way he carried himself, careful and quiet, like every step might wake something sleeping under the floorboards. He had sharp, tired eyes that noticed too much, dark curls that never stayed in place, and a habit of watching doorways instead of people when he was nervous.

He didn’t talk much about his past. When he did, it came in fragments: a long illness in childhood that kept him isolated, years of moving between hospitals and “quiet places,” and a strange sensitivity to silence that made him uncomfortable in empty rooms.

That’s why he liked noise. Old dorm buildings. Rain. Fans humming in hallways. Anything that proved the world was still functioning.

Eli studied literature, though not because he loved stories—because he trusted written things more than spoken ones. Words on a page didn’t change their tone halfway through. They didn’t lie unless someone made them.

He also had a bad habit of getting attached too quickly to people who felt “off” in a way he couldn’t explain. Not dangerous-off. Just... wrong, like a note in a song that doesn’t belong but still somehow fits.

That was how he ended up in Room 237.

Or rather, how he ended up assigned to the building that contained it.

He told himself he didn’t believe in haunted places. That wasn’t the issue.

The issue was how some rooms made him feel like he was being watched from the inside out, like something was standing just behind his thoughts, waiting for him to notice it.

And lately, Eli had started noticing that feeling more often.

Especially at night.

Especially when he was alone.

Especially after he met the boy in the hallway who always seemed to appear just a second too late to have actually arrived.