The Vanishing room

The rain had been relentless all day, drenching the streets in a thick, misty veil. Yet, as Nikitha approached the worn steps of Hotel Iris, the oppressive chill that wrapped itself around the building felt deeper, older. It was as though the hotel had been watching and waiting. The call had come in the early hours, someone had vanished from a locked hotel room. The door hadn't been tampered with, the windows sealed tight, and no sign of forced entry. No clues. Just a woman, gone.!

She turned to Sharma. “Get me everything you can find on the sanitarium and its history.”

Sharma nodded and left. Nikitha sat on the edge of the bed, flipping through Reena’s notes. A few pages later, she found a map - a floor plan of the hotel. Curiously, the plan showed Rooms 406 and 408, but no 407. It had been added later, squeezed in. Illegally, perhaps. Or secretly.

By evening, Nikitha was back in her office, digging through city records. Hotel Iris had been many things over the years: a colonial guesthouse in the 1930s, a military sanitarium during World War II, then abandoned for decades before being refurbished into a luxury hotel.

She found an old blueprint in the archives, dated 1944. Room 407 hadn’t existed then. In its place: Ward 7 – Restricted Psychiatric Quarters.

She sat back, stunned. Ward 7. Reena’s notes. She knew something.

Nikitha dialed quickly. "Get me Dinesh. And I want Anjali on this too. Backgrounds. Missing women. Focus on this hotel and this room."

Dinesh arrived at midnight, looking drawn. He hadn’t seen Reena in months, but he had dated her during the time Nikitha and he had been close. He carried a USB.

"This was in her last email to me. Sent at 3:15 AM the night she vanished. Subject: They found me."

Nikitha opened it. A photo of a hidden passage. Stone walls. A door with peeling paint and a number barely visible: 7.

There was also a voice memo. Static-filled, hurried.

"If you're hearing this, it means they got in. The room changes. It remembers. It's not just walls - it's layers. Look behind the mirror. I left something."

Nikitha replayed the words. "The room remembers..."

Back at Hotel Iris the next morning, Nikitha returned to 407 with Deepak. She ordered everyone else out.

She continued to flip through the Reena’s Red book. Inside were sketches, timelines, clipped newspaper articles, and a chilling list titled Unresolved disappearances.

The last name chilled her - Anna, 2002, same room. A junior reporter at Truth Line, and Vikram Singh’s colleague.

Nikitha stood again, eyes now focused on the far wall of the room. It was thicker than it should be, by at least a few feet. Something was behind it. A hidden space?

She stepped closer, knocking lightly against it. Hollow.

Pulling out her phone, she called Inspector Suresh Menon, the senior officer she'd worked with earlier. “Suresh, I need you to bring a portable thermal scanner. I think there’s a false wall in Room 407.”

It was past midnight when the equipment arrived. The thermal scan confirmed her suspicion, there was a narrow cavity behind the wall, with signs of recent movement inside. Someone had been there.

With the hotel’s maintenance crew’s help, they broke through the wall. Behind it, a narrow passage revealed itself. Dusty. Dark. Yet unmistakably real. The air inside was stale, carrying the scent of mold and old secrets.

The corridor curved, leading to a spiral staircase that descended into what looked like a sealed chamber beneath the hotel. Nikitha’s heart pounded as she stepped down carefully, torch in hand.

At the bottom was a heavy wooden door, its surface carved with strange symbols. She turned the handle, it creaked open.

What she saw inside stopped her breath. Time seemed suspended, the cot, the dust, Reena’s slow breath, it was like a forgotten painting come alive.

A room, dimly lit by a single skylight. It was old, too old. Walls lined with chalk markings, ritualistic symbols, and names scratched into the surface.

And in the center, lying on a narrow cot, was Reena.

Alive.

Barely conscious, eyes fluttering open as the light hit her face. Her mouth moved, forming words without sound.

Nikitha rushed to her, checking for injuries. “Reena? It’s okay. I’m here. You’re safe.”

Reena’s eyes filled with tears. “They... they wanted silence... they said I’d found the room that doesn’t exist…”

It took hours to stabilize her and get her to the hospital. Meanwhile, Nikitha sat with Sharma and Suresh, trying to piece together the twisted puzzle.

The hidden chamber, it turned out, was part of the original sanitarium’s basement. It had been sealed off after allegations of inhumane treatment. Some rooms had been used for experimental therapy, soundproofed, without windows, isolated completely. Room 407 had been created directly above it.

The map Reena found had led her to investigate. She’d pushed the mirror, found the latch, and triggered a mechanism that opened the false wall. But once inside, someone, possibly staff still loyal to the old secrets, had locked her in, hoping she’d be forgotten.

“Someone here didn’t want her story getting out,” Nikitha said.

The notebook confirmed it. Pages spoke of experiments, of patients buried in the basement, of a doctor named Varma who had used the sanitarium as a testing ground for “transcendental therapy”, something about inducing altered states through sensory deprivation.

And then, Nikitha noticed something else in Reena’s notes - references to a man named “K.” A researcher. Someone who’d worked at the hotel under a false identity.

She revisited the reception logbook. Cross-referenced names. One stood out: Kripal Singh. Checked in weekly. Always on the fourth floor. She pulled up his photo, an older man, silver hair, neat clothes. A doctor?

“Find him,” she ordered Sharma. “He might be the last piece of this story.”

The next day, Kripal Singh was picked up from his residence. At first, he was silent. Then something in his eyes shifted, resignation, perhaps. The truth poured out.

“Yes, I worked there. During the sanitarium years. Dr. Varma was a visionary, but also dangerous. He believed the mind could be freed from the body. He created those hidden chambers to isolate patients completely.”

“But Reena found it. She knew,” Nikitha said.

Kripal shook his head. “She wasn’t the first. But she was the loudest. And for that, they made the room remember her. The others… they vanished, too.”

“And the staff helped you cover it up?”

“They’re loyal. Most don’t even know what they’re protecting.”

Nikitha stared at him. “You’re going away for a long time.”

Back at the station, Reena was treated and debriefed.

 

“You were brave,” Nikitha told her. “You didn’t just survive - you uncovered the truth.”

Reena smiled faintly. “I knew someone like you would come.”

 

"No… listen. They didn’t just trap me. They used me. I heard voices. Experiments. Testing, something with memory. Hypnosis. Like the room was… programmed."

She spoke of an old man, never seen clearly, who asked her questions while she was restrained. Her voice was often recorded. They called it "stimulus response memory induction."

The forensic team found supporting evidence. A secretive psychology professor from the 1970s, Dr. D’Souza, had once owned the building. He’d disappeared in 1981, presumed dead. But his papers mentioned environmental conditioning chambers, rooms designed to alter perception and memory.

The term “Vanishing Room” appeared in a classified file.

Nikitha traced old associates. One name popped up: Dr. Aarav, a hypnotherapist turned underground cognitive scientist. He’d been arrested for unethical experiments in 2008, released on a technicality.

She found a clinic. Empty. Except for a file drawer filled with sketches of rooms, each labeled with phrases like “Threshold Breach” and “Memory Lock.”

The connection was real.

A week later, Hotel Iris was shut down by court order. The crawlspaces and underground rooms were sealed. A criminal investigation into historical disappearances began.

Nikitha met Reena at a quiet café.

"You saved me," Reena said. "But you also uncovered something older than any of us."

Nikitha nodded. "This wasn’t a ghost story. It was a trap set by men who wanted to play gods."

Reena slid across the red notebook. “There’s more. I didn’t find all the rooms. They say there’s one with no door, only a mirror.”

Nikitha took the notebook slowly.

“I’ll find it,” she said.

"And when you do?" Reena asked.

Nikitha looked out at the gathering dusk.

“I’ll make sure it never claims another name.” But in her heart, Nikitha wasn’t sure the story had ended.

As Nikitha stepped out into the bright morning, the shadows of Room 407 behind her, she knew this case would haunt her for a long time. It wasn’t just about one woman. It was about the weight of history, buried secrets, and the rooms we pretend don’t exist.

And she had found one of them.

Two months later, Nikitha received a small package. No sender. Inside was a photograph, an old image of the sanitarium, with a circle drawn around one of the basement doors.

On the back, a note in Reena’s handwriting.

“Room 7 still exists. And it was never alone.”

The chill that crept down Nikitha’s spine was colder than the rain that day she first stepped into Hotel Iris.

Some rooms never vanish. They just learn to hide.

They just wait to be found again.

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Image: Freepik