There's something wrong with Sarvey Hall.
When Mara Ellison settles into Room 316, the first sign is the cold, the way the air by the window never warms. Then come the whispers, threading through the night just loud enough to raise the hairs on her neck. And at exactly 3:16 a.m.: three even knocks from the closet. Never two. Never four.
Mara tries to be rational, pipes, neighbors, lack of sleep, until a recording captures the sound...and a rasping message: She's still in here. By October the room crackles with static, mirrors refuse to keep honest reflections, and a new roommate, Natalie Claybourne, stops sleeping, stares at the glass for hours, and finally breaks in a way no one can explain. Campus police flood the hall. The university papers it over.
Officer Steven Kent keeps coming back to check on Mara, to walk the corridor where the temperature drops outside 316 and the walls feel like they're listening. He finds what Mara won't say out loud in the journals hidden beneath her things: rules and warnings, taped-over mirrors, and the dread of a door that opens by itself.
In January, transfer students, and journalism majors, Kayla Bishop and Zoe Lin arrive chasing rumors, archived posts, and the campus whisper-network that insists Sarvey has a room you don't survive. Their search pulls them past official statements and into a pattern of vanishing girls, scratched paint, and that relentless tapping from behind the wood.
What waits inside the closet isn't a trick of light. It's a wound in the room. It breathes. It watches. And when the door opens, it doesn't always close.
Room 316 is a claustrophobic campus horror novel told across a school year of whispers, journals, and missing persons, a slow, inexorable pull toward the moment you realize the knocking is for you.
