The Fifth Floor Without Light

EPISODE 4 : THOSE WHO WERE NEVER INVITED

The last message arrived at 2:47 a.m.

No sender. No name. No voice.

Just one sentence:

"There’s another version of you, still living... on the fifth floor."

Nguyen An read it. Once. Twice. Three times. Four.

He flipped his phone facedown, turned toward the window.

There was no fifth floor outside.

The dorm building only had four. Four levels of old bricks, cracked walls, and an elevator that groaned like it had secrets. He’d lived there for three years. He knew every water stain on the ceiling, every outlet that sparked when used, every night footstep from each of his floor-mates.

There was no fifth floor.

But nobody ever said it couldn't exist.

Three days passed before Nguyen An dared to open the message again.

It was gone.

No record, no history.

Just a faint blank space on the screen—like a dream.

But the unease gripping his chest was very real.

He climbed to the top of the dorm that evening. The door to the rooftop was locked. But through the slit, he could see the fourth floor below.

Then he remembered: There had been a rumor once—about a final-year student who vanished. He couldn’t remember the name. Just one thing: the student had submitted a strange short story to the school’s writing club before disappearing.

The story was never published.

Its title: "The Fifth Floor With No Lights."

An searched the club’s archived drive.

A shared Google folder from last year. Deep within a dusty subfolder labeled “Drafts.” Near the bottom: a single PDF, its title a warped font almost illegible.

Tang5_kh0ng_d3n.pdf

He opened it.

Inside was a single page—a short story about a student who dreamed of a fifth floor. A place storing unread drafts, unspoken confessions, and people the world had quietly erased.

At the very bottom, a scanned handwritten line:

"Don’t go there if you still want to live as someone ordinary."

But Nguyen An hadn’t felt ordinary in a long time.

Not since his first story was stolen.

Not since Lam offered a wordless apology.

Not since “The Third Hand” vanished as if they had never existed.

An still wrote, every night.

But he posted nothing.

He wrote for himself.

About questions that never got answers. About pain no one ever saw. About people who had existed like bruises under the skin.

He didn’t know where that story would take him.

But he knew: if he didn’t follow it, it would haunt him forever.

That night, An returned late. The sky had no moon. No stars.

He passed by Block D—the oldest building on campus, long abandoned. Once a wartime dormitory. Now sealed off. But one window on the third floor was ajar.

He climbed in through the old fire escape. No one stopped him.

Inside smelled of mildew and dust. He walked slowly, counting the steps.

First floor – empty.

Second – darker.

Third – something rattled.

Fourth – a breeze howled through.

And above him—a staircase. Narrow. Crooked. Not on any blueprint he’d ever seen.

The staircase led to a wooden door.

Taped across it: a yellowed note.

"NOT FOR INVITED GUESTS."

An pushed it open.

Inside was a room. Wide. Unlit.

Yet somehow bright enough to see:

A large wooden desk.

Stacks of handwritten manuscripts.

A mirror covered by a cloth.

An old, sagging couch.

And in the middle: a black mailbox, rusted, labeled:

“For the Unnamed Authors.”

He walked toward it.

Inside was a pile of paper.

Short stories. Handwritten.

The first sentence read:

“This is where people send what no one wants to believe.”

An read them all. The stories spoke of a person with no name, living in three realms: the real, the virtual, and the buried. Someone who once had a voice, once had words, once had lines that were erased because they were “too real.”

That person had chosen to ascend to the fifth floor.

To write. To survive. To vanish.

An folded the stack, slipped it into his bag.

But one page at the back was scribbled hastily in fading blue ink:

“Nguyen An, if you’ve read this far, let me ask you:

Will you live in the light of someone else’s truth,

or write in the shadow of your own?”

Footsteps behind him.

He turned.

No one there.

The cloth was gone from the mirror.

In it, he saw himself—but not the present-day him.

It was the Nguyen An from a year ago.

Before everything.

Before Lam.

Before the silence.

Before the pseudonym.

Before he became “that writer.”

And in the eyes of that reflection—there was something both broken and still.

“Choose,” it said.

He didn’t hear it with his ears.

He remembered it.

Choose.

When he awoke, it was morning.

He was lying on the ground floor steps of Block D.

No staircase. No mailbox. No room.

Nothing.

But in his pocket—a single page.

Handwritten.

“You were invited. But no one ever invites you to leave.”

One week later, the writing club posted a new announcement:

“We’ve recovered an unpublished draft that may revive our ‘Anonymous Author’ section.”

First piece:

“The Fifth Floor With No Lights.”

Author: Unknown.

Editor: Nguyen An.

Submitted by: Unidentified.

Lam said nothing.

Linh didn’t show up.

Uyen left only one comment: “Keep writing.”

Nguyen An stared at his laptop screen.

Typed the first line:

“There are floors we don’t climb with our feet—but with memory.”

And he wrote.

And the story was not over.

Nguyen An didn’t return to Block D for the next few days. He didn’t write, either.

But he couldn’t stop thinking.

What was that room?

Why did it know his name?

Why did the manuscript—those stories—seem like they were waiting specifically for him?

He walked through campus as if he no longer belonged to its daylight version. The classrooms, the cafeteria, the schoolyard—they felt like shadows of something else. An overlay of normal life trying to convince him he was still a student, still young, still grounded.

But he wasn’t.

Something had shifted.

Every time he saw the elevator in the dorm, his hand paused at the panel. The number “4” was the highest it went. But now, it looked like a lie.

He began to notice it everywhere: graffiti that hadn’t been there before. Stray notes scribbled in the margins of returned assignments. A sticker under his desk in the lecture hall that read:

"Not everything real is seen."

He started writing again. Not for the club. Not for anyone.

Just for himself.

But this time, his stories felt... watched.

He told no one what happened.

Not even Linh.

Not even Lam, who hadn’t texted since the night of the apology-that-never-came.

It wasn’t fear that stopped him. It was the sense that saying it out loud would make it vanish—or worse, make it too real.

Some things weren’t meant to be spoken. Just written.

He spent his nights re-reading the old story: The Fifth Floor With No Lights. Every line now felt like it was speaking to him personally.

At one point, he came across a paragraph he hadn’t noticed before. It was faint, typed in a shade lighter than the rest of the text:

“The fifth floor is not built of brick and steel. It is made of memory, manuscript, and everything we bury instead of speak.”

Late one night, he woke from a dream that felt more like a warning.

In it, he was standing in front of the wooden door again. But this time, there was someone on the other side, knocking.

Softly. Rhythmically. Persistently.

When he asked, “Who’s there?”—no one answered.

The knocking stopped.

And then, from behind him, a whisper:

“You’re not writing fast enough.”

He jolted awake, drenched in sweat, heart pounding.

There were no footsteps outside. No shadows on the wall.

But when he turned on his phone, there was a new note in his drafts folder.

Untitled. Empty, except for one sentence:

“If you don’t write, someone else will.”

He tried to ignore it. He really did.

He went to class. Read his assignments. Turned in his essay on postmodern literary theory.

But even that paper—it got returned with a note from his professor:

“Excellent insight. Also, curious side note: I liked your metaphor about the fifth floor of forgotten truths. Is that from somewhere?”

An hadn’t written that.

At least… not consciously.

He flipped through his copy. There it was, paragraph four:

“Sometimes, knowledge is placed on unreachable levels. Like a fifth floor no one’s allowed to visit, but everyone senses is there.”

He didn’t remember typing that.

But the words were his.

He returned to Block D a week later.

The same fire escape. Same broken window.

But this time, he didn’t hesitate.

Each floor creaked as if protesting his presence, but the air was warmer now. Familiar, in a way that made his skin prickle.

The staircase to the fifth floor was still there.

So was the door.

This time, there was no note taped across it.

He pushed it open.

Inside, everything was as before—yet not.

The manuscripts had changed.

New pages. Fresh ink. Different handwriting.

He approached the table and saw something he hadn’t seen before.

A blank notebook.

On the cover:

"Nguyen An – Assigned Author."

Inside, a message:

"Your story begins now.

You may use your name,

Or write under ours."

He didn’t know who “ours” meant.

But his hands trembled as he opened to the first page.

He wrote for five hours straight.

He didn’t eat. He didn’t check his phone. He didn’t even notice when the lights outside faded and the room sank into its usual dimness.

But he could see.

Perfectly.

The words flowed like they had been waiting for his return. He wrote about the hidden lives on campus. About the silences between conversations. About the laughter that didn’t reach the eyes. About messages deleted before being sent. About people who lived between the layers of the world.

He wrote about himself—but it wasn’t a confession.

It was a map.

When he left the room, dawn was breaking.

This time, the staircase down felt lighter. Easier.

Back in his dorm, he slept deeply for the first time in weeks.

When he woke, there was a new post on the writing club’s page.

No one claimed to have uploaded it.

But it bore his style.

Its title:

“Some floors you reach by stairs. Others by story.”

The author was listed as: Third Hand.

He didn’t remember submitting it.

But he didn’t delete it, either.

Linh texted that afternoon:

"That latest post. You?"

An replied with a single period.

Linh replied:

"Thought so. I felt your breath in it. Also... be careful."

He didn’t ask what she meant.

Because deep down, he already knew.

(to be continued)