Sunlight streamed through the empty-glass sliding door and glared red against my eyelids as I blinked awake, my body aching and my movements sluggish. I moved, my limbs leaden and painful as I leaned forwards as if to rise, only to be jerked back with a sharp twinge in my wrists.

I gasped, now fully awake, and realized I was tied to a dining room chair in the kitchen, the room eerily dark despite the morning light filtering through the fallen barrier of wardrobe and sofa at the door. Lifting my chin to peer over my shoulder, I discovered my hands to be restrained with a plastic tie, the binding tight and digging into my skin, my wrists raw and rough already.

“Good morning, Charlie,” an unwelcome voice greeted me, the smile evident in his tone before I even turned to face him.

I lurched forwards, trying to release myself with brute force, only for the tie to slice the soft flesh of my wrists. The chair didn’t even move as I twisted and struggled, and I sensed something shift in the shadows around me. I glanced up to find the figure looming over me, its face hidden in the rags hanging loose and low around its head, its skinny, pale claw-like hands grasped firmly on the back of the chair to keep it rooted to the ground.

“Let me go,” I hissed, my voice hoarse and pained.

Adrian tapped a manicured nail on the kitchen counter, leaning against it as he looked over at me, scrutinising and judging what he saw with a narrowing of his eyes. “I told you - the lodge has claimed you as its own. You’re joining us. There is no leaving.”

I grunted as I tugged on my bindings, ignoring the pain biting at my wrists as I kept turning them and rubbing them against the hard plastic. “And I told you - I’m not for anyone to take.”

Adrian blinked, slow and calculated. He sighed heavily, his smile never changing. “You either become part of us or you…” His focus gravitated towards the figure behind me, his expression darkening with a joke I immediately decided I didn’t want to know about. “Well, neither of us want that.”

“What is the ‘lodge’?” I asked, trying not to cry out or jerk my arms too obviously as I felt the hot blood slide my hands easier against my bindings. “What does ‘joining you’ mean?”

Adrian’s smile widened, revealing a full set of perfectly straight and bleach-white teeth.”What brilliant questions.” He lifted his arms above his head as if in dramatic prayer, his eyes glistening with a keen passion drowning in utter madness. “The lodge is saviour! It finds the ones most lost, most isolated, most unhappy - and it lets them rest. A full week, sapping your energy in turn for its own until you are as much the lodge as it is you. A brand new life.”

“What if I leave before the week is over?” My right hand slipped from the tie, but I kept it stationary against my left.

A deep angered frown lowered over his eyes as his hands dropped, nails returning to incessantly tap harshly on the counter. “Then it feeds and doesn’t replace the void with its own power, and you’re as empty as you started.”

The figure twitched behind me.

“But we can still...use the vessel.” His frown fell away to a more sinister smile. “Is that what you wish to become, Charlie?”

“I wish to go home,” I spat, my left hand now clear of the tie, but I held the plastic in place against my wrists.

“There is nothing awaiting you out there,” Adrian said, his voice feigning sadness. “Nothing at all but falsities and hatred, where it is so cold and lonely. Here it is warm and there are so many of us. Can’t you hear them, Charlie?”

I listened, tilting my head slightly. I could hear the unceasing tap-tap of Adrian’s nails, the ragged breathing and rattle of twitching, tugged bones of the figure over me, and the roar of the generator outside. I looked towards the fridge and saw no green lights, heard no thrum of the fan.

Adrian nodded as if he knew what I’d realized. The electricity was off and yet the generator screamed - no, they screamed. Over a dozen voices crying out like a discordant, desperate wail, deep and constant, reverberating throughout my body like a callous, terrifying earthquake born of agony and fear.

“Join us,” Adrian said, and the screams demanded for me to run.

The figure’s breath was as cold as ice and as heavy as rotten flesh as I felt its lips brush against the shell of my ear. “Join us, Charlie,” it rasped in Adrian’s voice, echoed by a dozen begging for me to escape.

“Let the nightmare take you,” the figure whispered, words wet and revolting against my cheek.

I dropped the bloodied tie and stood, grinding my teeth as I swayed with the effort, my vision wavering at the edges and sparkling with a hundred lights.

Adrian’s smile didn’t falter, and the figure’s hand curled into my shoulder like jagged blades, claws puncturing through my clothing and skin as easily as a knife through melting butter.

“Sit back down,” he ordered.

The room flickered like a broken tape, the very walls swarmed with a dozen shifting faces pouring out of the wallpaper, mouths wide in screams, the floor a pool of dark crimson that lapped against my ankles. Things floated, bobbing up and down in the fluid, touching me as they passed, some fresh and warm, others rigid and frozen. Fragmented memories of people torn apart and morphed into the very foundations of a monster that engulfed a person whole, siphoning their soul and puppeteering their remains - or letting them rot with their very conscious still fully aware as they paved the hallways and insulated the walls.

The lodge groaned like a cavernous stomach, hungry for its next meal as the room gulped my energy and poured in shadow like a forgotten man crawling in the desert, eyes soaking in the mirage of refreshing water while filling his body with hot sand.

“Sit back down,” the lodge commanded.

And my legs collapsed beneath me, my body slamming back down into the chair like a dense stone.

The figure chuckled a screeching chalkboard against my cheek. “Good, Charlie, good. Now, just relax.”