The underground floor wasn't extravagant — just dimly lit, lined with rough concrete walls and yellowed tiles. The air was heavy, a little damp, and the place had the stillness of something long unused. At the center of the room stood a wide desk, slightly tilted from a broken leg, papers scattered across it. Chairs were pushed aside as if someone once stood in a hurry. Some chairs were arranged in front of small monitors — grainy black-and-white CCTV footage blinking from various angles: outside the hotel, the cafeteria, their rooms.
Behind the desk, Leo opened a drawer. Inside: a worn leather journal. He flipped through. The pages were filled with sketches — not just notes, but grotesque fantasies. Rooms with hidden blades. People tied to chairs. Smiling stick figures with knives buried in them. Maps of the hotel were drawn in messy pencil, and scattered across nearly every page were wide eyes. Watching eyes.
"Jesus," Leo whispered.
Vera leaned in. "That's Ellis's journal. Has to be."
Ivy didn't speak. She just sat down, staring at nothing.
---
They Make a Choice
They knew they had to get out. But the front doors were locked, and they didn't know how else to escape. Someone had to look upstairs — maybe for a phone, maybe for keys. Leo suggested Mason, the strongest. Ivy argued they couldn't send him alone. That's when the idea came.
"Send Asha," Vera said. "She knew Ellis. She was close to him, wasn't she?"
"If she's honest, she'll help. If she's lying—" Leo didn't finish the thought.
Asha agreed. Calm, quiet, but visibly shaken. "Okay, I will"
She sighed and slowly walked upstairs
Mason nodded but didn't fully trust her. He followed, watching her walk up the stairs.
She turned to Mason
"Maybe… maybe Ellis left something for me," she said, barely above a whisper. "Maybe a way out. He said I had to survive."
She turned to Mason. "Let me check my room. Then we'll meet at the stairs to the underground. Give me five minutes."
Mason gave her a slight nod, He followed at a distance, watching her figure disappear down the hallway. When she was gone, he searched every hall and door he passed — slow, careful, always expecting the walls to shift again. But there was no sign of Ellis. No trap. No key.
He returned to the stairs, waited.
Nothing.
Five minutes passed. Then ten.
No Asha.
He clenched his jaw, muttering, "She's gone," and started heading back underground.
---
Gas and the Attack
Down below, Leo, Ivy, and Vera remained. The CCTV flickered with static before cutting out completely, one screen at a time. Vera tapped the side of the monitor, but it stayed black. Ivy stared at a blank one — her own room — and looked unsettled.
In the corner of the room a desk which had papers stacked neatly on one side of the desk were files and identification cards. Vera sifted through them, pulling one after another. The names were unfamiliar at first, then unsettlingly familiar. Ivy's photo. Leo's. Hers. Each file had personal information — some of it they hadn't shared with anyone.
"I don't like this," Leo muttered.
Ivy snatched hers before anyone could read it, shoving it in her coat pocket. Vera didn't say anything. She quietly snapped photos of the IDs and the CCTV screens — instinctively documenting, just in case.
Without warning, a faint hiss echoed through the room.
"What is that?" Leo asked.
They looked around. No vents. No open windows.
Just the desk.
Then it came — a thin stream of white gas, seeping from under the desk and through cracks in the walls. The air changed. It didn't smell, exactly — but something felt wrong. Heavy. Sharp in the lungs.
Vera started coughing. Ivy tried to pull her sleeve over her face but stumbled back, disoriented. Leo ran for the stairs — only to stop dead.
At the top of the staircase, Ellis stood. Calm. Gun raised.
Leo reacted on instinct — lunging forward, slamming into him. The gun clattered to the ground as Ellis hit the steps with a dull thud, unconscious.
Leo turned, dazed from the adrenaline and the gas.
Everything went black.
---
Mason Returns
"Guys?" Mason called as he descended the stairs. "Asha's gone."
No answer.
He took another step, and the silence grew louder.
At the bottom of the stairs, he froze.
There they were — Leo, Ivy, and Vera. Each tied to a chair, leather cuffs cutting into their arms. Machines stood behind them, cold metal arms holding knives poised just inches from their throats.
Then the PA system cracked to life.
Ellis's voice.
"You have to make a choice, Mason. Pick one to die. The rest go free."
"No," Mason said, backing away. "No way."
"I said choose!" the voice snapped.
A door slammed open from the corner of the room. Ellis stepped out, face shadowed, fury carved into every line. A gun pointed at Mason's chest.
"You're not special. You don't save everyone, if you don't choose one, You'll. Be. The. One"
Then—
Darkness.
A loud pop, and the lights shut off.
Even Ellis hesitated. "What the—"
Mason didn't wait. He lunged, wrestled the gun from Ellis's grip, and with a clean motion, slammed him backward — his head cracked against the wall with a sickening thud. He collapsed, unmoving.
Mason turned to the others, ripping off their cuffs one by one.
Then a sound
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Ivy struck a lighter.
The flame flickered, weak against the dark.
And then they saw her.
Above them, swinging gently from the ceiling beam, was Asha.
A knife was buried into the back of her throat, its blade protruding slightly out the front. Blood leaked down her clothes, down her legs — down onto Vera's face.
She screamed. Leo grabbed a nearby cloth and wiped her face, keeping his own trembling in check.
"We need to get out of this floor," he said. "Now. There has to be a control room somewhere. where he keeps the keys." "Where all of this ends."
---
No one said a word. The image of Asha, lifeless and swaying from the ceiling, was burned into their minds.
They moved fast.
Mason led the way up the stairs with wild, anxious eyes. Vera and Ivy stayed close behind, still shaken. Leo hesitated only long enough to snatch Ellis's journal from the desk, the leather cracked and warm from his palms. The pages fluttered as he climbed, eyes scanning the sketches — raw, chaotic, but telling.
At the top of the stairs, he flipped to one drawing in particular: a rough blueprint of the hotel. Most of it matched what they'd already seen — the lobby, the rooms, the cafeteria, the underground floor.
But then he paused.
A thin line led upward — a staircase to the fourth floor. On that floor, there was only one room. A box, unlabeled, empty in the sketch. No furniture drawn. No doors or windows. Just a square with faint scratch marks around it, like Ellis or whoever drew it had pressed hard into the page and then erased something.
"Guys," Leo said, breathing fast. "There's something up there. A room we haven't seen. It's not even listed with the others — I think it's unfinished, or hidden."
"Fourth floor?" Ivy asked, glancing up the stairwell.
"It's the last one," Leo nodded. "Maybe it's where he controls everything. The keys, the locks — it could be up there."
"Then we stick together," Mason said firmly. "No more splitting up."
Everyone agreed.
They ascended together, past the third floor, footsteps echoing through the stairwell. The further up they climbed, the more the hotel seemed to change — the paint faded, wallpaper peeled back to reveal cracked plaster, and the air grew colder, like it hadn't been touched in years.
On the fourth floor, the hallway was dark and narrow.
Dust swirled in the faint light leaking from a broken overhead bulb.
No numbers were printed on the doors — except one, at the very end of the hall, barely visible.
No door handle.
Just a faint outline.
They approached.
"This is it," Leo whispered, pointing to the door while glancing at the sketch in the journal in his hand. "That's the room."
_ _ _
Leo pressed his palm against it.
It creaked open.
Inside was a small, old-fashioned room. No dust, no cobwebs. It wasn't abandoned — just... preserved. The walls were pale green, cracked in places, and decorated with pencil drawings directly on the plaster. Not framed. Not on paper. Etched, like someone had drew it at the walls for years.
This one was different from drawings in the rooms Mason and Vera had stayed in.
The drawing showed a forest. Stark white trees. Gnarled branches. Among them, dark figures — human-shaped but blurred, their eyes glowing white like needle pricks in the dark. Four of them, distant and tall, peering from between trees.
They all stopped at once to stare at it.
Vera spoke first. "Are those... people?"
Leo tilted his head. "They look like shadows. But with eyes."
"They're watching," Ivy said quietly.
The silence returned.
Then Mason muttered, "Let's search fast. We don't know if Ellis comes back here."
They split up.
---
🔎 Everyone's Search
Ivy crawled down beside the bed, her flashlight barely reaching the shadows underneath. She felt something soft — cloth — and tugged it out. A bloodstained sheet, the stain old, brown, crusted.
Her hand shook as she lifted it. Beneath it, something small gleamed in the dim light.
A silver necklace. Plain. A tiny crescent moon charm. Cold in her hand.
She swallowed hard and stuffed it in her pocket.
---
Vera pulled open the drawers in the study table. Nothing in the top one. But in the second: a ring of old keys, heavy and rusted, each one different in shape and size. She turned to the others.
"These might be useful. Or really, really not."
She slipped them into her pocket.
---
Mason opened the closet. The scent hit him immediately — metallic, earthy. The walls of the closet were scratched, deep grooves running downward, like claws or nails had dug in, struggling.
Inside hung a bundle of weapons — a knife still glistening, two pistols, and a coil of thick rope, frayed at the ends. On the bottom shelf: more ID cards. And posters, curled at the edges:
> MISSING – ELENA MORROW – LAST SEEN NEAR DUTTON HILL
MISSING – REED ALDERSON – 2000
MISSING – CHILDREN, 2 BOYS – NEVER FOUND
Mason looked around the closet, there were more posters of missing people going back in the years, 90s, 80s, even 70s
---
Leo stood at the desk.
Files were scattered across it — case reports, photos of severed limbs, all labeled clinically. But these cuts didn't match Ellis's style. Too clean. Too careful. It was like someone else had done it — or something else. Some bodies were just... missing chunks.
He flipped through a journal beside the pile. More drawings of trees, but now the forest was empty. Just snow and bark and open white space.
He snorted. "How many journals does this guy have...?"
No one answered.
He kept flipping. The handwriting started neat. Then got messy. Then unreadable.
Page after page — wild scribbles, words stacked over each other. But one word appeared again. And again.
> Hunger.
Hunger.
HUNGER.
HU—
Leo slammed the journal shut.
---
Vera stared at the wall again — at the drawing.
"Those eyes," she whispered. "What if they're real?"
Mason turned to her.
"What if Ellis wasn't just the monster," she said. "What if he was scared too?" She pasued, then added "What if there are other psychos , or somethings around?"
They all looked around again — suddenly feeling smaller in that room. Like someone — or something — had been there. Or still was.
A cold breeze brushed through the cracks in the wall.
Not enough for a draft.
Just enough to feel like a breath.
_ _ _
There was an old leaning bookshelf stood beside the drawing. Ivy brushed her hand across the dusty spines, reading titles out loud.
"Tax Records, 1893… Oh. This one's different."
She pulled it free. The leather binding cracked in her hands, but the gold-embossed title still gleamed faintly.
> "The Unsolved Departures of Ouray: A History of the Town and Its Dead"
Leo looked over his shoulder. "Sounds creepy."
Ivy flipped through the thick pages. Most of it was town history — the founding, old photographs of logging cabins, black-and-white portraits of settlers.
Then she paused.
> "Unsolved Disappearances — 1864 to Present"
There were dozens of names. No details. Just years. Children. Men. Entire families.
And below that, a note in smaller handwriting — maybe added later:
> "Despite frequent disappearances spanning over a century, no individual has ever been held responsible. Many suspect accidents, animal attacks, or human crime. But among locals, a deeper belief lingers — that the forest exacts a toll. That it remembers those who trespass."
Leo leaned in. "What does that mean? 'Exact a toll'?"
Ivy turned the page. There, across a yellowed spread, was an old folk tale — inked with fading illustrations of bare trees and gaunt, skeletal figures.
> "The forest craves intruders"
> When the first settlers came to Hollowpine, the winters were brutal. Some families vanished during the storms, trapped in the woods with no food. The ones who survived told of strangers outside their cabins — not animals, but people... twisted, silent, always watching.
> They said the snow made the screams echo. Said they ate what they could to survive.
> And some say they never really died.
Ivy's hands trembled slightly as she closed the book