The door didn’t open.
Claire pulled. Pushed. Nothing.
Storage 9 was locked from the outside now.
She turned back. Two plates. Two chairs.
And the drain in the middle, breathing.
Her phone lit up again. Same unknown number.
30 years starts now. Pick one.
Claire grabbed the journal from the table. Flipped pages frantically.
Hale’s notes. Diagrams. A circle of 10 chairs.
And in the margin, scribbled: The table can be broken. But someone has to stay behind.
Stay behind.
Her radio crackled. Static. Then a voice. Washington.
“Agent Morgan? We have another one. Georgetown.
Table set for 3. Pasta’s still warm. No one home.”
It was already spreading. Because Daniel left.
Claire looked at the wall. Hundreds of names.
At the bottom: CLAIRE MORGAN wasn’t crossed out yet.
She had two options.
Option 1: Become the Host.
Sit. Wait 30 years. Pick someone else. Keep it contained to 2 chairs.
Option 2: Break it.
Hale tried and failed. He left an empty chair.
The note said someone has to stay behind.
Claire walked to the drain. Knelt.
“It’s down there, isn’t it?” she whispered. “The 9.”
The breathing stopped.
Then: a knock. From under the floor. Once. Twice.
Like someone asking to be let in.
Claire stood up. Dragged the table away from the center of the room.
Dragged both chairs with it.
She took her gun. Aimed at the floor.
And fired into the drain.
The sound was deafening.
The lights exploded.
The temperature dropped to freezing.
From the hole came a sound like a hundred people exhaling at once.
Hungry. Angry.
The walls started to bleed. The names on the wall ran like ink.
And the third chair scraped across the floor by itself.
And sat down.
An empty place setting.
For the next one.
Claire staggered back. Blood from her nose.
The radio crackled again.
“Agent Morgan, we found Laura Reed.
She’s alive. She’s at a diner.
She said she was invited to dinner and didn’t feel hungry anymore.”
It worked.
Partially.
Claire looked at the new, third plate.
The table was bigger now.
A voice, not Daniel’s, whispered from the drain:
_You broke the deal. Now we make a new one.
And you’re still at the table._
Her phone buzzed.
Photo message.
A dining room. A long table.
10 chairs.
And in the 10th chair... a silhouette that looked exactly like Claire.