Vacancy Beyond the Treeline

When Cole Donovan, Rebecca Holloway, and Nathan Graves pull off the highway for the night, they check into a roadside motel that seems almost too quiet to be real. It isn't until they try their separate rooms that they realize something is wrong: every door, in every room, is exactly the same door, down to the same scratch in the same spot on the same brass handle. Curiosity gets the better of Nathan first. He opens his door expecting a bathroom or a closet, and instead finds a forest that stretches on for what looks like it should be miles, impossibly contained behind a frame no wider than a few feet. As the three of them try to understand what the motel actually is, they start to suspect that leaving might not simply be a matter of walking back out the way they came in.

Connor Hayes CH writes horror and paranormal fiction rooted in the uneasy space between the ordinary and the impossible: motels with too many doors, roads that loop back on themselves, and places that remember every guest who ever stayed. Drawing inspiration from classic road-horror and liminal-space folklore, Connor crafts slow-building, atmospheric stories designed to unsettle rather than shock.