Moving the wardrobe from the bedroom to block the empty frame of the sliding door took a lot more effort than I’d originally thought, and even more effort to push the sofa from the living room to lean against it. I leaned heavily against the kitchen counter, out of breath and flexing my aching muscles, and scrutinised the set up.

The wardrobe did a good enough job of blocking the now constantly open door and I could only hope the sofa weighed enough to keep it in place if the figure tried to ram its way in. Then again, it had shattered the glass without even touching it so my hopes weren’t...very high.

I picked up the knife and did a round of the house, triple checking that every window was securely shut and locked, pulling all the curtains and blinds closed as if that would stop anything. Then I went to the front door and opened it, staring at my useless car in the orange light of the late afternoon. No signs of a figure or a prankster camper, only the gentle breeze and the song of the birds in the trees.

I closed the door, locking it and dragging a side table from the living room to press against it. The living room was now nearly bare with only a single armchair in the centre of the room and the large TV on the wall. I settled into the chair, pulling my legs close to my chest so I could prop my chin on my knees.

I just had to survive the night, I told myself. The mechanic would arrive in the morning, fix my car, and then I’d get the hell out of here.

I rested the knife on the left arm of the chair and picked up the remote from the right, turning the TV on and flicking through the channels. Most were buzzing black and white static, and it took me a good few minutes to find any that actually showed anything. One ran grainy replays of ancient shows that maybe my dad would have watched, and another I think played the news but the sound was fuzzy and the picture was broken, the woman sat behind the desk almost split in half, sections of her blurring in and out of line with everything else.

I stared blankly at the old grainy shows until the adverts came on - adverts I’m sure I remembered from around five years ago and didn’t run anymore - and then I would switch the channel to the broken newswoman.

She was smiling, but her nose kept jumping around her face, her body fracturing and then reforming before breaking apart again in different directions. A line of white text on a red background scrolled constantly at the bottom of the screen, but the quality was much too poor to make out any of it. The only thing I could read was the time in the top right - big and bold, and very much wrong. It had been stuck at 01:03am and never changed, no matter how many times I changed the channel. I wondered if maybe the same minute was replaying over and over again, so I watched the woman and her breaking body, I analysed the blurry scrolling text to see if the shapes of the words repeated. They didn’t.

Every now and again, the woman would vanish and a video would play, a clip of a news report, or a snippet of a sports game, or even a man pointing at fluffy clouds hovering on a cartoon map - just like any normal news channel. And yet the time never changed.

01:03am. I checked my phone and opened up the browser history, tabbing down the list until I found the search I’d made for a map of Midcreak Park on Sunday night. I’d typed that in at around 12:30, meaning...meaning 01:03am is probably when I arrived at the lodge. I scoffed at myself. This was not a horror film where the TV would freeze at exactly the time I showed up in the clearing, but it also didn’t feel right to just shrug it off as a mere coincidence. Plus, I couldn’t be completely sure that had even been the time. Just a theory. Yeah, just a theory.

“Tonight, we have a-”

I glanced up at the TV, the woman smiling brokenly at me. She was nodding, her hands neatly folded together on the desk.

“Tonight-” she said again, the sound cutting into a dull fuzz, only a few words and phrases managing to escape the terrible signal.

I flipped back to the grainy shows, finding solace in the sepia-toned cowboy film. Then the adverts came back, trying to sell me a product that went out of fashion years ago. I frowned, returning to the news channel.

The woman had stopped smiling. “Tonight, we have a special guest,” she said, her voice clear and pure despite the haphazard splintering of her features. “It was ten years ago when Charlie Harcourt went missing after a week’s break at a peaceful holiday lodge, and still to this day no body or suspect has been found. Tonight, I will be speaking to Charlie’s childhood friend and also the leading man of the search, Adrian Oakes!”

“What…?”

“Adrian,” the woman smiled, short and twisted, before gesturing towards the man sitting beside her at the desk. “It’s a pleasure to speak to you.”

Adrian wore a suit perfectly tailored to his frame, his shoulders board and his jawline stern despite the obvious morning stubble on his chin. He smiled tiredly, but his eyes were bright and his lips pulled into the expression with practised ease. Ten years the woman had said, but this Adrian had not aged one bit - his hair was brown and gelled back, his nails manicured and the gold watch on his wrist gleaming in the studio spotlight.

“The pleasure is all mine, I assure you,” he said, his voice under a layer of static just as it was when I spoke to him on the phone, completely in contrast to the honeyed fluidity of the newswoman.

“I’ll get straight to it,” the woman began. “Has there been any progress in the search for Charlie Harcourt?”

Adrian’s body was just as perfect as his posture, no line or section flickered while the newswoman split into a dozen different segments, overlapping and jagged. He smiled sadly, but it was like watching an actor pretend to cry, shimmering unshed tears in his eyes, an odd pity in his expression that didn’t feel real. “I’m afraid that there has been no progress since Charlie went missing. I...This is my last ditch attempt, to ask for someone, anyone, to please call in with any information they have.” He paused, taking a deep breath. “But, honestly? I think we all need to bury Charlie Harcourt and leave my friend to rest.”

The newswoman pursed her lips, quiet and thoughtful. “And have you?” she asked.

Adrian’s eyebrow twitched upwards. “Have I?”

“Have you buried your childhood friend?”

Adrian laughed, muffled with static at the bottom of a drainpipe, loud and hearty as if hearing the best joke ever. “A long time ago.”

Then he was gone and the woman smiled at me again, her voice back to that indecipherable fuzz.

The time changed. 01:04am. I glanced down at my phone to see that it matched.

Ten years…? I checked the date on my phone, ensuring that it was indeed still today and not the future. Childhood friend? I had met for the first time Adrian three months ago when he joined the company, with the only reason we were so friendly being that I’d been the one to train him.

“I’ve lost it…”I whispered to myself and flinched at the sound, my voice like a crack of thunder in the silence of the lodge. Rotten meat, nonexistent lodges, figures in the trees, changing paintings, strange voices, shattering glass, and now a messed up hallucination on TV. Maybe I’d fallen asleep in the armchair while watching that cowboy film and just had a crazy nightmare.

I stood up, the TV remote clattering noisily to the floor.

No, I was definitely awake.

Then, just insane?

The doorbell that didn’t exist rang in answer.